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Duin Blows A Scam Wide Open In SW Portland

Even a stopped clock, as the saying goes, is right twice a day. And so it is the ulta-lib columnist Steve Duin at The Oregonian has detonated a major bomb that, for the most part, brings together the Righties and the Lefties: a married real estate broker and her mortgage company president husband snookered their 88 year-old neighbor into selling them a 2.2 acre parcel of land in SW Portland for $22,000. The actual value: currently $800,000. Heck, you can't buy a 2.2 yard parcel of land here for $22,000. But the old folks have been living down the road for some 68 years, and so when they bought the 2.5 acre total on Garden Home Road, it likely didn't cost much more than around $20,000 at the time.

Duin first broke the tale here. The real estate broker involved was fired by her company shortly afterward; she didn't file the required paperwork through the company, and an investigation is about to be launched by the state Real Estate agency. And her hubby isn't faring any better; he may be president of the mortgage company, but the reviews on Yelp and other web sites are suddenly withering.

It seems pretty clear that these two real estate professionals ripped off their (and my) geriatric neighbors, and there are damned few things in this world that can unite liberals and conservatives - but they found one. Happily, she's out of a job and facing an investigation - and he's sitting on an increasingly hot seat as well.

Congratulations to Duin and The Oregonian, odd as it feels to say that. I think I need a shower.

Oregon Spotted Frog Hits Threatened List

GRANTS PASS, Ore. (AP) — Twenty-three years after it was first proposed for protection by the Endangered Species Act, the Oregon spotted frog is being listed as a threatened species.

For the past decade, Oregon Zoo has been including the species in its captive propagation/conversation conservation program, in which they take egg masses from the wild and raise the frogs from egg-stage to semi-adulthood (generally killing hundreds of them in the process) - and then release the few dozen survivors back into the wild. As a rule, the release is accompanied by media fanfare, showing these dedicated professionals at the release site, after which their lead conversation conservation researcher describes the importance of what's being done without ever mentioning the mortality rate.

In point of fact, inmates at a Washington state prison have a far greater record of success than Oregon Zoo in raising and releasing the species, so you might think it'd be a better use of resources to simply contribute equipment and a sum of cash equal to the amount spent by the zoo on field trips and staff time to the folks with demonstrated success. You would, of course, be wrong.

The project generates PR, which the zoo uses extensively in its propaganda educational outreach and donation efforts to drive home their important work in the preservation of biodiversity. Now that the frogs are actually listed as threatened, it will be interesting to see whether or not the organization is held accountable at some point regarding their inept management of the "conservation effort".

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Barn Door, Say Goodbye To Horse

And here we go again: Oregon gov. Retread's signature accomplishment, "Cover Oregon", didn't work last year - despite the nearly $300 million "investment - and it doesn't work now. Better yet, it's not going to work come this November, when we're all supposed to sign up for a health insurance plan again:

Word is spreading that the state might not meet its deadline this fall for connecting with the federal health insurance exchange. State and federal officials were scrambling for a solution last week.

One minor problem: Oregon is still dependent upon Oracle for part of the switchover from the state's failed site to the federal exchange, but Oracle's suing Oregon and Oregon's suing Oracle. Doubtless, this is making a lot of lawyers very happy, but it kind of stands to impede collaboration. For a supposedly high-tech state, which is what the PR folks want everyone to believe, our "leaders" have amassed a pretty dismal track record.

Gangsta, Vancouver-Style

A hot pink gun? Really? Man, the brothers on Chicago's South Side have to be laughing their butts off.

The hot pink .22 cal. rifle is hardly the stuff of “Scarface.” But it’s enough of a gun to land Carlos Carmona-Gonzalez in federal prison.

A convicted felon and reputed gang leader known as “Downer,” Carmona was caught with the single-shot Keystone Sporting Arms last June after offering to sell guns to a police informant.

Federal prosecutors say the 23-year-old man has been enmeshed in Southwest Washington gang violence for the past seven years. In a contention he denies, prosecutors describe him as a leader in a gang set operating in Vancouver.

The 23 year-old's already got nine felony convictions, so what's he doing still out on the streets? Isn't there some point at which you just toss him into a cell and conveniently lose the key? Whatever happened to the idea of punishment for idiots like him - or is it just that the jails are so larded up with pot-smokers that they've got no room for actual menaces to society?

