Posts from — April 2007

Doesn’t mean no one’s out to get you.

Back on April 11^th I wrote:

I read on a site during my search that the melamine may have been added to increase the protein level in the gluten when it was tested and priced. The site is a bit strange and “tin foil,” but amines are proteins, so there is some logic and science in the guess.

Today: LitBrit at Shakesville is reporting in the post, Pet Food Poisoning: Now In Three Protein Ingredients, that the FDA is looking into the possibility that the introduction of melamine is intentional “to increase the protein level in the gluten when it was tested and priced.”

The site where I read this is associated with the Schiavo controversy to an extreme degree, but they seem to have been correct on this point. I really hate that we have a government that makes what would normally be “wild conspiracy theories” not only rational, but true.

Because they do not have to rely on advertising, the BBC has the ability to do things differently than the American media. Among the differences is having Peter Horrocks, Head of TV News at the BBC explain the process and thinking behind: Why we showed gunman.

In this case, my immediate reaction would have been to have a panel of experts in law enforcement, mental health, and the media review the material and report on it. Then I would have scheduled the materials to be broadcast at a later date, cynically, the Fall sweeps, to give the families and friends time to grieve. I wouldn’t have done it on the anniversary, as grief counselors would tell you that is another hurdle for those who are grieving. Six months would give professionals time to study the materials and come to reasoned conclusions. I would also make a significant contribution to a victims’ fund, knowing that whatever I did, some people would hate it, and I would need PR cover. It’s called reality, and it is brutal, but you ignore it at your own risk.

When Mom’s Away?

ZZZZ. ZZzz. Zzzz.

[Editor: The only time off Ringo gets is when they are asleep. Property is not going to be a “blue”, but a gray tabby. ]

Friday Ark

Way back when, I was somewhat negative about the lack of diversity on the Supreme Court.

The fact that five male Catholics whose law degrees were granted by Harvard [3] and Yale [2] have decided that there is no problem with overruling the decisions of actual doctors of medicine with specialized training in the affected field leads me to believe I was right. This was an opinion designed to conform to the dogma of their fringe group in the Church, not the Founding Fathers.

Badtux looks at arming students. [This happens to you when you are testing multiple frozen pizzas.]

Here’s the deal, if you aren’t ready to kill someone, having a gun is worthless. Not everyone is afraid of guns, you need to be able to honestly say that you can pull the trigger and take another life, or don’t own a gun. Guns are dangerous by design.

All of these people who claim that if the students or faculty were armed, it would have changed the outcome are delusional. It was one guy and no one tried to hit him with a chair. No one turned a fire hose on him. No one attacked him with any of the many things that will kill a human being that are readily available in a classroom. He was the only one with a killer instinct in the building.

Guns are tools, not mystical, magical devices that imbue those who hold them with knowledge, courage, and power. Cops carry guns 24/7 and are still killed. The same for the military. Having a gun that you can’t or won’t use is stupid and could get you killed…with your own gun. You would be dead and embarrassed.

I don’t know this for a fact, but I suspect that the people who are cheerleading for everyone to have guns wouldn’t be anxious to run towards the sound of gunfire.

Update: This isn’t about courage.  A number of people sacrificed their own lives to protect others.  They weren’t capable of killing, but they certainly had all of the courage there is in the world.

Between killing two people in the dorm and 30 in the class building, Cho Seung-Hui dropped by the Post Office and sent a package to NBC News with his disjointed thoughts on paper and DVDs.

He identified himself as “Ishmael” on the package and had “Ismael Ax” on his arm when found.

My wild guess from what little I read is that he may have meant “Ismael Ach”, of the tribe of Ismael, referring to not to Arabs, but to the novel, Ishmael by Daniel Quinn which deals with how messed up the world is.

Unfortunately he didn’t learn that you have to get elected before you get to change the world by killing a lot of innocent people.

To Quote myself: “The brain has a nasty habit of blocking things people don’t want to remember and adding things to make a ‘better’ story.”

Melissa at Shakesville notes that we now know the first woman killed was not the shooter’s girlfriend. The victim’s roommate and best friend didn’t know the shooter and had never seen him. The media and probably law enforcement assumed that this was a boyfriend/girlfriend problem because that’s the most familiar story.

So the “Asian male with a maroon hat” would have been all the police would have had to work with even if the initial victims hadn’t died.

It’s unfortunate that we don’t have better tools available to spot dangerous mental health problems earlier, but we don’t.

From start to finish this is one of the 5% of cases where the victims didn’t know their murderer.

Update: Via All Hat and No Cattle – the initial police effort was focused on locating and questioning the victim’s actual boyfriend, Karl D. Thornhill because of the reasonable assumption that this was one of the 19 out of 20 cases of murder, rather than the exception.

Update: what was really going on was all of the last possible minute e-tax filers: TurboTax e-filing woes draw customer ire combined with BlackBerry outage: RIM a victim of its own success?, the e-filing at the IRS site, and the 24/7 over-exposure of the Virginia Tech story. If we weren’t such procrastinators, this wouldn’t have happened. [I “snail mailed” my paper forms on Sunday.]

