MaxRedline

Why The USA Beach Volleyball Team Is Keeping Bikinis

1) They're Americans, dammit!

2) The sand doesn't bother them as much, with less clothing to catch the stuff.

This really works! If they played naked, there'd be even less clothing to trap sand.

Side benefit: bet the Mooslims would default.

NewsFlash

Today, Microsoft is rolling out a new web-based email client, making a clean break from its old hotmail client. It looks good; it's fast and free, and unlike Google's GMail, it reportedly doesn't invade your privacy.

You can find it at http://www.outlook.com/

While Google has long used the corporate tagline, Don't Be Evil, they rarely seem to live up to it.

Microsoft says the lack of ads on personal mail is a big privacy advantage over Gmail, which uses algorithms to scan your mail and shows you related ads alongside every message.

Personally, I’ve never minded Gmail’s ad-scanning, but Hall argues that a lot of people are creeped out by it. 

If you're among those creeped by Googles continual privacy invasions, Outlook may be your best friend.

• Outlook is productive—you get free Word, Excel, and PowerPoint web apps built in with 7 GB of free cloud storage.

• Outlook is private—you’re in control of your data, and your personal conversations aren’t used for ads.

The above bullet-points, of course, come from Microsoft. The company everyone loves to hate. On the other hand, Google's not as friendly as everybody assumed it was.

Personally, I haven't been especially annoyed with GMail, though I know plenty who are. But I do like the Microsoft application better.

Your mileage may vary.

Port Of Astoria Goes SCUBA

Auditors note that the Port is just about underwater, financially. It didn't help that they spent half a million plus on lawsuits:

The Port spent $527,000 on legal battles with Oregon LNG, the Bank of Astoria and others since fiscal year 2008, according to Browne. The Port is suing its former and Clatsop County’s current attorney, Heather Reynolds.

But they've been bungling along on other fronts for years as well; among other things, they made the often fatal mistake of "deferring maintenance" - i.e., spending that money on other stuff. It's always less expensive to maintain early and often, rather than trying to play catch-up down the road.

They got into gambling, as well, betting much of the farm on a log export facility that didn't pan out, and betting again on a facility expansion for a single electric vehicle manufacturer, Lektro. Their product line revolves around one component - electric "tugs" for pulling and pushing aircraft. When the recession hit the airline industry, it hit Lektro hard as well, and it left the Port holding the bag to the tune of about half a million dollars.

It's not that Lektro's a bad company; it isn't. But the Port needs to stop pretending to be a publicly-funded development company and start running itself like a business.

And it needs to quit playing the ponies.

Obama Administration Busted In New Black Panthers Case

You may recall that members of New Black Panthers were popped on charges of voter intimidation in Philadelphia, and that when it became clear that DoJ would prevail in the case, the attorneys were ordered to drop it. Once again, racist Attorney General Eric Holder was implicated in the interference, but as is always the case with the Obama political appointee, he skated.

A federal court in Washington, DC, held last week that political appointees appointed by President Obama did interfere with the Department of Justice’s prosecution of the New Black Panther Party.

“The Court’s decision is another piece of evidence showing the Obama Justice Department is run by individuals who have a problem telling the truth,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said. “The decision shows that we can’t trust the Obama Justice Department to fairly administer our nation’s voting and election laws.”

This comes as no surprise, given the documented corruption and incompetence demonstrated regularly by the Obama administration. As the old saying goes: a fish rots from the head down.

Odor In The Court!

The 9th U.S. Circus Court of Appeals has ruled that the federal government can use your cell phone as a "roving bug" - can use your cellphone as a microphone and record conversations – even when the phone is not being used. Given the ubiquity of the devices, which the federal government gives away "free" to low-income folks (they even run expensive television ads hawking the "free" phones), one can expect phones to become a favored weapon in the surveillance state. It's for your own good, Citizen.

There are, of course, far reaching implications of such a decision. As we reported recently, a person will not know, and perhaps will never know, if he has been the target of surveillance on the part of the federal government.

 

Interesting Photo

Looks almost like the skies are favoring America. Could be bad news for BO and MO, as we know how they feel about the country.

Changes

Linked commenting is now implemented here. If it turns out to be a honking pain in the butt, I'll get rid of it. Thus far, I'm ambivalent.

I've been availing myself of the cloud cover and cool temps to do some chainsawing, and was up about 20 feet in an alder, taking off branches that are just going to fill the gutters with leaves come fall, when I found a downy woodpecker nest in the upper part of the trunk. Well, rats. So much for my grand plan of limbing. then taking the sucker down. I'll go on with the limbing (alders are darn near impossible to kill), but leave the trunk standing. For now.

If English starlings or sparrows eventually take over, I'll drop that trunk in a heartbeat - preferably with the illegal aliens still inside. For the moment, knowing who's living there, it's spared.

Buy Stock In Depends™

The Greenies are going to be crapping themselves. Morrow Pacific has signed letters of intent with manufacturers Gunderson and Vigor Industrial to build 20 enclosed barges at a total cost of over $75 million. The purpose: to transport dirty, horrible low-sulfur coal from the Powder River Basin. Offloaded from trains at Port of Morrow on the upper Columbia River, the barges would transport product downstream to Port of St. Helens, where it would then be loaded onto ocean-going ships bound for Asia. This is a nightmare development, according to Greenies.

Gunderson and Vigor tend to disagree:

“We need projects like this in Oregon,” said Bill Furman, CEO of Gunderson. “This is an amazing opportunity for Gunderson and will employ 350 local workers.”
 
Frank Foti, CEO of Vigor Industrial, said the Morrow Pacific project “will increase manufacturing jobs in Oregon and provide economic development in rural communities.”

Greenies are fighting it for all they're worth (and a lot of ignorant people donate to them, so they have quite a bit of cash to spend on litigation), but they're kind of out-of-step:

EarthFix, a public media project of Oregon Public Broadcasting focused on the environment, reports the following:

"A new public-opinion poll for EarthFix finds a majority of residents in Washington, Oregon and Idaho express support for transporting coal from Wyoming and Montana through the Northwest so it can be exported to Asia.

"DHM Research polled 1,200 residents in Oregon, Washington and Idaho. Fifty-five percent said they were supportive of new coal export proposals."

Unlike the well-heeled Greenies, a lot of folks in the Pacific Northwest think that creating family-wage jobs is kind of important.

They're finally catching on to the Greenie agenda.

 

 

Welcome!

Guests from Washington, D.C. and Dearbornistan have been frequent visitors of late, and local "science writer" David Afpel has burned the midnight oil, checking in here on several occasions in the wee hours from his blogspot accounts here and in the U.K.  While the topics perused by the others have been varied, Afpel appears to have focused on the "global warming" post of yesterday. Perhaps he's hoping for a bump on his sites, as traffic here exceeds that of his combined sites. Good luck with that.

AlGore Rails Against Extremists

Oddly, he's not referring to himself nor Barky. Naturally, that's how he referred to Republicans in a Democrat fund-raising email sent today. Mr. Man-Made Global Warming is very afraid of the extremist Republicans, as they might cut into his bottom line by removing "green energy" subsidies or possibly curb his "carbon credits" business model. He might even have to give up one of his seven "homes".

"The last thing we want is the Republican Party — a party that’s been hijacked by an extremist fringe — to win the White House and tighten its grip on Congress," Gore writes. "That would spell disaster for our economy and our environment."