This suit explores the avenue of “body” language and non-verbal communication. Intended for awkward introductory glacier encounters, it acts as an “ice breaker”, better enabling a person to lie prone on the surface of the glacier and give it a hug. Worn on the front of the body, the reflective padded material serves to mediate the difference in temperatures between the human body and the glacial ice....
Read about the adult summer camp where this suit was invented HERE, not an inexpensive camp to attend:
Individuals: $1600 (an $800 deposit is required after acceptance.) Groups of 4 or more from the same organization: $1200 per person (use promotion code 200: name of organization). ITP Alumni: $800 (use promotion code 100)
Complete payment is due by May 25 to keep your spot.
I'm at a loss for words except to say, You can't make this stuff up!
From this source quoting James J. Lee, who invaded the Discovery Channel's building today in Silver Spring Maryland, fired shots, and held hostages until the police shot him:
"Nothing is more important than saving ... the Lions, Tigers, Giraffes, Elephants, Froggies, Turtles, Apes, Raccoons, Beetles, Ants, Sharks, Bears, and, of course, the Squirrels. The humans? The planet does not need humans.”
Stan Cox tried to make the case for reducing our reliance upon air conditioning in a recent essay in the Washington Post:
...In a world without air conditioning, a warmer, more flexible, more relaxed workplace helps make summer a time to slow down again. Three-digit temperatures prompt siestas. Code-orange days mean offices are closed. Shorter summer business hours and month-long closings -- common in pre-air-conditioned America -- return.
[...]
Saying goodbye to A.C. means saying hello to the world....
This portion is particularly idyllic and, in my view, insanely implausible:
...During unseasonably warm spring and fall days, hearings are held under canopies on the Capitol lawn....
Read the entire puff piece HERE. The essay garnered 1321 comments!
Reactions to Mr. Cox's essay have varied. See these two letters to the editor. The first letter, written by Warren C. Robinson (one who has lived in the Washington, D.C. area for some eighty years), calls Mr. Cox's essay "hogwash." The second letter, written by Beth Baker, waxes poetic:
Stan Cox's July 11 Outlook commentary was music to my ears. For me, summer is a time of porch-sitting, hearing orioles sing through my open windows, fans blowing, enjoying a tall glass of iced tea or a gin and tonic, wearing a sundress, and generally reveling in a languor that I never feel in winter....
Read both letters, and decide for yourself which one is more in touch with reality.
Ultimately, as should not surprise us, Mr. Cox's recent essay in the Washington Post is a promotion of his book Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World (and Finding New Ways to Get Through the Summer).
By the way, no word yet as to just who is the first volunteer to give up air conditioning in a Washington, D.C., heat wave and just sweat out muggy weather. I rather imagine that Obama wouldn't be the first to step up. Heh.
This post is not another personal, whiny one as should be obvious by the accompany graphic from Google images.
Rather, this post is a reaction to this June 4, 2010 story from the Washington Post. Lengthy excerpt below the fold:
It wasn't typical fare for the neighborhood e-mail discussion group, but Jean Teichroew hoped that another Silver Spring resident might know the answer to her question: "Whose responsibility in the county is it to remove a dead chicken?"
The rust-colored, feathered corpse had been lying rear-up near an empty Heineken box at 16th Street and Second Avenue, just north of downtown Silver Spring, since late last week, Teichroew wrote on the North Woodside forum Tuesday. After it had begun to "ripen" in the heat, she wrote, she called Montgomery County's Animal Services Division but was told that officers couldn't retrieve it unless the bird was "the size of a vulture."
[...]
...A Montgomery County Council member's staff intervened and red-shirted "ambassadors" from downtown Silver Spring's Urban District were sent to pick it up....
Apparently, these citizens in Montgomery County, Maryland, felt that they required government help to get rid of a dead chicken, particularly when
Teichroew said that the chicken, which she had to pass daily on her walk to work, was "pretty disgusting."
Of course, as the dead chicken lay there day after to day, it continued to rot and reek while citizens waited for the government to take care of the matter:
Teichroew said she and her son, Peter, 24, planned to remove the chicken themselves Saturday with a bag and a pair of gloves. But when her son saw the bird's size, he told her, "Mom, that thing is huge!"
Concerned that the smelly, fly-covered corpse was a public health hazard, she asked her son to call Animal Services again. "Tell them it's really, really big," she recalled telling him. "Maybe you'll get someone who doesn't have the 'vulture rule.'"
This time, he was told that someone would be sent out. But when Teichroew walked to work Tuesday morning, the chicken was still there. She then called Montgomery's Highway Services division, but it referred her back to Animal Services and the police department's non-emergency number. When she called that, she said, she was pointed back to Animal Services and the highway division. That's when she called the office of council member Valerie Ervin (D-Silver Spring), and a staff member passed her concerns along to Rodriguez.
