Adventure is worthwhile - Aesop

Thursday, January 31, 2008

To all of you out there posting on forums, beware of blatant dumbassery like this...Assmunch eats tree in M5.

He posted on the BMW M5 forum — www.M5board.com — as “AmericanM5,” the proud new owner of a 2008 BMW M5 painted Space Gray.

He had a problem. It happened when he had “everything set to max” and changed gear with the shift paddles mounted on the steering wheel. As he said, “and I’m going pedal to the metal pushing 140 and upshifting, there tends to be a thud noise with the gear change.” AmericanM5 wanted to know if this was normal.

And he added: “Let me say I am a beginner when it comes to high-performance cars as I am only 18, so take it easy on me.”

It gets better.

At 3:30 a.m. on January 26, a 2008 BMW M5 painted Space Gray flew off the raised end of a runway at a private airport just outside Ocala, Florida, sailed 200 feet through the air and stuck a huge tree. The impact with the tree occurred 15 feet off the ground. Five young men, aged 18 to 20, were killed instantly.

Members of the M5Board began to put the pieces together. AmericanM5 said he was 18, had a 2008 M5 in Space Gray, and said he lived in the Ocala area. And he signed one of the posts, “Josh.”

The driver of the crashed M5 had been Josh Ammirato.

The irony of the car’s color is trumped by the spectacular distance the car remained airborne (bear in mind that 200ft. is a 20 story building!) and at that speed the impact of the car must have shredded these over priviledged turds like lettuce and cabbage.

Much like a yellow light, young Josh was given an ominous warning by his fellow bloggers…

A forum member from Queensland, Australia, applauded AmericanM5’s decision to get a BMW: “I would much prefer an 18-year-old with brains to have an M5 rather than spend his money on some other piece of junk that could kill him and his mates in an accident,” wrote M5DAL, a forum member since 2004. He continued: “If you crash in a big way, expect to be on the news.”

“Thanks, guys, don’t get me wrong,” AmericanM5 wrote. “I never said I didn’t respect your wisdom. Thanks for the welcome, and I am looking forward to getting to know you guys better...and I plan to have all the pics up tomorrow. Josh.”

That was his last post.

Shame to have lost such a cherry ride..... 

Is there anyone reading this who is active duty US Army, or recently got out?  I have a question for you.  Shoot me .

Those durn scientists have done it again. Clearly this can’t be true because the timeline of 6,000-10,000 years doesn’t jibe with what we know about the earth.

Genetic mutation makes those brown eyes blue

People with blue eyes have a single, common ancestor, according to new research.

A team of scientists has tracked down a genetic mutation that leads to blue eyes. The mutation occurred between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago, so before then, there were no blue eyes.

“Originally, we all had brown eyes,” said Hans Eiberg from the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of Copenhagen.

Wha, wha, what! You mean all of a sudden something about us changed? Well, that cain’t be! Here’s the best part:

That genetic switch somehow spread throughout Europe and now other parts of the world.

“The question really is, ‘Why did we go from having nobody on Earth with blue eyes 10,000 years ago to having 20 or 40 percent of Europeans having blue eyes now?” Hawks said. “This gene does something good for people. It makes them have more kids.”

So a pigment mutation occurred and that trait was propagated throughout an entire continent and parts of the world. Hmmm. Why weren’t these freaks killed? Some pervert must have fancied blue eyed women.

All kidding aside, when we debate about evolution, it’s little riddles like this that start adding up. Isn’t it fascinating? Don’t you see that it not about one species magically becoming another in the span of one generation? It’s little changes bit by bit over time that we’re talking about.

Anyway, I’m really interested in the theories behind why this trait propagated. Is it similar to when a bird is attracted by the color of a mate? I dunno. Very interesting though.

Alhumdoneallah!

DUBAI (Reuters) - A leading al Qaeda member in Afghanistan, Abu Laith al-Libi, has been killed, a Web site often used by the group and other Islamists said on Thursday.

A banner on the Ekhlaas.org site said Libi had fallen as a martyr, without giving further details.

