Vote YES on English-Only

It amazes me the items which get adopted as part of the liberal litany of urban Democrats seeking to prove their bona fides to other members of their herd.

Even as an atheist, I get the lesson of the Tower of Babel story in the Christian Bible:

The story is found in Genesis 11:1-9 (KJV) as follows:

1 And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. 2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. 3 And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. 4 And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. 5 And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children built. 6 And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. 7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. 8 So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. 9 Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

So now, with eyes that do not get sharper with age, I cannot read without glasses and magnifiers the warnings and instructions on product labels rendered in at least two languages. I accept that the illegal aliens, mainly Mexicans, that I see in criminal court every week have the right to have their prosecutions explained to them in their own language; but for taxpayers to have to pay to translate and present instructions on how to VOTE or get government freebies in languages other than English is just plain LUDICROUS!

Here's the audio pitch clearly stating the obvious about why this Nashville referendum should pass overwhelmingly. If you think otherwise, you are just plain wrong, dummy!

Meet the New Boss

Here's about what I expect from the new President, because throughout the campaign, he showed me over and over that he's basically an ambitious but overcautious chickenshit. Here's The Who; you know the tune, "Won't Get Fooled Again":

Rep. Stacey Campfield, a TN Treasure

Until recently, Tennessee State Representative Stacey Campfield was getting a bad rap from the press, the Democrats in the legislature, and the blogosphere. Now, however, with the dual-house Republican majority in Nashville and Stacey's growing experience at communicating his message, people are not trying so much to ridicule his positions and bills, that never should have been ridiculed to begin with, except by unthinking herd animals.

If you haven't added Stacey's blog to your Favorites or RSS feeds, here's a link to it. He's a pretty frequent poster, especially when the General Assembly is in session, so those of you who browse sites will usually find something new there. Personally, I just have his site fed to my newsreader and get quick notice every time he posts something, without having to browse manually from site to site.

In case you would like to see what Stacey Campfield looks and sounds like in action, watch the high-quality video he is featured in, as the guest of Instapundit's good-looking, smart, libertarian-thinking psychologist wife, Dr. Helen Smith, who also blogs as part of the Pajamas Media A-list. Click on the image below to go to the video.

Don't Move to Memphis!

As you look around on the web to try to decide whether to take a job offer in Memphis or go to school in Memphis or for any other reason move to Memphis, I hope you land on this post, because I hate to see anyone cast his or her lot in with this piece of shiatt city.

You can go ahead and skip to the link to hard data I've provided at the end of this post, but take a minute to read my introduction.

I was born here and have lived almost all my life here, six decades so far, except to go away for college. Memphis used to be a far better place to live than it is today. Memphis used to make the best popular music in the world. Memphis used to be safe.

The two main cultural streams that flowed together in Memphis -- the original Delta blues and real hillbilly music -- have dried up and will never flow again, leaving the city in a musical desert punctuated only by the braggadocio of low-life criminal 'hood rats making dumb-ass doggerel verse to the phony simple robotic accompaniment of imported Japanese beat boxes.

Elvis is dead. Otis Redding is dead. Al Jackson is dead. Booker T. Jones moved to Los Angeles and is not coming back. Steve Cropper moved to Nashville and is not coming back. Duck Dunn moved to Florida and is not coming back. Chips Moman moved away, made the mistake of coming back, left again, and is never coming back. Furry Lewis is dead. B.B. King moved to New York City and Las Vegas and is not coming back. Beale Street is a tourist trap.

Don't come here to become a musical star or any other kind of pop culture star. That doesn't happen here anymore.

Memphis has seen a few non-musical business startups of historical note; but the cotton market is no longer centered here, having gone electronic and decentralized. The supermarket was invented here and so was the motor hotel, but the passage of time has dissipated Memphis' headquarters role in those businesses.

