Silliness abounds all around tonight's celebration in Times Square.

I saw someone from Countdown Entertainment on Fox News claim that the 83,000 watts of power required to light the ball are being generated using clean, green wind-generated electricity.

Can't you just picture it, pristine, clean, silent windmills churning away on top of NYC buildings, piping their captured green energy over to the sparkling, shimmering shining ball of consumption?

How, you ask, can they risk that there might not be enough fickle wind available to power their oversized erector set? How can an event attended by half a million and viewed by another 500,000,000 million people worldwide rely upon a power source as spotty as wind generated electricity?

Maybe they'll run some wind mills all week charging up batteries that they can use as a back up, storing up enough power so if the wind isn't blowing they can still claim to have powered the ball using wind power.

Nah.

What they are going to do is arbitrarily declare that the ball's electricity, drawn off the same grid as every other damn thing in the city, is 'from' a windmill farm in upstate New York. That's right, ConEd is going to supply power to the ball from a grid primarily powered by fossil fuel generated electricity, but they are claiming that the 83 kW required to run the lights are magically the same 83kW that they are donating from the Fenner wind farm, even though there is no guarantee that the wind farm will be generating watt one at midnight tonight.

Electric energy entering the grid is fungible, and to claim that power from a windmill, which might not even be turning at midnight, is powering the lights of the ball is ludicrous feel-good bunk. That'd be like claiming that you could put a drop of distilled water in an twelve quart pot of tap water, stir, then reach in with an eye-dropper and pull out the same drop of distilled water that you earlier added.

The only wind power making this ball's light up is the hot air of those who are trying to politicize and "green" up this event.

Problem solving 101

Problem, discovered in the FAQ for tonight's celebration in Times Square.

Q: Will there be public restrooms available?

No. There are no public restrooms available.

Solution, the Sneaky Leaker.

Then, with no sense of irony apparent, the FAQ offers up this advice:

Q: Will there be areas in Times Square designated for disabled persons?

A. The police will set aside a viewing area for disabled people, located on the northwest corner of 43rd Street. However, this area will fill up quickly and it is advised that disabled visitors arrive early in the day.

Here's tonight's random pondering:

What does it say about Jeff Bezos and Amazon.com that three of the seven items on Mr. Bezos' wish list are now "currently unavailable" from Amazon?

LawMeme reports that the FBI is investigating Clonaid's unlikely claim of having cloned a human being. I asked in a comment over there

By what grant of authority, or for the purpose of investigating what crime, does the FBI plan to investigate Clonaid's unlikely claim?

Although another anonymous respondent assured me that "Human cloning is illegal in the United States. If Clonaid did in fact clone a human in the USA then they have commited a serious crime", a quick search of the US Code turned up no statute criminalizing cloning.

Can any reader shed some light on this one? Under what right, absent perhaps some federal research dollars being misdirected to fund this research, can the FBI spend time on this matter? FDA inspectors, maybe, but the FBI?

And how does this fit into its renewed focus on the war against terror?

UPDATE: I did quick Lexis searches in the US Code and the CFR and I found nothing criminalizing cloning. The linked yahoo article mentions:

The United States has no specific law against human cloning. But the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which regulates human experiments, says its regulations forbid human cloning without prior agency permission, and it has launched an investigation into whether Clonaid illegally performed any work on U.S. soil.

At most this is a regulatory infraction, so why is the FBI wasting time on this?

Another UPDATE: Justene of Calblog commented at LawMeme:

I think the reason why the FBI is "wasting time" on it is that the Executive Branch clearly opposes cloning and is going to do what it can even though the Legislative Branch has not made it illegal yet.

I fear that I agree. I'd written an answer to my own question when I posted the first update but I wasn't ready to accuse Bush of using a federal police force for such blatantly politically motivated intimidation.

This sucks.

I have a standing offer to my non-gun-owning friends for an all expenses paid trip to the shooting range. I supply the ammunition, firearms, targets, protective gear and I pay for the range time. In return I demand only safe operation and that they try to enjoy themselves. I go out of my way to not proselytize, though I hope that the act of shooting itself will demystify guns. I haven't turned anyone into a gun owner, yet, but I have changed a lot of attitudes.

Over the years five people, including my sister, had taken me up on the offer. When I lived in the DC area I would bring people to the world-class NRA Headquarters range in Fairfax. Before heading to the range I would go over all the safety & range rules, familarize my student with the controls and operation of the guns that we would be shooting, and prepare them for the environment that they could expect at the range.

