Out of yesterday's Washington Post, I came to notice a full-page ad....something that rarely occurs with the Post....mostly because of the tremendous cost involved. Larry Flynt of Hustler fame, offered up a $1 million reward for any information that linked a Washington political figure to a scandal. He was careful not to say a Republican or Democrat. Twenty years ago, Larry's empire was broad and full of cash. Today, Hustler is mostly a dead-end magazine (their circulation is reportedly around 750k copy per month). I'm guessing he'll get a couple thousand bogus phone calls....to waste the time of his team. Maybe somewhere in the midst of this....they might get three or four phone calls that might lead to something. The end-result? The republic standing there with Hustler acting as it's protector of virtue and purity. Sadly, Larry wasn't the guy who dug up the Clinton episode, or any of the forty other significant political lust scandals of the past decade.
Word comes out this week that John Edwards really doesn't want that lusty tape that his former girlfriend, Rielle Hunter, made of a bedroom episode destroyed (as the judge has decreed). He didn't give alot of explanation to this request. His big case.....over illegal campaign contributions is due to start in the next month or two. Potential from that case? Thirty years in prison, if the jury was convinced on all charges and given the max. Who knows? Maybe he's deep into debt and willing to market the tape.....giving everyone a different view of John than they were used to? I'd figure $8 for a pay-per-view episode might be reasonable.....but who would watch such a thing?
We had an odd cop impersonation episode in Arlington over the last week. Some guy pulls up to a red light where a older gentleman (70 years old) was sitting. The younger guy yells over to the older guy that he's a cop and that the older guy was speeding.....he wants the older guy to pull over into the parking lot. So the older guy does this. The younger guy demands the license and registration.....which the older guy complies by handing over his wallet and registration. The pretender cop goes back to his car and pretends apparently to be talking to someone over radio or cellphone.....then hands everything back to the old guy, minus $160 that he took out. Then the young guy left. Other than a limited description of the younger guy.....there's not much to go on, except he was driving a Mustang. With all the undercover cops wandering around the DC area......you just can't tell. That's the sad part about living in an urban area.
Monday, 5 March 2012
Saturday, 3 March 2012
Just the Obvious
The BP oil guys finally came to a conclusion over all the lawsuits for the oil mess in the Gulf. The pay-out? $7.8 billion.
By the time that the lawyers and the thousands of folks get to the conclusion of the pay-off.....I doubt if any single fisherman gets what they really thought they deserved. They will sit there in shock.....having thought back in 2011 that they'd get treated right for their bankruptcy episode. It just won't be that way.
Who gets money from the pot? Cleanup folks, fishermen, just everyone who claimed damage or sickness, hotels, pubs and bars along the Gulf, and local town councils.
By the end of 2013, I would imagine that lawyers will take roughly forty percent of the money....because of the man-hours they put into this. Most folks will laugh over check for $1k and wonder what idiot made the decision that this was all they'd get.
For BP? Their stock will rebound by next week, and everyone will be very happy over the settled sum.
By the time that the lawyers and the thousands of folks get to the conclusion of the pay-off.....I doubt if any single fisherman gets what they really thought they deserved. They will sit there in shock.....having thought back in 2011 that they'd get treated right for their bankruptcy episode. It just won't be that way.
Who gets money from the pot? Cleanup folks, fishermen, just everyone who claimed damage or sickness, hotels, pubs and bars along the Gulf, and local town councils.
By the end of 2013, I would imagine that lawyers will take roughly forty percent of the money....because of the man-hours they put into this. Most folks will laugh over check for $1k and wonder what idiot made the decision that this was all they'd get.
For BP? Their stock will rebound by next week, and everyone will be very happy over the settled sum.
The Qur-an/Nuke Pit Solution
Based on comments made today in the press.....a minimum of five US army guys will get a disciplinary review after this stupid burnt Qur'an episode in Afghanistan. This recommendation, coming from both a senior Afghan military and US military review.....doesn't really solve much, because it's mostly a recommendation. The review did admit by the end....none of this was intentional.
