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Not yet, but it's gettin' there *

Ex- UM, NY Jets footballer Braylon Edwards, cousins involved in bar fight in Birmingham (Ann Arbor.com)
Edwards wasn't arrested though.

Bill Bonds & Rich Fischer to team up to do news talk radio show on WCAR-AM (Detroit News)
Might be good. Bonds always has lots of opinions and observations. I hope it doesn't bog down into old fart type ramblings though. We'll see.

GM claims it made a $2.5 billion profit last quarter (Detroit Free Press)
Good news if it is fact true. "Government motors" need more vetting for news like that to be entirely credible in my humble opinion.

MSU football legend Bubba Smith dead at 66 (Lansing State Journal)
Natural causes.

Italian gunmaker Chiappa adding RFID chips to it's products starting next year (Gun Nut)
Cui bono?

The Driver License: Is It Necessary? (Lewrockwell.com)
"The basic (and only legitimate) purpose of the driver license is to certify that the owner of that license has proven that he/she is capable of operating a motor vehicle on public roads in a safe and responsible manner. The license should not be withheld for any reason other than the fact that the applicant could not pass a fair and objective driving test."

DL's have actually become an American internal passport  rather than just the certificate of competence to operate a motor vehicle it started out as. Cui bono?

Can You Split Atoms of Uranium at Home in Your Kitchen? (Popular Science)
Yes, but it's not legal in Sweden. Or pretty much anywhere else either for that matter. And where did this guy get useable amounts of uranium and americium anyway? Those are two elements are highly controlled substances.

Live as a political hack die as a political hack: A cautionary tale. (Blaska's Blog)
In re the Wisconsin Supreme Court scuffle incident.

"[Dane county, WI prosecuting attorney] Ismael Ozanne does not want to bring charges," says Blaska, "and for good reason. He knows he has no case but fears that deciding not to charge will enrage the howling mob in Madison. He fears that his liberal privileges will be revoked and that he will be the target of sing-alongs and vuvuzelas. He will be linked to the Koch Brothers and ALEC. Oh, and he can forget about election to the post to which he has been appointed." [emphasis added]

Hoist on his own petard. Heh.


* Wanna buy a flag like this one? Go here.

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Dean of the "venom harvesters" dies at age 100 (Dave Petzal, The Gun Nut blog)
"Mr. [Bill] Haast was the foremost venom milker in the history of the profession, and he received 172 bites from all manner of lethal serpents over the course of his lifetime, some of which nearly killed him."
I wonder if all those bites prolonged his life, shortened it, or made no difference at all? One thing for sure though is that Haast had a passion for what he did and that is usually thought of as a major life extender.

DSK conclusion-jumpers now appear left with oeuf sur le visage (John Soloman, Daily Beast)
Doh!

Tactical flashlights for home defense (Popular Mechanics)
"Developed initially for special forces in the military and law enforcement, these lights, with their intensely bright beams, are also available to civilians. They offer protection by temporarily blinding an intruder. Unlike a room light or a conventional flashlight, which shows the bad guys where you are, tactical lights are designed to identify a target without turning you into one."

Ernest Hemingway was wired-tapped by the FBI in his final years (Slashdot)
Just like he suspected he was even though his family and friends chalked it up to clinic depression, old age and alcoholism. Vindication after you're dead is about as hollow a victory as it's possible to get, eh?

How America will end (zenpundit.com/)
"The primary problem with the American political economy is that in the last 10-15 years, elite, moderately liberal technocrats have made common cause with the elite, moderately conservative rentiers of the financial and corporate world to form an incipient oligarchy. One sees their fellow Americans paternalistically as children. The other sees us as sheep to be sheared. It’s a common enough ground on which to unite and it is the reason you see a very liberal Democratic Obama administration and a Pelosi-Reid Congressional leadership counterintuitively putting corporate regulation in impenetrable shadows not seen since before the Stock Market Crash of 1929 as if they were the minions of Jay Gould and J.P. Morgan."

10 Great Things About the Japanese (Colin Liddell, Taki's Magazine)
3. THEY ONLY ACCEPT REFUGEES FROM FIRST WORLD COUNTRIES
"While most Western countries throw open their borders every time there’s a public flogging/vaginal circumcision/paper-clip shortage in the Third World, the Japanese do their bit for the planet’s displaced by only accepting refugees from First World countries such as America. Japan is home to an estimated 88,000 US citizens. Since most of them are Democrats, geek boys, and liberal-arts graduates, this provides a valuable service to Americans by removing what would otherwise be a highly unproductive and unsightly segment of their population."

Heh! Reasons #6, #7, and #10 are pretty good too.

Libyan rebels arms shopping list (Robert Ziegler, Foreign Policy)
I was struck by the ridiculously high prices for many of the arms listed. I mean $300 USD a piece for a lousy AK-47? Gimme a break. The rest of the stuff on their "list" is expensive and technologically advanced stuff that ex-pat economics students and repatriated day laborers from Europe or oil rig workers from the Gulf emirates aren't able to use properly or maintain. The prices listed are the kind of sky-high rip-off profiteering you'd see from bent arms dealers in a 1980's action-adventure movie based on a Frederick Forsythe novel something.

Weblog -June 10, 2011

Ypsilanti neighborhood degenerating into violence, chaos (Tom Perkins, annarbor.com/)
Sleazy liquor store surrounded by abandoned cars and houses two blocks from public housing. What could go wrong?

Flint-area Goodwill store customer finds full funeral urn for sale on their shelves (David Harris, MLive/Flint Journal)
Sad and funny at the same time, eh?

Disgraced Rep. Wiener won't resign; He needs the paycheck (Chuck Bennett, New York Post)
Likely the first honest thing Wiener has said about himself to date and esp. on this matter.

Senators target Bitcoin currency, citing drug sales (Don Reisinger, Cnet)
Senators Shumer and Manchin just can't stand people being able to spend money that the government can't trace, control or regulate. Can't have that much liberty now can we?

The HK416—The gun that (probably) killed bin-Laden (Joe Pappalardo, Popular Mechanics)
Typical of high-end German engineering. Precise, efficient, perfectly executed and very expensive. Just like their cars.

Iceland's citizens are writing its new constitution online  (Clay Dillow, Popular Science)
It will be interesting to see how this works out. However Iceland has some distinct advantages. No racial/ethnic or religious minorities. A single homogenous group will likely work out better assuming this can be done at all. All previous attempts at constitution drafting have been done by constituent assemblies, well connected local elites or imposed by a foreign power.

Outgoing US SecDef castigates NATO countries for not pulling their weight in global security ops (Matt Welch, Reason)
Bottom line: "It might be worth beginning to consider whether intervening in far-flung civil wars really qualifies as 'defense'." Indeed.

Extra Gene Copies May Trigger Some Cases of Autism (John Timmer, Ars Technica)
"Overall, the new studies strengthen the argument that autism is primarily a genetic disorder, and help explain why it has been so hard to identify the genes: most mutations are rare or completely unique to the affected individuals."