Today brought number student number six when I received an unexpected call from a coworker who was also off this week. I loaded up the trunk with my Ruger MK-512 (pictured), my Smith & Wesson Model 15 (no picture available), a bunch of ammunition and eyes and ears for both of us. I stopped by his house, did my pre-range spiel, then we headed off to Wolf's Range in Bristol, CT. My friend shot well for a newbie. Very well. He enjoyed himself, and though he reports he isn't ready to own a firearm yet he's pledged to apply for his Connecticut CCL, much the same way he obtained his scuba qualification despite his not owning any diving equipment.

So, there's my bit of one-on-one lobbying for the day.

Not a regular feature of this blog, but certainly a regular feature of my life, I'm always telling people about great bargains that they can get at various places. I shop for friend's wives, friends for their wives, computers and electronics for everybody, firearms for some, and even cars on several occasions. I've got a special "in" with cars since in a long gone part of my life I used to sell cars.

At the height of shopping assistance my brother-in-law flew me to Chicago last year go car shopping with him.

More than just a bargain hunter, I enjoy helping people find well made goods at a competitive price that fulfill their needs.

I wonder if there is anyway I could make a career out of this.

Anyway, Amazon's Friday Sale this week offers up some amazing bargains, including this one that I thought was such a good deal I'd let my friend/family/readers know about it by posting it here.

Calphalon Commercial Hard-Anodized Limited Edition 5-Piece Super-Sized Set -- $99.99 including super saver shipping.

• 12-quart stockpot with lid
• 5-quart saute with lid
• 12-inch omelet pan

I go away for a few days and look at what I missed -- Time chose Whistleblowers as it "Persons of the Year".

Source.

Yet another TSA disgrace.

I wonder where are the love-nests that eight or nine Senators missing today's Republican Conference conference call were shacked up in?

Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) reported that the eight or nine Senators were unreachable and that their offices were closed for the holidays. I find that pretty damn suspicious that there were eight or nine Republican US Senators who did not know about the conference call and were unreachable in order to be notified of the call. With today's available technology how the hell could there be eight or nine Senators who are truly out of touch of their caucus' leaders? The guy who delivers my pizza has a cell phone & two pagers!

I figure either they did not want to participate because they have loyalty to Sen. Lott, they don't like Sen. Frist, and/or they are shacked up somewhere with their bimbos and they didn't want to come out of hiding for the call.

Interesting item by a career pilot qualified to captain the Boeing 737 who bought a 737 flight manual online and has now received a federal grand jury subpoena under the USA Patriot Act. Apparently the federales now treat flight training material as a "national security threat".

What next, Microsoft's Flight Simulator?

[Link via Politechbot.]

Set against the backdrop of Walmart's recent loss for illegally forcing unpaid overtime, I wonder why Target stores would allegedly do something like this?

Unrelated UPDATE: I updated my earlier post about an ebay seller who caught a thief.

Maybe it'll be a Green Christmas for someone.

Sometimes I forget that there are certain things that the web just doesn't know about. Though I shouldn't be I get surprised when google, teoma, aj and dogpile searches turn up not a single page concerning a topic. Often this happens with some piece of nostalgia from my own life, something that I would expect to survive at least in the google usenet archive which escapes even that early form of the internet.

For example I cannot find any mention of a very early multiplayer, real-time computer game called Galactic Trader (Gal Trader for short) that was developed (by Andy Payne, I believe) at Cornell University in the late 80's. Gal Trader was played on a system then known as vax5, a machine that also was widely used for email, some programming classes, mathematical simulations and usenet news reading/posting.

I also can't find any information online about Pratt & Whitney's line of American Association of Railroads gages, a product I believe they manufactured until around 1992. I can see that Precision Gage and Tool now manufactures gages like the old Pratt ones, but I'd like to know more about the Pratt gages.

What does this all mean? Not much, just that it is important to remember that the web often comes up short, so I guess we shouldn't get too dependent upon it.

Bush Inoculated Against Small Pox, AIDS -- Brilliant satire from ScrappleFace.

You haven't seen disturbing until you've seen Al Gore packing away some chow before speaking at the Union League Club in Chicago.

Next, on C-Span Two, Book TV features Al Gore stuffing his pie hole.

If Tim Sandefur keeps making his writings available on the web, I suspect he won't be able to "go back to being frank with [his] friends" and shed us interloping readers of his page.

Also, I think the Slaughter House Cases should be overruled.