Prosecutors describe Carmona as a leader in the South Side Locos 13 street gang set operating in Vancouver. The set is a small part of the Surenos gang family, a loose affiliation of street gangs born out of Southern California.

Okay, if he's Locos, place him in lockdown in a mental facility for, say, 30 years. Of course, I'd prefer the China solution: one bullet; charge his family. Why waste resources?

Oh, but see, this time he's really changed: he's "a father of two" (great role model) and he was an abused child and he's "prepared to leave the gang life". That latter should be easy enough: we know it as "three strikes and you're out".

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Wild Oregon

As professional "planners" at the state, regional, county, and city levels continue to plot ways to increase urban density and "fight sprawl", it's worth noting that of all the lands in Oregon, a mere 2% is developed.

While Oregon is home to just one national park, it's home to 47 wilderness areas that encompass 2.5 million acres, or four percent of the state.

That's right, we have twice as much space designated permanently as wilderness as we have developed space. And yet, that's still not sufficient as far as the professional preservationists are concerned.

Today, that only four percent of Oregon is protected as wilderness is something environmental groups bemoan.

Given that motorized vehicles and even mountain bikes are off-limits in wilderness areas, such places are no longer accessible to an increasing swath of our population, so it seems reasonable to ask just how much wilderness we need. After all, over half of the lands in the state are owned by the feds or the state, with other large chunks owned by regional, county, and city governments. Add to that the thousands of acres owned by private companies such as Weyerhaeuser, who now are implementing annual fees of as much as $300 to access them for recreational purposes, and we have a situation in which we're more and more frequently barred from even visiting the open spaces surrounding us.

"When I was a kid I hiked to the top of Mount Whitney and the High Sierra, but I'm not that age anymore, and what they're basically staying is, 'OK, you have to stay home now,'" Swift said. "I like wilderness in the sense of being able to go hunting and camping and all those wonderful things. But throwing a wall around these huge strips of real estate and saying to most people, 'keep out,' makes no sense. I find it offensive."

We're not talking, here, about blasting the tops off mountains for mining operations, as they do in places like West Virginia; this is about merely being able to get into these places to hunt, to fish, to camp for a bit, or to simply take a day visit to drink in some scenery - and it's all being taken away. At least, if you're not a young hipster from academia.

If you're not: stay out. There is such a thing as "too much of a good thing".

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Where Did All The Water Go?

"The planet...has a fever!" That's what professional alarmists have been saying for years; AlGore even got a Nobel in recognition of his focused efforts to whip up mass hysteria while enriching himself.

The speech by former US Vice-President Al Gore was apocalyptic. ‘The North Polar ice cap is falling off a cliff,’ he said. ‘It could be completely gone in summer in as little as seven years. Seven years from now.’

Those comments came in 2007 as Mr Gore accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for his campaigning on climate change.

But seven years after his warning, The Mail on Sunday can reveal that, far from vanishing, the Arctic ice cap has expanded for the second year in succession – with a surge, depending on how you measure it, of between 43 and 63 per cent since 2012.

Not only is there a lot of the stuff, it's also growing in thickness; it's denser, stronger, and now more resistant to melt than was the case even a decade ago. So much for the much-hyped "death spiral" that by now would be irreversibly speeding up global warming due to lack of reflective ice. And while some continue to cling to the idea, insisting that if not by this year, then certainly by next, the Pole will be essentially ice-free, others are beginning to acceept what the data are telling us:

Judith Curry, professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, said last night: ‘The Arctic sea ice spiral of death seems to have reversed.’

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California, There They Go

Revving up that economic engine again, the California legislature has passed the first statwide ban on evil plastic bags in the country; a development that should exert absolutely no negative effect upon the dynamo that is the state economy. I've lost track of the number of burgs in that state that have gone bankrupt, but they hold the national record in terms of sheer numbers - although Detroit's the largest single city to go bankrupt, so California still has its work cut out for it. They claim to be getting things on track, but that's mostly a high-speed rail line to nowhere; having recently managed to reduce their unfunded liabilities by around $90 billion, they're hardly out of the woods, regardless of whose figures one chooses to believe:

California, with about 12 percent of the nation's population, could have an unfunded pension debt approaching $300 billion, plus another $100 billion for retiree health care.

