michigan

Chris Knight's avatar

History was made yesterday as Detroit became the largest American municipality ever to file for bankruptcy.

What was once the wealthiest city in the United States is now $18 billion dollars underwater.  It can’t pay its bills.  It can’t pay out pensions to employees.  And there is practically no income.

But hey!  All is not lost!  Detroit can simply have a “Save Detroit Telethon”!




How does a city as ruined as Detroit make a comeback? Getting rid of every vestige of its failed leadership would be a good start. But that alone isn’t going to make up for all the damage that kowtowing to the unions (representing both government employees and private industry) has done.

Actually, to be honest: I don’t know how a city like Detroit could recover.  I believe it’s possible, but it would take a very long time.

Expect all kinds of hell if the United ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

38 children and six adults killed. Several dozen wounded. The assailant killed himself.

That was the toll from the Bath Township Consolidated School Massacre in Bath Township, Michigan. On May 18, 1927…

You can read more about it here.

Incidentally, not a single firearm was used in the worst school massacre in the nation’s history.

It is not what is in the hand so much as what is in the heart.

Thoughts and prayers going out to the people of Newtown, Connecticut this afternoon....

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I guess if Philadelphia can have a Rocky Balboa statue, and if New York City has one of Ralph Kramden and if Milwaukee has the Fonz as a landmark, then Detroit should get a lasting monument to its own… hero?

(Oh yeah, I almost forgot : nearby Mount Airy – the model for Mayberry on The Andy Griffith Show – has that life-sized bronze statue of Andy and Opie going fishing! So I guess the precedent has already been set for fictional lawmen. Law-cyborgs. Whatever…)

Earlier this week a flood of support coalesced across Facebook and Twitter to erect in Detroit a statue of… RoboCop. The titular “part man, part machine, all cop” hero of the 1987 sci-fi action smash-hit movie. Somebody forwarded the idea to Detroit mayor Dave Bing, who responded with “There are not any plans to erect a statue to Robocop. Thank you for the suggestion.”...

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As you can guess however, he didn’t get away with it. Nicholas Woodhams of Kalamazoo, Michigan has pleaded guilty to mail fraud and money laundering and has been sentenced to a year in prison and made to pay $650,000 restitution for his scheme that tricked Apple into sending him nearly ten thousand brand new iPods…

Prosecutors say he took advantage of a warranty program by guessing the serial numbers of iPods still under warranty and claiming they were broken.

The company sent him 9,000 new ones over a year and a half.

Investigators say he turned around and sold those on the Internet.

Actually rather clever. I have to admire him for coming up with such a plan, even though it was obviously the wrong direction to direct such creativity toward....

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As clever as Erwin Rommel was, I can’t remember him ever pulling off what Will Foster of Flint, Michigan has done: build a working Panzer tank (albeit one-half sized) from scratch…

The Kettering University engineering student’s mini-Panzer can go up to 20 miles per hour with its three-cylinder diesel engine, is quite maneuverable and the turret can rotate 360 degrees to fire empty Red Bull cans from its air-compressed cannon powered by a SCUBA tank. Foster said that he built the tank to use in paintball competitions, after seeing some people drive “tanks” that were really golf carts.

Aim your targeting reticle here to read more about Foster’s creation. And here’s a YouTube video of the tank in action…

...

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Chris Knight's avatar

State reps in Michigan want to give each child in that state a free iPod, courtesy of the taxpayers of that state.

That has to be one of the worst and most stupid proposed abuses of government power that I’ve ever heard of. The Detroit News expresses blunt outrage in an editorial about the proposal, that says it better than I can here.

You know, if this goes through, these Michigan politicians are going to be encouraging crime. Think about this for a minute: free iPods for people who might ordinarily not be able to afford an iPod. Well, is the government of Michigan going to be getting iTunes for all of those people to go along with their new iPods? Probably not. These kids will have an MP3 player but no MP3s. And the music for those iPods has to come from somewhere…

So if this goes ...

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