IN CALIFORNIA, A RURAL REBELLION IS BREWING. “These used to be wealthy resource-based economies, but now many of the towns are drying up, with revenue to local governments evaporating. Unemployment rates are in the 20-percent-and-higher range. Nearly 79 percent of the county’s voters in a recent advisory initiative opposed the dam removal, but that isn’t stopping the authorities from blasting the dams anyway. These rural folks, living in the shadow of the majestic Mount Shasta, believe that they are being driven away so that their communities can essentially go back to the wild, to conform to a modern environmentalist ethos that puts wildlands above humanity.”
Just “occupy” the water pipelines to the cities and you’ll get noticed. But expect less favorable press treatment than the OWS folks got.
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.
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.
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. . . .
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?
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.
A clip from your November 04, 2001 article seems eerily relevant to today:
Even lamer was the claim that the Sept. 11 attacks were an argument for closing the (nonexistent) “gun show loophole.” This claim, made first in a Brady Campaign press release and then in a suspiciously similar op-ed bearing the byline of former Clinton Administration official Eric Holder, just plain flopped. Nobody could be persuaded that Usama bin Laden’s boys would have trouble laying their hands on an AK-47, regardless of what rules govern gun shows.
Remarkable progress in biology. So much has followed the revelation achieved by Watson and Crick.
My last night in Cambridge, I spent the early evening drinking a couple pints in The Eagle. The Eagle is the pub in which Watson and Crick hung out after hours from their work in nearby Cavendish Laboratory and where they made the announcement, commemorated by plaques within and without, of their discovery of the structure of DNA. So I’m sitting alone at a table, soaking in the ambiance and my pint, and overhear an animated discussion of genetics at the next table. I look over and am surprised…Well, see for yourself. A rather nice end to my visit here.
Cheers,
Stephen
P.S. Confirmation came when I decided that this called for a second pint . While at the bar refilling, the young man who you cannot see in the picture sent blocked as he is by the two gents in the right foreground stood next to me and asked the pint puller if Watson got free drinks. I chuckled at that. We spoke and I learned that Watson had given a talk and was spending time with hosts in his old haunt.
I had to be up early this morning to appear on Fox & Friends. I was finished by 6:30, so I decided to stop by the Occupy DC encampment at McPherson Square in downtown Washington. Conditions were miserable; 40 degrees, dark, windy, muddy, steady rain. The weather, predicted to deteriorate even more later, was enough to test the resolve of the most dedicated anti-capitalist.
The small park is filled with tents. At times there have seemed more tents than protesters, and indeed, a friend who has kept a close eye on Occupy DC suggested to me that many of the tents — which convey the impression of a substantial, permanent protest — are actually unoccupied. That’s hard to prove, short of barging into randomly-selected tents. But even among the tents that are in use — and I saw a total of four early-risers in the park Saturday morning — there is the question of how many Occupy DC protesters are actually homeless people who have come to McPherson Square for shelter, a hot meal, and companionship. . . . On Saturday morning, I met a man who said he was an artist and told me that “the world’s f—ed up” in large part because “Bush took all the money and gave it to the Chinese to pay for the war.” After a while, he told me that he normally lived at a couple of “squats” in other parts of town but that he had met some people from Code Pink who told him they had a tent in McPherson Square. So he came to the park. He’s certainly not alone — there are plenty of other homeless there, he told me — but it’s hard to say how many homeless are part of the permanent Occupy DC contingent.
BOSTON COMMUTER RAIL USERS SAY OCCUPY IS HOGGING THE TOILETS: “Commuters and merchants in South Station say they are fed up with Occupy Boston squatters who are hogging electrical outlets and taking sponge baths in bathroom sinks, turning the bustling terminal into a unsanitary locker room.”
ASTEROID 21 LUTETIA: A mini-planet. “Europe’s comet-bound Rosetta probe flew by Lutetia last year and gave scientists a big surprise. With its dense body and an interior that seems to have survived intact, the large asteroid appears more like a protoplanet — a leftover building block from the formation of the solar system.”
SOMETHING THAT CAN’T GO ON FOREVER, WON’T: Americans’ Incomes Flat, Spending Up. Yeah, the returns on savings are — by design — nonexistent, but I don’t think we’ll get an economic recovery this way. Just call me one of these critics: “Critics say the Fed is punishing those who play by the rules — those careful enough to set aside money for savings or people who built up a nest egg and are living on fixed incomes that depend on interest.”
I repeat — if this were a Republican administration, the press would be full of sob-story reporting about senior citizens eating dog food because their CD rates are so low.
TRADERS TALK BACK to OccupyChicago. “Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you’re only going to hurt yourselves. What’s going to happen when we can’t find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We’re going to take yours. We get up at 5am & work until 10pm or later. We’re used to not getting up to pee when we have a position. We don’t take an hour or more for a lunch break. We don’t demand a union. We don’t retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates, we’ll eat that.”
Ha! Joke’s on you, dudes — the Occupy folks don’t have jobs.
