*sigh*

Virginia Tech massacre report critical of university's response to rampage that killed 33

Good grief. A "rampage" didn't kill anyone. One nutjob murdered 32 people before putting himself out of everyone else's misery.

And for fuck's sake, the shooter was not a victim!


Hard not to notice that the "what should have been done" report doesn't include "allowing staff and students with valid state conceal-carry weapon permits to bring their weapons onto campus so when someone starts shooting they can shoot back."

Silver lining

The good news is ISU basketball starts in 69 days.

Oh. FRED!

is announcing his candidacy the day of Saints@Colts.

Yes, that's how I measure time.

Heh. Heh heh.

I haven't been reading the Des Moines Register sports page as religiously as I should be, but it comes as no surprise that the top two articles today are:

ISU QB Bret Meyer "steadying influence."
Hawkeye player gets new lawyer.

If anyone needs me, I'll be on the couch listening to the ISU game. They have a new coach, a former defensive coordinator, which I hope doesn't impact Bret Meyer's chance at an NFL career (7,979 yards so far...) next year.

Since 1998, the Cyclones are 27-9 when playing in August and September.

It all turns to shit when the BigXII play starts; I'll be waiting for basketball in about four weeks.

Sad.

Unattended toddler drowns in tub, teenage brother may or may not be charged.

I'm pretty sure you can't charge someone with felony stupidity, or there would hardly be anyone left on the streets.

I suppose they could make him take a child-care class, but if he didn't just learn the important concepts of the "water safety" chapter, he's not going to.

Lotta poor people in Milwaukee

Unshocking. I drive through it every day.

But if this article is supposed to make me feel bad and want to volunteer to hand over more of my paycheck to the state of Wisconsin--quotes about $4 cups of coffee and Ozaukee County--for redistribution, it failed. For starters, I can't afford to own a house ANYWHERE in WI, and I live and work in neighborhoods where no one in their right mind would open a coffee shop (the Subway a block from work went out of business in less than a year). I need my paycheck so I can get the hell out of renting shitty apartments.

Then, the main anecdote is a 41-year-old grandmother of five. Nothing wrong with a 41-yo grandmother in theory; it's better for a woman to have a baby when she's twenty than to wait until her mid-thirties. But all five grandchildren live with her. The article doesn't mention the whereabouts of the parents, but by my math, that's somewhere between two and ten adults who aren't acting like adults.

If this woman's kids hadn't chosen to dump their offspring on her, her "poverty trap" springs wide open. If the parents were raising their own damn kids, she has time to get into some additional education or take a longer bus ride to a better paying job. Even if they live with her to save money, they could still contribute a paycheck to the household income, or leave her with time to improve her own situation...(Can baby daddies be forced to give child support to their child's maternal grandmother if she's raising the baby?)

But nowhere in this article does anyone mention that people having babies they don't bother to care for could be a factor in a city's poverty rate.

I feel really bad for this woman; I had to live with my sister for a couple of months when I couldn't find a job that paid more than $6/hr and I felt like shit every second until I found a job and moved to Milwaukee. But a string of bad choices I made led up to that period of my life, and a whole string of bad choices this woman and her children made have led to this period in her life. I expect to pay for my own bad choices (I think I've finally retired all the debt accrued during my last bout of unemployment, but my credit score is hosed), but I draw the line at subsidizing the bad choices of others.

Profiling?

Mark Steyn makes an interesting point, as usual:

If Senator Craig had gone into the stall, rolled out his prayer mat, yelled "Allahu Akbar!" and been observed attempting to weaponize the ballcock, the undercover cop would have shrugged, "Do I really want to get stuck with another four-week stint in Sensitivity Training hell?" and gone about his business.

The construction is kind of awkward for a band, but "Weaponize the Ballcock" would be a great name for an album.

But I'm really surprised you can get arrested for "soliciting" gay sex--not offering to pay someone for it, just making gestures "understood" to be solicitations--in MINNEAPOLIS. I use the phrase "gay mecca of the Midwest" because it's faintly ironic (in the city of Mecca, gay people are beaten by the religious police), and because the more common "San Fran on the Mississippi" tars them with an anti-American brush I don't quite feel they deserve (some neighborhoods in St. Paul, OTOH...). Seriously, every gay Iowan I've known, except one who went to Colorado, has relocated to Minneapolis because there is a large gay community and the straights are more or less "enlightened." Their Pride festival is two weeks. The last time I was in downtown Minneapolis, a week before the Pride Festival, it was festooned with rainbow flags, and a gay club had two-story banners of shirtless men out front. Does this sound like a town that reviles gay people and/or homosexual acts?

Just seems like there would have been a test case built around someone arrested in a Mpls restroom at least ten years ago. Or maybe there was, and the straights aren't as "enlightened" as I've been led to believe.