FedEx, formerly Federal Express, shows what a good idea and a good education can do when combined with inherited wealth for startup money, and it capitalizes on one of Memphis' historical strengths: roustabout warehouse labor; but it is probably the city's last great business launch. Already, FedEx is building other hubs in other locales; and I fully expect the headquarters itself to move one of these days to a safer and more culturally rich environment.

Memphis is the closest city to the Delta cotton fields that employed a lot of slave labor, and it was on the transportation route from Mississippi to St. Louis, Chicago, and Detroit, as blacks fled the South. Too soon, the paternalism of politicians promising a Great Society blunted the potential of freedom and replaced the paternalism of the plantations. Monogamy was never the prevailing pattern of sub-Saharan African peoples, but their embrace of typical American family values after the Civil War was eventually shattered by subsidies that reward old plantation-style bastardy, excess fertility, and households centered around women and missing a husband. White and then also black flight from a worsening urban underclass doomed entire neighborhoods, while the meager socialization in unwed mothers' "homes" fostered a burgeoning tsunami of female parasites and male predators. Memphis is at the top of lists for crime. You do NOT want to live here!

Now here's the promised legit local newspaper piece with recent data about the decline of Memphis, Tennessee. I presume it was painful for them to publish the piece, because bad news like this depresses their market area and the newspaper's own profitability. The [Memphis] Commercial Appeal called the analysis "The Great Migration: Taxpayers pouring out of Shelby County."

Another Obama Mistake

White House political office will remain

President-elect Barack Obama has answered bipartisan calls for the disbandment of the White House office central to the Karl Rove-style politics the Democrat condemned as a candidate. The office stays.
. . . .
The office he will oversee has been strongly denounced by some Republicans and Democrats, including Obama's former opponent Sen. John McCain, who vowed to abolish the office if he were elected, and House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), who issued a report last month recommending its elimination.
. . . .
The Office of Political Affairs was created by President Ronald Reagan. And while it has been criticized for as long, it has also been staffed by every president since. Opponents of the office argue that a partisan political office has no business being in the White House. “It’s not an office that should be subsidized by taxpayers, and it should not be part of the White House itself,” said Craig Holman, a lobbyist with the government watchdog group Public Citizen. The office has no benefit for the public, he said.

TN House Dems Re-Elect Junketeer DeBerry Speaker Pro-Tem

You would think Tennessee House Democrats could find someone new to be Speaker Pro Tempore who has not shown the tendencies to take excessive advantage of her office as I described in this previous post.

But NOOOOOO!!! And they got party traitor State Rep. and new Speaker of the House Kent Williams, whom they just installed, to be the deciding vote for ole Lois! Must have been part of the deal.

I am ashamed that my own State Representative Jeanne Richardson re-installed this junketeer to burden Tennessee taxpayers even further.

These developments may make the 2010 elections even more interesting, as they will determine who gets to carve the new districts during the expected 2012 reapportionment.

Kent Williams "Kurita's" TN House Republican Majority

Truly, what goes around, comes around, you reap what you sow, blah blah blah.... In the last Tennessee General Assembly, then-Senator Rosalind Kurita crossed party lines to deliver the speakership to a Republican.

Today, Republican State Rep. Kent Williams got the votes of all 49 Democratic Representatives and combined them with his own to elect himself Speaker of the House.

Reportedly, the new Speaker Williams voted as a moderate in prior years. It will be interesting to see how the Committee Chairmanships are handed out.

Recent Studies in Morality

American teens lie, steal, cheat at 'alarming' rates: study

The attitudes and conduct of some 29,760 high school students across the United States "doesn't bode well for the future when these youngsters become the next generation's politicians and parents, cops and corporate executives, and journalists and generals," the non-profit Josephson Institute said.

Is Crime Contagious?: Experiments vindicate the broken windows theory of how disorder spreads.

In 1982, two social scientists, George L. Kelling at Rutgers University and James Q. Wilson at Harvard University, proposed the "broken windows theory" to explain both how disorder spreads and how it is sustained. In The Atlantic Monthly, the two asserted that "disorder and crime are usually inextricably linked, in a kind of developmental sequence. Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken....one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing."
. . . .
Now, a new study (additional online info here) published in Science provides some strong experimental backing for the broken windows theory.