So you can imagine this scenario. It's a layered screw-up. Some intelligence guys find coded messages in Qur'ans being handed around the prison. They confiscate the documents, and hand them to some superior officer. The officer reviews the case, and likely assigns his chief of staff the task of getting rid of the problem.
This chief of staff probably puts them into a box and sits on the issue for months, and then his replacement gets the box. The replacement guy probably doesn't know anything, and just assigns Private Snuffy the job of burning the items (just like the fashion that we'd dispose of an old US flag). By the time you come to the end....it's probably six to ten folks who had some part in this whole thing. Sadly, there's probably not a single Army regulation that clearly says what to do with coded Qur'ans.
So you come to two problems. First....this disciplinary review. I would have problems in believing you can find any Army officer who would give out paperwork to any GI.....without some direct violation of a written regulation. In this case.....I have my doubts such a regulation exists. So the joke is.....the idiots will issue a bogus disciplinary document to some kid. The kid will hand it to a judicial review panel, and toss it out six months later....admitting they can't find any violation of the regulations. Everyone pats themselves on the back....because the whole bogus situation is now fixed.
The second problem is more difficult. What do you do with those future coded Qur'ans that turn up? My advice? Pack all these code Qur'ans up and ship them to the nuclear storage pit out in Nevada, and just let them sit 10k years until they dissolve. It's best way to get rid of nuclear waste and coded Qur'ans. We can pay some guy named Larry to truck them from Washington DC.....after some four-star generals bless them as nuke waste-like material. Larry would have a security convey to escort him....ensuring no Qur'ans are actually dropped on interstates, or stolen by any stupid idiots along the interstate system. Eventually, Larry would deliver them to the pit, and they'd be sealed in 55-gallon barrels, taken as far down as possible, and sat by some nuke material.
The sad part about this whole mess? The coded messages written? They probably had Super Bowl picks announced by the various guys in the prison, and it was the only way to communicate their picks to other members of the prison. The truth is....you just don't know what the coded messages ever said. All you know.....is Private Snuffy burned some Qur'ans, and he got caught. Sadly, he'll return to Iuka, Mississippi one day, and tell momma why he got into trouble, and everyone in the family will talk badly about the US Army for the next hundred years.
Only in America
So you can imagine this scenario. It's a layered screw-up. Some intelligence guys find coded messages in Qur'ans being handed around the prison. They confiscate the documents, and hand them to some superior officer. The officer reviews the case, and likely assigns his chief of staff the task of getting rid of the problem.
This chief of staff probably puts them into a box and sits on the issue for months, and then his replacement gets the box. The replacement guy probably doesn't know anything, and just assigns Private Snuffy the job of burning the items (just like the fashion that we'd dispose of an old US flag). By the time you come to the end....it's probably six to ten folks who had some part in this whole thing. Sadly, there's probably not a single Army regulation that clearly says what to do with coded Qur'ans.
So you come to two problems. First....this disciplinary review. I would have problems in believing you can find any Army officer who would give out paperwork to any GI.....without some direct violation of a written regulation. In this case.....I have my doubts such a regulation exists. So the joke is.....the idiots will issue a bogus disciplinary document to some kid. The kid will hand it to a judicial review panel, and toss it out six months later....admitting they can't find any violation of the regulations. Everyone pats themselves on the back....because the whole bogus situation is now fixed.
The second problem is more difficult. What do you do with those future coded Qur'ans that turn up? My advice? Pack all these code Qur'ans up and ship them to the nuclear storage pit out in Nevada, and just let them sit 10k years until they dissolve. It's best way to get rid of nuclear waste and coded Qur'ans. We can pay some guy named Larry to truck them from Washington DC.....after some four-star generals bless them as nuke waste-like material. Larry would have a security convey to escort him....ensuring no Qur'ans are actually dropped on interstates, or stolen by any stupid idiots along the interstate system. Eventually, Larry would deliver them to the pit, and they'd be sealed in 55-gallon barrels, taken as far down as possible, and sat by some nuke material.