Finally, the local government arrived to solve the problem, that of a dead chicken, for pity's sake.
Although both the newspaper and the various involved civil servants found a lot of humor in this story, I do not.
Why in the world didn't at least one of the affected citizens glove up, don a mask, grab a shovel and a couple of heavy-duty trash bags, and take care of the matter himself (or herself, for that matter)? Not a pleasant task, to be sure, but a necessary one, unless one wants to smell decomposing animal flesh day after day. I also find amazing that the woman and her twenty-four-year-old son, both adults, wimped out from scooping up a dead chicken.
Americans have become way too reliant on the government to solve problems which citizens themselves can and should solve for themselves. Honestly, I cannot imagine my father's generation walking by a stinking animal carcass day after day and not tending to the matter themselves. Can you?
As Mark of Casting Pearls Before Swine recently opined:
We are becoming a nation of whiny little wusses.
In all sorts of ways, right down to being too squeamish to remove a chicken carcass.
Normally, I'd save a posting such as this for weekend humor. Of course, what you're about to watch in the video isn't really funny in a light-hearted sense.
Democrat Peggy West, the 12th District Supervisor for south Milwaukee, doesn't know that Mexico borders Arizona (hat tip to Infidel Bloggers Alliance):
Apparently, the following map is a stranger to her:
Below the fold, additional information about the idiot in the video.
Peggy West was elected 12th District Supervisor in 2004 and, after being reelected in 2008, is serving her second term representing 50,000 residents on Milwaukee's south side. She currently serves as 2nd Vice-Chair on the Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors. Supervisor West also has the unique distinction of being the first Latino/Hispanic American to be elected to the Milwaukee County Board.
[...]
A committed believer in community service, Supervisor West volunteers for UMOS, Inc. and Mexican Fiesta and serves as a mentor at Notre Dame Middle School.
[...]
...She also serves on the Executive Committee of the Milwaukee Democratic Party.
Is she also an Obamabot?
Regardless, as the saying goes, "We surrounded by idiots," many of them our so-called elected public servants.
[Ex-Muslim] Rashid recently examined the theological implications of Muhammad's hatred for the gecko lizard, which the prophet accused of being "an infidel and enemy of the believers." Muslims who kill it in the first strike receive 100 "heavenly-points," whereas those who kill it in two strikes receive only 70.
Now for something really disgusting:
More graphically, [Coptic priest] Fr. Zakaria recently examined canonical hadiths (authenticated Muslim accounts) that record Islam's first believers eating Muhammad's feces, marinating food in his sweat, drinking the water he gargled and spit out, and smearing his phlegm all over their faces—all to his approval.
As Raymond Ibrahim's essay concludes:
[S]illy cartoons of Muhammad are the least of Muslims' problems.
Prior to his election to Congress, Rep. Johnson served twelve (12) years as a DeKalb County magistrate judge, five (5) years as a county commissioner and three (3) years as chair of the DeKalb County Budget Committee.
Rep. Johnson practiced civil and criminal law in DeKalb County for twenty-seven (27) years. A staunch supporter of public education, he is a graduate of the District of Columbia Public Schools...
The case for private education and homeschooling grows stronger every day.
And then we have this, also from the congressman's web site:
One of the earliest congressional supporters of President Barack Obama, Rep. Johnson served as co-Chair of the Obama Campaign in Georgia.
(Note: This is a long post as it is a bit of a round up)
I've been telling some of my non-blogging readers and friends about the following two videos, to gasps of incredulity and am posting the material in this post "for the record":
So, should we sign a contract without reading it? Come on! The first thing most of us learn about signing papers laid before us: "Read before you sign!" Yet, Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi uttered words that have to rank up there with the craziest political statements ever. I call for her to be brought up on charges of political malpractice. Information about political malpractice HERE; please take a moment to read the link.
The second video, quite an admission, and additional material are below the fold:
And who can forget the following statement?
As for the health-reform act itself, read the following from the March 23, 2010 New York Times (hat tip to THE ASTUTE BLOGGERS):
In Health Bill, Obama Attacks Wealth Inequality
For all the political and economic uncertainties about health reform, at least one thing seems clear: The bill that President Obama signed on Tuesday is the federal government’s biggest attack on economic inequality since inequality began rising more than three decades ago.
[...]
...This fact helps explain why Mr. Obama was willing to spend so much political capital on the issue, even though it did not appear to be his top priority as a presidential candidate....
A reminder from a previous post here at Always On Watch:
In case you can't access the above audio, what Obama said:
If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples. So that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it I’d be okay.
