Tombstone, AZ residents told their water supply could be cut in order to protect Mexican owls [CNN]

"Things I Learned from People Who Tried to Kill Me" [Small Wars Journal]

In between wars the British army is an S&M holiday camp for men [Taki's]

The psychology of lying [Wired]

Post smug vacation statuses on Facebook, get your house burgled [Ars Technica]

To feel like a man, act like a man [Brett McKay]

The Cuban revolution's "American Commandante" [New Yorker]

Detroit's countdown to bankruptcy; This too is "what democracy looks like"  [Detroit Metro-Times]

“Merchants have no country": Pat Buchanan on free trade agreements [American Conservative]

Cleaning up other people's landscaping efforts when you buy a house [Claire Wolfe]

Statistics Unmask Phony Online Reviews [MIT Technology Review]

Serial killers are not just a white male phenomenon [Amazon.com]

Love for Detroit doesn't pay the bills [The Detroit Shoppe]

"Vagina". If you can't say it, then don't legislate it. [MLive]

Making education a commodity: A master's degree for around $100 [I Programmer.info]

Well-to-do types using SF's rent control law for their personal benefit [SF Chronicle]

E-book revenues beat hardcovers for the first time [TechCrunch]

Political opinion from a double-life sentence serving convicted murderer in VA [Washington Post]

Stealing a Watch, Made Easy: How to harness the psychology of inattention [WSJ]

There are plenty of things Detroit needs more than a parade [Detroit News]

Marring street art with graffiti in Hamtramck [Detroit Metro Times]

Former NYPD Commissioner Bernard Kerik says 'prison is like dying with your eyes open'  [NY Daily News]

The story of an ex-CIA agent's legal problems after she kidnapped a terror suspect in Italy. Now she's wanted by Interpol [Foreign Policy]

What Facebook knows about you [Technology Review]

The American Jewish Future: Orthodox, Right-Wing, Poor? [The Volokh Conspiracy, JTA]

Detroit Corporation Counsel's lawsuit to void emergency state aid agreement dismissed by judge [Detroit News]

A Handgun When You Can’t Buy a Handgun [Gunsamerica]

Let Detroit and the rest of Michigan's brokest cities go bankrupt

The emergency financial manager approach is clearly just too fraught with politics and brinksmanship and the governor and the legislature (both past and present) simply lack the fortitude to stand up to the charges of undemocratic meddling in local affairs and racism and act for the common good. Lansing should just let Detroit go under.

Sooner or later these cities are going to have to face reality and see what they're in for when they don't pay their bills. When creditors, pensioners, employees, et. al. don't receive payment these cities will then end up in federally run Bankruptcy Courts like it or not. Being tenured federal judges the bankruptcy courts can then sort it all out without all the politics and drama of Michigan's EFM process.

Surfing the net

Two gangs of Detroit teens started a gunfight over who makes the best Kool-aid last week. Not kiddin'. That's just how gangsters roll. You can be shot any time over anything there. Seriously. [Huffington Post/Detroit News]

Surfin' the net!

Driver's licenses are not about driving a motor vehicle on public roads. That hasn't been the case for a while now. Driver's licenses nowadays are actually a De facto  national ID card. Some people understand this, but sadly most people do not. [Hooligan Libertarian]

Putting a bio-electronic "bar code" into each and every human being on Earth would make "society more organized", and therefore (presumably) "better" says some unknown sci-fi writer. Whatever. The statist bureaucrats can't even make the trains run on time let alone regulate human society. And even if they could I'd still be against it. We're not cattle. [New York Daily News] [Hat-tip to Infowars.com]


Popular Science has this story about the Pentagon's latest intrusion/intel gathering technology which is currently being field-tested in Afghanistan. Little golf ball-sized sensor devices that transmit data for up to two years. The snoops sure could have fun with that technology. Scatter them around and send an armed UAV drone to check any "suspicious activity". Scary.

DC Comics' super-hero Green Lantern is gay.  North Star is too, if you care. [io9]

"How Chemistry Stymies Attempts To Regulate Synthetic Drugs" [Slashdot.org/]
Make a molecule illegal and amateur chemists will build an analog to it. Every time you try and make something "fool-proof" nature evolves a better fool. Just sayin'. 

If you spy on the "governance class" it is a felony. Now, if they spy on you, well then it's: "Got something to hide citizen?" [Ann Arbor.com]

Black & white photos from Detroit's golden-years.

Defunct Packard Motors plant now in ruins.

It'll make you cry looking at what we've lost. If you look at pictures of Hiroshima or Dresden or Stalingrad from immediately after World War II and at pictures of Detroit, St. Louis, Gary IN, from the same time period (and the rest of our industrial midland cities from the same time too) and compare them to what they look like today. Except for the war memorials Hiroshima, Dresden, and Volgograd (nee Stalingrad) are now totally rebuilt modern cities and Detroit, Gary, and the rest of the America's industrial Heartland cities are in ruins.You'd think the Nazis and Imperial Japanese had won the war. Just like always America wins the war but loses the peace. [Business Insider]

The Dark Ages to return in Detroit?

Detroit maybe going dark. In order to save on replacement and energy costs the city of Detroit may not  repair the 40 percent of its streetlights that don't work currently and may shut off many others that do. It looks like we're moving back into the dark. That's the proposal anyhow. [Bloomberg]

"Death by a gunshot in Detroit is as natural as it get's."