Alas, the Comedian is correct. I like the idea of the anti-smoking law in NYC. Having lived in CA, I liked the smoke free bars out there. It would be nice not to soak your coat with Febreze when you get home from a drink in New York City.

Nevertheless, I do have concern about where the line lays. Smoking raises our health insurance rates, but then so do cyclists when they are hit by cars. In addition, sometimes a bike could slow a driver down for a couple of seconds if the road is not wide enough to pass. Should we outlaw bicycles on public roads also?

Included in the meeting to vote on smoking was also a vote on using cellphones in theaters. While we are at it, why not ban them in restaurants and bars?

Not that bans work at all. I still see tons of people talking on their hand held phones in cars in the city. (Probably the drivers who are running down those damn cyclists.)

Senator Lott to step down, stay in Senate.

Well, it looks like my archives are inaccessible for the moment. Google cache to the rescue.

Traveling to sKorea anytime soon? If so, be sure to check out Wes Dabney's 10 rules for riding the subway in Korea while American. Heck, even if you aren't headed over there you'll get a kick out of his list.

IT CAME! IT CAME! IT REALLY REALLY CAME TODAY!

Tony Pierce delivers. My Blook came in today's mail and I couldn't be more excited.

Congrats Tony. Well done.

OK, so sometimes I'm a bit slow on the uptake. (Slow on the uptake in the Blogosphere, of course, meaning that it took me more than 2 hours to link to something.)

Please go read Bill Whittle's thoughts on guns and freedom. No matter your position on the topic I think Mr. Whittle, who does not now and never has owned a gun, expresses clearly the true debate behind gun control.

Let me be the first to make this joke -- Under new federally imposed guidelines, Point-O-Eight Is Enough.

Stuart Buck's The Buck Stops Here's snazzy new color scheme inspired me to create an .ico icon for favicon.ico use and a .gif for linking to his blog. You should see the .gif over at the top of my links list.

I'm am not now, nor have I ever been a smoker. I'm pretty sure Tuba Boy will disagree with my take on this, but I think that Michael Bloomberg's city wide smoking ban proves that at heart he is a statist authoritarian thug.

Haaa Haaa.

Schadenfreude: Learn It, Love It, Live It.

Sometimes it is nice to see lobbying fees not provide their typical 10,000 to 1 payoff from government largesse.

UPDATE to this post about mass-mass-transit blues caused by a bunch of black boxes with the word "fear" showing up in a NYC subway station: Art Student Nabbed in 'Fear Box' Stunt

          Could have been worse, he could have been blowing up mailboxes.

Iraqi Report Could Prove Damaging to Germany

Hmmm, I wonder if this might interfere with a certain German mega-conglomerate's plan to sell a tiny U.S. subsidiary, a division that happens to manufacture and design dual-use technology, to an Indian company, while downplaying technology export issues?

Link to article via The Hub.

In celebration of my new link from Bag and Baggage (Not, I note, scrip and scrippage), I offer my #1 rated entry for "Things on a Lawyer's Christmas List".

     12 Jurors acquitting

     11 Toxic torts

     10 Defendants settling

      9 Class actions

      8 Hours of sleep

      7 Hot secretaries

      6 Egg shell plaintiffs

      5 Slip... a-and... falls!

      4 Memoranda

      3 Plea bargains

      2 Large judgments

      And a new desk and leather chair!

Yes, this means that you can figure out my real I D by finding this Top 5 list.

Don't drink and drive.
But if you do, don't speed.
But if you do, wear your seat belt.
But if you don't, make sure you are driving a Ford F-150, because it is really the fault of the door latches that your are dead.
Your next of kin will remember you fondly.
(The Bloomberg story was more detailed, but not a public link.)

Did you hear about the cowardly ex-Soviet poultry inspector?

            He's a chicken Chechen chicken checker.

And if he were an obsessive Onanist?

It's been a while since I bothered to click on Blogger's Next Blog button, but the great luck represented by finding Edward Hugh's BONOBO LAND on my first (and only) click of the day makes me think I should go out and buy a lottery ticket.

Mr. Hugh's clear and concise, yet not overly simplified writing makes economics approachable even for an econ-dolt like me. Look for his permalink coming later today.

I just love this headline: "Shove Comes to PUSH", detailing how some of Je$$e Jackson's own tactics are being used against him.

More on Jeffrey S. Lehman taking over Cornell from the paper of record in The City of Evil.

The process began last March when Rawlings, saying he yearned to return to the classroom, announced he was stepping down. From there, the committee received about 1,000 nominations for possible successors, a list that was quickly pared down to 500.