The sad part about this whole mess? The coded messages written? They probably had Super Bowl picks announced by the various guys in the prison, and it was the only way to communicate their picks to other members of the prison. The truth is....you just don't know what the coded messages ever said. All you know.....is Private Snuffy burned some Qur'ans, and he got caught. Sadly, he'll return to Iuka, Mississippi one day, and tell momma why he got into trouble, and everyone in the family will talk badly about the US Army for the next hundred years.
Only in America
Inappropriate Words
This week turned into a media circus of sorts....once a Georgetown law student got into the contrception mess by appearing in front of Congress and discussing the painful financial woes of birth control pills for college gals.
By the middle of the week, Rush Limbaugh rushed into the mess.....tossing the word "slut" onto the female Georgetown college student. Then yesterday, a number of media folks and political folks (mostly Democrats) rushed up to say that "slut" was a highly offensive term and very inappropriate to utter. At one point, even the Georgetown University chancellor rushed in....to say this term of "slut" was a terrible misrepresentation of ladies at his university.
I sat and pondered over this. It's sad in a way that a university chancellor has to stand up and defend young ladies at his university from being called "sluts". Personally, I can't think of any professor, in the history of the United States, who ever got called in to utter his defense of "sluts". We've had chancellors say regrets for riots, corruption, raising tuition, unsportsman-like behavior, hazing, and bad professors....but this is the first time for commenting on "sluts".
The truth here (my humble numbers)? If you use typical average numbers for colleges like Mississippi State, Texas Tech, and Florida State....then your slut-average on campus is likely to be less than five percent of the female population. Sure, you might run out to UCLA or Nevada State, and run up against a ten percent statistic, but that's rare. Georgetown? This is a $59k a year tuition, book and dorm fee situation.....so when you come to a place like this.....there aren't many folks fooling around or wasting their time. I admit, there are more ladies to men at Georgetown (roughly 55 percent to 45 percent), and out of 3200-odd ladies there....there might be forty-four sluts at best.
So from my humble guess of forty-four Georgetown sluts, I personally think Rush went a bit overboard. I'm pretty sure that none of the forty-four Georgetown sluts worry much about birth control, and have situation covered, without much help from the government.
Tonight, I'm guessing forty-four sluts from Georgetown University will mingle at some bar, discuss their situation, and hostility over a number of non-sluts being tossed into their category. You don't want slut-wannabes or pretender sluts walking around and claiming your status....it just ain't right. Eventually, Rush will travel to Georgetown, and say his regrets to the forty-four gals.....in that he never wanted to put non-sluts into their category. They'll all share a beer....give Rush a Georgetown University "Sluts" t-shirt, and the story will quietly disappear the very next day.
Only in America.
By the middle of the week, Rush Limbaugh rushed into the mess.....tossing the word "slut" onto the female Georgetown college student. Then yesterday, a number of media folks and political folks (mostly Democrats) rushed up to say that "slut" was a highly offensive term and very inappropriate to utter. At one point, even the Georgetown University chancellor rushed in....to say this term of "slut" was a terrible misrepresentation of ladies at his university.
I sat and pondered over this. It's sad in a way that a university chancellor has to stand up and defend young ladies at his university from being called "sluts". Personally, I can't think of any professor, in the history of the United States, who ever got called in to utter his defense of "sluts". We've had chancellors say regrets for riots, corruption, raising tuition, unsportsman-like behavior, hazing, and bad professors....but this is the first time for commenting on "sluts".
The truth here (my humble numbers)? If you use typical average numbers for colleges like Mississippi State, Texas Tech, and Florida State....then your slut-average on campus is likely to be less than five percent of the female population. Sure, you might run out to UCLA or Nevada State, and run up against a ten percent statistic, but that's rare. Georgetown? This is a $59k a year tuition, book and dorm fee situation.....so when you come to a place like this.....there aren't many folks fooling around or wasting their time. I admit, there are more ladies to men at Georgetown (roughly 55 percent to 45 percent), and out of 3200-odd ladies there....there might be forty-four sluts at best.
So from my humble guess of forty-four Georgetown sluts, I personally think Rush went a bit overboard. I'm pretty sure that none of the forty-four Georgetown sluts worry much about birth control, and have situation covered, without much help from the government.
