MaxRedline

This is a big moose

How silly can you get?  Well - how about building a big fake moose and billing it as a convention center?  Metro's David Bragdon is crying in his beer over on the trendy Northwest side of Portland - bank on it.

North Korea May Be Onto Something

Let's be honest, here:  you'd enjoy taking a manager out.  As the adage goes, even a blind hog, in a forest of oaks, may uproot the occasional acorn.

Granted, the North Koreans are a bit extreme.  But let's face facts: the population of managers has grown to unsustainable levels,  and so the only humane course of action is to undertake a culling operation.  It's for the good of the species.

Gosh, It's Only $33 Million!

It's not like they're proposing to build a mile of light rail, after all.  The City That Works is just looking at "investing" in wind power.  The concept is led by Commisioner Dan Saltzman, who has considerable experience in matters relating to the general pissing away of millions of dollars.  This particular scheme would involve selling bonds, rather than directly stealing from your wallet.  However, given the incredible amount of debt to which Portland City Council has already committed, who in their right mind would purchase bonds from an insolvent city?

Dan's The Man, though - if anybody can push through a plan to spend millions, it'd be him.

Dan:  why not consider starting on a slightly smaller scale?  If it works, then look at scaling it up.  Let's put a few windmills in the Portland City Council chamber.  With all the air that you and the other guys push around, it's bound to generate some wattage.  So if it proves cost effective (and there is little doubt that it would be), we can expand it to the Multnomah County Commission.  From there, we can increase production with a facility at the Metro Council.  Having shown solid results, we can make a good case for extending wind power generation facilities into Salem - just imagine the energy production we could reap from there!

You don't need to rip us off for another few tens of millions of dollars, Dan.  You can give us "green power" just by yakking away as usual.

That BioFool Bite

Heh!  Those biofool mandates come right on back to kick you in unexpected places, don't they?  Turns out that the summer B99 biodiesel turns to Jello when the temperatures drop.  Go figure.

As usual, the City of Portland is right on top of it - eight of their Water Bureau trucks conked out.  Way to go, Fireman Randy: can't wait for the results to come in on some of your other feel-good mandates.  That's some real leadership, there.

The really scary thing here is that the Fireman touts himself as the most conservative member of the Portland City Council - and he probably is.

Biowarfare: The 3,300-Year-Old Version

The first use of bioweapons appears to have occurred (where else?) in the Middle East, around 3,300 years ago.  And Saddam thought he was on the cutting edge?

The historical documents hint that the Hittites – whose empire stretched from modern-day Turkey to northern Syria – sent diseased rams to their enemies to weaken them with tularemia, a devastating bacterial infection that remains a potential bioterror threat even today, says the review.

Ma Anan Sheela, hang your head in shame.  You were a piker.

Bluegills: Good Eating And Easy To Catch

Unfortunately, over in Japan, they apparently prefer whale and eel and stuff like that, so the whole Bluegill thing hasn't been catching on, and now it's a problem.  As crown prince, Akihito received bluegill as a gift from the then mayor of Chicago, Richard J Daley, during a visit to the US in 1960.

And, well, the fish kind of got away from them.

Biwa, the world's third-oldest lake, is home to about 1,250 tonnes of bluegill; nationwide, the population is estimated at 25m fish.

And no, bluegills aren't considered a "delicacy" in Illinois.  They're just easy-to-catch panfish.  Japan just needs more rednecks.

Dems In Doo-Doo?

It appears that, by and large, America hates Clinton and company.  Or as they're occasionally referred to : Clinton, inc.  It seems difficult to believe, but the report doesn't come from The Oregonian "newspaper", and so it gains points for credibility.

Greenies Aren't Going To Be A Problem For Long

In what has to be the most under-reported story of the year, greenies aren't having kids because children are not "eco-friendly".  This is great news, but it hasn't received a lot of play.  We don't need more idiots in the world, and the fact that greenies are taking themselves out is a truly delightful development.  Sanity may yet prevail.

When Social Services Are Neither

Oregonians are all too familiar with the most recent DHS fiasco, in which they decided to expatriate a two-year-old American citizen to Mexico.  Due to the surrounding uproar, that decision's been put on hold for the time being.  However, this sort of thing seems endemic to "Social Sevices experts".  Across the pond, "experts" decided to give an expectant mother ten minutes with her child after birth - then remove the child to foster care.  They really blew it though - they told her what they intended to do.  So she fled to Europe.  It seems unlikely that the Social Services "experts" will make that mistake again.

The question:  given their history of arrogance, do we really need Social Services folks at all?

Military Technology Comes Home

Unmanned drones, now routinely deployed to track terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere, are about to get a new home: Texas plans to start using them to track and cite speeding drivers.  The UAVs, which can run for nearly a day on a gallon of gas, sport powerful cameras - complete with night-vision - capable of homing in on a vehicle from distances of as much as 60 miles.  If you thought photo-radar and red-light cameras were a bummer, wait until they unleash the next generation of revenue-enhancing tools.