The group of 500 was then winnowed to 100, then again to 35. It was those 35 who began receiving visits from search committee members last spring. Lehman was chosen from a final group of three candidates.

Among those considered for the job were women as well as people of color, a choice which would have been another Cornell first.

Instead, they chose Lehman, who is white, but who will be part of a group defending affirmative action programs around the country before the Supreme Court this spring.

Hewing to the very principles of affirmative action, Morgens said, the search was diverse and ended with the most qualified candidate.

"We did think that it was time for Cornell to have a woman president," Morgens said. "We did have finalists of color. (Lehman) is a white male. But we did not see sacrificing the interests of the university for the sake of diversity, but we did consider it."

There you have it, admission from a high ranking Big Red official that diversity requires choosing less than optimal candidates for positions, placing idealism ahead of effectiveness.

I suppose in the long run such an approach is doomed to failure as less and less effective persons are placed in positions of high responsibility, the organizations that they lead will spiral down to deserved obsolescence.

(Aside: My failure analysis may not work as planned due to liberals merely preaching diversity as their highest goal, not acutally living it. "Diversity for thee, none for me.")

If I were still commuting by bike I'd be bucking up for some of these right now.

I'm fighting with my archive index page template right now. It might be inoperable for a while...

UPDATE: I'm done, I think...

Likely sickened by all the discrimination lawsuits, Jeffrey Lehman is going to leave The University of Michigan Law School to become the 11th president of Cornell University.

This one strikes pretty close to home as my lovely wife is a graduate of Michigan Law and I received my B.S. at Cornell. My wife's reaction, "Now why would he go and do that? He had a pretty sweet deal at Michigan and he loved being there. I guess he was just really sick of all the civil rights/discrimination lawsuits."

[Source: An email from Cornell to all alums.]

Bummer.

This is a great story about how an ebay seller-turned-detective caught a guy who scammed him with a fake cashier's check. It is a great story of an individual doing what several police agencies would not/could not do.

On Tuesday I got a useful reply [from a message board], try the Secret Service, counterfeiting is their jurisdiction. I made my way to the under-renovation Federal Building here in New Orleans. After walking many a dark, scary hallway, found myself at the door of Agent Keith Lopola. Keith came out and heard my case. I had brought copies of all the emails between myself and Steve Matthews/Paul Smith/Mr. Christmas, a copy of the check, and the call journal I had started keeping. Agent Lopola told me the same thing the FBI did, "It falls under our jurisdiction, but we can't take the case."
...
On Friday in preparation for flying up I mapped the new address from the one for Mr. Christmas to see how close it was. As I looked at the map, it hit me. The new address wasn't in Chicago. It was in a suburb, Markham. I googled for the Markham police and 5 minutes later was talking to a very enthusiastic Sargeant Knapp. I had hit the jackpot, the new drop was outside of Chicago jurisdiction and therefore outside of their inattentiveness as well. Sargeant Knapp informed me he loved this kind of thing, even had a UPS and Fedex uniform ready. He'd call Fedex and they would set it up for Tuesday. I was certain I was dreaming. After talking to two detectives in Chicago, an FBI field agent, an agent in the New Orleans field office of the Secret Service, an agent with the L.A. Secret Service and having a conference call with a large group of agents from the Chicago Secret Service, I finally was getting somewhere. And I didn't even have to stand on someone's doorstep with a baseball bat to do it.

Your tax dollars at work. Here's a guy who did all the heavy lifting, tracking down the scumbag that stole from him, getting pictures of the sight of the drop, and setting up a sting, yet still he can't get anyone from the FBI, USSS or Chicago PD to get off their asses and arrest a likely felon.

Kudos to you Sargeant Knapp and the Markham PD. You and your deparment, serving a community of just 15,000 people, were able to do what the might federal government could not be bothered to do.

Oh, and for what its worth, try to be sure and have all ebay payments in hand before shipping, and if possible conduct some part of the transaction through the US Mail since Postal Inspectors are not quite so lackadaisical as their alphabet soup federal brethen.

[Link from Reason's Hit and Run.]

UPDATE:The NY Times carried an article on this story on 12/19. Here's my favorite part:

And this week Mr. Smith got a call from an investigator with the Chicago Police Department responding to his first request for help. The investigator "suggested I put together a controlled drop like the one they had read about in the newspaper,'' Mr. Smith said. "I told them that was me, and that was this case."

