ninme

Posted by ninme at 4:59 pm No Comments

I can’t believe how good this is.

Totally ripped off from Wheat & Weeds.

Posted by ninme at 8:08 am No Comments

This is how they tried to save the Yellow River Dolphin: “Jiangsu province Changshu City Fluorine Chemical industry land sewage treatment plant (江苏省常熟市氟化学工业园污水处理厂) was responsible for collection and processing of the industrial sewage. However they did not, the sewage pipe was extended 1500 meters under the Yangtze River and releasing the sewage there. 2009 June 11“

“Villagers from Kang village in Linfen City, Shanxi Province (山西省临汾市下康村) due to long-term consumption of the polluted water contaminated by industrial waste, there were 50 people who have cancer and cerebral thrombosis. 64-year-old Wang Baosheng got ill since 2003, he has fester all over his body so he cannot go to bed and lying face down on the edge of the bed each day. July 10, 2005”

And I can’t even handle looking at the pictures of the children.

China Hush – Amazing Pictures, Pollution in China

Lu Guang (卢广) from People’s Republic of China won the $30,000 W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography for his documentary project “Pollution in China.”

Click through to see the whole collection.

Posted by ninme at 11:14 pm No Comments

An infographic:

North Korea: The Craziest Country In the World

Posted by ninme at 10:18 pm 1 Comment

Telegraph – Bad weather blamed for Scotland having ‘more people with ginger hair’
Scotland’s notoriously bad weather appears to be behind why more of the country’s population appeared to be blessed with ginger hair, new research has claimed.

The non scientific research found that in areas where the temperatures in summer were cooler and winter days were shorter – such as in Scotland – people with ginger hair were more likely to survive and evolve.

I love this story.

Posted by ninme at 9:50 pm No Comments

NRO – AWOL in the Bunning Battle
The GOP shows why Obamacare is a good bet for the Left. By Andrew McCarthy

If Obamacare passes, Obamacare is forever. Just ask Jim Bunning.

The Kentucky Republican finally caved in Tuesday after relentless pressure from other senators — including Republicans — to drop what the Politico called his “one man” filibuster of a bill to extend expiring unemployment benefits. …

In this case, there ought to have been raging controversy: Bunning was objecting to yet another monthly extension of unemploymentpayments absent an explanation of how it would be paid for. …

That proved unacceptable, and not only to Democrats. Maine’s Susan Collins took to the Senate floor to assure Americans that Bunning’s radical views about Congress’s not spending yet more billions it doesn’t have “do not represent a majority of the Republican caucus.” And sure enough, they didn’t. Once Bunning backed down, the measure passed by a whopping 78-19.

And that’s for something that had a finite time period. An ending. A limit. And there’s more!

Besides unemployment compensation, what is in the bill Bunning was blocking? The proposed goodies include public funds to prevent what would otherwise be a 21 percent reduction in payments to doctors who treat Medicare patients.

Of course, these are exactly the sort of steep cuts that enacting Obamacare would accomplish. Given that enacting Obamacare is the Left’s ne plus ultra, why not just let the Medicare payments get slashed now? Because Democrats realize that if people get a load of how Obamacare would actually work before it is a fait accompli, they will scream bloody murder. So the game is to make certain that doctors don’t feel the pinch now, just as the game is to pass Obamacare now but delay its implementation until 2013 — allowing Obama and Democrats to get through the 2010 and 2012 election cycles without being held accountable for the epic disaster that will be government-controlled medicine.

I’ve managed to ignore this story for a little while, but I’m back to feeling anxious and discouraged.

In sum, Bunning’s battle gave Republicans a chance to make points about runaway deficit spending, the fraudulence of PAYGO posturing, the foolish redistribution of wealth to create expensive and unproductive government jobs, unemployment-benefit extensions that Democrats refuse to pay for and that actually increase unemployment, and the monstrous rationing that would be wrought by Obamacare. So, did Republicans rally behind Bunning? Not a chance.

Read the whole thing to feel EVEN BETTER about our Republican protectors.

He was right to do so. These extensions happen continually. The stimulus — which is a redistribution of wealth from the private to the public sector, and from people who work to people who don’t — extended unemployment benefits for 53 weeks. Another extension in November added 20 more weeks. Cato’s Alan Reynolds reports that this brings the total to 99 weeks of benefits in high-unemployment states. The measure on which Bunning has relented adds another month. And having browbeaten him into withdrawing his objection, Democrats will now seek an extension through the end of this year, i.e., another 36 weeks or so.

Posted by ninme at 3:26 pm No Comments

I’ve never heard of Rose Gray, nor her restaurant, but reading India Knight write about eating (and going into labor, and continuing eating) there, makes me want to go there. Failing that, I can buy the cookbook…

Posted by ninme at 12:37 pm No Comments

BBC – New video of tsunami wave sweeping through Chilean town

Posted by ninme at 12:34 pm No Comments

A little local action:

Queen Anne News – Hilltop Yarn is hanging up its knitting needles, closing its doors for good March 29

Hill said the decision was not taken lightly. It came after two years of serious consideration–after an electrical fire in their previous location in late 2008 almost burned the shop down and left the entire stock with smoke damage; after sales tax went up, again.

dot dot dot

“I’ve applied for a lot of jobs over the last year. My business really hasn’t paid me any significant amount of money since the fire, so I’ve been applying for the last two years and I’ve been turned down and turned down,” Hill said. “I heard a lot of ‘You’ve been your own boss for a long time. You don’t really want to come here and have me be your boss.’”

