About Time, too.

Louisiana's Second Amendment Sales Tax Holiday Announced

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Hope my school money is in by then. :D

Quote of the Whenever #3

"I’ve learned, unfortunately, [that] relying on the general intelligence of the human populace is one hell of a leap of faith."
-Robert, Keep Texas Zombie Free

Britain's Nanny State Boomerangs On British Embassies

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090813/od_afp/britaintraveldiplomacyoffbeat_20090813081901

British embassies tired of bizarre requests

LONDON (AFP) – Help! I've just had my breasts enlarged and I don't like the new size. British embassy -- sort out my boobs!

Along with tips on jam-making and how best to discipline naughty boys, these are just a few of the bonkers requests being fired at British embassies around the world, the Foreign Office said on Thursday.

The country's 261 diplomatic missions across the globe are getting fed up of bizarre demands for help from Brits abroad, some of whom seem to think the British embassy is an agency for finding lost sunglasses and paying bills.

"If you have a serious problem abroad -- maybe you've been involved in an accident, have lost your passport or are a victim of crime -- we can help you," said Juliet Maric, the British Consul in Alicante on the Spanish east coast.

"But we can't tell you who is allowed to use your swimming pool, pay your taxi fares for you -- or do anything about the exchange rate.

"We regularly get enquiries from people who think we're a one-stop-shop for any problem they might encounter while abroad; this can be frustrating as we need to focus resources on the serious cases that we're there to help with."

One lady, unhappy with the size of her newly-boosted breasts following surgery, asked if the embassy could help.

A mother asked the Florida consulate to help her teenage son pack his suitcase and give him a lift to the airport as he was feeling unwell.

One person called in consular assistance to find out what ratio of fruit to sugar should be used when making jam.

A holidaymaker in Italy asked the embassy where a particular brand of shoes could be bought.

Other requests have included asking for embassy staff to pay a bill when a credit card had "maxed out" and a traveller asking "Can you tell me how to make my naughty son behave?"

"Our embassies are not there to provide weather reports or give advice on unruly children," said consular affairs minister Chris Bryant.

"It's important that British nationals understand what the Foreign Office can and can't do for them."

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Britain should not be surprised by this. This is what happens when you run a Nanny State: people will treat you like you are their nanny.

Quote of the Whenever #2

"When your opponent comes out and states clearly that he opposes you, regards you as the enemy, and will work actively and purposefully against the things that are important to you…rejoice! He has made your decisions easier."

-Commander Zero, Pocket radio, politics, gardening

Hardball?

Watch this clip:






Now watch this one:





This had me screaming at my computer monitor. "He's never said that"?!?!
What a liar! That's exactly what I posted in the comments, too. Someone else replied that what he was saying in the clip is that THE PRESIDENT has never said he wanted a single-payer healthcare system.

Technically, that's correct. PRESIDENT Obama never said that; SENATOR Obama did.






Hiding behind these kind of semantics would make even a used-car salesman feel shame.

Hardball? More like Sleazeball...

Zombie Watch #3

http://scienceblogs.com/zooillogix/2009/04/zombie_spiders_return_from_the.php

Zombie Spiders Return from the Dead to Haunt Your Dreams
Category: spider • zombie
Posted on: April 28, 2009 6:06 PM, by Benny Bleiman

So you start out with a simple experiment, so simple in fact, that it sounds like Andrew and I came up with it when we were seven: How long do different species of spider survive underwater? You take 120 wolf spiders of three different species that live in marsh lands, and you submerge them underwater until they drown. Simple enough. Some live 24 hours, some 28 hours, and some 36. Ok, that's a long time, but it makes sense as these creatures live in marshes so they must have adapted to survive submerged for extended periods of time. It is then, however, that things take a turn for the horrifying.

As you're weighing out the dried out spider corpses, you notice that some of them start twitching. Then more and more begin twitching. Then all of a sudden, most of them are alive again. Not only are they alive, but they have grown to five times their normal size, have become exponentially more aggressive, and violently attack your entire research staff.