A week late and a donut short. Typical.

I found a story in the NYPost about the fire, and it is good. The answer to one of my questions is that the apartment was actually a massive two story duplex. So, the smoke would have been able to move up a stairway inside the apartment. Thus, explaining why smoke was pouring out on the floor above.

The better details are that a lady throwing cigarettes into a trashcan started the fire and then a car hit the husband after he visited his wife in the hospital. Hey, who could make this stuff up?

Unfortunately, the idiotic move of throwing cigarettes into the trashcan injured seven firefighters. Too bad there aren't laws about being stupid.

Fironic: Or what you miss by not living in THE City

On the way to work yesterday, a pack of about 100 school kids was coming out of 70th street as I went to walk across. I looked up to see flames and smoke shooting out of a residential building at the other end of the block, near Lexington Avenue. To bypass the mayhem, I walked down and across 69th and looked back up Lex. Flames were shooting out of two end windows on the 6th or 7th floor. Pretty amazing sight, I have never seen something like that in person before. The flames reached up about two stories and the casement window frame on the floor above appeared to be burning also. Maybe the caulk holding in the panes is flammable? Smoke was also billowing out a couple of windows over on floor above also. I didn’t think that was supposed to happen in a high rise building. Maybe it is just the fire that isn’t supposed to spread.

The firemen were just putting up their ladders and tapping hydrants, so I stood and gawked. Not much seemed to be happening outside, but every now and then, a geyser of water would blast out of a window, so I got the impression that they were fighting it from the inside. After about 10 minutes, the flames suddenly went down.

I watched for another 15 minutes while they broke most of the windows out on the floor above to release the smoke. They used the truck ladders to break out some of the windows like a battering ram. Very cool, and a bit funny, because you couldn’t be sure they were doing it on purpose. (Oops! Charlie is not allowed on the ladder controls anymore.)

Finally, you could see the reflective stripes on the turnout coat sleeves as the firemen were breaking out the remaining windows from the inside. Those guys are nuts. With the smoke that thick, I doubt there was any way for them to see what was going on. Maybe they crawl along on the floor under it, but I was much happier to be on the outside.

The ironic thing about the whole event is that a month ago, there was a big fire at the building around the corner that backs right on this building. If Ithaca is the city of evil, I guess 70th and Lexington would be the corner of evil. The story behind the last fire was interesting. It was caused by a firebomb from the owners Nephew! Apparently, the Uncle fired him for stealing from the business. What do you say to your brother when your kid torches his livelihood? Two bystanders apprehended the guy as he tried to hail a taxi to make his getaway.

It might be a bit early to tell for sure, but I think that Colin Quinn's Tough Crowd (On Comedy Central) has the potential to be what Bill Maher's usually crappy Politically Incorrect should have been.

There's a new player in the European soft drink market called Mecca Cola. Not only is the taste of Mecca Cola an unabashed imitation of Coca Cola, its packaging shares Coke's red and white color scheme.

The 1.5-liter bottles — with their white swoosh lettering and red background — resemble Coca-Cola, although Mathlouthi said his product is not designed to compete with any specific cola brand.

I did a bit more searching and I discovered that virtually all of Mecca Cola's advertising slogans are directly traceable to past Coca-Cola slogans. Check it out for yourself.