That's the rosy view, but Moody's says that in all, the state's unfunded liabilities are closer to $1.2 trillion, or triple the rosy picture. Chew on that for a minute: unfunded liabilities means that state politicians promised state workers - and their designees signed the contracts guaranteeing - certain pension and health-care benefits but spent all the money without setting anything aside to pay for those benefits. So the money has to come from somewhere, and it sure isn't going to come from the pockets of the people who made those promises in the first place. 

No, it's going to increase pressure to confiscate more cash from taxpaying employees and their employers. In California, the obvious thing to do is to keep driving out businesses and thereby reducing employment, then, and banning plastic bags is a great way to accomplish that: Crown Poly, a Huntington Park manufacturer, plans big layoffs, adding to the outflow of major companies relocating to other states. 

Their cunning plan seems to be working perfectly.

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Larson Follows Through

A couple of days ago, we discussed the possibility here that gov. Retread's latest PSA might have been fortuitously timed to benefit his re-election campaign; although released only on the web, it got a lot of play on the local broadcast channels. Makes him look really benevolent. Also looks kind of illegal.

Well, come to find out that the Mouth of the Columbia, radio talker Lars Larson, filed a complaint with the Oregon SoS office yesterday, addressing that very issue. That got picked up by The Oregonian, appearing on their website late yesterday afternoon. Predictably enough, lefties are swarming the place, hurling epithets and slobbering across their keyboards and generally having a complete meltdown. A few of them are even throwing Sarah Palin into the mix. Truly cheap entertainment on a slow news day!

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Important Work

Today is noteworthy for a couple of reasons - for one thing, and much to the chagrin of sensitive Muslims everywhere, it's Bacon Day in many parts of the world. Closer to home, here in America, it's also National Roasted Marshmallow Day, and the U.S. Forest Service yesterday issued an important safety guide to address that issue:

The U.S. Forest Service on Friday published a nearly 700-word article on how to safely roast marshmallows, all in preparation for Saturday, which is National Roasted Marshmallow Day.

As one might expect, the article is riddled with safety tips that might make you think twice about even carrying matches into the forest at all, let alone actually igniting a marshmallow and putting your family’s life at risk.

Your roasting stick should be at least 30 inches long, but before you actually stick a marshmallow on the end of it, you may wish to consider other, healthier eating options: stick a pineapple slice on there instead. Or better yet, a banana, which you can dot with blueberries from your local farmer's market!

Remember, it's all about "campfire fun".

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Oceans Not Receding, Planet Not Healing. Obama Blames Media.

He loved them until he didn't.

President Obama on Friday said social media and the nightly news are partly to blame for the sense that “the world is falling apart.”

Evidently dismayed at having to interrupt one of his vacations, pResident Obama has determined that his former allies in the media and on the internets are responsible for instilling fear amongst the sheep. Clearly, his ineptitude has nothing to do with anything; it's all down to bad press, what with people reporting that the Islamos sawed the head off another American journalist and Pooty-Poot's sending actual troops into Ukraine. These are minor issues, and Obama has many other things to worry about, like the timing of his upcoming executive order giving amnesty to millions of illegal aliens. These are the important things, after all.

Meanwhile, King Abdullah, speaking in a little place over there in Saudi Arabia, contends that the ISIS Islamonuts will be in Europe within a month - and America in two:

"If we ignore them, I am sure they will reach Europe in a month and America in another month," he said in remarks quoted on Saturday by Asharq al-Awsat daily and Saudi-backed Al-Arabiya television station.

And in another out-of-the-way spot known as Britain, some guy by the name of Cameron, who is apparently a prime minister or something, announced that the country is elevating its terror alert from "'ere now, what's all this" to "Oh bloody hell". Apparently, their media is full of as much doom and gloom as ours, but this Cameron chap isn't one to cast blame. He went on to note that as many as 500 British citizens appear to be over in the middle east, terrorizing alongside the other nutballs, and he's suggested that their passports may be revoked, which would apparently make it more difficult for them to return to the U.K.

That seems reasonable; if they admire the ISIS boys so much, then by all means they should be encouraged to stay there.

 

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