Tonight, I'm guessing forty-four sluts from Georgetown University will mingle at some bar, discuss their situation, and hostility over a number of non-sluts being tossed into their category. You don't want slut-wannabes or pretender sluts walking around and claiming your status....it just ain't right. Eventually, Rush will travel to Georgetown, and say his regrets to the forty-four gals.....in that he never wanted to put non-sluts into their category. They'll all share a beer....give Rush a Georgetown University "Sluts" t-shirt, and the story will quietly disappear the very next day.
Only in America.
Hank for Senator
I believe most everyone is tired of politics from both sides of the aisle, and that Hank might be the right guy to send over and represent the state. In fact....if it was just two human senators and 98 cats......we might all be better off.
Hank's top topics? He's for free cat chow and would vote to seize cat food production plants in America. Hank also believes in sixteen hours of sleep for people, which means you'd be limited to four hours of actual real work, and a twenty-hour work-week. And Hank would like to create a zone of protection around the Senate, against dogs.
How many write-in's will Hank get in Virginia? I'm betting on 300 votes.
Friday, 2 March 2012
North Dakota Fighting NCAA Dimwits
It's hard to go more than thirty days with the NCAA....without any major negative press. This week? The NCAA got all upset with the University of North Dakota. The University has decided, at least for the moment.....to go with the regular normal name of their school in athletic competition.....the Fighting Sioux. The NCAA came out and said that they'd forfeit any wins, if their players, the cheerleaders, band-members or even coaches....wore or displayed anything pertaining to the Fighting Sioux.
This entire discussion with the NCAA's strategy....goes back a number of years....where they simply said that anything having to deal in a hostile fashion to the American Indians....is a bad thing.
This was going to just slide off and become a non-issue until spring of last year....when the state legislature approved a law that requiring the university to use the Fighting Sioux nickname. This brought everything up for another round of NCAA discussions.
If the school had losers sports teams.....none of this would matter. But the truth is that they actually have men and women's teams in various sports....which win.
I sat and pondered over this....and finally decided what ought to be done. Rename the teams. They should become the University of North Dakota Fighting NCAA Dimwits.
How quick could the NCAA react to this? I suspect there is not a single rule in the book that would forbid any university from doing this, so they'd have to invent a rule out of thin air. They would look like absolute fools while in the process of doing this.
How many fans across the nation would jump on board and buy t-shirts and support the North Dakota Fight NCAA Dimwits? Millions. People from Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama would come out and support the North Dakota team.
The problem I see is that some Indians support the use of the name for the North Dakota team, and consider it a positive message in representing the Sioux nation. For that reason, the NCAA really comes off looking stupid.
So onward, the Fighting NCAA Dimwits!
This entire discussion with the NCAA's strategy....goes back a number of years....where they simply said that anything having to deal in a hostile fashion to the American Indians....is a bad thing.
This was going to just slide off and become a non-issue until spring of last year....when the state legislature approved a law that requiring the university to use the Fighting Sioux nickname. This brought everything up for another round of NCAA discussions.
If the school had losers sports teams.....none of this would matter. But the truth is that they actually have men and women's teams in various sports....which win.
I sat and pondered over this....and finally decided what ought to be done. Rename the teams. They should become the University of North Dakota Fighting NCAA Dimwits.
How quick could the NCAA react to this? I suspect there is not a single rule in the book that would forbid any university from doing this, so they'd have to invent a rule out of thin air. They would look like absolute fools while in the process of doing this.
How many fans across the nation would jump on board and buy t-shirts and support the North Dakota Fight NCAA Dimwits? Millions. People from Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama would come out and support the North Dakota team.
The problem I see is that some Indians support the use of the name for the North Dakota team, and consider it a positive message in representing the Sioux nation. For that reason, the NCAA really comes off looking stupid.
So onward, the Fighting NCAA Dimwits!