While the last sentence of that previous paragraph was not, not false, the rest is completely true. Researchers at the University of Rennes in France had just this experience recently when conducting just such an experiment. It turns out the marsh dwelling wolf spiders are able to put themselves into comas, effectively changing their metabolic process to no longer require air, in order to survive long periods underwater.

"This is the first time we know of arthropods returning to life from comas after submersion," Julien Pétillon, one of the lead researchers told National Geographic.

Quote of the Whenever #1

"Being a danger to your government is, dear readers, the very essence of a Free People."
-Clifford, over at http://redstickrant.blogspot.com/

Zombie Watch #2

Swine flu: Mexico City becomes 'strange zombie city' as residents hide behind doors
The normally bustling streets of Mexico City were virtually empty yesterday, with millions preferring to stay in their houses rather than risk contagion from the killer swine flu.



By Ioan Grillo in Mexico City

Published: 11:10PM BST 26 Apr 2009



A mixture of fear, suspicion and frustration set in across the country as the death toll from swine flu rose and the government took an increasingly tough position to stop it spreading.
Many of those who did venture out wore the blue face masks that were being handed out by soldiers at check points along the main avenues.



"It's like we're in a strange zombie movie or something," said Gerardo Garcia, a 23 year old student, hurriedly stocking up with groceries.


"You don't know who could be carrying this plague so it is best to just keep behind closed doors as much as possible."


A shutdown of all schools, universities, museums and theatres was extended to bars and discos, which the government decreed they could forcibly close if they did not shutter their doors voluntarily.


Sunday Masses normally celebrated by millions in this strongly Roman Catholic country were also cancelled - the first such closure since Mexico's religious wars of the 1920s.
Health workers on the ground were overwhelmed with people reporting the key symptoms of the epidemic such as coughs, aching muscles and diarrhoea - although many may have had traditional forms of flu.



In total, 1,300 people were fighting the virus in hospital beds across Mexico with as many as 81 people dying of the disease.


Feelings of anxiety also swept through the 1,000 strong British expatriate community in the city.


Bar owner Umair Khan, 35, of Wembley, London, said he was getting increasingly worried seeing how events were developing.


"Originally, I wasn't in a major panic. But now that everything is shutting down it shows how serious it is," Khan said. "I have been here for 11 years and I have never seen anything like this."


Mr Khan said he shut his business - A British-style pub called the Black Horse - on Saturday after the government decree.


"It's a loss of money but you can't be angry about it," he said. "The last thing I would want is for someone to die after getting sick in my bar."


School teacher Gavin Judd, 38, from Birmingham has also been given a holiday from work.
"My plans are to avoid to going out as much as possible," he said. "If this is serious enough for the government to shut my school then I think it is a very real threat."


Mr Judd said he had no immediate plans to leave Mexico City, but said he will go if the government continues the school shut down until the end of the summer.


However, some others were taking the threat less seriously.
Hugh Carroll, a 56 year old investment broker from Glasgow, said he was unconcerned about the virus.
"I'm not worried in the slightest. It's probably been over exaggerated," he said. "Most people here don't trust what the Mexican government say and I don't believe them either."
Mr Carroll said he had not heard the declarations from the World Health Organization. He planned to go out and meet friends as usual.


Some Mexicans shared this disbelief, alleging it could be some kind of government conspiracy.
"It's probably all just made up to keep our minds off the global recession," said Roberto Santino, a 60-year-old building site foremen. "Our government has been using these tactics for years."
Mr Santino claimed new government powers to fight the virus - including the power to search suspects and houses - were just an excuse to trample on people's rights. Another conspiracy theory was that warring drug cartels, who killed eight civilians in a grenade attack in September, could be behind the misery.


"Who knows what is going on. Are the narco cartels using a secret weapon?" asked Lionel Trujillo, a 42-year old salesman, nervously fingering a surgical mask covering his mouth and nose.


Those at health centres showed more frantic worry.
At the Santiago Acahualtepec public clinic in Mexico City's working class Iztapalapa neighbourhood, a queue of patients, mostly clad in face masks, packed out the waiting room and stretched into the street.