Does Religion Make People Nicer?: Only if they think Sky Big Brother is watching.

For example, young men may risk sacrificing themselves in war to protect their tribe. So how does religion encourage prosociality? The answer is that being watched by a Big-Brother-in-the-Sky tends to make believers nervous about being selfish.
. . . .
"The cognitive awareness of gods is likely to heighten prosocial reputational concerns among believers, just as the cognitive awareness of human watchers does among believers and non-believers alike," hypothesize the authors. But supernatural oversight is even better because it "offers the powerful advantage that cooperative interactions can be observed even in the absence of social monitoring."

Sexually charged shows such as Sex And The City and Friends to blame for rise in teenage pregnancy:

Teenage girls who watch a lot of TV shows with a high sexual content are twice as likely to become pregnant, a study said yesterday.

Boys watching similar shows are also much more likely to get a girl pregnant.
. . . .
Previous studies have found that teenagers who watch TV shows and music videos with a high sex content become sexually active earlier and have an increased risk of contracting diseases.
. . . .
The study also found that teenagers living in a two-parent household were less likely to get pregnant, while those with behaviour and discipline problems were more likely.

Teen Motherhood: Celebrity Buzz Belies Its Cost

Teen motherhood has gained a bit of celebrity allure with the pregnancies of Jamie Lynn Spears and Bristol Palin, but front-line professionals see a starkly different reality involving poverty, lost opportunities and a cost to taxpayers in the billions of dollars annually.
. . . .
"Teen births do have substantial, widespread negative effects, especially for the children of teen mothers," said University of Delaware economist Saul Hoffman, who compiled the estimate.

"The children are more likely to be in foster care, less likely to graduate from high school," he said. "The daughters are more likely to have teen births themselves, the sons are more likely to be incarcerated."

Second Life

Second Life is probably the greatest virtual world ever.  Check out this fantastic video introduction:



I have GOT to check this out! However, there are perils, as this nonetheless amusing news story points out: Second Life affair leads to real-life divorce.

A couple have divorced after the husband was caught having a “virtual affair” with a female character in an online game.

David Pollard and Amy Taylor met in an online chat room in 2003 and married after discovering a shared love of the internet game Second Life.

In the game, players create characters known as avatars, which then interact with others in a virtual world. To his wife's horror, Mr Pollard's interaction included virtual infidelity with a female character playing the role of a prostitute.

Here's the threshold pifall though.  The avatars' looks:

and the players' real looks:

Abuse of 911 Callers

The abuse of a few slobs calling 911 for help with ludicrously mundane matters has prompted the powers that be to propagandize the public that 911 is for emergencies only and evidently also to train their operators to be very strict, TOO STRICT, in turning away calls for assistance that don't involve impending loss of life.  In other words, the number is just there for calling an ambulance for someone having a heart attack, NOT for crimes in progress against you or someone else, and especially not your neighbor's alarm going off.

I have an anecdote that shows what I mean and why I am still angry about this overkill.  I had an aging neighbor who drank excessively and was becoming increasingly senile and demented.  More than once before, he had left something cooking on his stove and forgotten about it, which resulted in his fire alarm going off and smoke coming out of his house.  Each time, his neighbor on the other side and I had to get involved to make sure the house itself was not on fire and in danger of spreading to OUR houses.

