MaxRedline

Polar Pray

A polar bear looks up at a cross in Wesleyville, N.L., on Wednesday, March 29, 2017. THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO - Ocean View Photography, Jessica Andrews

N.L. is their abbreviation for Newfoundland. The bear seems almost prayerful in the shot.

Heresy

Pump your own gas? In Oregon? Maybe...

If passed by the Senate and signed into law by Gov. Kate Brown, people shopping for gas in counties with fewer than 40,000 people will be able to pump their own at all hours. Affected counties would include Baker, Clatsop, Crook, Curry, Gilliam, Grant, Harney, Hood River, Jefferson, Lake, Malheur, Morrow, Sherman, Tillamook, Union, Wallowa, Wasco and Wheeler counties, according to the most recent population estimates.

"This bill affects 5 percent of Oregonians," Bentz said. "The other 95 percent don't have to worry about pumping their own gas."

Whew! That's a relief! The idea of helpless libs worrying about trying to pump their own gas conjures up some terrifying mental images.

How To Get A 200-Ton Boulder Off The Road?

In Oregon, the transportation department goes for dynamite. They tried blowing up a whale that washed ashore, once, but that didn't work out quite as intended, as "the blast blew blubber beyond all believable bounds". But it the case of the boulder in question, blocking both lanes of highway 138 east of Roseburg, dynamite it was.

Oregon Department of Transportation crews responded to the 12-foot rock on the highway east of Glide early Thursday morning. The rock and several other large, 50- to 100-ton pieces blocked the roadway for several hours until Roseburg contractor Weekly Bros. Inc. and blasting service Austin Powder reduced the massive rock to rubble.

Obviously, paving crews will need to be doing some work down there today.

That Big Wreck In Texas...

It turns out that according to traffic wreck reconstruction specialists, if you're old, it doesn't much matter whether or not you wear a seat belt:

A traffic accident expert says the 13 senior adults killed this week in a minibus wreck in southwest Texas were more susceptible to internal injuries and damage to vulnerable organs because of their advanced ages. Kelley Adamson, president and owner of A&M Forensics and Engineering, told the San Antonio Express-News (http://bit.ly/2oGnzPi ) that a head-on collision, such as the one Wednesday, is the equivalent of striking a brick wall.

He adds that seatbelts aren't necessarily effective at speeds in excess of 35 mph (56 kph). Authorities have not said whether the bus carrying the senior adults was equipped with restraints.

Older people, while they may appear fit and strong, will likely still have more vulnerable organs, he said.

“Younger people, they tend to be stronger all the way through,” he said. “We know that a lot of people in a crash over 40 miles per hour… they suffer internal injuries such as a rupture to the heart, liver, kidney, spleen — these things happen at those levels. Especially for older people. They literally die of internal injuries and head injuries.”

I've always kind of wondered about that, though I've never poked around for an answer. But it's long seemed that as frail as some of our older folks are - breaking stuff in simple falls, for example - one might expect that the seat belts themselves would cause a lot of damage even in relatively low-speed wrecks; to say nothing of whiplash effects.

Just Browsing The Jihadi Aisle

A young Muslim man waged a jihad-like rant last week using the familiar battle cry, “Allah Akbar,” but it didn’t happen in Mosul or even Baghdad — it took place in small, Midwestern Indiana.

It's actually "Allahu Akbar", but what's a letter? In any event, it certainly livened things up in sleepy Muncie, Indiana when 24 year-old Khalid Bilal attempted to convert a store employee to Islam. Upon being rebuffed, he flew into a rage; striking and choking employees, yelling that he was going kill everyone there, and generally exhibiting the serenity and peacefulness so often associated with those of the Islamic persuasion. But wouldn't you know it - somebody called the cops.

Bilal then tried to break the hand of an officer attempting too place him in custody and charged at another. Police finally resorted to the use of a taser to restrain him and place him in handcuffs, WISH-TV 8 News reported.

But Bilal wasn’t finished — he repeatedly kicked at the officers with both feet while shouting “Allah Akbar,” or Allah is great.

Law enforcement reported that Bilal continued attacking them even after he was admitted to the hospital while attempting to restrain him to the hospital bed.

Bilal was preliminarily charged with battery of police, resisting law enforcement, disorderly conduct, battery with injury, intimidation and strangulation.

Surely it was all due to a cultural misunderstanding...they tend to go with that "convert or die" thing, and a lot of people just don't understand that.

Related articles

American Jihad

The 2% Solution

Since many "immigrants" regularly send money back home by wire transfer, some GOP House members are kicking around the idea of tacking an additional 2% fee on all such international transfers which are known as remittances.

The U.S. has one of the lowest costs to send money home, at about 6 percent of the payment. Canada’s rate is twice that, while the world’s other big economies hover around 8 percent.