"My daughter started showing signs of the sickness overnight - her temperature has shot up and she has been in a lot of pain," said Maria Angeles Garcia, a 33-year old teacher, waiting anxiously to be seen. "I am just praying that she does not have this plague."

Zombie Watch #1

http://www.inteldaily.com/news/173/ARTICLE/8827/2008-11-24.html

This was something I started a while back, and am now reposting here. That's why the article is from late '08 instead of something more recent.

Zombie Economics: Super-inflation snap-back will occur six to eighteen months from now

By James Kunstler


(Kunstler) -- Though Citicorp is deemed too big to fail, it's hardly reassuring to know that it's been allowed to sink its fangs into the Mother Zombie that the US Treasury has become and sucked out a multi-billion dollar dose of embalming fluid so it can go on pretending to be a bank for a while longer. I employ this somewhat clunky metaphor to point out that the US Government is no more solvent than the financial zombies it is keeping on walking-dead support. And so this serial mummery of weekend bailout schemes is as much of a fraud and a swindle as the algorithm-derived-securities shenanigans that induced the disease of bank zombification in the first place. The main question it raises is whether, eventually, the creation of evermore zombified US dollars will exceed the amount of previously-created US dollars now vanishing into oblivion through compressive debt deflation.

My guess, given the usual time-lag factor, is that the super-inflation snap-back will occur six to eighteen months from now. And the main result of all this will be our inability to buy the imported oil that comprises two-thirds of the oil we require to keep WalMart and Walt Disney World running. At some point, then, in the early months of the Obama administration, we'll learn that "change" is not a set of mere lifestyle choices but a wrenching transition away from all our familiar and comfortable habits into a stark and rigorous new economic landscape.

The credit economy is dead and the dead credit residue of that dead economy is going where dead things go. It came into the world as "money" and it is going out of this world as a death-dealing disease, and we're not going to get over this disease until we stop generating additional zombie money out of no productive activity whatsoever. The campaign to sustain the unsustainable is, besides war, the greatest pitfall this society can stumble into. It represents a squandering of our remaining scant resources and can only produce the kind of extreme political disappointment that wrecks nations and leads to major conflicts between them. I don't know how much Mr. Obama buys into the current adopt-a-zombie program -- his Treasury designee Timothy Geithner was apparently in on this weekend's Citicorp deal -- but the President would be wise to steer clear of whatever the walking dead in the Bush corner are still up to.

All the activities based on getting something-for-nothing are dead or dying now, in particular buying houses and cars on credit and so it should not be a surprise that the two major victims are the housing and car industries. Notice, by the way, that these are the two major ingredients of an economy based on building suburban sprawl. That's over, too. We're done building it and the stuff we've already built is destined to loose both money value and usefulness as the wrenching transition goes forward.

All this obviously begs the question: what kind of economy are we going to live in if the old one is toast? Well, it's also pretty obvious that it will have to be based on activities productively aimed at keeping human beings alive in an ecology that has a future. Once you grasp this, you will see that there is no reason to despair and more than enough for all of us to do, so we can recover from the zombie nation disease and get on with the next chapter of American history -- and I sure hope that Mr. Obama will get with the new program.

To be specific about this new economy, we're going to have to make things again, and raise things out of the earth, locally, and trade these things for money of some kind that we earn through our own productive activities. Don't make the mistake of thinking this is optional. The only other option is to go through a violent sociopolitical convulsion. We ought to know from prior examples in world history that this is not a desirable experience. So, to avoid that, we really have to put our shoulders to the wheel and get to work on things that matter, and do it at a scale that is consistent with what the world really has to offer right now, especially in terms of available energy.

In my view -- and I know this is controversial -- a much larger proportion of the US population will have to be employed in growing the food we eat. There are many ways of arranging this, some more fair than others, and I hope the better angels of our nature steer us in the direction of fairness and justice. The prospects of a devalued dollar imply that we very shortly will not be able to get the all the oil-and-gas based "inputs" that have made petro-agriculture possible the past century. The consequences of this are so unthinkable that we have not been thinking about it. And, of course, the further implications of current land-use allocation, and the property ownership issues entailed, suggests formidable difficulties in re-arranging the farming sector. The sooner we face all this, the better.