Year	This Original Coca Cola Slogan	Insprired this Mecca Cola Slogan
1886	Drink Coca-Cola.	Die Infidel
1890	The wonderful nerve and brain tonic and remarkable therapeutic agent.	Wonderful with cow brain when you mix nerve agents.
1891	Delightful summer and winter drink.	Delightful filth infested rathole drink.
1906	The drink of quality.	The Drink of not burning in hell for supporting the great satan.
1909	Drink delicious Coca-Cola.	Drink Mecca Cola, unless you want to support the Great Satan, infidel.
1910	Right off the ice, Coca-Cola.	Right off the Sand, Mecca Cola
1911	It's time to drink Coca-Cola	You drink Mecca Cola. NOW, Infidel!
1912	Demand the genuine...refuse substitutes.	Demand the genuine, destroy infidels.
1918	Any time, everywhere, the favorite beverage.	Do not even think of drinking any other beverage infidel.
1929	The pause that refreshes.	Mecca Cola gives you the energy you need for Jihad.
1930	Old Santa says: "Me too".	Satan says, "Come Infidel, join me in hell" for not drinking Mecca Cola
1933	Drink Coca-Cola, anywhere, anytime.	Mecca Cola, until we tell you to die, infidels.
1941	Make mine a Coke.	Make everyones' a Mecca. EVERYONE.
1943	Coca-Cola is good.	Coke is the breast milk of the Great Satan, Drink Mecca Cola.
1944	Hello Coke.	Hello Infidel
1945	Whenever you hear "Have a Coke" you hear the voice of America.	When you hear "Mecca Cola" you hear the voice of Jihad.
1948	Where there's Coca-Cola there's hospitality.	Where there's Mecca Cola there's Jihad.
1956	Gives a bright little life.	Kills a small christian.
1959	Cheerful life of Coke.	Die Infidel
1963	Go better refreshed.	Crawl into a cave and die you infidel. But first, enjoy Mecca Cola.
1970	It's the real thing.	Mecca Cola is nothing compared to the joy of killing you, infidel.
1971	I'd like to buy the world a Coke.	I'd like to kill all infidels, then enjoy a Mecca Cola.
1975	Look up America, see what we've got.	Prepare to die America, here come's Mecca Cola.
1976	Coke adds life.	Die Again, Infidel!
1980	Have a Coke and a smile.	Have a Coke and you will be put to the sword. Mecca Cola, keep your head attached to your body.
1982	Coke is it.	Great with goat.
1985	We've got a taste for you. America's real choice.	Choose to Die, American Satan
1986	Catch the Wave. Red, white and you.	Die American pig-dog.
1988	Can't beat the feeling.	We will beat you to death, infidel.
1989	Can't beat the real thing.	We will beat you to death, infidel.
1993	Always. Coca-Cola.	Always Allah. Always.
1993	Taste it all.	Taste nothing lest you risk the wrath of Allah.
1994	Play Red Hot Summer.	Games are for soon to be dead infidels.
1996	Enjoy	Die Infidel
2001	Life is Good	Life is Good, unless you are about to die, infidel.

Even TIA federales can't hide from Google.

Apparently this jackhole columnist would rather the proletariat not have the ability to watch the watchers. It occurs to me that his theory is very much like the theory used to try to ban all sorts of openness and freedom in our society -- Because a freedom might be abused it must be controlled.

Me, I take the opposite approach -- Because a freedom might be abused it must be celebrated, cherished and protected against those that would strip it for their own selfish reasons.

Microsoft made at least one more millionaire than it thought. Meet The Dude.

"He didn't ever seem like he flaunted his money," said Schnase, who knew Feussner worked at Microsoft.

"It didn't seem extravagant."

Federal prosecutors said in a statement last night that Feussner used the millions to amass expensive watches and jewelry, a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, a Hummer, a Mercedes 500 SEL, and Ferrari 355 Berlinetta, a Jaguar Vandenplas and a motor yacht.

Just what would Feussner have to be accused of buying for it to "seem extravagant"?

(The Dude's Personal Website - Google Cache)

I don't think Ted Turner is an asshole because he's a statist, liberal, authoritarian, tax-and-spend thug of the highest order.

Nope, I think Ted Turner is an asshole because he continues to say crap like this.

"I went from no money to a pile of money as big as the World Trade Centre, and then just like the World Trade Centre, poof, it was gone overnight. That's terrible."

Aside: Why are donations to the UN deductible for computing U.S. income taxes?

(From today's Hindustan Times.)

Ahh, Yemen wants its missles back. Well,

The 9/11 hijackers just used boxcutters, right?

I'll update the sidebar eventually, but if anyone wants to welcome Tuba Boy, please write him @ Tuba747 a t h o t m a il dot c o m , removing all spaces and making necessary anti-spam replacements. Me, I'm off to Mohegan Sun for the day.

As the Comedian can be such a grinch, I thought I would start out with something seasonal and uplifting. I am sure you will be delighted to know that Tuba Christmas has finally made it to Tuba City.

However, we find that even Tuba City has an evil past:
"Two years ago, they closed down the (high school) band program because of lack of interest," Welch said. "And Tuba City didn't even have any tuba players when it did have the band."

Should we be worried or reassured by the fact that "Control of Communicable Diseases Manual" is an Amazon top 10 seller (currently #9) for the .mil U.S. Military domain and the #11 top seller for the .gov Government domain.

Registration equals confiscation. Always.

There's a reason why Stuart Buck comes first on my list of links.

UPDATE: This second post by Mr. Buck offers even more. It appears that the 9th circuit may have turned some California LEO's into ex-post-facto felons.