It was not immediately clear if Libi’s death was linked to a suspected U.S. missile strike that killed up to 13 foreign militants in Pakistan’s North Waziristan region this week.

The attack had targeted second or third tier al Qaeda leaders, according to residents in the tribal area.

Tribesmen in the area had said a deputy of Libi, a senior al Qaeda leader, had been staying there and was among the dead, according to an intelligence official.

Yalla! Yalla!! Allah’s will has been done.

HBO Asia is showing the film Casper, as in “The Friendly Ghost.”

Have you ever noticed Casper’s shape?  Big round head, little body.  It just dawned on me, Casper was an aborted fetus.

There’s a fascinating article on evolution in today’s NYT.

Here’s an evolutionist’s dream: 10,000 planet Earths, starting from the same point at the same time, and left to their own devices for four and a half billion years. What would happen? Could you go on safari from one planet to the next seeing an endless procession of wildly different organisms? Or would many of the planets be home to life forms that are broadly similar?

The conventional answer to this question — the one championed by the late Stephen Jay Gould, for example — is that chance events, from mutations to asteroids, play such a large role in evolution that each of the planets would be totally different. And probably, after four and a half billion years, they would be. I wish we could do the experiment, though. It might hold some surprises.

Looking around the Earth, it’s striking how often similar traits evolve in similar environments. So: birds living on remote islands typically lose the power of flight. Males in species (be they chimpanzees or yellow dung flies) where females are promiscuous tend to evolve high sperm counts and large testes.

So that explains why I walk differently when I go out barhopping!

Animals that live in caves lose their eyes and their color: whether they live in Rwanda or Romania, they’re a pallid, blind lot, the troglodytes. Mammals that specialize on eating leaves — be they cows or langurs (that’s a monkey) — have evolved foreguts where bacteria break down the leaves, as well as special enzymes to help with digestion. Amazingly, the same phenomena are also seen in the hoatzin, a leaf-eating bird from South America. In short, evolution has a remarkable tendency to repeat itself.

It’s got pictures, too.

Over at LeeInChina I’ve posted my thoughts on the drinking age, and yet another lesson that “free” America can learn from Communist China.

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Hear, hear!!

COLUMBIA, S.C.—A South Carolina lawmaker says underage military servicemen and women should be allowed to drink alcohol.

Rep. Fletcher Smith has sponsored legislation that would allow service members younger than 21 to purchase alcohol if they show a military identification card to a bartender or store clerk. South Carolina state law prohibits the sale or possession of alcoholic beverages by anyone under 21.

Changing the law would cost South Carolina to lose federal highway money. South Carolina raised the drinking age to 21 from 18 to comply with federal law in 1984.

Safety advocates oppose the Greenville Democrat’s bill. They say many studies show that giving alcohol to people younger than 21 does not make life safer for the military, nor for others on the nation’s highways.

Jesus, and this is a democrat.. I’m going to dig and find out who’s behind the opposition. I have a feeling a ‘safety’ group might be a conservative values group. Anyone wanna bet me? I wish we had a hero category, because this man deserves it.. The best i can give him is a ‘Deep Thoughts’ praise.

Update by Lee: Let’s not forget that the whole federal 21 drinking age thing is the baby of Elizabeth Dole, who was Secretary of Transportation at the time, and is now a senator from North Carolina.  As usual, the world’s greatest magazine gets it exactly right.

It’s been 20 years that America has had a minimum federal drinking age. The policy began to gain momentum in the early 1980s, when the increasingly influential Mothers Against Drunk Driving added the federal minimum drinking age to its legislative agenda. By 1984, it had won over a majority of the Congress.

President Reagan initially opposed the law on federalism grounds but eventually was persuaded by his transportation secretary at the time, now-Sen. Elizabeth Dole.

Over the next three years every state had to choose between adopting the standard or forgoing federal highway funding; most complied. A few held out until the deadline, including Vermont, which fought the law all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court (and lost).

Twenty years later, the drawbacks of the legislation are the same as they were when it was passed.

The first is that the age set by the legislation is basically arbitrary. The U.S. has the highest drinking age in the world (a title it shares with Indonesia, Mongolia, Palau). The vast majority of the rest of the world sets the minimum age at 17 or 16 or has no minimum age at all.

