Sorry, no funny April Fool’s Day stuff from moi today. I suck at planning teh funnee, being more of a spontaneous kind.
Hope you all are finding hilarity where you can today.
And now I’m off to see Frau Doktor, She of the Cold Stethoscope.
So, do you think it to be a bad thing to go to your first visit to the Pulmonary Specialist on April Fool’s Day?
That High Occupant Vehicle lane that you use on occasion is going to become a toll lane available to Low Occupant People who want to pay for the ability to use the lane when they are by themselves in the car.
You say, “Great idea!” It is a voluntary tax the state can use make some more money to keep up the roads!
Although described as “user fees,” motorists who pay expected tolls to use existing lanes on Interstates 95 and 395 in Virginia will not be paying for improved road maintenance or new road capacity anywhere in Northern Virginia under proposals expected to begin construction later this year. Instead, motorists taxed to drive on existing lanes will find their money used to subsidize new buses, “enhance 12 existing bus stations,” and improve rail service in the city of Fredericksburg.
The Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) last year entered an agreement with Fluor-Transurban, a company that will construct, operate and provide routine maintenance for “High Occupancy Toll” lanes constructed on existing high occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes on I-95/395. Vehicles with three or more passengers would continue to use the lanes for free, but single passengers could pay a variable toll to buy their way in. To keep the complex system running, a $50 million infrared tolling camera system would scan every passing vehicle and image both the driver and passengers. When the computer believes fewer than three people are on board and a toll has not been paid, a ticket will be sent in the mail.
And good luck fighting that ticket.
Letting citizens volunteer to pay a tax IS a great idea. Taking their money and not using it to maintain the roads they’re using in the process, or building new capacity is idiotic.
Make traffic flow so well that no one needs to pay the toll, then worry about funding for services that the minority of commuters use. Or, gasp, make the fees for bus use and train use relative to what they cost to operate.
Washington State has been mismanaging funding (supplied by automobile fees) while keeping ferry-user fees so inexpensive for so long that that communities have sprung up around the terminals. People who work in Seattle have moved to Bremerton and Port Orchard. Hell, the entire population of Whidby Island would be out numbered by deer without the nation’s largest ferry service. In just the last couple years we’ve been having so many boats taken down for service or simply dropped from the line up that now the people who built their lives and livelihoods around this service are finding that they’re SOL.
At least they will hopefully have learned a little lesson in not trusting the government like that again.
If you want less of something, you punish it.
If you want more of something, you subsidize it.
The State of Washington’s legislators have not yet learned this very simple lesson.
Teresa Jackson is raising three grandchildren by herself on a fixed income, and saving money for their college education is nearly impossible.
But now Washington state is stepping in to help low-income students like Jackson’s grandchildren go to college.
A new scholarship for low-income middle school students comes with a promise that if grades are kept up through high school – at least 2.0 – the state will pay for college. Kids need to keep out of trouble with the law, too – no felonies.
“This is my only opportunity,” said Jackson, who at 61 is taking care of two teenagers and a third child in elementary school after their mothers – Jackson’s daughters – developed substance-abuse problems.
“We just barely make enough to survive. And saving up for college is impossible. It’s a burden off my shoulders,” Jackson said.
The College Bound scholarship is part of a recent string of initiatives by the state and universities trying to usher low-income students to a college education.
Christened “College Bound” by legislators, the state began rolling out registration for the scholarship this year. The only stipulation is students need to be under the free-or-reduced lunch program. The deadline to enroll is June 1 for eighth graders.
Students who enroll must continue to meet low-income criteria when they apply for college admission.
Yes, the story is heartbreaking. It is also the exception, rather than the rule.
Basically, you need to stay poor and dependent upon the state for at least four years, and your child/children can’t rob a bank, rape or murder anyone before they graduate, and they get a free ride into college?
Keeping a 2.0 GPA should be able to be done by an average child in their sleep. Not committing criminal acts, not just felonies, is just something every decent citizen should be able to do for their first 18 years. Hell, these are even easier qualifications than the ones required to be able to join the military.
