January 13, 2018
New York's Kennedy Airport, while going through some surface appearance improvements, has been called a Third World Airport many times. A few days ago, when it was around 17 degrees, pipes broke in a terminal and water flooded over the baggage claim area, causing chaos. Maybe they should get some advice from the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport people on how to handle cold weather...
according to Reuters:
.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Flooding from a water main break forced the temporary suspension of some flights at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport on Sunday, adding to the misery of travelers after a winter storm canceled or delayed hundreds of flights in recent days.
A worker attempts to remove water following a water main break in the arrivals area of Terminal 4 at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City, U.S. January 7, 2018. REUTERS/Andrew Kelly
Water poured from the ceiling onto a check-in counter and covered large areas of the floor of Terminal 4, video on CNN showed. The disruption occurred while the U.S. Northeast continued to endure bone-chilling weather with the New York temperature at 17 degrees Fahrenheit (-8 Celsius).
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
08:40 AM
| No Comments
| Add Comment
Post contains 198 words, total size 1 kb.
January 12, 2018
Missouri's Republican Governor Eric Greitens, a former Democrat who switched parties to run on the GOP ticket last year, has been caught in a Fifty Shades of Gray moment, photographing a bondage sex session with a woman in 2015. His wife was pregnant with their child at the time.
KMOV in St. Louis has the story. more...
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
11:54 AM
| No Comments
| Add Comment
Post contains 734 words, total size 5 kb.
One day, Trump says DACA is a "bill of love,†he’ll sign anything Schumer and Feinstein put on his desk, and there will not be a real wall. His idolaters scream "treason.†On Thursday, Trump promises to "build a Great Wall†and complains about immigrants from the "s—hole countries†of Africa and the Caribbean. The cult is in heaven again. more...
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
11:04 AM
| No Comments
| Add Comment
Post contains 1025 words, total size 7 kb.
In our through-the-looking-glass world, we so often view matters backwards without even realizing it. Take DACA (actually, leave it), where even many conservatives consider it a given that the individuals covered under it must somehow be granted amnesty. Overlooked is that they’ve already been granted amnesty.
Consider: Imagine you return from a trip to find someone has broken into your home, is squatting there and is eating your food and using your services. Might you not call the police? Might this invader not be charged with various crimes, such as breaking and entering, trespassing and theft? more...
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
10:52 AM
| No Comments
| Add Comment
Post contains 668 words, total size 5 kb.
It will be interesting to see how businesses report their earnings with customers looking elsewhere for their Dr. Pepper, but with customers shopping elsewhere, it won’t be good. If they’re being driven to different stores in order to shop for drinks, there is little doubt that customers will do the rest of their shopping there as well. It won’t just be soda that’s affected.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
09:33 AM
| No Comments
| Add Comment
Post contains 101 words, total size 2 kb.
A vote against single payer
From the article:
"Today, breast cancer kills 39% fewer women than 25 years ago. Prostate cancer kills 52% fewer men, the American Cancer Society announced last week. You can thank new technologies that detect cancer early and defeat it for many of the lives saved. Americans diagnosed with most types of cancer have better odds of surviving it in the U.S. than anywhere else on the planet.
XBut watch out. These staggering achievements are at risk. A chorus of Democratic politicians is kicking off 2018 with renewed calls for universal, government-run health care. Leading the pack for single-payer are presidential contenders Senators Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.
Single-payer advocates intend to make their scheme affordable by slashing the use of costly medical technology and new drugs. That's a death sentence for many cancer patients. It robs them of what they need to beat their illnesses."
Read it all!
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
09:07 AM
| No Comments
| Add Comment
Post contains 165 words, total size 1 kb.
January 11, 2018
Will this photo sink Oprah's possible candidacy?
Prob'ly not. She's black, a woman and a Democrat.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
12:35 PM
| No Comments
| Add Comment
Post contains 26 words, total size 1 kb.
Not that she would, but that she could. And he has some good arguments.
http://www.misfitspolitics.com/home/how-she-could-win
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
12:29 PM
| No Comments
| Add Comment
Post contains 30 words, total size 1 kb.
