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The Usual Suspects Are At It Again

Urban preservationists want Barry to declare 2.5 million acres in east-central Oregon a national monument. They never go there, so nobody else should, either.

ADRIAN -- The future of 2.5 million acres in southeast Oregon's Malheur County drew a crowd of about 500 to the gymnasium at Adrian High School on Thursday night to discuss the Owyhee Canyonlands.

About 45 percent of the land in sprawling Malheur County, second largest in Oregon, is administered by the Bureau of Land Management's Vale District, an agency of the Department of the Interior.

Meeting attendees appeared overwhelming against any additional federal regulation, though they listened politely to environmentalists, mostly from Portland and Bend.

It's all about Saving the Planet, so environmeddlists from Portland are perfectly happy to drive several hundred miles round-trip to the town of 140 people in order to explain why it's so important for the residents to not sully the lands by using part of them from time to time. BLM restrictions are simply insufficient, as far as the urbanite preservationists are concerned.

Because, you know, the people who've lived there for years are really a bunch of stupid hicks, and the urbanite's know what's best.

Heck, those folks are so stupid that they don't even vote Democratic!

 

Extreme Driving

A guy in Michigan kind of lost control of his Ford Mustang.

Apparently, he went hypoglycemic while driving.

Another Released Email May Be A Smoking Gun

Additional information related to former Oregon gov. Retread and his First Squeeze's shady dealings emerged with the release of an email that demonstrates, despite their repeated denials, Retread's intention to firmly entrench his First Squeeze as a fixture in his administration's conduct of state business:

The email showed Kitzhaber's intent to merge Hayes' outside environmental work with his agenda as governor. He sent her a plan for unifying state efforts behind early childhood development as a "good template" that "can offer a roadmap for the work (our work) we can pick up once I get the budget balanced," he wrote.

He said he envisioned her work on regional clean economy efforts "converging with the education/social service transformation I am counting on."

Kitzhaber subsequently appointed Hayes to a state task force that devised a 10-year energy plan.  She helped author the plan.

He also ensured she had state office space "to get you out of that big house," an apparent reference to Mahonia Hall, the publicly-owned governor's residence.

Hayes, you may recall, has repeatedly denied her status as a state representative because she was not a paid employee. As has been discussed here previously, that's an invalid assertion; there are many state representatives serving in unpaid positions on a variety of commissions, and their meetings, emails, and other related documents are considered public records under state law.

That's why her assertion was dismissed. Three federal investigations into their activities continue.

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Cylvia Strikes Out

Happy Halloween!

Everybody has their own way of celebrating it; from the 8th to the 5th century B.C., Athenians in Greece held their annual pharmakos celebration, which involved sacrificing an ugly person. If the term seems somehow familiar, that's because the word pharmacy originated from the Greek term, which meant both medicine and poison; healing and death.

Nowadays, a lot of folks just dress up in costumes and/or contribute to man-made global warming by carving jack-o-lanterns, as observed here yesterday. But here in Oregon, we go old-school - we go with the Black Death. No point in messing around.

Another White Cop/Black Teenage Girl Thing

You've probably heard about the South Carolina incident in which the cop was fired for subduing an unruly teen in a math class, but another incident happened this week in D.C.: cops broke up a fight between two groups of teens and ordered them to disperse.

After it was over, 17-year-old Aaliyah Taylor, a senior at Ballou High School, walked up to the officer and started playing “Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae)” on her phone. Instead of clearing out, as the police officer had demanded that she and the rest of the crowd do, she started dancing the Nae Nae.

Whatever that is...anyway, the officer warned her - that she had better moves. She defused the situation by dancing along; taking Taylor completely by surprise. Hey, the cop had just returned from duty in Iraq; she's in no mood to fight over here.

Surprise!

Apple phone owners who use the auto-update feature and set their phones to function as alarm clocks were late for work today. That's because the newest update that happened overnight also restarted the phone, which turned off the alarm, which...is yet another reason why I have an Android phone.

Hipster Fad Recalled

It turns out that if you put a kid into a little wheeled box composed mostly of fabric and tow it behind your bicycle in traffic, it's possible that an injury could result. And so it is that Eugene, Oregon-based Burley Design "trailers" are being recalled.

Being hip is getting harder.

If you hit the Burley website linked above, you see photos of Portland hipsters towing kids behind their bicycles in "iconic" locations and generally showing how cool they are. For some reason, they don't seem to have any shots in Eugene.

But they're all about safety:

At Burley, safety isn’t an afterthought—it’s our first thought. Unlike many other products on the market today, ours are tested in-house during the earliest design phases to ensure that safety and reliability are built in from the beginning.

Yep - that's why the stupid things are built out of plastic, tubular aluminum, and sturdy yet colorful fabric. Safety first!

People who buy these things and haul kids around in them are certifiably nuts.

Common Solvent Keeps Killing Workers, Consumers

Sounds like water.

But no, the article's about the dangers of methylene chloride, which is commonly found in paint strippers. Yes, in a confined space, the fumes can kill quickly. So it would seem as though the answer's fairly simple: turn on a fan. Popeye the neighbor man next door spent two years in a garage converted into a workshop, building a boat. And he began by building a wooden frame capable of holding three inexpensive box-fans, which he positioned in the doorway of his shop before breaking out the marine-grade paints and varnishes. He also wore a respirator. He's still alive.

We don't need a ban; just common sense.

Fogle Hits The Air Again

Probably not what he had in mind, as secretly recorded tapes in which he discussed his love of raping children will be airing today and tomorrow on the "Dr. Phil" television show:

INDIANAPOLIS — A Florida woman who made a complaint to Subway about its former pitchman Jared Fogle will appear on Dr. Phil in a two-part program airing Thursday and Friday.

Rochelle Herman-Walrond claims to have secretly taped Fogle discussing sexual encounters with children, a release from the talk show program said.

The program will air the contents of the recorded phone conversations on the show, the release said.

This thing's 38 years old, and for some 15 years he was making a darned good living pitching foot-longs for Subway. But while he was doing that he was also heavily involved in child porn and raping children, at least one of whom was six years old.

Rochelle met him when he appeared on her Florida television show, became suspicious when he mentioned that he thought middle-school girls were "hot", then befriended him and began secretly recording the telephone conversations. Ultimately, she used those to blow the lid off the whole sordid deal.

As a result (and unsurprisingly), Fogle lost his high-paid gig, his wife is divorcing him, he's paying 100,000 to each of fourteen identified victims, and he's due to be sentenced Nov. 19th - just in time for Thanksgiving! - to as much as 12 years in prison. Supposedly, he's seeking treatment, though it's a bit late for that.

He'd just better hope that he's not released into the general population in prison.

Meanwhile, someone's put together an ad for competitor Quiznos:

Imagine That! The Computer Models Were Wrong

The finding of molecular oxygen in the gas cloud surrounding Comet 67P has blasted a big hole in accepted science:

The remarkable findings, detailed in the journal Nature, challenge the ideas scientists currently have of how our solar system formed. “When we first saw it, we went a little bit into denial because it is not what you would expect to find on a comet,” Prof. Kathrin Altwegg, from Bern University, said at a press briefing. “All models show that molecular oxygen will react with the hydrogen and will no longer be present.”

Woopsie. It appears that when you program your computer model based upon what you think you know, the output reinforces your preconceived notions. How is that possible?