NITPICKING FOLLOWS: The Instapundit says of Jesse Jackson that "even a broken clock is right twice a day."

Actually, the saying is "Even a stopped clock is right twice a day." A broken clock, muck like Jesse, can be wrong damn near all the time.

I've got my own conspiracy theory about the whole Hootie/Raines/Augusta/Woods debacle:

Rush Limbaugh has suggested, obliquely, but on several occasions that he has non-public information that convinces him that Tiger Woods is actually a fairly conservative guy. Perhaps this whole corner-Tiger and make-him-be-a-good-liberal tactic of the NYT is merely an attack designed to compromise any future strength Tiger might have should he choose to flex his political muscles.

I've decided to take on a little help keepings things at this blog interesting, so sometime soon you will start seeing posts from my (literally) best man Tuba Boy.

I invited Tuba Boy to join this blog because everytime we talk he has something interesting to say, a cool take on the world, or just a great observation on life in the big city.

He claims he will be posting only once a week or so, but I suspect once he starts posting he will want to post more often than weekly.

I'll update the email address on the sidebar as soon as he provides me with a suitable cleaned anonymous email address.

(BTW- Tuba Boy is living proof that playing Tuba doesn't hurt your chances of getting into an Ivy League University.)

2 officers indicted over their actions as part of the MACFU.

Capt. Mark A. Aguirre, who oversaw the Aug. 18 raid designed to curb drag racing along the 8400 block of Westheimer, and Ken Wenzel, a sergeant in his South Central Patrol Division, were each indicted on five counts of official oppression.

WooHoo!

Unfortunately, though, the article also includes this:

Acting Police Chief Tim Oettmeier told Houston City Council in September that any future operations on the scale of the controversial Kmart raid will have to be approved by the police chief in writing.

OK, so Official Oppression like this might happen again in the future, but now we at least have the assurance of the chief signing off on it. Whoopee.

Maybe, just maybe they should have a policy disallowing actions like this, not one that just assures that higher heads will roll should everything turn to crap again..

Now if Racine, Wisconsin could just get its head out of its ass.

There used to be a damn funny webzine called ISIS that dealt with the wackiness and unfettered liberalism of Ithaca, The City of Evil. It has since disappeared, leaving behind only this cryptic message. Does it mean that it has been shut down, or does it mean that they've decided to stop writing and start taking action?

Anyway, one of its columnists, who goes by the pseudonym Hank Hill has started a blog of his own. I linked to one of his articles back in October, and I expect to be linking to his blog in the future.

Welcome to the Blogosphere!

(Between my first and second years of law school I summer interned for a Judge of the NYS Court of Claims, the court of original jurisdiction for unjust conviction and imprisonment cases (commonly called 8-b claims) in New York State.)

I worked that summer on an unjust conviction and imprisonment case that had been heard by another Court of Claims judge, a judge who passed away after the trial but before he drafted his opinion. I listened to the transcript tapes of the entire trial & reviewed all filed papers. My post is based upon this experience and a quick refresher peek I took at the Court of Claims website today.

Claimaints (what plaintiffs in the Court of Claims system are called) must not only prove that they are not guilty of the crime for which they were convicted/imprisoned, they must also demonstrate by clear and convincing evidence that they had nothing to do with the crime, and that "he did not commit any of the acts charged in the accusatory instrument or his acts or omissions charged in the accusatory instrument did not constitute a felony or misdemeanor against the state."

The burden of proof required for a plaintiff to prevail on a case brought for wrongful imprisonment under the Court of Claims Act is very high, so high that the Judge I interned for stated that it could almost never be met. He told me that essentially someone had to prove that they are not only innocent, but that they never admitted guilt nor claimed to have any role in the crime.

So, right off the bat any plea-bargained defendants can never bring a claim, nor can anyone who has ever made any admission of complicity in the crime.

Defendants must in essence prove themselves not just innocent, but they must have maintained all along that they are innocent, and they must not be guilty of any lesser crimes arising out of the original incident.

I'm not terribly familiar with the fact pattern in the Central Park Jogger case, so I leave it as exercise for the reader to determine applicability.

UPDATE: Just to be clear, this discussion deals with what it takes to win a monetary judgment against NY State for unjust conviction and imprisonment. It presupposes that the claimaint has already had their conviction(s) overturned.

I always wondered why public places didn't have geiger counters and or other radiation detectors as a way to detect and catch potential terrorists. Turns out they might.

Seatbelts use save lives, but seatbelt law enforcement?

Well, then, I guess you wouldn't mind if we all just left.

