MaxRedline

Crispy On The Outside

I'd like four fried chickens, and a Coke.

Joliet Jake could have had the order filled in Southeast Portland last night, when two chicken coops went up.  The movement to avoid buying eggs from the grocer and to instead spend much more by raising a few chickens in the back yard has really caught fire - costing one resident around $35,000 in damages.  Wow - that kind of scratch could buy a whole lot of eggs.

Apparently, the urban "farmers" were using heat lamps in the chicken coops to keep their babies warm when things got a bit out of hand.  Portland Fire Department recommends using a plain old 100-watt incandescent light instead - apparently forgetting that due to the political ramifications of the great "man-caused global warming" hoax, standard bulbs won't be available much longer.

Boring Cutting-Edge

This could be the beginning of a bright new future in the Portland metro area, as the little town of Boring is looking to opt-out of TriMet.  Recognizing that the agency has been busily diverting funds into light rail at the expense of bus service, they've correctly concluded that the payroll taxes that the agency collects from them buys them essentially no services.  They're paying for cutting-edge light rail lines that will never serve their town, and they've about had enough of it.

Good for them!  They know a scam when they see one. 

“They have been pushing rail expansion for decades now,” Mr. Rubin said, “and it has not had much of an impact in terms of increasing transit ridership. The big problem is that these are very, very expensive, and we wind up spending so much money on building these rail lines that there is not enough to operate bus service. So we wind up cutting back on bus operations and then raising fares, which drives the riders away.”

“The science of public transit is not too complicated,” Mr. Cervero said in an e-mail message. “It comes down to how time-competitive transit is with the private car. If it takes two to three times longer to get from Point A to Point B by transit, the vast majority of folks will drive. If it’s faster going by bus or train, then most will forsake their car and ride transit.”

If a normal 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. employee wants to ride the bus from Gresham on a weekday morning, he or she would leave the Gresham Transit Center at 5:16 a.m. and arrive in Boring at 5:30 a.m.

If a Boring resident wanted to use TriMet to travel to a Gresham or Portland-area business each weekday, he or she would leave Boring at 5:30 a.m. and not be able to return home until 6:49 p.m.

“The Boring community pays thousands of dollars a month to TriMet,” Bates said. “TriMet provides a bus line connecting to Gresham, but you’ve got to get up at 4:30 in the morning to catch the (5:30 a.m.) bus. And it only goes to (Gresham and Portland). It doesn’t bring anyone to Boring (in the morning).”

Yeah, that's it in a nutshell: who wants to get up at 4 a.m. in order to get to a job that starts at 8:00?  You're supposed to love it, because it's so great.  In my case, work is a twelve-minute drive away.  By transit, it's over two hours.  Each way.  I spend less than half an hour driving to and from work, as opposed to 4 hours or more.

To put it another way, taking transit to and from my job would subtract the equivalent of half a work-week from my life, each and every week.  Oddly, I value my free time.

 

A Thanksgiving Message To All 57 States

Sarah Palin was in great form yesterday; it's a quick read, but well worth the time.  As Obama said, "We welcome our Republican counterparts along, but they gotta sit in back."  Palin seems very comfortable there.  

At What Price?

The mantra, both here in Portland and across the country, is "green jobs".  Until recently, Spain led the world in green technology and government-subsidized "green jobs".  Now teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, Spain has abandoned their programs - and that's something that Americans should be taking into consideration.

Green jobs are now being hailed as the next big hoax as studies emerge showing that for every green job produced, more than double that is lost in other areas of the economy.

Studies in Spain have indicated that about one in ten "green jobs" are permanent, yet the country spent $774,000 for each such job "created" - while losing 2.2 jobs for each "green" job.  A similar evaluation in California yielded virtually identical results.

That's cold, hard reality.

Unfortunately, reality is unlikely to faze politicians intent upon parading their "green" credentials.  

Autoimmune Disease

Despite the ongoing uproar over scanners and searches at airports, Big Sis (Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano - the same inept individual who can't seem to protect our borders) is now entertaining the idea of extending similar "security" procedures to trains, ships, and even mass transit systems.  It was only a matter of time.

… He remembered Bigend saying they were a symptom of auto-immune disease, the state’s protective mechanisms ‘roiding up into something actively destructive, chronic; watchful eyes eroding the healthy function of that which they ostensibly protected.

        - Zero History, William Gibson

 

        

The GM IPO - Low Volt

Left under-reported amid the hoopla of the Government Motors IPO was one telling little detail:  the stock was being peddled at a loss.

Combine that with the actual details on their new Chevy Volt, and what you have is a story of a car company still in a death spiral.

Their much-heralded Volt is a hybrid car, and not a particularly good one at that: it can run on battery power alone, where it achieves an EPA value of 93 mpg.  However, its range on battery power is only 35 miles.  It can run on gasoline alone, as well, and in that mode it achieves 37 mpg.  The Volt was advertised as able to run 230 miles on a single charge; clearly, that figure was severely overblown.

Perhaps the good news, if any, is that in peddling its shares below cost, the feds are essentially admitting that they have no business trying to run a car company.  On the other hand, as the prospectus states down in the fine print, the door remains open for the government to re-nationalize the company.