As the fiesta of "globalism" (Tom Friedman-style) draws to a close -- another consequence of currency problems -- we'll have to figure out how to make things in this country again. We will not be manufacturing things at the scale, or in the manner, we were used to in, say, 1962. We'll have to do it far more modestly, using much more meager amounts of energy than we did in the past. My guess is that we will get the electricity for doing this mostly from water. It may actually be too late -- from a remaining capital resources point-of-view -- to ramp up a new phase of the nuclear power industry (and there are plenty of arguments from the practical and economic to the ethical against it). But we have to hold a public discussion about it, if only to clear the air and get on with other things, namely the new activites of alt.energy. But I would hasten to warn readers (again!) that we'll probably have to do these things more modestly too (don't count on giant wind "farms"), and that we are liable to be disappointed by what they can actually provide for us (don't expect to run WalMart on wind, solar, algae-fuels, etc).

In any case, we're not going back to a "consumer" economy. We're heading into a hard work economy in which people derive their pleasures and gratification more traditionally -- mainly through the company of their fellow human beings (which is saying a lot, for those of you who have forgotten what that's about). Our current investments in "education" -- i.e. training people to become marketing executives for chain stores -- will delude Americans for a while about what kind of work is really available. But before long, the younger adults will realize that there are enormous opportunities for them in a new and very different economy. We will still have commerce -- even if it's not the K-Mart blue-light-special variety -- and the coming generation will have to rebuild all the local, multi-layered networks of commercial inter-dependency that were destroyed by the rise of the chain stores. In short, get ready for local business. It will surely be part-and-parcel of our local food-growing and manufacturing activities.

I hate to keep harping on this -- but since nobody else is really talking about it, at least in the organs of public discussion, the job is left to me -- we have to get cracking on the revival of the railroad system in this country, if we expect to remain a united country. This is such a no-brainer that the absence of any talk about it is a prime symptom of the zombie disease that has eaten away our brains. Automobiles (the way we use them) and airplanes are utterly dependent on liquid hydrocarbon fuels, and you can be certain we'll have trouble getting them. You can run trains by other means -- electricity being state-of-the-art in those parts of the world that do it most successfully. I know that California just voted to create a high-speed rail link between Los Angeles and San Francisco. It's an optimistic sign, but it shows more than a little techno-grandiose over-reach. High speed rail would require a mega-expensive re-do of the tracks. We need to scale our ambitions for this more realistically. California (and every other region of America) would benefit much more from normal-speed trains running every hour on the hour on tracks that already exist than from a mega-expensive, grandiose sci-fi program that might not get built for ten years. The dregs of the Big Three automakers can and should be reorganized to produce the rolling stock for a revived railroad system.

Even amidst the financial carnage underway right now, the public is enjoying a respite from high-priced gasoline, but it is due to be short-lived. As I've already said, we are in danger not just of oil prices going way back up again, but of losing access to our supplies from the exporting countries. In other words, we're just as likely to face shortages as high prices, and soon. Oil shortages are certain to produce a political freak-out here unless we get our heads screwed on right -- and this means that Mr. Obama had better prepare quickly for a comprehensive action plan in the face of such an emergency (which has to include a robust public information initiative).

In the meantime, Mr. Obama must dissociate himself from all activities aimed at the care-and-feeding of zombies. Mr. Obama is correct that there is one president and one government at a time, and since this is the case in reality, he must avoid being contaminated by the choices they make as their clock ticks out. Obviously, world markets might be more disturbed if Mr. Obama were to step up and actively contradict everything that is being done to cultivate zombies right now. He is in a very delicate position. But being a man of intelligence and sensibility, he may successfully navigate this rough passage.

That this melt-down is building straight into the Christmas holidays is one of those accidents of history that leaves one reeling in wonder and nausea. The cable networks better be prepared to bombard the public with round-the-clock showings of It's A Wonderful Life, because they're going to need all the moral support they can get as zombies stalk through the silent night, holy night.