So now the state wants to take my tax money to “encourage” kids to be just barely decent citizens, all the while telling the parents that if they try and better themselves, increase their own education, get a better job, etc., that their child’s future will be in the balance?
Whatever happened to kids working your way through college?
Has the state given up on the parents and are hoping the college funds reward will sink into the kid?
I am of two minds on this issue:
On the one hand, if the university staff and faculty are going to campaign to stop students from defending themselves, then they have a responsibility to keep hazardous individuals off the university campus.
But I absolutely do not like this methodology.
On the agenda: A student who got into a shouting match with a faculty member. Another who harassed a female classmate. Someone found sleeping in a car. And a student who posted a threat against a professor on Facebook.
In a practice adopted at one college after another since the massacre at Virginia Tech, a University of Kentucky committee of deans, administrators, campus police and mental health officials has begun meeting regularly to discuss a watch list of troubled students and decide whether they need professional help or should be sent packing.
These “threat assessment groups” are aimed at heading off the kind of bloodshed seen at Virginia Tech a year ago and at Northern Illinois University last month.
“You’ve got to be way ahead of the game, so to speak, expect what may be coming. If you’re able to identify behaviors early on and get these people assistance, it avoids disruptions in the classrooms and potential violence,” said Maj. Joe Monroe, interim police chief at Kentucky.
The Kentucky panel, called Students of Concern, held its first meeting last week and will convene at least twice a month to talk about students whose strange or disturbing behavior has come to their attention.
Such committees represent a change in thinking among U.S. college officials, who for a long time were reluctant to share information about students’ mental health for fear of violating privacy laws.
“If a student is a danger to himself or others, all the privacy concerns go out the window,” said Patricia Terrell, vice president of student affairs, who created the panel.
Ms. Terrell needs to have her “privacy concerns” thrown out the window.
If a student is a danger to themselves or others, they need to be removed from the campus entirely and put somewhere with padded and/or barred walls. Somewhere that they cannot get their hands on gasoline, matches, a vehicle, a baseball bat, an axe, or any number of other items that could harm themselves or others.
And it should not be a group of administrators who are making this decision. Trained professionals unaffiliated with the school only.
School-run “Judicial Hearings” need to be replaced with real law and order. Sadly, it appears that the administrators are so frightened that they may lose a fraction of power over their little fiefdoms that they run the risk of ignoring a problem that could, quite literally, blow up in their faces.
Case in Point: ALF/ELF.
Each and every one of the animal rights/eco-terrorists is a danger to others, but the universities and colleges don’t bother to help police agencies investigate, and sometimes even hinder investigators.
State/County/City run colleges and universities seem to forget that they work under the taxpayer dime and are doing so on taxpayer property. Someone needs to remind them.
I would suggest your state’s governor, but fat bit of luck getting that to happen (except when they’re kissing his/her ass during budget negotiations).
But anyway, contact your local location of supposed higher education and see if they have one of these groups. Ask as a concerned parent, if you find that your title as “Taxpayer” isn’t good enough for them. Then step it up to the next level.
If universities will not let the local/county/state constabulary become involved in keeping dangerous individuals off the campus, and off our streets, then they need to have their funding looked at until they come to their senses.
Update: And now I finally remember why I was originally unhappy when first reading about this.
How long will it take before a uber-leftist teacher sends a student’s name to this board when he/she disagrees with their Marxism instruction during remedial English class?
It seems that the landslide victory for “He who shall not be middle-named” in the Washington State Democrat Party Primary was not all that it should have been.
Washington’s Feb. 9 precinct caucuses brought record turnout, cramped quarters, and heated arguments to gatherings statewide. But the next round in April could bring chaos.
