And that is it for me folks. At least until the 25th.
I’ve got a couple things below here for y’all and then I’m handing it off to our good man, David.
Take care of yourselves and be good to one another.
If I hear otherwise, well, you just wait until your father gets home.
That is what members of the anti-Bush left are calling for:
When Daniel Ellsberg, the defense analyst, leaked the Pentagon Papers to the press in 1971, it created one of the most significant newspaper stories — and battles — of the century. One thing it did not do was prevent the Vietnam War, although it may have shortened it. Now he is calling on officials within the government to leak “the Pentagon Paper of the Middle East” to modern reporters, to short-circuit another possible war.
Ellsberg’s challenge is found in the October issue of Harper’s magazine, to appear next week. E&P has obtained an advance copy.
The article is titled, “The Next War,” with the conflict in question a possible face-off between the U.S. and Iran. Ellsberg, based on unconfirmed reporting by Seymour Hersh and others, believes there is a “hidden crisis,” with government insiders aware of “serious plans for war with Iran” while “congress and the public remain largely in the dark.”
His remedy: “Conscientious insiders” need to leak hard evidence to the press and public, while risking their current and future employment, as he did in the early 1970s.
Desperate times do not always call for desperate measures.
But desparate people almost always do.
The safety of every worker “to the maximum extent feasible” was the goal of Congress when it passed the Occupational Health and Safety Act in 1970. A new department, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), was formed within the Department of Labor to pass safety regulations and to inspect workplaces. For twenty-five years OSHA has been hard at work. The agency has over 4000 detailed regulations, dictating everything from the height of railings (42 inches) to how much a plank can stick out from a temporary scaffold (12 inches). There are about 2000 safety inspectors in the field, not many compared with 6 million workplaces, but enough to do some good if they focus on firms with bad safety records. Several hundred billion dollars have been spent by industry to comply with OSHA’s rules. Intuitively, all this expense must have done some good.
It hasn’t. Safety in the American workplace is about the same as it was in 1970.
Philip K. Howard – The Death of Common Sense
Statisticians can add the safety features such as ABS and airbags which come standard in today’s vehicles to all of OSHA’s regulations. In the trash and recycling industry, we still have the same percentage of accidents and injuries from accidents as we did back in the “Dino-Days” as the drivers call them. Though we do our best to do make sure we’re as safe as possible.
You can’t legislate out human error.
Everybody say “ho!” It’s a twofer!
I was having one hell of a time finding something truly fitting of this series this morning. Blogsnot was down and even Avarosis was only being inflammatory, so what to do!?!
Why The Huff-a-ton Post, of course!
Barely one-third of the way down the list of stories, professional eco-defender, Laurie David, chews out Wolf Blitzer for giving the “There is No Global Warming” side of the debate a few minutes of airtime:
Dear Mr. Blitzer,
How is it possible, after a year of extensive media coverage, numerous scientific studies, and An Inconvenient Truth, you are still offering global warming reports that mislead and confuse the American public? Tuesday, when reporting on the new findings by the American Meteorological Society linking global warming to hurricane ferocity, you immediately undermined the report by giving equal weight to the one “skeptic” who says it just ain’t so.
Oh No! Not one skeptic! He could ruin the hyper-frightening monopoly! how dare you, Mr. Blitzer!
Then, just below Ms. “We’re All Gonna Boil in the Oceans” Laurie David, I find writer and former university instructor, Ed Hamilton, thanks the Pentagon (in all seriousness) for not bombing that funeral full of al Qaida members in Afghanistan:
The Pentagon is apparently taking heat for their refusal to bomb a funeral in Afghanistan. So I just wanted to be the first to commend the Army officers involved in the decision for their courage in standing up to the bloodthirsty lunatics in the White House who would bring our country down to the level of the terrorists.
This is a breath of moral fresh air in the otherwise fetid quagmire into which we have sunk ourselves in the Middle East.
America cannot win with these folks; If we’d have bombed the funeral, we’d be “Sinking to their level”. But since we haven’t erradicated al qiada from Afghanistan, we’re failures.
You’d think that smart people would be the ones who are never happy, because they know the world’s ills. But it turns out that it is the ones who shouldn’t be given shoelaces who fill that niche.
I have been remiss in telling you about my upcoming absence.
Next week, I will not be in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.
Last Christmas, the mother formerly known as the Analog Mom laid upon myself and my wife and my brother and his wife tickets for a 5-day/4 night cruise into the Inside Passage and I will be leaving Monday.
I’ve never been on a boat this big, so it should be a trip in more ways than one. Also, despite what the wife will tell you, I’ve never been waited on hand and foot, so I’m going to have to remember my people skills.
If you have a some spare cash and want to take what I’m told is a hell of a cruise or you want to come out and wish us Ban Voyagee (pfft, yeah right), here be the itinerary.
If’n we get attcked by Killer Whales while tendering into Nanaimo or the ship gets overrun by jihadi canucks, I will the entirety of RNS to our good man David, who has the RNS trademark “Cold, Mean, Heartless and Cruel Administrator Power” while I’m gone. Y’all will have to shoot it out over my guns though. There’ll be a Teamster watching the place, so you’ll have to get past him before you can even start trying to crack your way into the vault that is “The Mens Room”.
I’m telling you this now because, well, I forgot before, and because it throws a wrench into my plans of playing music from this new album I’ve got that I wanted to load up.
Because I got favorable feedback from my last musical post, with Craig giving me keyboard ‘metal hands’ – \m/ \m/ – I have decided to just post up more metal for today and start with the new stuff whence I return.
