House "health care" bill: Death panels and trial-lawyer protection

The guys at Flopping Aces have gone through the 1,990 page abomination that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has introduced as the House of Representatives(?) version of the health scare "reform" bill.

Yah you read that right: one thousand, nine hundred and ninety pages.

It's calculated to cost $1.28 trillion.

So what's in this... thing?

Abortion funding.

The so-called "death panels" that we have been told repeatedly were just a figment of some people's imagination.

And... get a load of this one:

"Pelsoi inserted a provision which would punish state governments who attempt any kind of law suit abuse reform that would impact lawyers fees."

What. The. Hell. ???

So it's not enough that Congress has decreed that pharmaceutical firms are to be protected from lawsuits stemming from any injury or death that even untested vaccines might cause. Now our "lawmakers" are shielding trial lawyers from tort reform... by way of "health care" legislation?!

Who the hell do these people think they are?

I know what they are not. They certainly do not qualify to be our "representatives". With the exception of possibly two or three people that I can readily think of that are in Washington today, the members of the House and Senate and the Obama White House are so detached from the reality outside the Beltway that they have no understanding or empathy at all with the American people. Pardon my French folks, but these idiots don't have a f#&@ing clue at all about the lives of the people they allege to be "serving".

Do you think Nancy Pelosi gives a flying rat's ass about you or me or anyone else? "Let's hear it for the power!" she cried out when she became Speaker of the House. And that's all that matters to these bastards.

We don't have a government of the people, by the people and for the people anymore, friends and neighbors. Sane people are incapable of even desiring to write up nearly two thousand pages of legislation that will take away personal liberty and put their children's grandchildren into hopeless hock.

So what kind of person is capable of such a thing?

Mull that one over in yer gray matter...

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Stimulus jobs are $160,000 each?!?

That's what Jake Tapper at ABC News has reckoned. Figuring that the Obama administration is boating of anywhere between 640,000 and 1 million jobs saved or created because of the "stimulus" package, and that $159 billion was allocated by Congress and President Obama for such purpose, then the most conservative estimate has each rescued job worth $160,000.

The White House economists are calling these figures "calculator abuse". Wish I'd have thought of that one during those many times that I struggled with algebra in eighth grade!

Pssst... hey, President Obama. Wanna really use the government to create jobs and bolster the economy? It's very very simple:

CUT TAXES
AND
CUT SPENDING!!!

NO country in history has ever spent itself into prosperity. America can not possibly be any different.

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It's Chris Knight's Jack-O-Lantern 2009 Edition

Two years ago it was pumpkins carved in the likenesses of the honorable Dr. Ron Paul and a certain local school board member. Then last year it was a Big Daddy from the BioShock video games series.

So what did I do for this year's Halloween?

It's ME!

THAT'll make the neighborhood kids think twice before knocking on the door for candy! :-P

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Bad driving has a genetic component

Have a horrible driving record? It might be in your DNA. Here's what scientists at the University of California at Irvine have found...

People with a particular gene variant performed more than 20 percent worse on a driving test than people without it - and a follow-up test a few days later yielded similar results. About 30 percent of Americans have the variant.

"These people make more errors from the get-go, and they forget more of what they learned after time away," says Dr. Steven Cramer, neurology associate professor and senior author of the study published recently in the journal Cerebral Cortex.

This gene variant limits the availability of a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor during activity. BDNF keeps memory strong by supporting communication among brain cells and keeping them functioning optimally. When a person is engaged in a particular task, BDNF is secreted in the brain area connected with that activity to help the body respond.

Previous studies have shown that in people with the variant, a smaller portion of the brain is stimulated when doing a task than in those with a normal BDNF gene. People with the variant also don't recover as well after a stroke. Given these differences, the UCI scientists wondered: Could the variant affect an activity such as driving?

"We wanted to study motor behavior, something more complex than finger-tapping," says Stephanie McHughen, graduate student and lead author of the study. "Driving seemed like a good choice because it has a learning curve and it's something most people know how to do."

The driving test was taken by 29 people - 22 without the gene variant and seven with it. They were asked to drive 15 laps on a simulator that required them to learn the nuances of a track programmed to have difficult curves and turns. Researchers recorded how well they stayed on the course over time. Four days later, the test was repeated.

Results showed that people with the variant did worse on both tests than the other participants, and they remembered less the second time. "Behavior derives from dozens and dozens of neurophysiologic events, so it's somewhat surprising this exercise bore fruit," Cramer says.