Steve Bates of Yellow Doggerel Democrat had his DSL go down and then a computer fail.

Global Crossing had an unusual outage on a segment of the Internet backbone.

My DSL was down and the ‘Net was slow.

Mustang Bobby reports the CrackBerry e-mail system failed.

It sounds like a bunch of incompetent amateurs are attempting to delete all records of their e-mails.

Look, I have a radical proposal, that I have made many times in the past on many different forums, to no avail: instead of passing new laws, why don’t we try actually enforcing the laws that exist? Instead of slapping wrists for violations of current guns laws, why don’t we try kicking some butts?

There are a handful of gun dealers who are tied to hundreds of weapons that show up at crime scenes around the country, and yet they still have their Federal Firearms Licenses. This is not right. This is not just. This cannot be allowed to continue.

Many of these operations have no showrooms or real stores, but they sell huge quantities of weapons. They get fines, and occasional suspensions but they stay in business.

It is time to actually fund the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and to actually enforce the laws. The same thing needs to occur on the state and local level with real enforcement taking place and real penalties handed out. There is no point in passing new laws until we figure if the old laws will work. A law that isn’t enforced is a political press release.

Well the “experts” have already decided that everyone in charge at Virginia Tech is an incompetent buffoon who should be fired because this incident happened.

Some are saying that they should have “locked down the campus” which would have stopped the second shooting. They don’t suggest how that could be accomplished with over 25,000 students on a campus with 100 buildings on 2,600 acres when your entire police force for 24/7 coverage is 40 officers, but that’s what needed to be done. And when the campus got sued after the incident occurred anyway since they had locked in the killer and his weapons with the victims, these people would have argued that the administration should have allowed people to escape.

The problem is that the officers who responded to the first shooting received from the witnesses a description of Asian male wearing a maroon hat. The two people who could have provided better information were dead or dying. Without a good description, who do you look for? Does anyone believe there was only one male Asian on the campus, because they didn’t know the perpetrator was a student until later. As for the hat, it was probably a Virginia Tech hat and college students, despite their denials, all tend to dress alike.

This was the WORST incident of this kind ever. There is no right answer, because no one has ever dealt with this before. There still isn’t enough confirmed information to make any judgments. Let’s wait for the complete picture and stop going off half-cocked. The people at the top had to have known some of those who were killed personally, and they are dealing with grief like everyone else on the campus.

Jack Cluth at People’s Republic of Seabrook is having his 47^th birthday and is complaining about his lost youth.

Almost nothing I do on the ‘Net can be done in a reasonable fashion on dial-up speeds, and I almost never stream anything or watch video. Every site I check has so much graphic content that it just oozes and seeps across the screen when I try to load the pages. Just a like to YouTube brings the entire process to a screeching halt as you wait for the still frame to load. I don’t pay the extra bucks for DSL to sit here and wait.

This has been going on since 8AM and I haven’t even finished my normal blog run, much less grab the stuff I want for what I’m doing for a client. Why, whatever the problem is would affect my service on the Panhandle and the service in Hardee County in Southwest Florida is beyond me.

On Sunday, Keith at The Invisible Library celebrated his fourth blogiversary™. It was a quiet affair as befits a library.

August J. Pollak at Some Guy With A Website has provided a simple way of consolidating and capsulizing the Internet Argument. Just save the link and the next time there’s a flair up, post it.

Update: Apparently some guy calling himself Atrios at Eschaton is celebrating his fifth blogiversary™ today. [see “Internet Argument” above.]

Update: It’s my DSL, which is now working at about 28.8Kbps. Embarq/Sprint/whatever they call themselves these days is “aware of the problem” and their “engineers are working on it.” But no one bothered to tell the people who are paying for it. To find out you have to call and navigate the pinball phone system and rack up enough points to hear a recording. Telecoms and banks change their names more often than drug dealers.

It may be my DSL connection, but the ‘Net is extremely slow this morning. It acts like a Denial-Of-Service [DOS] attack. This really impacts my ability to work on my current project.

It could be related to all the people trying to file their taxes on this, the last day. Since the 15^th fell on the weekend, and the 16^th is a holiday in DC, people have until midnight tonight to file without penalty.

There is also a lot of traffic because of the Virginia shooting, but the information is flowing like cold oatmeal.

Things should speed up after all of the ‘Net music radio stations go out of business, thanks to the RIAA [Internet radio broadcasters dealt setback]. I have never seen an industry more hellbent on their own destruction. They are destroying their markets with greed. I don’t understand why people who “pay” terrestrial radio to play their music, want to gouge all other sources. If people don’t know your product exists, they are not apt to buy it. Too bad the large record record companies have not figured out that everyone else isn’t in their criminal class. Just because they’ve been “stealing” from artists for years doesn’t mean that everyone else is stealing from them. I don’t guess it occurs to them that if they cleaned up the way they dealt with performers, a lot of people would be more willing to deal with them. There are a lot of people who don’t look on stealing from thieves as a crime. A clue for record company executives: Charles Dickens died a while ago, so you can stop trying out for his latest novel.