(I'm also reminded of all the "George Bush's fascist Christian thug Gestapo is going to round up all the gays!" rhetoric I heard around Mpls and Iowa City around the 2004 election. Not sure why I'm not hearing that again this week, unless three years with no evidence sent it down the memory hole. Arresting a Republican as a cover is the sort of diabolical "Rovian" touch conspiracy theorists eat for breakfast.)

Weaponize the ballcock!

Total eclipse of the moon

Total Lunar Eclipse starts at 3:51 a.m. CDT.

Moonset in MKE is 6:16 a.m., so we'll miss the ending.

Two great tastes that taste great together...

I was trying to ignore current events over the weekend, because I'm getting concerned about my growing level of cynicism, but somehow this filtered through and made me smile.

Colts D looked good last night, or the Lions are worse than usual, I'm not sure which.

Go west, young people.

In the early 20th century, low-income Americans migrated from areas of the country with high unemployment to areas with lots of jobs. See also Detroit, Milwaukee, Chicago, Buffalo, Cleveland...

In the early 21st century, the government will pay you to stay poor and unemployed in Detroit, Milwaukee, Chicago, Buffalo, Cleveland while jobs go unfilled west of the Mississippi.

But--waah!--the culture out west is DIFFERENT, and Americans have ROOTS in the inner cities, and we can't expect people to have some initiative and make their own decision to improve their lives (because we're liberals and we know what's best for them)!

*blink* Don't the "international workers" and "outsourced Texans" taking these jobs face the same issues?

Dunno; it just seems so obvious to me. Maybe that's because I've moved to new places--including a crappy little town I did NOT want to live in--four times to take a job so I could keep litter in the catbox. If I couldn't find an entry-level job around here--especially if I had a kid in MPS!--I'd be saving up for a bus ticket (heck, bus fare to where the jobs are would be an excellent use of "welfare-to-work" monies). But I'm weird. And I'm not trying to buy votes by handing out cash and importing new voters.

Something a little lighter

NFL Reports Strong Sales Of Michael Vick's 2008 Jersey

I wondered how long that would take...

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel ran the obligatory "Waaah! Suffering children!" editorial today, about the deportation of the illegal immigrant "activist" from Chicago leaving her 8-year-old son behind.

The only person responsible for that child's suffering is his mother. She chose to enter the country illegally and give birth here, knowing full well (because she'd been deported once already) what the risks were. She further chose to commit Social Security fraud in Chicago.

You want to feel sad about the fate of some children?

Xavier Brown
Unnamed girls, age 7 and 1.5
Zina Linnick, Adre’Anna Jackson, and two other unnamed girls
Alex Tsuji
Dani Countryman
another unnamed 15-yo girl...

And those college students in Newark, and the high school student from Port Washington, and babies that didn't get to be born, and hundreds of kids growing up without a parent who was killed by someone in the county illegally...it goes on and on and on. Most of the articles time out after 30 days.

I don't have any sad left for a woman who CHOSE to fuck up her kid's life.

Interesting.

A friend of mine insists there is no vote fraud anywhere, even as I send her article after article about Milwaukee, because no one would EVER abuse the sacred right. Everyone takes their responsibility to cast one-and-only-one well-informed, carefully-considered vote as seriously as she does.

I admire her faith, but no one over the age of 10 should be that naive. Look, ma, double voting!

I've been in a "fugue state" in Stallis once or twice. But every time I've driven by a polling station on an election day, I've been reminded to go vote at the precinct listed on my registration, instead of pulling in and giving a false address. I'm weird like that.


Anyway, I'm glad to see someone is not only cross-checking new registrations with existing ones, but reporting discrepancies. If only there was some way to cross-check lists from other counties and states; I'm still annoyed that al-Gore won Iowa in 2000 by a margin of approximately the number of U of Iowa students who admitted to the student paper that they voted once on campus and once at their parents' address.

OK, I lied...

More about Michael Vick. ESPN columnist Jemele Hill has written a very good column that will probably make her very unpopular.

But Vick let you down. He betrayed you. He heightened the stereotypes of black men instead of eroding them. Racists certainly will feast on Vick, but he was the one who made himself an entrée.

But this is what's going to get her the most criticism, I think:

...let's attack this poisonous idea in the black community that equates only negatives with success. Surely, one reason Vick kept his circle of friends is because successful black people are pressured into keeping their toxic buddies around for the sake of "keeping it real" -- even though they've spent most of their lives trying to escape the street lifestyle in which many of those friends remain.

Ow.

There's a very long, very good piece by Myron Magnet in City Journal, too, that was not written about Vick but about the culture that glorifies him.

Web nonsense

My employer has started using Websense to keep us from reading about sports at the office. I have no objection to that, but I can't figure out how it decides what to block while I'm reading at lunch.