They don't tend to leave stories up for long, so I am going to reproduce this WTIC story in full.

FEDERAL SECURITY SCREENER CHARGED WITH THREATENING TO BLOW UP SECURITY CHECKPOINT AT BRADLEY AIRPORT STATE POLICE HAVE CHARGED A FEDERAL TRANSPORTATION SECURITY SCREENER AT BRADLEY AIRPORT WITH THREATENING TO BLOW UP A SECURITY CHECKPOINT IN TERMINAL A.

WAYNE SALVADOR, 50, OF SPRINGFIELD MASSACHUSETTS IS CHARGED WITH THREATENING AND BREACH OF PEACE.

STATE POLICE SAY SALVADOR GOT INTO AN ARGUMENT WITH ANOTHER SCREENER MONDAY, THREATENED TO HARM OTHER EMPLOYEES AND BLOW UP THE CHECKPOINT.

SALVADOR WAS ARRESTED EARLY WEDNESDAY WHEN HE SHOWED UP FOR WORK AT THE AIRPORT AND WILL BE ARRAIGNED AT ENFIELD SUPERIOR COURT.

This must be that new Federal Professionalism we were promised.

"Eminent domain should be used for true public projects, not to take from one private land owner to give to another wealthier land owner," King wrote. "That is wrong and it should stop in Connecticut and throughout the country."-- Martin King III

I am reminded of a few of the scenes incorporated into Forever Ephemeral (Low Bandwidth Version) over at AntiAntiWar in which government a bureaucrat arrives in a moving van at a couples suburban home, telling them that they have been reassigned housing on the other side of town because their house has been assigned to another family.

I don't know that I've ever written a blog post directed to just one reader before, but here goes.

Hey Toast! Who Is Jimmy Choo?

And for everybody else reading (OK, both of you...), the NY Times Magazine also had a great article about phones as art, though I think that this trend isn't a recent phenomenon.

[Bad pun alert.]

God forbid ATLA ever gets its hands on one of these.

I have a permalink (over there in the left columnn) to Robert L. Kocher, but I do not have one to The Laissez Faire Electronic Times, even though pieces like this one by John T. Wenders make me think I should add LFE to my permalinks.

In a general sense, the idea of any voluntary activity or organization being "non- profit" is a conflict in terms. All voluntary activities must be beneficial, or at least expected to be beneficial, or no one would undertake them. In common use, then, non- profit has come to mean non-monetary-profit. But even in this sense, one can make a pretty good case that often there is no such thing as a non-monetary-profit activity either. Accounting legerdemain is simply used to classify profits as costs. A lot of people have become very wealthy running or working for non-profit organizations. Yet, fiction or not, the idea of non-profit organizations and activities is widespread and probably growing.

The entire piece is just over 2,000 words, all of which are worth reading.

I-95 was bad this weekend, but at least it wasn't this bad.

Maybe we could stop the explosion in the white tail deer population by getting Alan Greenspan to declare an irrational exuberance for deer protection?

	Start With				End With

Year 0	500,000		40% Growth gets you	700,000

Year 1	700,000		40% Growth gets you	980,000

Year 2	980,000		40% Growth gets you	1,372,000

Year 3	1,372,000		40% Growth gets you	1,920,800

Year 4	1,920,800		40% Growth gets you	2,689,120

Year 5	2,689,120		40% Growth gets you	3,764,768

Year 6	3,764,768		40% Growth gets you	5,270,675

Year 7	5,270,675		40% Growth gets you	7,378,945

Year 8	7,378,945		40% Growth gets you	10,330,523

Year 9	10,330,523	40% Growth gets you	14,462,733

Year 10	14,462,733	40% Growth gets you	20,247,826

USA Today has an interesting and fairly balanced article about satellite TV hacking that includes an awful lot of links to hacking sites.

Finally, a self help book written for me.

Interesting piece today in The Hartford Courant about Roland W. Betts, W's "First Friend". Rolando, as President Bush calls him, offers some advice that I've heard from many wealthy people.

During a two-hour conversation in his cozy, memento-filled office in New York City this fall, Betts leaned back in a moment of reflection. "If I were speaking to students at Yale, I would tell them to immerse themselves in what they love. Immerse themselves and the success will come," he said, breaking eye contact and staring into the middle distance. "Never do anything for the money; that's just sick."

Time and again this theme shows up, do what you love and the money will follow.

And don't forget to make all those needed connections while you are obtaining your Ivy League degree(s)....