"In order to reduce any impact of these proceedings on their child, the parties have decided to reach a settlement swiftly and privately,†Abedin’s lawyer, Charles Miller, and Weiner’s attorney, Margaret Donohoe, said in separate statements.
But family law expert Michael Stutman said they’d still have to file a divorce settlement in court for it to be legally binding.
Stutman, a prominent Manhattan divorce lawyer who’s not involved in the case, speculated that Weiner and Abedin might want to stay married to invoke spousal immunity. [emphasis mine]
https://pagesix.com/2018/01/10/huma-abedin-and-anthony-weiner-call-off-divorce/
I doubt they'll be living together once Carlos Danger emerges from the slammer.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
11:48 AM
| No Comments
| Add Comment
Post contains 105 words, total size 1 kb.
There has been quite a bit of analysis of the Trump meeting with Congress in which he appeared to promise to sign any DACA bill put before him. While some in the conservative movement are wailing and gnashing teeth, others are sunnily dismissing the issue. So, which is it? Did Trump throw us under the bus or did he outmanuever the Democrats?
I see a nbumber of strategic issues involved which, if Trump actually is faithful to his campaign promises (something still not clear after all this time) then he has a variety of reasons why he would do this. Let me explain.
more...
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
11:02 AM
| No Comments
| Add Comment
Post contains 811 words, total size 5 kb.
A little bit of England comes to Minnesota
And it's not what you might think. No, we're not replacing lutefisk with steak and kidney pie. (Although one might wish it were so.)
Hey Mo...
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
09:52 AM
| No Comments
| Add Comment
Post contains 39 words, total size 1 kb.
GREAT MOMENTS IN NUTRITION – FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER:
Chocolate may go extinct as soon as the year 2050, according to scientists from the University of California, Berkeley. more...
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
09:20 AM
| No Comments
| Add Comment
Post contains 459 words, total size 3 kb.
A common theme among progressives is that conservatives aren't just wrong; they're dumb.Reagan was dumb.G.W. Bush was dumb.Trump is dumb."Knuckle-dragger," "mouth-breather," "stupid," and "uncultured" are typical pejoratives hurled at conservatives, who apparently tend to live in trailer parks, require dental care, handle snakes, and marry first cousins.Why, I had a liberal actor (excuse the redundancy) tell me once that I wasn't necessarily bad, just not as "evolved" as he was.(I had a great retort at the ready, but I decided just to lash him with my tail instead.)
The reason for this arrogance isn't as simple as many may think.Rather, it relates to a deep psychological phenomenon that makes it difficult for those afflicted to evolve out of the leftist primordial soup.
I'll introduce this with a story.Many years ago, I was at an affair attended by a very chauvinistic, left-wing Greek fellow who would expound upon the superiority of Greek culture while at times demeaning the U.S.He was like the father character inMy Big Fat Greek Wedding, only with an anti-American twist.Desiring to take him down a peg and do a little face-to-face trolling, I finally said with a smirk, "If all that's true, why is Greece now like a third-world country?"(For those offended, know that I have great respect for ancient Greek accomplishments, just love moussaka, and have the physique of a Spartan hoplite.)
more...
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
09:13 AM
| No Comments
| Add Comment
Post contains 984 words, total size 7 kb.
January 10, 2018
Amid all the excitement generated at the Golden Globes by Oprah Winfrey's speech, with empty-headed liberals (but I repeat myself) touting a run by her for the White House (ironic, yes?) in 2020, there is this excellent article from The Federalist, which I found on Lucianne.com this morning, and which I commend to your attention. The title is particularly provoking, though the author leaves out a number of instances he could have used to back it up.
The official NBC network account went so far as to post (and later delete) a tweet hailing her as "OUR future president.†Her long-time consort Stedman Graham told the Los Angeles Times, "She would absolutely do it.†Meryl Streep got so carried away she told The Hill, "Now she doesn’t have a choice†but to run. It continues to amaze me that there are actors in Hollywood who can portray intelligence on the screen without possessing a scrap of it themselves. Acting is truly a magical art.