And we are now one step closer toward understanding my family :-P

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Meet the Liberian Analog Blogger

Think the blogosphere needs the Internet? Bah! A dude in Liberia on the west coast of Africa is running a blog devoted to gathering that country's news and in spite of his old-fashioned technique, he's got hordes of readers!

In Monrovia, Liberia, there's a guy taking the matter of a lopsided, state-run media and reshaping it into a free-of-charge, independent news-aggregator—all accomplished with dry-erase board and couple markers. (Sorry, internet!) Each morning, at 10:45 AM, Alfred Sirleaf wakes up and heads down to his bulletin board to post the day's news, culling together a slate of stories his countrymen might otherwise never see. Grateful readers line up in droves, on foot and in cars, to read these updates, in what has been described as the country’s—and probably the world's—only analog blog.

Hit the above link for video of Mr. Sirleaf and his unique "website"!

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What has been seen...

...can never be un-seen.

Be mindful of that before you click this link.

Remember: it's your choice. Consider yourself duly warned.

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Tricky the Coyote hits car at 75 mph, is trapped between grill and radiator and gets taken on 600 mile ride... and SURVIVES

Sometimes, the headlines simply demand to write themselves.

Crash here for the tale of Daniel East, his sister Tevyn, and how they inadvertently brought Tricky through a harrowing eight-hour scenic tour of the desert wasteland of Utah and Nevada.

Tricky not only lived, but he suffered just a few minor scrapes on his paws.

(And methinks Tricky should sign an endorsement deal with ACME while that iron is still hot.)

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Electronic Frontier Foundation launches Takedown Hall of Shame!

The Electronic Frontier Foundation - which many of y'all will remember came to the aid of Yours Truly two years ago during that very bizarre situation with Viacom - is now setting out to document "the worst of the worst" of bogus copyright complaints. Hit here for the Takedown Hall of Shame, featuring outrageous acts of DMCA abuse by Warner Brothers, the Nation Organization for Marriage and many more!

(By the way, in my opinion there are few finer organizations out there than the Electronic Frontier Foundation: those guys really go all-out to defend the rights of content creators. If you're feeling so led, ya might wanna consider making a contribution to 'em 'cuz they definitely more than earn it :-)

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This weekend only: Theatre Guild of Rockingham County's encore performance of DISNEY'S MULAN JR.

This past month the young actors of Theatre Guild of Rockingham County rocked the house with Disney's Mulan Jr. (starring Jessica Wray as Mulan and Peggy Wasmund as Wushu). In case y'all missed it the first time, be at the new Market Square in Reidsville (ummm... North Carolina) this coming Saturday, October 31st at 4 p.m. 'cuz they're gonna do one more performance. Come out and enjoy the show.

And you'll still have plenty of time for trick-or-treating, too!

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BIOSHOCK 2 finally gets a real trailer!

Rapture: the ultimate town without pity. The fallen utopia that brutally demonstrated man's horrific potential without God and law to restrain him.

And it looks like things have gotten even worse in the ten years since the events of BioShock...

BioShock 2 beckons us back under the sea on February 9, 2010.

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Popcorn Sutton gets final send-off and public farewell

More than seven months after taking his own life rather than be wrongfully imprisoned, Marvin "Popcorn" Sutton has been laid to rest... again. And this time his many admirers had the opportunity they had long desired to pay their final respects to the famed moonshiner, Appalachian legend and completely American original character that was Popcorn Sutton.

Originally buried in Mt. Sterling in North Carolina, Popcorn's widow Pam Sutton cited "problems with vandalism" as the reason for moving and re-interring Popcorn's casket at Resthaven Memorial Gardens in Dandridge, Tennessee: not far from Popcorn's home in Parrotsville.

The move was scheduled for this past Saturday. A public memorial service was also held, attended by hundreds of people including country music legend Hank Williams Jr.

An old-fashioned horse-drawn hearse then brought Popcorn Sutton to his final resting place.

WBIR has more about the service for Popcorn Sutton, including a rather intriguing comment from Hank Williams Jr.

And here are three videos of the service, courtesy of aliciajose on YouTube (thanks aliciajose!)...

Popcorn Sutton Memorial Service Part 2

Popcorn Sutton Memorial Service Part 3

And if y'all wanna know why so many of your friends and neighbors have found Popcorn Sutton and his craft so endearing and enchanting, I cannot possibly recommend enough Neal Hutcheson's award-winning documentary The Last One. This has become the most-watched DVD of my collection in the past year (mostly 'cuz of all the people who keep asking to borrow it! :-)

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Wanna see the first eight minutes of ABC's remake of V?