Until finally Nordstrom’s saw her years experience as a business owner as a plus and offered her a job. And though she’s sad to say goodbye to her own shop, Hill can’t hide the fact that she’s ecstatic to have a full time job.

“I’m fully employed. I’m thrilled!” she said. “Nordstrom’s was the first place that valued that I’d been my own boss. It’s a good fit.”

Poor lady.

Posted by ninme at 2:41 pm 1 Comment

Mark Steyn being chipper and optimistic again on the subject of the West in general and in this case, a favourite topic of ours in particular:

Or take Scotland. Most anywhere you go around the planet, from Hong Kong to Hudson’s Bay, almost everything that works was created and developed by Scotsmen. Now the whole joint’s a statist swamp where government spending accounts for 75 per cent of the economy and the menfolk idle away their days on a diet of drugs and fried Mars Bars with a life expectancy in the less salubrious parts of Glasgow getting down to West African standards. They’ll never make any contribution to the world again.

Posted by ninme at 9:36 pm No Comments

Headline: Naked Woman Tied To Tree In Tacoma Park Not A Problem

Article:

Several police officers responded to a 911 report of a naked woman tied to a tree in Point Defiance Park in Tacoma.

Spokesman Mark Fulghum told The News Tribune officers talked with the woman and a man Tuesday in the Owen Beach area and determined it was a “consensual rendezvous.”

No one was arrested.

End of article.

Posted by ninme at 11:29 am 1 Comment

Pretty much!

Posted by ninme at 10:43 am 2 Comments

Not quite as awesome as Mr McS, but a lovely story of spooks and necessity breeding awesomeness:

CNN – How board game helped free POWs

During World War II, the British secret service hatched a master plan to smuggle escape gear to captured Allied soldiers inside Germany. Their secret weapon? Monopoly boxes.

The original notion was simple enough: Find a way to sneak useful items into prison camps in an unassuming form. But the idea to use Monopoly came from a series of happy coincidences, all of which started with maps.

Maps are harder to smuggle than you might think. They fall apart when wet, and they make a lot of noise when unfolded. Allied officials feared paper maps might draw the attention of German troops, so they turned to an unlikely source for help — silk. Not only would silk maps hold up in all kinds of weather, but they’d also come with the life-saving benefit of being whisper quiet.

To produce these silent maps, the Brits turned to John Waddington Ltd., a company that had recently perfected the process of printing on silk and was already manufacturing silk escape maps for British airmen to carry. What else was Waddington known for? You guessed it — being the licensed manufacturer of Monopoly outside the United States.

Suddenly, the popular board game seemed like the perfect way to get supplies inside German-run POW camps. At the time, the Nazis were hard-pressed to get provisions to their own troops, much less to the Allied soldiers they’d captured.

Wishing to hide this less-than-stellar upholding of the Geneva Convention, they happily welcomed Red Cross aid packages for POWs. So throwing Monopoly games into the care kits along with food and clothing was met with little scrutiny. Monopoly was already a well-known game throughout Europe, and the German guards saw it as the perfect way for their detainees to remain occupied for hours.

I’m totally back-dating this to make up for yesterday.

So, what would the movie of this look like? It’s tricky doing a movie about card games. Hard to make people sitting around a table with carefully blank faces very dramatic. But Casino Royale did a good job of combining thrilling spooks with a game of poker. I say we use that as a template!

Posted by ninme at 8:19 am No Comments

More hardware store misery, too. John Stossel, via Mark Steyn:

For 15 years, the B & B Do it Center, a local hardware store in the small California town of Camarillo, has been putting out coffee and doughnuts for its morning customers. Actually longer, says owner Randy Collins; the previous owner did it too. Customers liked the courtesy, but… well, you know where this is going.

Inspectors told Collins that unless he was willing to install stainless-steel sinks with hot and cold water and have a prep kitchen to handle the food, he was violating the law.

As California government has solved all of its other problems, it seems appropriate to regulate coffee and doughnuts. The county bureaucrat, apparently with a straight face, described what Collins must do before he can offer the doughnuts to his customers:

“What some establishments do is hire a mobile food preparation services or in some cases a coffee service,” said Huff. “Those establishments have permits.”

It’s amazing that they still allow people to have children without permits.

Update: Added links from RC2 on that last line, there…

Posted by ninme at 11:18 pm No Comments

Been busy. Snoozy like OMG. À demain.

Posted by ninme at 6:21 pm No Comments

WaPo – IOC failing in its responsibility to the Olympics, by Sally Jenkins

As the Vancouver Games come to a close, International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge will call them a success. But it’s the IOC — so incubated in blue blazers, five-star accommodations, and shellfish buffets — that requires real assessment. Exactly what should the purpose of the IOC be? Rogge seems hard-pressed to define his job…

It’s been almost a decade since Rogge took over the IOC, and the hope that he would provide some integrity and leadership to the organization is gone. Instead, the primary achievements of his millennial Olympic movement are unwieldy growth, a breathtaking collaboration with regimes that commit human rights abuses, and a shucking of responsibility for Olympic-sized ills. The IOC, confronted in Vancouver with a couple of lethal issues and fresh human rights concerns at the next Winter Games in Sochi, Russia, instead reserved some of its toughest words for this late-breaking scandal: the drinking of champagne by women in public.

Hah

Curtsy: RC2’s Google Reader.