There are a great many reasons Winfrey should not run for president. Chief among them is that she has built her career, not just as a charismatic daytime television star, but also as our nation’s premier snake oil salesman. She is responsible for promoting a whole variety of quack medical nostrums and launching the careers of questionable experts. She may not be as prolific as Gwyneth Paltrow—to my knowledge, she has never tried to sell us a coffee enema—but she is far more influential.
She invited Suzanne Somers onto her show to peddle hormone injections and an absurd vitamin regimen. . . . Oprah also brought on Jenny McCarthy to peddle the anti-vaccination scare.
One of her favorite guests has been Dr. Christiane Northrup, who "has written about how she has used Tarot cards to help diagnose her own illnesses.â€
If all this weren’t enough, Oprah is the one who anointed Mehmet Oz as "America’s Doctor.†Dr. Oz has a long history on his own show—produced by Oprah’s company—of hawking miracle cures and bogus weight loss pills. Ross Pomeroy at RealClearScience has documented some of the "magic†and "miracle†hokum Oz promotes to his millions of viewers without any supporting scientific evidence. A group of his Columbia University medical school colleagues went so far as to publish an op-ed taking him to task.
[...]
You could attribute Winfrey’s history on this to ruthless cynicism—getting rich and famous by telling the suckers what they want to hear. Or you could attribute it to her own gullibility, scientific illiteracy, and tendency toward subjective emotionalism and outright mysticism. Neither possibility is very reassuring, but both are oddly familiar. Let’s see: a lowbrow TV star with a tendency toward gushing hyperbole and relentless self-promotion, who shows a tendency to be influenced by bogus experts and crackpot theories. What could possibly go wrong?
There's more, of course. The entire article is found at http://thefederalist.com/2018/01/09/remember-oprah-winfrey-premier-national-snake-oil-salesman/
Come to think of it, this shows real political potential, but I think she'd do better as a senator than a president. If Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein can get away with the kind of chicanery they pull just about every day of the week, she could too.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
09:59 AM
| No Comments
| Add Comment
Post contains 605 words, total size 5 kb.
January 09, 2018
Blogging may be a bit light today and tomorrow; I, chief editor and Big Kazoo from the 'Lou here at The Aviary, have a lot on my plate, so I may be a bit behind. Please bear with us. Hopefully Dana or Jack will have a few goodies for you, oh noble readers.
We will be back on track no later than Thursday.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
11:02 AM
| No Comments
| Add Comment
Post contains 69 words, total size 1 kb.
The Left keeps insisting, absent any proof, that it's the easiest thing in the world for someone without proper documentation to fire up his computer browser and go onto the Internet, find any old gun dealer and buy himself a shootin' iron even though he doesn't meet the legal requirements to own one. Michael Bloomberg, in particular, has made a national reputation for himself as one who insists such things happen practically every day.
However,
[a] Democrat-backed study meant to expose illicit online gun sales instead seemed to show the opposite -- with hardly any sellers taking the bait when undercover investigators tried to set up dozens of illegal firearm transactions.
Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., as well as Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, had commissioned the Government Accountability Office report to look into how online private dealers might be selling guns to people not allowed to have them.
Their efforts were based on a 2016 report from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), which claimed that "anonymity of the internet makes it an ideal means for prohibited individuals to obtain illegal firearms.â€
"Congressional requesters asked that GAO access the extent to which ATF is enforcing existing laws and investigate whether online private sellers sell firearms to people who are not allowed or eligible to possess a firearm,†the GAO report said.
[...]Did you catch that? Seventy-two attempts. I would dearly love to see the people represented by those seventy-two attempts arrested and prosecuted the same way you or I would be prosecuted if we had done the same thing. Or the way an actual criminal who had tried to obtain a gun this way would have been prosecuted if they had gotten him.