Here ya go!

The Nazi lizards from outer space invade again for the first time next week, November 3rd at 8 p.m. ET/PT on ABC.

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2012 "end-of-world" date a miscalculation (by more than two centuries)

Somebody get Roland Emmerich on the horn: his upcoming 2012 movie is gonna be off. Like, waaaay off.

Per the reckoning of a group of scientists being reported in a Dutch journal (link goes to English translation) the popularly-held belief that the Maya calendar predicts the destruction of the world in 2012 is a miscalculation and doesn't even have anything to do with the end times whatsoever. The real end of the Maya cycle of time, according to what these researchers have found, is around 2220... and then the calendar just goes back to the beginning, even as ours ends on December 31st and goes into January 1st.

So like Lt. Commander Susan Ivanova of Babylon 5 once said: "No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There is always boom tomorrow."

(But if this kind of thing floats your boat, we've still got Sir Isaac Newton's prediction of a 2060 apocalypse looming before us :-)

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Rest in peace GeoCities

Fifteen years after it first offered free web space for anybody, GeoCities is shutting down today.

I can't remember the last time that I went to a GeoCities-hosted page. But once upon the time they glittered across cyberspace like sand on the seashore, mostly for "personal home pages". Those are dying out now, being supplanted by blogs like this one.

It can't be said enough though, that a lot of us today took our first steps into that larger world with GeoCities. Mark Milian writes a fine send-off for the service at the Los Angeles Times site and if you want a tribute to just about every GeoCities page that ever got created, click here.

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So, it has come to this: Chris reviews TWILIGHT

Yeah, I've read Twilight, the first novel of Stephenie Meyer's vampire series that has sold bazillions of copies and is now threatening us with a second motion picture. Even though I'm hardly the target audience for these books, I figured that it's culturally relevant enough to acquaint myself with it.

And I have to report to all two of this blog's faithful readers that much to my surprise, I enjoyed Twilight more than I had anticipated. So far as vampire fiction goes I'm still going to consider Dracula to be the high bar, along with Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles (the first several books anyway). But in Twilight I found a satisfying fulfillment of something I hadn't realized there had been a dearth of: a thoroughly modern-day American vampire mythos.

And that's the thing that makes me want to read the other books in the Twilight series: Meyer does establish quite a deep and empathetic lore in her tale of Bella, Edward and the Cullen clan of vampires. Yeah, they're vampires. I can finally buy into that. Up 'til now, what little I'd known of the vampires in the Twilight books had caused me to muster up a "meh". I mean, "vampires" who aren't afraid of sunlight, aren't repelled by garlic or crucifixes, etc.? Those aren't vampires, those are people with severe eating disorders at most. But having the read the book I kinda like this updated take on the vampire physiology, just as I thought Anne Rice had a brilliant and even sensible basis for vampires in her literature.

In other aspects, Twilight reads much like any romantic novel aimed at adolescents and young adults... and that's fine too. Vampire fiction cuts across a huge swath of genre. In this case it didn't detract from my personal appreciation of the novel at all, and I don't foresee it being a hindrance in my reading the other installments of the Twilight series either.

So if, like me, you've been wandering the bookstore aisles and inwardly debating whether Twilight is a book worth sinking your teeth into (or at least sinking into your wallet and plunking down money for), I'll have to give it a good recommendation.

And maybe sometime I'll even draw up the courage to watch the movie...

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Right now I'm watching THE SUPER HERO SQUAD SHOW

Y'all have got to check this out! It's on Cartoon Network and it's based on those cute lil' Marvel Super Hero Squad toys from Hasbro. But don't let that mislead ya: The Super Hero Squad Show is really more like Marvel Comics meets The Family Guy.

What sort of funny are we talking here? Captain America was just on the phone while wearing a Confederate outfit, discussing the re-enactment he's on his way to: "Hey it's the Civil War, what's the worst that could happen?"

Looks like I've found something new to DVR (in addition to those reruns of Are You Being Served? on PBS :-)

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What if the Internet was turned off?

"It's the not-to-distant future. They've turned off the Internet. After the riots have settled down and the withdrawal symptoms have faded, how would you cope?"

That's the grim scenario envisioned by Cracked.com, which asked its readers to send in their Photoshop-ped submissions depicting an Internet-addicted society suddenly having to make do without things like Twitter, Nigerian scam e-mails and online porno. At the link you'll find the top twenty entries, each hysterically funny... and clever!

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