<…>

The second drawback of the federal drinking age is that it set the stage for tying federal mandates to highway funds, enabling Congress to meddle in all sorts of state and local affairs it has no business attempting to regulate — so long as it can make a tortured argument about highway safety.

Efforts to set national speed limits, seat belt laws, motorcycle helmet laws and set a national blood-alcohol standard for DWI cases have rested on the premise that the federal government can blackmail the states with threats to cut off funding.

The final drawback is pretty straightforward: It makes little sense that America considers an 18-year-old mature enough to marry, to sign a contract, to vote and to fight and die for his country, but not mature enough to decide whether or not to have a beer.

We are a nation of fucking sheep.  Quick, everyone get those lights on your bicycles!

I don’t think an excerpt can do justice to P.J. O’Rourke’s take on the 2008 election. I will not, however, that the article “appeared” on February 4, 2008 in the Weekly Standard.

OK.

Here’s my favorite quip:

Mitt Romney is supposed to be my own type of candidate, a true conservative. But Mitt was governor of Massachusetts. This is like applying to be pope and listing your prior job experience as “Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem.”

Read the whole thing. Do not drink anything while doing so. God damn, I wish I could write like that.

OK, another quote:

The problem for Obama is that, as yet, he doesn’t have much political stature. However, there is a “Disney factor” is American politics. Think of America’s politicians as the Seven Dwarves. They’re all short — short on ethics, short on experience, short on common sense, short on something. But we keep thinking that one of these dwarves is going to save our snow white butt.

We’ve got Dopey right now. We had Sleazy before him. Grumpy lost in ‘04. Sleepy was great in the 1980s, but he’s dead. How about Obama?

Update by Lee: Oh my God.

John Edwards is a personal injury lawyer, the sort of fellow who covers North Carolina with billboards reading, “Y’all May Have Been Malpracticed on by a Doctor and Not Even Know It. Call (800) S-H-Y-S-T-E-R.”

Seriously, there are tears running down my cheeks.

Pew has some research about the issue that matter to Republicans and Democrats, highlighted by the 38 point gap in how important it is for the government to insure the uninsured.

What struck me about the poll was the stark difference in philosophy. The Democrats overwhelming (60% or more) think the government should deal with global warming, improve jobs, reduce health care costs, deal with poverty, protect the environment, secure medicare, improve education, reduce crime, reduce the deficit, secure social security, deal with energy, strengthen the economy and defend against terrorism. That’s quite a laundry list. I’m surprised they don’t wnat the government to advise them on fashion.

Never mind that not only has government proved inadequate to deal with most of these problems (apart from crime), it’s frequently made them worse.

By contrast, the majority of Republicans only think the government should strengthen the military, strengthen the economy, deal with immigration and secure social security. Slim majorities unfortunately also favor dealing with “moral breakdown”, energy problems, improving education and reducing health care costs. It’s not that I don’t care about those things as well. it’s just that the governments record on all those issues is so dreadful.

Perhaps most disappointing is that more Democrats (64%) than Republicans (52%) think the budget deficit should be dealt with. Yeah, party of fiscal responsibility. That’s us.

The in-depth report is even more interesting. There is a huge gap in how Republicans and Democrats perceive the economy (no surprise there—check out the huge spike in economic negativity the last time a Clinton was running for office) and the economy now outpaces Iraq as the biggest concern.

Looks like I was wrong—I won’t have John Edwards to kick around any more. A pity. I was waiting for the moment in the debates when he would start channeling Eleanor Roosevelt.

I present you with the latest absurdity of Muslims expecting everyone else to conform to their whacked-ass beliefs:

Court backs Muslim women in clothing case

STOCKHOLM, Sweden - Two Muslim women blocked from a Goteborg swimming pool for refusing to change their clothing won more than $3,100 each in damages Tuesday.

The Court of Appeal in Western Sweden, overruling an earlier lower court decision, ordered Goteborg to pay each woman 20,000 kronor and legal costs for discriminating against them.