Thursday, 1 March 2012
The SES Story
In the US government, we have this rank....called SES. In basic terms....it's a civilian that is very much at the 1-star to 4-star general level. Back in the late 1970s....someone dreamed up this idea of the super-civilian grades to run vast programs throughout the US government. Today, there are around 7,100 of these guys. The original idea was that you'd get to a post in one organization....develop your skills....and maybe five to eight years later....move. There would be this enriching process for you, and your old organization....so that everyone got this new 'agenda' in their mind.
Well....someone did the statistics and discovered that almost half of the 7,100 folks....have never moved in their entire career as a SES (some over thirty years). To be honest, only eight percent have ever ventured beyond their own organization. So if you got hired as a Postal SES....the odds are....if you ever moved, then you moved from the Texas zone, to the Atlanta zone....and still stayed within the postal system.
Some Congressmen are a bit angry over this. They'd like to force these SES's to actually move to new organizations. Course, it might reflect badly because the guy is incompetent at most of what he does, and it'd be noticed quickly at the new organization. And this is one of the fears of the SESs, and why they really don't want too much movement.
I'm guessing this won't go far. The SESs can hustle around various management groups, and eventually show this is all pretty stupid....even if it comes from a bogus study.
Well....someone did the statistics and discovered that almost half of the 7,100 folks....have never moved in their entire career as a SES (some over thirty years). To be honest, only eight percent have ever ventured beyond their own organization. So if you got hired as a Postal SES....the odds are....if you ever moved, then you moved from the Texas zone, to the Atlanta zone....and still stayed within the postal system.
Some Congressmen are a bit angry over this. They'd like to force these SES's to actually move to new organizations. Course, it might reflect badly because the guy is incompetent at most of what he does, and it'd be noticed quickly at the new organization. And this is one of the fears of the SESs, and why they really don't want too much movement.
I'm guessing this won't go far. The SESs can hustle around various management groups, and eventually show this is all pretty stupid....even if it comes from a bogus study.
My Neighborhood
We had this oddball speeding episode across the river, into Maryland a couple of days ago. Some county council gal.....Karen Toles....apparently got into her county-provided vehicle....and was going from one event in the county to another, at 105 miles per hour, in a 55-mph zone.
Naturally, the cops come upon her, but not in the right fashion where this would be recorded in two types of fashions that are acceptable for the court guys. So rather than give her a major ticket for speeding, they simply gave her a ticket for reckless driving.
This story got out. Frankly, it's upset almost everyone in Prince George's county. So Karen came out yesterday and said she was going to take a driving course, and would temporarily give up her county-provided vehicle....to make folks happy. Well....that didn't help much.
Today, Karen did her best to avoid any contact with the media. My guess is that she won't show at all tomorrow for work, and might disappear for all of next week for "some well deserved leave" (always a good quote).
In Germany.....once you go thirty over the limit.....they tend to give a major ticket and take away your license for at least thirty days. Here? Nothing much.
The silly part to this story is that the media kept digging. Karen has around five different tickets over the past couple of years. If you asked me....she's a fairly aggressive driver, and itching for a major accident. My humble guess is that she will likely have this major car accident one day and be utterly shocked at the extent of damage and injury. That's about the only way that she'll realize her skills aren't that good.
Naturally, the cops come upon her, but not in the right fashion where this would be recorded in two types of fashions that are acceptable for the court guys. So rather than give her a major ticket for speeding, they simply gave her a ticket for reckless driving.
This story got out. Frankly, it's upset almost everyone in Prince George's county. So Karen came out yesterday and said she was going to take a driving course, and would temporarily give up her county-provided vehicle....to make folks happy. Well....that didn't help much.
Today, Karen did her best to avoid any contact with the media. My guess is that she won't show at all tomorrow for work, and might disappear for all of next week for "some well deserved leave" (always a good quote).
In Germany.....once you go thirty over the limit.....they tend to give a major ticket and take away your license for at least thirty days. Here? Nothing much.
The silly part to this story is that the media kept digging. Karen has around five different tickets over the past couple of years. If you asked me....she's a fairly aggressive driver, and itching for a major accident. My humble guess is that she will likely have this major car accident one day and be utterly shocked at the extent of damage and injury. That's about the only way that she'll realize her skills aren't that good.
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