Relics of the Old Republic

So all that stuff in the Constitution about not allowing "excessive fines"  can just be ignored now? Apparently this so in the People's Republic of California where you can receive a $1,000 fine for throwing a football or frisbee on the  beach in Los Angeles county and for digging a hole more than 18 inches deep into the beach sand as well. The vast majority of the people in Cali don't deserve the paradise they live in. Truly.

LA graffiti artists pissed because others defaced their art

No seriously. Some LA "street artists"painted a mural on the wall of a building and then some different people put their work over it. The nerve of some people, eh?
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Hear ye! Hear ye!

Ex-Michigan QB Forcier lands at San Jose State (Michigan Daily)
A semi-talented young man who doesn't give a flying fook about getting a college education and who just wants to play football. Follow your bliss Tate, cuz life and youth are both short.

Robert Ettinger, cryonics pioneer dies at 92 and is frozen (Wikipedia)
He hoped to be revived later on. Ettinger wrote The Prospect of Immortality the original manifesto of the cryonics movement in 1962.

Linguists say they can "out" men impersonating women on Twitter (Slashdot)
About 65 percent of the time anyway.

How Los Angeles lost its mojo (New Geography)
"The machine that now controls Los Angeles by default consists of an alliance between labor and the political leadership of the Latino community, the area's largest ethnic population. But since politicians serve at the whim of labor interests, they seldom speak up for homeowners and small businesses."
Business hating environmentalists are the second edge to this double edged dagger.

Ypsilanti has a beer festival (Eastern Echo)
Who knew? I'd have gone if I had.

Detroit Metro-Times has a story about a Detroit area guy who left Motown to go to Hollywood and become a screen writer. Started out well but turned out to be tl:dnf for me. 

Sign of the times...

Recalling South L.A. as it used to be - LA Times

Nostalgia for the way SoCal used to be when it was dominated by white European immigrants and Okie migrants.

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Buyer's remorse over borrowing $50K for an Ivy League M.A. degree - Craigslist (Anonymous)
Hoity-toity wine snobs duped out of big bucks by counterfeits - Slate (Mark Steinburger)
Proof that the FBI is surveilling social networks - BBC
"Armed police were sent to a U.K. school because "...scanning software picked up a suspicious combination of words."
Is Los Angeles still America's "city of the future"? - New Geography (Joel Kontkin)
Joe Lieberman defends his "emergency powers over Internet" legislation - CNet
"It's vital that the president can 'say to an electric company or to say to Verizon, in the national interest, "There's an attack about to come, and I hereby order you to put a patch on this, or put your network down on this part, or stop accepting any incoming from country A,'" said Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut who caucuses with Democrats."
Sign of the Times: Deranged female shooter kills 2, kidnaps 1, wounds 1 - NY Post
Didn't kill herself before being captured though.