For example, I can't access James Lileks' home page, but I can access the Supreme Leader of Iran's daily fatwa.

Supreme Leader's advice of the day: "Listening to Children’s Songs"

• Question: What is your opinion about listening to children’s songs? Are the children allowed to sing for their homeland, parents, etc. while using singing equipments?
• Answer: Listening to ghinā’ is impermissible no matter whether it is sung by children. Also, the parents should not provide their children with musical instruments to be used in songs even though children are not bound to religious duties.

I gotta remember this one the next time someone bleats on about how Islam and Christianity are both equally evil and/or neutral (which view depends on how much they hate Christianity...). One forbids music--no singing and no instruments. Especially no secular music! The other has a rich tradition of using music in worship (J.S. Bach) and no implicit regulations against other music.

All the other major world religions have musical traditions. All the tribal/animistic societies have songs and instruments. Even Stalin didn't forbid nursery rhymes.

I'm newly impressed by just how STUPID you have to be to believe in cultural relativism, much less believe that a culture where music is forbidden is better than the culture that gave us Eddie Van Halen and Randy Rhoads (not Randi Rhodes, ugh) and Lawrence Welk and....

"Activist"??

Activist arrested in L.A.

Don't see anything in the definition of "activist" that includes fraud or fugitives.

After entering the country illegally twice, she became an activist shortly after she was arrested in 2002 during a federal sweep at O'Hare International Airport, where Arellano cleaned airplanes. She was later convicted of using a fake Social Security card.

Oh, you become an activist after you're arrested. Gotcha.

I'll have to do more research after work, but I don't think any of the "activism" has been directed at checking the identity and residency status of airport workers.

I have friends who should read this but they won't

Following a link from NRO, Bruce Bawer in the City Journal...

...if you want to ensure peace, worry less about freedom. Appease tyranny, accept it, embrace it—and there’ll be no more war.

I'm not awake enough for additional biting commentary. But I'm tired of people who don't understand that giving bullies what they want when they beat you only gets you more beatings (I learned that when I was SEVEN, for Pete's sake), and I'm more tired of people who expect me to trade my essential liberties for a little warm fuzzy feeling.

I could write this post every day.

I swear I read this same article, with different dead children, EVERY SINGLE DAY.

The man accused of running a stop sign and causing a crash this week that killed a 17-year-old Port Washington boy is an illegal immigrant who was convicted in Wisconsin in December of first-offense drunken driving, authorities confirmed Friday.

DECEMBER! Why the !*&$(#! is this is piece of crap still in Wisconsin?!?

The article is headlined "Identity of fugitive confirmed", but I'm inclined to doubt that:

An arrest warrant has been issued for Carbajal-Lile, 27. The Sheboygan County Sheriff's Department says he may be en route to Mexico. The U.S. Border Patrol has been alerted regarding his status as a fugitive. Carbajal-Lile's last known address is in Fredonia.

He uses a number of aliases, including: Eddie Carbajal; Eddie Lile; Eddie Carbajal-Farvies; Negro Carbajal; Negro Carbajal-Lile; and Negro Lile.

Why does an "honest, hard-working immigrant" need seven names? Committing the fraud Americans won't commit?

We've already got more than enough Americans committing murder, thanks.

If nautical nonsense be something ye wish

A giant SpongeBob SquarePants promotional balloon stolen from atop a Sheboygan Burger King in November 2004 will be returned to the restaurant today, Sheboygan police said.

Living in Wisconsin is pretty much living in News of the Weird.

We're overdue for a story about sex with ruminants.

"Stop snitchin'" is the fault of...whom?

Another quilter I used to admire until they came down with industrial-grade BDS.

We wonder why the whole teenaged society has adopted the “don’t snitch” policy that was mentioned on 60 Minutes last night. In my opinion, CBS got one thing wrong. This distrust of authority has been fostered by our society. It is not just a phenomenon of the poor or the immigrant societies. The biggest contributor to this fear was summed up in a bumper sticker I saw weeks ago. It addresses the political tripe of “family values.”

Family Values Is Having Your Brother Steal the Election for You.

*blink*

People "of color" are refusing to cooperate in investigations into crime plaguing their neighbors and themselves--even the senseless accidental slaughter of children--because they're following the example of George Bush winning the 2000 election?

I'm not sure what's funnier: the idea that Bush is some sort of criminal mastermind or the idea that the entire street-wise hip-hop culture is aping a fictionalized "disregard for the law" attributed to a Yalie from a patrician white family.

No, I lied, that second idea is the funnier. I get a mental image of Flip Wilson saying, "W made me do it!"

Anyway, please, tell me about how refusing to tell the police who shot the four-year-old when they meant to shoot you is a "family value" our society should be encouraging. I tend to think obstructing justice is a crime.