"Private sellers on Surface Web gun forums and in classified ads were unwilling to sell a firearm to our agents that self-identified as being prohibited from possessing a firearm,†the GAO reported, noting that in their "72 attempts ... 56 sellers refused to complete a transaction once we revealed that either the shipping address was across state lines or that we were prohibited by law from owning firearms.†In the other cases, the investigators' website was frozen or they encountered suspected scammers.
Ain't gonna happen, though.
The entire article is here, and well-worth the read: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/01/08/dem-ordered-study-to-expose-illegal-online-gun-sales-backfires.html
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
10:37 AM
| No Comments
| Add Comment
Post contains 395 words, total size 3 kb.
Recently, I reported onthe firing of Mateo Rueda, now an ex-art teacher after showing ten- and eleven-year-olds nude "artwork" at Lincoln Elementary School in Hyrum, Utah on Dec. 4, 2017.Normally I would have let this story go by now, but Rueda continues playing the victim, aided and abetted by complicit reporters; libertines the world over; and, unfortunately, some good people who don't realize that the media have mischaracterized his trespass.
Rueda, a native of Colombia, demands an apology, even as he condemns his fellow Cache Valley residents as "cultural dead-ends" and members of a "narrow-minded community."He also said,"I was overqualified[.]I took the [teaching] position with an open heart to make a difference in a predominantly[] Mormon community where there isn't much culture."My – charitable as well as charming!Yet his defenders – who've called people such as me puritans, prudes, and even Nazi-like book-burners – should know that Rueda himself confessed that the nudes were out of bounds.
more...
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
09:35 AM
| No Comments
| Add Comment
Post contains 932 words, total size 8 kb.
January 08, 2018
Highland Illinlis is a pristine slice of Germany on the Illinois prairie. A middling town about thirty miles from St. Louis, a sort of far flung ex-urb of my hometown. Founded by Swiss and settled by Germans, it is a clean, peaceful burg with gingerbread houses and a beautiful body of water called appropriately Silver Lake. The town sits a little ways from the interstate, so it is sheltered from the problems that come from people passing through.
Southern Illinois is a strange place. Many of the communities in the metro east, the Illinois side of the St. Louis suburban area, are impoverished hellholes. East St. Louis is the crown jewel of liberal urban planning, a city that more resembles Moghidishu than anything in America; there are innumerable abandoned buildings, street signs have long been stolen as have lightbulbs from street lights, and the level of violence is at a rate comparable to Honduras. In other parts of southern Illinois we have hillbilly country, with dirt poor whites living like their comrads in West Virginia or Arkansas. But Southern Illinois also is dotted with beautiful, prosperous German communities like Highland, communities that are almost entirely white (Highland is 97% white with a scant 0.2% being African American. I strongly suspect the success of Highland and her racial makeup sticks in the craw of many liberals in Illinois and in the Federal bureaucracy. more...
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
12:49 PM
| No Comments
| Add Comment
Post contains 1803 words, total size 12 kb.
Think planetary temperature data are accurate measurements based on physical data? Think again.
According to the article by David Wojick:
"Contrary to popular belief these are not measurements. They are the output of complex statistical models. These statistical models are every bit as questionable as the climate models they feed into, actually more so."
[,,,] more...
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
11:09 AM
| No Comments
| Add Comment
Post contains 817 words, total size 5 kb.
Senator Chuck Grassley’s legislative director is about to join the National Biodiesel Board – to help that industry "navigate federal policy issues that most affect†its continued mandates, subsidies, growth, prosperity, and longevity as a permanent Washington and national fixture. Meanwhile, biofuel mandates are causing major problems for motorists, small engine users … and small refiners that produce gasoline and must blend increasing amounts of ethanol into smaller and smaller quantities of gasoline – or be fined or forced to spend millions of dollars buying certificates attesting to their attempts to comply with the mandates.
This crony-corporatist, fascist-style socialism means the government doesn’t own companies outright – but it does decree how they must operate, what they must produce, who pays and who benefits, and which environmental values are protected or sacrificed.
more...
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
10:32 AM
| No Comments
| Add Comment
Post contains 1398 words, total size 15 kb.
32 queries taking 0.4528 seconds, 192 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.
