Negative99

State of Global Warming

Ha! It’s hard to believe anyone is still taking this seriously, but for those keeping score at home - it now appears that in addition to cows… moose are contributing to global warming more than automobiles?! You can’t make this stuff up. Some braintrust of researchers in Norway are concerned that moose are belching and tooting the environment into potential catastrophe. This instantly conjures scores of pointed questions targeting the validity of the research and the sanity of the researchers, not to mention the dubious scientific conclusions.

One question I might ask is… then why is it also getting warmer on Mars? Are moose belching there, too? And why does your comparison regarding the larger carbon footprint of a moose, compared to a car, lead you to the conclusion that moose are even a BIGGER threat… rather than the conclusion that, “Oh, maybe cars aren’t doing as much as we thought.” And why haven’t we seen the effect from moose before now… because surely with all of man’s atrocious macho-paternalistic pillaging of the world’s natural habitats wouldn’t there logically be FEWER moose today than there used to be? And better yet, how are the PETA crazies going to take this… do we wickedly hunt down and eat these tasty yet evil beasts of voluminous anal gas?… or do we honor their natural existence as it starts to boil the oceans?

See… it’s those Catch-22’s that make it so hard being on the left.

State of Sports

It’s great when the highlights of every major sportscast right now includes footage of Michael Vick. Actually that’s not great. Actually it’s a horrid picture of the journalistic sensationalism that consistently manages to displace actual news with repetitive drivel. And doesn’t it warm your heart to know that organizing dog fights is yet another act society scorns more than the plunging of cold steel into the base of a baby’s skull?

State of the Blog Spam

82,382 spam comments blocked… and counting.

State of the Blog Design

This may not mean much to some… but the new design will be a labor of progressive enhancement. So basically, I’m going to put up a new design that will function adequately and will look different… but will not be in its final state, nor will it have any bells and whistles. After I begin this process I will be tweaking the design over the next few weeks to “tune” it to what I want. This is in contrast to the usual design reboot that most sites do where the entire design is completed in a sandbox environment and deployed immediately in a near-finished state.

State of the Prison System

As much as the geographic snobs here in the Northeast love to snoot their beaks at anyone with a southern twang (which to us is everyone from Pennsylvania down), I can’t help but be reminded that folks down south got themselves a better way of gettin’er done. Take this story about a jail in South Carolina that is making inmates who sexually misbehave wear a pink jumpsuit for three months of their “stay”. I love that idea. I love every part of it. Here you got these inmates who are exposing themselves (and worse) to female prison guards… and the prison has thought up a very clever way of “marking” them as the deviants they are for the rest to see. Shame. Shame - used appropriately - is a great thing.

Of course, there’s a lawsuit against making inmates wear the pink jumpsuit. This lawsuit was filed by a current inmate serving time for assault & battery with intent to kill… and he thinks wearing a pink jumpsuit will unfairly “label” him and cause others to make derisive comments. [cue the violins] Somehow I don’t feel sorry for this felon… and somehow I don’t feel sorry for a criminal being shamed for acting like an animal. In fact, if anything, it blows my mind that inmates can expose themselves and throw semen on female guards without fear of punishment… and even in “progressive” South Carolina. Holy smokes… how in NASCAR’s name do inmates get away with that to begin with?

I mean seriously… let’s say an inmate throws a urine/feces mixture (which is common) on a female prison guard - you would/should whack them with your nightstick. If they do it again (for whatever insanely idiotic reason) you would/should whack them twice… and they do it a third time and you whack’em thrice… and so on and so on… you get the idea. Logically the greater the pain inflicted by strikes with a nightstick the less “attractive” the urine/feces throwing becomes. And again, logically the more severe and numerous the nightstick strikes the greater time will pass between urine/feces throwing events. One could even postulate that there is a critical number of nightstick whacks that would preclude any repeat urine/feces throwing events for the remainder of their sentence.

Now, the above reads a little totalitarian with a dash of sadistic fascism… and a pity it does. But it certainly puts the pink uniform in a better context. And we can only wish for the day when they’ll bring back the stocks.