The World Bank puts remittances from the U.S. at more than $50 billion a year. A Pew Research Center analysis puts the figure at $133 billion in 2015.

At present, Mexico rakes in around $24 billion a year in remittances, more of which figure as big percentages of other Latin American economies as well.

The congressmen estimate that an additional 2% fee would bring in over $2 billion a year, which could be directed toward enhanced border security. Additional border sensors, for example; you could purchase and install a heck of a lot more sensors and cameras at $2 billion a year. Trump's Wall seems needlessly expensive and unlikely to succeed, especially as Mexicans seem to be excellent tunnel-builders.

Linus Pauling Vindicated

For years, many mocked the two-time Nobel Laureate from Oregon and author over his belief in the benefits of high doses of Vitamin C. As it happens, he was right:

Injecting patients with a dose 1,000 times higher than the recommended level could target tumour cells and make radiation and chemotherapy more effective.

The research, published in the journal Cancer Cell, showed that iron in the tumours reacted with the vitamin to form destructive “free radical” molecules which selectively caused only cancerous cells to die.

Seems that the science wasn't quite settled, after all.

Aerospace History Nailed

Elon Musk’s SpaceX flew a reused rocket to space and back again, a key milestone to reducing launch costs and one day enabling people to live on other planets.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket rumbled aloft, deposited a customer’s satellite into orbit, stuck its landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean and drew raucous cheers from the crowd gathered Thursday at the company’s California headquarters.

So they demonstrated that it can be done, something once thought impossible. It took four months to get the rocket stage inspected, tested, and prepared for a return flight, but they hope to pare that down to a little over a day.

Wrong, As Usual

The House yesterday approved a bill that, according to the New York Times, “not only gives cable companies and wireless providers free rein to do what they like with your browsing history, shopping habits, your location and other information gleaned from your online activity, but it would also prevent the Federal Communications Commission from ever again establishing similar consumer privacy protections.”

Naturally, the hysterics are out in force - and just as naturally, they're wrong; the ISP you use can sell aggregate data, but not personally identifiable data. Nonetheless, there's a nutball out there who's trying to collect $1 million in donations that he intends to use to buy:

The Internet histories of all legislators, congressmen, executives, and their families and make them easily searchable at searchinternethistory.com.

Everything from their medical, pornographic, to their financial and infidelity.

Anything they have looked at, searched for, or visited on the Internet will now be available for everyone to comb through.

There's just one little problem: you can't do it. There's a rather large difference between aggregate data (think Google) and personal, individual online activity. Selling the former is legal; selling the latter is not.

The Telecommunications Act explicitly prohibits the sharing of “individually identifiable” customer information except under very specific circumstances.

As in: should law enforcement suspect that you're into kiddie porn or terrorism. Even in such cases and armed with a warrant, they simply scoop up all of your electronics and forensically examine them; they don't go to the ISP and demand browsing records. Just last week we discussed here the case of a guy who's been in jail for 18 months because although authorities have evidence of his involvement in kiddie porn, he downloaded files to two portable hard drives, which are encrypted, and he refuses to give up the passcode to unlock them. He's being held indefintely, and his lawyer's efforts to win his release have thus far proven fruitless.

Under the heading of "very specific circumstances" come things such as the recent string of threats to Jewish Community Centers. They were found to have originated in Israel, and to have been made by an Israeli-American. In these kinds of cases, individually identifiable information is gathered.

But paranoia is powerful, and there's a lot of it floating around because "Trump administration!" "Republicans!" Auugh! It's unclear as to whether Trump Derangement Syndrome is covered under Obamacare. Also unclear is what the aforementioned nutter is going to do with the donations he's managed to scam from other nutters.

One thing is clear: he's not going to buy the "Internet histories" of anybody. But as long as he's only scamming like-minded nutters, it's all good.

Hysteria: it's what's for dinner.

Related articles

Your Browsing Data Could Soon Be Compromised Thanks to US House

What Do ISPs Really Look At In Content: Deliverability Part VI

For Sale: Your Internet Browsing History - GigiOnThat!

How To Protect Your Browsing History: Internet Service Providers Argue Against Your Privacy

Zero Tolerance, Again

A five year-old North Carolina girl was suspended from her kindergarten last Friday for playing with a stick.

See? The stick looked like a gun.

Caitlin explained that she and her two friends were using their imaginations, playing "King and Queen."

She was playing the guard protecting the "royals" and picked up the stick to repel an imaginary intruder.

Hoke County Schools said Caitlin posed a threat to other students when she made a shooting motion, thus violating policy 4331.

It's amazing that one small school district has several thousand "policies". These folks aren't educators, they're vegetators. And by the look of things in America today, they're doing an excellent job of growing vegetables.