 310 murders last year (2010)

Sadly, this is quite true in Detroit. They don't call us the  Motor Murder City for nothing.

[Headline: "Mortician discovers gunshot wound in body after man's death ruled natural" - Detroit Free Press]

Things wot I learned on the Internet today

* Even terrorist's websites get hacked sometimes. Tough luck Tali-gangsters.

* Ann Arbor should stop trying to be  hipster heaven and just stay a nice place to live in the Midwest.

* It's not a good idea to have first cousins marrying each other.

* Detroit is not going to be "ready" for a white mayor  any time soon.

Guns Don't Kill People; Dangerous Minorities Do

Good point. Some timely observations from the SBPDL blog. And, sad to say, they are most likely correct observations about how things really go around here. Minus out the violent crime hotspots here in Michigan (Detroit, Flint, etc.) and this place would have the same crime stats as as a civilized social democracy like Sweden.

Brave, creative duck farmer trying to reclaim Detroit's urban wasteland

...one duck at at time. Suzanne Scoville raises a flock of ducks for their eggs in the backyard of her Detroit home and plants gardens on the vacant lots that surround her house on the city’s east side. "Better to light one candle than to curse the darkness" it is said. I just hope nobody robs or kills her.

Detropia

I find it is really odd how a certain type of white ex-Detroiter relishes the opportunity to masochistically chronicle the death, decay, and dismantlement of a once great city on film. But on the other hand such displays can get you noticed at the Sundance film festival and by the Huffington Post so there's that. Turn the camera around and speak into the microphone Ms. Ewing* and tell why you left Detroit?

*(Detropia's co-director Heidi Ewing is from Farmington Hills)

Sadly in Detroit that's just how we roll

Grandmother beat down by irate party-goers at the Dearborn Chuck E. Cheese when she asked them to stop cursing and swearing so loudly near her grandson's birthday gathering inside the restaurant. This isn't the first time something like has happened before either. Go figure?

"Detroit is Ground Zero for the breakdown of the Blue Social Model."

Says Walter Russell Mead. "The race issue is a red herring", Mead goes on to say, "when it comes to Detroit.  Detroit isn’t broke because it has an African American majority; it is broke because for decades its politicians have spent more money than they had, and because Detroit never figured out how to reinvent itself as it lost its industrial core."

Well that and auto union greed and short-sightedness, a national government hell-bent on destroying the manufacturing economy in favor of financialism, and the obtuse, incompetent, corrupt, African-American "elite" (such as they are) that have run Detroit since 1973.

And I thought metro-Detroit politicians were corrupt

Then along comes Illinois. From this article at Newgeography.com comes some really harsh stats on the swamp that is politics in Chicago. And I thought we were bad because Detroit's ex-mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was removed from office after pleading guilty to several corruption related felonies as was the Detroit City Council President who is currently in prison for taking bribes and a huge federal investigation is underway in re Wayne County Executive Robert Ficano's shenanigans. That's all pretty bad I admit but then along comes Illinois: At least 27 Chicago aldermen/women have been convicted of felonies for their conduct in office in past few years. (Frosting on the cake: Four of the last six Illinois governors were convicted of felonies and went to prison too.) And yet these guys get elected and re-elected with the regularity of a well oiled machine. Go figure?

Business Insider: "Detroit dominates as the auto industry roars back to life"

"Detroit Industry" by Diego Rivera 1933

This is good news if it's true. [Link] It's hard for me to get too jazzed about the American automobile companies any more given that during their 2009 bail-out GM killed off its most exiting brands and Chrysler became subsidiary of the Italian-based Fiat.

The Kwamester, despite all he's done (as well as been convicted of), "has forgiven himself" he tells EMU audience

Awww. Forgiveness sure is nice isn't it? Especially when it is extended by the one and only person you really do actually care about. What a narcissist, eh? If this puzzles you consider this. The political class is different from the rest of us you see. Estimates are that the general population is about 4 percent sociopathic but among the political class the rate has got to be more like 99 percent. The only realistic course of action I can see therefore would be this: I wouldn't trust a government office to anyone who desires to have one. Just wanting that power shows they can't be trusted with it.

You can lead a horse to water...

Abandon all hope ye who enter here

...but you cannot make them drink it. Michigan's education bureaucracy is considering withholding badly needed funds from Detroit Public Schools because of their persistently high rate of truancy it has been reported. Threats and sanctions such as this are likely futile though; if there were anything the DPS could do about this chronic problem they would have done it already.

Jack Lessenberry: "An Emergency Manager could be what Detroit needs"

Whoa. Lessenberry is and has always been a pretty standard  progressive Democrat for as long as I have been reading him and so I never expected to hear this opinion from him. Ever. But now we have.

"Detroit government is terribly broken and dysfunctional", says Lessenberry, "in a way it has so far proven impossible for elected leaders to repair. The basic problem is this: What was once a prosperous city of nearly 2 million people is now a largely dilapidated and shrunken one of barely 700,000 mostly very poor people.

In addition to vast debts and a current budget deficit, the city has a social services and public employee sector built for a larger, richer city, and can no longer sustain it. Especially not in the face of massive revenue cuts from the state."

Sad but true.