But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society.
And to that extent as radical as people tried to characterize the Warren court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as it’s been interpreted, and the Warren court interpreted it in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. It says what the states can’t do to you, it says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf. And that hasn’t shifted. One of the I think tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributed change and in some ways we still suffer from that.
Add it all up, and it should be clear to any thinking person what this administration is all about. Change, all right, with the hope being overturning the America as we know her.
Some reading below the fold. From this post at Totus:
Here we go again, the administration is planning to establish a new government agency, one that will answer to the president, to report on what Gary Locke the secretary of commerce has already said, "that climate change is a real threat". We all know that the climate is changing, its been changing since the beginning of time, before man walked the earth, before the first microbes swam in the seas. This is just another effort on the part of government to control the message and try and get ahead of the firestorm causes by climategate. These global warming fanatics are grasping at straws in what will turn out to be a vain attempt to sway public opinion again. Those who believe in global warming will not go quietly into the night, moves such as this show their desperation and perhaps the dying quiver of their once popular movement.
(Note to family and friends: The most recent update on Mr. AOW is here, updated December 12)
Jimmy Peanut's idiocy continues to grow by leaps and bounds — just in time for Christmas. Maybe all the Merry Christmases and Christmas lights set him off this time.
In an address to a gathering sponsored by the World Parliament of Religions (PWR) last Friday, former US President Jimmy Carter has once again blamed traditional religion, particularly Southern Baptists and Roman Catholics, for “creating an environment where violations against women are justified.”
[...]
“Their continuing choice provides a foundation or justification for much of the pervasive persecution and abuse of women throughout the world,” said Carter. Carter goes on to list horrific violations against women such as rape, genital mutilation, abortion of female embryos and spousal battery.
Not even a hint of a mention of the misogyny of Islam. Of course.
Any student who uses the word could be suspended from Danvers High School in Massachusetts! Many parents are just fine with the ban on the word "meep," a word popularized by Beaker on The Muppet Show and the cartoon character Road Runner.
Apparently, a biology teacher felt threatened by the word.
The most revelatory passage in the so-called “plain English” version of the health care bill that the Senate Finance Committee approved on Tuesday (without ever drafting the actual legislative language) says that in the future Americans will be offered the convenience of getting their health insurance at the Department of Motor Vehicles.
You might ask, "Which idiocy?" After all, there are SO MANY IDIOCIES to choose for discussion these days.
Well, instead of posting about BHO (several of those posts below this one), I've chosen the following short video, one about the new euphemisms in our nation's textbooks (hat tip to Weasel Zippers):
The book The Trouble with Textbooks is available at Amazon. If you have children or grandchildren still in school or if you are a teacher, you might want to buy your own copy and start checking the, ahem, new terminology.
(hat tip to Weasel Zippers) Remember when Olbermann got into a spot of trouble last fall?
The final straw came during the RNC just after a tribute to the victims of the 9/11 attacks was aired on MSNBC. ..Olbermann apologized that MSNBC had decided to honor the [9/11] victims by airing the tribute and stated that the tribute was ‘’not appropriate to be shown,’’ and that any who participated in showing it should be ‘’eviscerated’’.
Commenters, feel free to add more data about Olbermann.
Today, Mr. AOW and I signed off on our electronic filing for our 2008 taxes. Maybe we shouldn't have bothered:
Also see the comments at YouTube. ----- Have you ever known anybody who, for whatever reason, didn't pay federal taxes? I have. The result: penalties, interest, seizure of assets, etc. Indeed, I myself got slammed with a penalty last year because I inadvertently underestimated my quarterly payments to Uncle Sam.
But thus saith the Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in the U.S. Senate (paraphrase): Our tax monies are not being forcibly taken from us. We have a voluntary system, and that is a "fact of the matter."
A possible new danger has been detected in those beloved children's classics, any published before 1985. The possible danger cited — lead in the ink used for the printed word.
The danger isn't a clear and present one. Nonetheless, Congress has taken action to ban the books.
From this article in the Washington Post "Health" section:
Rachel Merrill, mother of three, was holding innocuous-seeming contraband in her hand at an Arlington Goodwill store earlier this month: a 1971 edition of "Little House on the Prairie." This copy of the children's classic had just become illegal to resell because of concerns that some old books contain lead in their ink.
Legislation passed by Congress last August in response to fears of lead-tainted toys imported from China went into effect last month. Consumer groups and safety advocates have praised it for its far-reaching protections. But libraries and book resellers such as Goodwill are worried about one small part of the law: a ban on distributing children's books printed before 1985.