Some of the delegates and alternates selected in February to participate in the next stage of the process, the legislative district caucuses, aren’t even registered to vote, while others were elected as delegates in the wrong precinct. Jim Sharpe, a member of Kitsap County’s credentials committee, estimates that more than 10 percent of the 2,300 delegates and alternates elected in his county fit into one of these categories, with the vast majority falling into the former.
I’m sure the party bosses will be able to easily make up that 10% with cemetery polling and help from ACORN.
I’ve been hearing that Obama was picking up a lot of new voters. I just hadn’t guess that these voters were so virgin that they still had the “Fresh Voter Scent” about them.
Two thumbs up to Seattle Weekly journalist, Aimee Curl, for digging up this info. I haven’t seen word of it in any of the other “Corporate Media” publications out of King County, leading me to believe that this problem won’t be fixed by the August convention.
Hell, it probably won’t be fixed by November. But that never stopped a leftist from voting in Washington State.
A number of readers let us know about the Chaos Computer Club’s latest caper: they published the fingerprint of German Secretary of the Interior Wolfgang Schäuble. The club has been active in opposition to Germany’s increasing push to use biometrics in, for example, e-passports. Someone friendly to the club’s aims captured Schäuble’s fingerprint from a glass he drank from at a panel discussion. The club published 4,000 copies of their magazine Die Datenschleuder including a plastic foil reproducing the minister’s fingerprint — ready to glue to someone else’s finger to provide a false biometric reading. The CCC has a page on their site detailing how to make such a fake fingerprint. The article says a ministry spokesman alluded to possible legal action against the club.
I am unable to see how come some people (and groups of people: Like governments) cannot see that technology has made it easier to impersonate someone, not more difficult.
Found at Samizdata
Joe has pictures of the Boomershoot site here. Four weeks to go.
You can picture me getting my boots sealed and wishing the cover Dave, David and I are using for our firing positions would fit in Buddy the Jeep.
Politicians are a disease
America will be infected with one of these three diseases in January, 2009, certain. Take your pick. Terminal brain cancer (Obama), Terminal pancreatic cancer (Clinton) , or syphilis (McCain). One, syphilis, will allow you life for an extended period; long enough for a possible cure in 4-8 years (if not sooner). The other two, not so much. Sorry, but them’s your choices. If you don’t make the choice yourself, the dumbest person you know will make it for you.
Thinking this was a zombie attack.
But I’d have been wrong.
Zombietime’s 10 Part photo/video/essay on last week’s San Francisco/Berkeley proests is a good way to spend a Sunday afternoon.
Click the link. You know you want to.
Because it was night (an old inside joke that fits well right here).
So I missed “Earth Hour”. Not because I didn’t know about it, but because it was a stupid idea.
Google, in their infinite leftitude, turned their mainpage screen from stark white to “You’re killing the Planet” black in the hopes that we’d all feel guilty.
Too bad for them that for a LCD monitor to produce a black background instead of one that is white, it uses an extra 20% more wattage.
So I spent my evening running Google searches on everything I could think of.
And lastly, Formula 1 has no love for “Earth Hour”
It is often said that perception is more important than reality in F1. What irony then, that at a time when Formula 1 is struggling to reinvent itself as an environmentally responsible sport that the organizers of the Singapore Grand Prix have chosen Earth Hour to debut megawatt using streetlights that will be used to illuminate F1’s first night race later this year.
The lights (300 times more powerful than normal street lights) are being tested today when much of the world is turning their lights off for one hour to symbolically bring attention to the growing environmental crisis. The lights (only a fraction of the 1500 that will be used in the race) will be left in place and turned on each evening at 7 PM along with the regular street lights in Singapore for a week.
Formula 1 has an enormously difficult task in trying to convince that world that it is anything other than a gross display of excess. Thanks to the organizers of the Singapore Grand Prix (incidentally that’s the Singapore Government) that task is now even more difficult.
F1 and the companies associated with it need to be smarter than this.
I think they are doing this because after working around cars with 20,000RPM redlines for a while, it is damn near impossible to hear the little Gaia-worshippers whine.