BILL BENNETT not making inroads into the Pickup Artist community. “So, a sincere plea to Bennett and his ilk: Get your heads out of the sand. You can start by repeating the following to yourself every morning in the mirror: What’s wrong with men? Nothing that isn’t also wrong with women. . . . Men don’t avoid marriage and family because they have a ‘maturity deficit’. They rationally avoid marriage and family because, as the institutions are currently constituted, they are a raw deal for men. . . . If conservatives are serious about restoring a traditional concept of manhood to the modern man, I have a few suggestions for them.”
SO MICHAEL WALSH JUST CAME OUT OF HEART SURGERY AT CEDARS SINAI, and when I asked if there was anything I could do for him, he said to plug his new novel, Shock Warning. How could I say no? (Bumped).
Plus, from the comments: “The protests are a response to Obama’s failure to live up to the promises he made to the people who voted for him. That’s why you don’t see pro-Obama signs there.”
SHOCKER: Report: Fights erupt among Occupy Wall Street protesters. “Fights are erupting among Occupy Wall Street protesters, so much so that one corner of Zuccotti Park has emerged where protesters say they won’t go for fear of their safety, the New York Daily News is reporting.”
Related: Flier at Occupy Phoenix asks, “When should you shoot a cop?” Anti-semitism and violence — it’s like they’re trying their hardest to live up to their own worst views of the Tea Party movement. Plus: “I’m curious to see how the media in Arizona and the rest of the nation approach this development. They went into convulsions retroactive to the Gabrielle Giffords shooting that killed six other people because Sarah Palin used crosshairs on a map once (as had Democrats on a number of occasions), which the media used to paint the Tea Party and conservatives as somehow responsible for the massacre conducted by a madman with no discernibly rational political posture. Will they hold the Occupy movement to the same ridiculous standard? I’m betting …. no.”
E.P.A. DECIDES the Fisker Karma is a subcompact. “Look at the vehicle in the picture above. Does that look like a subcompact car to you? Well, if you peer at the Fisker Karma through the regulatory lens of the EPA, then it would.” Hmm.
IF YOU’VE GOT A BIG-TICKET PURCHASE FROM ABROAD, IT MIGHT BE BETTER TO MAKE IT NOW: Dollar Decline In Full Swing. Or not — like I know what’s going to happen next. . . ..
The vice president showed no reaction as O’Toole listed the officials who participated in the simulation, the complications they encountered as they tried to develop an emergency response and the arguments that broke out as they watched the disease spread beyond control. She concluded by telling the vice president that the country was unprepared for a biological attack.
Cheney nodded. “O.K.,” he said. “But what are we looking for? What does a biological weapon look like?”
At this, Larsen reached into his briefcase and pulled out a small test tube. “Mr. Vice President,” he said, “it looks like this.” Inside the tube was a weaponized powder of Bacillus globigii, almost genetically identical to anthrax. “And by the way,” Larsen said, “I just smuggled this into your office.”
At one of the most secure buildings in the world, in a moment of unprecedented alarm, the White House guards had searched Larsen’s briefcase — and never even saw the powder. “They were looking for the wrong things,” Larsen says now. “They still are.”
HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Americans Stuck By Housing Collapse: “Essentially, millions of Americans have become frozen in place, researchers say, unable to sell their homes and unsure they would find jobs elsewhere anyway.”
UNITED AUTO WORKERS not welcome in the South. “’I see no need for union representation,’ says Adrian Leslie, line worker at Volkswagen’s Chattanooga plant. ‘We are being treated fairly here.’”
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) on Thursday rejected a proposal by the Democratic members of the congressional supercommittee on deficit reduction, declaring its $1.3 trillion in tax increases unacceptable. . . .
“This is the same number that was in the president’s budget, the same number that I don’t know if they found any Democrats in the House and Senate to vote for,” Boehner said. “And so, I don’t think it’s a reasonable number.”
The deficit panel must come up with at least $1.2 trillion in budget savings by Nov. 23 to avoid automatic spending cuts that both parties want to avoid.
Members of the panel have given little indication that they have made significant progress in their secretive negotiations, and comments Thursday by Boehner and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) reflected an increasing sense of urgency about the stalemate.
On the other hand, Supercommittee members have been soaking up campaign contributions from lobbyists. So it’s not a complete failure.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: I Owe U. Don’t bother clicking, as you’ll only get a paragraph unless you subscribe to Time. The big news is just that this story is now getting wall-to-wall coverage, instead of just being a recurring theme on InstaPundit . . . .
The company missed Wall Street’s estimates for both revenue and earnings and said it would have lower profit margins next quarter. This resulted in the usual spanking of Amazon’s stock, as short-term profit seekers growled in disgust and raced for the exits.
In other words, with respect to Amazon, it’s the same as it ever was. . . . Amazon is doing what many more American corporations could and should do: Balance the near-term “profit motive” with a more holistic mission of focusing on the long-term and serving customers, employees, shareholders, and the community at large.
Is that right? Because that’s what people say they want.
REP. JOE WALSH TO ERIC HOLDER: You Better Resign Immediately, Buddy. “Operation Fast and Furious funneled firearms legally purchased at gun shops in the U.S. to known criminal syndicates to prove these syndicates have access to legal purchased weapons. This is a deliberate attempt to vilify and attack the millions of gun owners in America who value our Second Amendment and have never broken the law.”