If nothing else, the timing of this offer was impeccable: it's a turkey.

They "Report"; You Decide

CNN reports that the nutballs who refer to themselves as the "animal liberation front" sent razor blades smeared with "AIDS-infected blood" to the home of a UCLA neuroscience researcher.

Ostensibly, they're upset because he uses federal grant money to study addiction, but that's just a smokescreen.  Their real beef is that his work involves vervet monkeys; they'd be just as hyped up if the researcher's work was funded privately.

Their clever plan overlooked one minor detail, however: HIV can't survive outside of the human body for more than a few hours.

And CNN is guilty of sloppy reporting (hardly unusual for them): the blades could not be tainted with a syndrome - which, after all, is what AIDS is.  The blades may have been tainted with HIV-infected blood, but they certainly weren't tainted with AIDS.

Sarah Palin Clubbed A Fish; Leftists Then Threw Hissy Fits

Palin was shown on a fishing trip during which she clubbed a halibut on the noggin.  Generally, that's what you do with fish when you catch them; it's quick, humane, and effective.  Of course the animal rights nuts went bonkers: A spokesperson for animal rights group In Defense Of Animals told TMZ: 'Sarah Palin’s complete lack of compassion as demonstrated in this snuff video is disgusting.'

Ummm...how do you "compassionately" kill a fish?  Would these folks prefer to let it suffocate to death?  Oh, right - fish are "sea kittens", according to these folks, so you shouldn't catch them in the first place, much less eat them.

A couple of years ago, she was "caught on camera" speaking at a turkey farm - while people were (gasp!)  Killing turkeys right behind her!  Okay, she had just "pardoned" one turkey - but she didn't extend that to all of them.  Still, the Left went wild.  She scares them, and so whenever an opportunity arises to vilify her, they jump on it.  "She lacks compassion!"

Really?  Then put her on Kim Jong Ill and his successor, Mentally.

She's exactly what the NKors need to experience.

But back to the turkey slaughter...

Never mind that on average some 42 million turkeys are killed in time for Thanksgiving dinner each year; the remains of ours, in fact are resting in the fridge at this very moment.  Quite frankly, we don't care about the AR nuts nor their attitudes, as the bird was tasty.  The AR nuts are unlikely to be mollified by the fact that we found the dressing, potatoes, rolls, cranberry sauce, and other side dishes tasty as well. 

It may horrify the AR nuts, but it's impossible to vilify that many Americans if you want donations to keep coming.  For the time being, they have to ignore the basic facts - like the fact that our dentition and digestive systems speak to our omnivorous nature, while our front-centered eye placement affords us the binocular vision common to successful predators.  We're built to eat just about anything.

Perhaps the AR nuts would prefer that we return to our Thanksgiving roots, which featured not fowl, but fish - a fish which most Americans today view as distinctly unappetizing.

Squanto — a Patuxet Indian who had learned English — took pity on the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony who had managed to survive that first brutal winter, and showed them how to plant corn, putting a dead fish in each hole where a seed was planted. But before that, before the ground had even fully thawed, he taught them a perhaps more valuable skill: how to catch a fatty, nutritious fish that would sustain them in the worst of winters. And this food item, likely on the table of that first Thanksgiving, would have carried special significance to those remaining colonists. Eels — a forgotten staple of our forefathers.

Indeed, eel was the dinner that Pilgrims were given on the very day after they made peace with Massasoit, the sachem, or leader, of the region.

Eh - no...you can bet the AR nuts wouldn't really like that, either, due to the inhumane method of harvest that the savages employed:

The following account is from “Mourt’s Relation,” mostly written by a Plymouth resident, Edward Winslow: “Squanto went at noon to fish for eels. At night he came home with as many as he could well lift in one hand, which our people were glad of. They were fat and sweet. He trod them out with his feet, and so caught them with his hands without any other instrument.”

He trod them out with his feet.  You can well imagine the agony that the poor eels underwent at the foot of the merciless savage.

Would not a club to the head be more humane?  Certainly, that would be their argument.  But then, that returns us to Palin, who must be vilified at every turn, if only for the halibut.

You'd think that the Leftists would love President George H.W. Bush.  After all, the tradition of presenting the Presidential turkey had previously been a "greet, then eat" scenario.  It was Bush Sr. who inaugurated the current tradition of greeting and "pardoning" the turkeys.

If they were really into their proclaimed cause of animal "rights", then the Left would worship Bush as an enlightened leader of this great nation.  Of course, they aren't, and they can't.

Bush is a damn Republican.

TSA Tempest

This whole thing has been blown up as a distraction.  The scanners and groping have been constantly in the news, and the only possible reason for it is to focus attention so that other issues can slide by.

It's a manufactured controversy, and built for a reason.

But many folks are yawning, while others are taking advantage of the new air travel edicts.

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Check out the sponsor.  They'll print 'em, you stick 'em.

The Vulnerable Penguin

Even the big Zero has finally admitted the unthinkable: Portland's pervy little "mayor", whom they have supported for years, has actually managed to taint the office.  With no accomplishments of significance and with a concomitant diminution of authority, the Penguin is increasingly seen as positioned to lose the coming 2012 election.

His loss would be Portland's gain.