The women — dressed in headscarves, sweatpants and long-sleeved T-shirts — accompanied their children to the public pool on two separate occasions in April 2004 but were asked to leave after refusing to change their clothes.

Lifeguards told the women they were not welcome unless they got changed into something lighter because their clothing did not comply with the pool’s safety and hygiene regulations.

Pool have rules for safety, hygiene and even to protect the filter systems and pumps and stuff. When those rules conflict with your religious views, the answer is to not take part in swimming there. Most reasonable people realize this but not these two dipshits. No way. Allah commands us to swim with our children! Fine. Then why not get one of these? See, there is a solution but they’re so backwards, they won’t even use it. Pssst...Adiba...it’s the 21st century...we have synthetic fabric!

It’s sad that governments bow to this kind of bullshit. If I was a judge, I’d have told them to pound sand. Literally.

When I read the headline that some illegal aliens had rear-ended Homeland Security agents, I had a completely different and far more disturbing image in my head:

Normally, a non-injury rear-end collision wouldn’t warrant a news story. But in an ironic twist, this crash involved a van full of illegal immigrants which slammed into an SUV owned by the Department of Homeland Security.

The Arizona Department of Public Safety said the Chrysler van was heading west Tuesday morning when it was involved in a three-vehicle chain-reaction crash near the Elliot Road off-ramp. Harold Sanders with DPS said, “the 11 illegal immigrants inside the van were turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”

There were no reports of any injuries, despite the fact that the van was overloaded.

The passengers inside could have been moving targets for other vehicular danger. “The van was not designed to hold 11 people,” Sanders said. “That’s based on the amount of seat positions. I believe there were only two or three passenger seats.”

Not mentioned: after the accident, the illegals immediately offered to repair the damage for only $100.

Um, OK:

Forty years after feminists threatened to burn their bras, British women have won another battle in the fight for equality.

Asda, Britain’s second-biggest food retailer and owned by U.S. giant Wal-Mart, says it will no longer charge women more for bigger bras in its George fashion range.

“We’re putting an end once and for all to one of the last prejudices—that of the bigger-busted woman,” said brand director Fiona Lambert in a statement.

“From now on, all bras at George will be exactly the same price from A cup through to F cup.”

It’s communism I tells ya! We need to send Bill Clinton to investigate this immediately.

Actually, I would speculate that most of the price of any garment—bra or burkha—is not the cost of material but the cost of labor, shipping, display and advertisement. So the “No F-Cup Left Behind” move stems from the same logic that leads US restaurants to serving ever more massive portions at dinner—the food is only a tiny fraction of the price.

Well, either that or Asda is hoping to land Keeley Hazell on an endorsement contract.

The human skull edged out Romney in Florida.Romney loses Florida to cadaver.

MIAMI - Sen. John McCain won Florida’s Republican primary on Tuesday, apparently ending Rudy Giuliani’s hopes for the GOP presidential nomination and taking a critical victory over Mitt Romney in the battle for momentum as the campaign turns to Super Tuesday.

Giuliani will endorse McCain on Wednesday at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif., a senior member of his campaign told NBC News late Tuesday.

NBC news analyst Howard Fineman reported that sources told him the two campaigns were negotiating details of the deal.

“The responsibility of leadership doesn’t end with a single campaign, it goes on and you continue to fight for it,” Giuliani said in Orlando, Fla., as supporters with tight smiles crowded behind him. “We ran a campaign that was uplifting.”

Asked directly if he was dropping out of the race, Giuliani said only: “I’m going to California.”

In the Democrats’ primary — a nonbinding contest in which no delegates were at stake — Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton finished with the most votes.

I’m personally not going to look too much into it. Florida is a state with a foot in the grave, for one thing. It’s no surprise to me that they’d vote in someone who’s running mate is the Grim Reaper. As for Shillary’s *erm* victory, it’s also no surprise that bigots would choose sexism over bigotry as the lesser of two evils.

The cantidates are supposed to be out in my neck of the woods today, or tommorrow, at the Reagan Memorial. that ‘whirring’ buzz that you hear in the background is Reagan spinning in his grave at warp speed.