According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the agency charged with enforcing the act, lead in the books' inks could make its way into the mouths of little kids. Goodwill is calling for a change in the legislation even as it clears its shelves to comply, and libraries are worried they could be the next ones scrubbing their shelves.
[...]
Implementation of the new law has libraries and secondhand bookstores reeling. Although they could pay to have each old book tested, the cost ($300 to $600 a book, according to the American Library Association) makes that impractical.
The [Consumer Product Safety Commission] has advised libraries not to circulate old books while the agency reviews the situation....
"We're talking about tens of millions of books," said Emily Sheketoff, executive director of the Washington office of the American Library Association....
Of course, in order for children to suffer the deleterious effects of lead poisoning, they have to ingest the toxic element. The last time I checked, (1) children do not generally lick the pages of books, and (2) parents are responsible for keeping possibly dangerous items away from their toddler's prying hands and hungry mouths. Furthermore, I've never known of one single case of lead poisoning stemming from traces of lead in the printed word. Has anyone? In fact, according to this article:
Could a vintage, dog-eared copy of “The Cat in the Hat” or “Where the Wild Things Are” be hazardous to your children?
Probably not, according to the nation’s premier medical sleuths, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The CDC statement likely means that not one documented case of lead poisoing can be traced to the ink in children's classics.
The above-cited Washington Post article also states that the possibility of lead poisoning from the ink on the pages of older books is one of some controversy and dispute:
Scientists are emphatic that lead, which was common in paints before its use was banned in 1978, poses a threat to the neural development of small children. But they disagree about whether there is enough in the ink in children's books to warrant concern....
"On the scale of concerns to have about lead, this is very clearly not a high priority," said Ellen Silbergeld, a MacArthur scholar and professor of public health at Johns Hopkins University who is considered one of the leading experts on lead poisoning.
"It doesn't take a tremendous amount of intelligence to figure out what the highest-risk sources of lead are," Silbergeld said. "...I think this is just absurd, and I think it's disingenuous." She said that toys, poorly made jewelry and other trinkets were cause for much more alarm.
Nevertheless, in typical bureaucratic fashion, the federal government is barreling ahead with purging bookshelves of these children's classics. After all, Congress has so mandated.
The same kind of idiocy as we see in this nonsense with fussing and fuming over what likely amounts to no danger whatsoever also afflicts those in charge of various governmental oversights, both present and proposed. Today's Americans as a whole, however, continue to want more government intervention in all aspects of our lives — all "for our own good," of course. Thus, we see another example of governmental bureaucracy going too far and participaing in yet another wild goose chase.
Recently, citing the disappearance and downsizing of some newspapers, I posed this FEATURED QUESTION about journalism. Now it seems that U.S. Senator Benjamin Cardin has introduced a bailout bill for certain newspapers. From this article at Reuters (hat tip to MR of Infidel Bloggers Alliance):
U.S. bill seeks to rescue faltering newspapers
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - With many U.S. newspapers struggling to survive, a Democratic senator on Tuesday introduced a bill to help them by allowing newspaper companies to restructure as nonprofits with a variety of tax breaks.
[...]
Cardin's Newspaper Revitalization Act would allow newspapers to operate as nonprofits for educational purposes under the U.S. tax code, giving them a similar status to public broadcasting companies.
Under this arrangement, newspapers would still be free to report on all issues, including political campaigns. But they would be prohibited from making political endorsements.
Advertising and subscription revenue would be tax exempt, and contributions to support news coverage or operations could be tax deductible.
Because newspaper profits have been falling in recent years, "no substantial loss of federal revenue" was expected under the legislation, Cardin's office said in a statement.
Cardin's office said his bill was aimed at preserving local and community newspapers, not conglomerates which may also own radio and TV stations. His bill would also let a non-profit buy newspapers owned by a conglomerate.
"We are losing our newspaper industry," Cardin said. "The economy has caused an immediate problem, but the business model for newspapers, based on circulation and advertising revenue, is broken, and that is a real tragedy for communities across the nation and for our democracy."
Newspaper subscriptions and advertising have shrunk dramatically in the past few years as Americans have turned more and more to the Internet or television for information....
Thus far, the bill has no co-sponsors. In sane times, the bill wouldn't have any co-sponsors. But do we live in sane times?
Who or what entity will next be looking for or offered some kind of bailout? Whoever or whatever entity seeks help from the federal government and thereby from the taxpayer, some politician on Capitol Hill will be willing to accommodate the request — in the name of looking out for our "general welfare," no doubt.
The clause "promote the general welfare," in the Preamble of the Constitution of the United States, has led to more expansion of government than our Founders ever foresaw or advocated. Would our Founders any longer recognize the country which they established?
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