Because just like a Barrett .50, I have too much metal for one hand – \mmm/
The Constitution is a model of flexible law that can evolve with the changing times and unforseen circumstances. This remarkable document, shorter than the EPA’s Benzine rules, gave us three branches of government and a Bill of Rights build on vague principles like “due process”
The Death of Common Sense – Philip K. HowardÂ
I’d like to thank once again the folks who have dropped their suggested reading materials in the comments. I think I have a list of sufficient length to make the long trip to half priced books.
I’m sure that the titles in the stack I set on the counter will make the usual Howard Dean supporting cashier bunch her face up very nicely.
On a side note, CAShane mentioned the Mack Bolan series of books in Tuesday’s comments.
In the latter half of my elementary years I started reading “The Executioner” series and even did a book report on book #3 “Battle Mask”. I think it was when I got to the part where Bolan finds his plastic surgeon friend after the mob guys had tortured him (breaking joints/pulling his nipples off with pliers) that made the teacher rethink her idea of having us stand up in front of the class to give our reports out loud.
For the non-Mack knowing, go here. For those who have books #1-10, how much?
Between Seattle, Washington and Bozeman, Montana
In Seattle, when a police officer has to discharge his weapon in the line of duty, the news stations always show footage of the criminal’s crying relatives blaming the “trigger happy cops” and how the “little angel” was just turning his life around. When the inquest comes out with the “Justified” verdict we get to hear about the family’s lawsuit, which usually gets tossed out as soon as it comes before a judge and then more footage of the crying relatives.
I swear, it is like there is a script they follow.
However, in Bozeman, you get something like this:
A Bozeman police officer was justified in fatally shooting a man who had pointed a gun at the officer during a traffic stop, a coroner’s jury here has ruled.
The jury watched the patrol car video of the shooting and listened to two hours of testimony on Thursday before deciding 6-1 that Lt. Rich McLane’s actions were warranted in the shooting of Gary Gottfried on June 2.
The videotape showed that after McLane asked Gottfried for his driver’s license, Gottfried pointed a semiautomatic pistol at McLane’s face and pulled the trigger, which “clicked.”
There was no bullet in the chamber. Gottfried tried to load the handgun and shoot at McLane a second time.
(snip)
Gottfried’s uncle, Ed Gottfried of St. Ignatius, also attended the inquest.“The verdict was pretty clear,” he said. “(Gary) did point a pistol. It was pretty obvious from the video.”
IÂ normally wouldn’t have posted this, giving it a “finally, an honest family member” exclamation when the wife showed it to me, until she told me that the officer, Lt. Rich McLane, is her cousin.
Small world, indeed.
Yesterday, the RNS Server Savior, Craig at MTPolitics, felt the need to point out “Da Rules” of MTPolitics.
Let it herby be known that for no particular reason other than I think they’re good, I am co-opting them for “Da Rules” at RNS.
Because there ain’t no nothing about not being able to borrow “Da Rules” included in “Da Rules”.
They are below the fold and there will be a link to them on the sidebar in short order.
If you’re a frequent traveller or a reader of the “Travel” section of your local paper, you may have read the name Rick Steves. I have, his stuff in published in at least one, if not both, of the Seattle dailies.
If you have any of his large number of books, you may want to think about buying another writer at your next purchase, because he is the subject of today’s installment of “The Dumbest Thing I’ve Read All Day”.
“I think we’re 300 million people and if we lose a few hundred people a year to terrorists, that doesn’t change who we are and it shouldn’t change the fabric of our society. Frankly I think we should get used to losing — as long as we’re taking the stance in the world of being the military superpower, you’re going to have people nipping at you. And if it’s hundreds or thousands — we lose 15,000 people a year to have the right to bear arms and most people think that’s a good deal, year after year. We spend 15,000 people for the right to bear arms. What do we spend to be as aggressive and heavy weight on this planet? We’re always going to have terrorism.”
That may just well be the dumbest thing I’ve read all week, and it is only Thursday morning. In just one paragraph I’ve found a guy who is a BDS sufferer, apathetic to terrorism and a gun bigot.
There is more where that came from. Put your knee boots on.
Matt Stoller of the MyDDblog is upset that a MoveOn.Org ad was pulled by a local TV affiliate after allegations of it being filled with half-truths and full-on lies.
When local affiliates won’t run mainstream political ads funded by small donations of regular citizens because the other side doesn’t like what they say, it’s bordering on overt censorship.
Let us count the errors in Stoller’s sentence, shall we?
1. MoveOn is NOT “mainstream”. It’s membership consists of less than 10% of the population and nearly one-third of their members are not US citizens or even residents.
2. MoveOn is not funded by small donations from regular citizens. George Soros is not a “regular citizen”.
3. A TV station cannot censor anyone. Only the government can censor. Day 1 of Civics teaches us this.
Three errors in one sentence, each of which is passed off as the truth. Since they are passed off as such and we know them not to be, that makes them lies.
If he is defending this ad with lies, how much do you want to bet that the ad itself is not truthful?
I can guarantee it isn’t, because here is the sentece which follows the one above:
One key piece of any progressive agenda has to be media reform.
Media reform is leftists speak for “overt government control of the airwaves”. This is also known as “The Fairness Doctrine”.
How do I know this, because of the very next sentence:
We need to break the backs of the people engaging in these unAmerican tactics.
Ahh yes, the overt threats. Typical of those who scream “fascism” or “censorship” and every available opportunity.