One night the alarm went off again, and I could see smoke coming out of the house!  I called 911 to report the alarm, whereupon the operator told me I didn't have an "emergency" and that I would have to call another number because the circumstances were not life-threatening.  I raised my voice to emphasize that the old man next door was IN the house, at which point the operator began to chew me out for not showing him proper respect!  Oh man, I was just about to decide to get this bastard fired when I saw the Fire Department driving up.  I relayed that fact to this turd-head operator and suggested he send the Police too because this man was obviously a danger, easily a fatal one, to himself and others.  After that, the operator seemed to relent; and soon the cops were driving up.  I explained the situation to the firemen and policemen and suggested my neighbor be taken to the Med for observation and emergency commitment, which was done.  My neighbor was subsequently admitted to the Lakeside mental facility and ultimately to Western State (mental) Hospital in Bolivar, where he remains to this day.  The family repaired the extensive smoke damage to the house that had resulted from my neighbor going out to his shed, grabbing some scrap lumber, building a fire in his converted-to-gas fireplace, and setting the mantel on fire, until fire hoses were stretched into the house to put the fire out.  The house is now rented out.

Well, recently it seems some misguided dummy in the Millington Police Department responded to a 911 call by a store manager complaining of multiple shoplifting in progress by citing the manager for 911 abuse.  Ultimately the case was diverted, but not before being reported in the paper, attracting 70 comments criticizing what was done to the manager.  One commenter pointed out correctly that the Tennessee statute authorizing these 911 districts, TCA 7-86-102, recites as one of the law's principal intents "quicker apprehension of criminals."  Now, the whole statute is peppered with repeated instances of the word "emergency," but how qualified is someone at the other end of a telephone line to make that determination, when an operator mistake can result in death, serious bodily injury, rape, or arson?  Isn't someone in the process of stealing a family's only car an "emergency" to that family?  What if you are walking in the neighborhood and reasonably believe you are about to be mugged or kidnapped and call 911 so the cops can get a GPS fix while you ride out the scary situation?

These 911 operators ought to pass all but the most obviously inappropriate calls on to the precincts involved, which can further evaluate the call and triage their resources to respond.  If the call is found to be clearly abusive, a warning ticket should be issued, and subsequent abuse should then and only then be prosecuted.  If the people running the 911 show want it as just an ambulance number, then give us 811 to call the cops, something way easier to remember than 545-COPS or your local precinct's number.  Direct that 811 to whoever answers 545-COPS now.  I've called that number and received the most courteous treatment from the MPD operator.  I bet these 911 operators are nowhere near as qualified.

Stars Without Makeup

Some of these ABC News slideshows are fun.  This one shows side-by-side similar head shots of celebrites with and without their makeup (more or less).  Click on the picture below to go there; I can't embed it.

Holiday and Senior Sex News

A couple of interesting articles from McClatchy Newspapers:

Holiday sex: Christmas season is peak for mating

The Christmas-New Year's period produces a year-high spike in sexual activity and conceptions in the United States, according to biorhythm researchers and makers of sex-related products.

They attribute the increase to holiday leisure and New Year's resolutions to have children. New Year's irresolution fueled by alcohol and partying is another contributing factor.

As seniors live longer they find 'love expectancy' also grows

"When I was growing up, I didn't see women who were in their 60s and 70s as women," he said recently. "Now, it's amazing. The men I know are all looking at 80-year-old women. They're our friends. We listen to them. We dance with them. We have sex with them when we can. It's beyond comprehension."

Read the rest.

The Drug War Drags On

Sherry L. Johnston, the mother of Bristol Palin’s fiancé, was arrested Thursday night on drug charges.

Police arrested a record 872,721 persons for marijuana violations in 2007, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation....

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said the U.K. will raise the penalty for possession of cannabis from next year, rejecting advice from a panel of scientists that said there should be no change.

The Drug Warrior's Best Friend

Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), Barack Obama's choice for chief of staff, has a history as a hard-line drug warrior.

President-elect Barack Obama has retreated from his support for marijuana decriminalization....

On Tuesday, December 2, a group of law enforcers who fought on the front lines of the “war on drugs” and witnessed its failures will commemorate the 75th anniversary of alcohol prohibition’s repeal by calling for drug legalization.



Voters in Fayetteville [AR] will decide November 4th whether police should put a lower priority on arresting people for possession of marijuana.

Nick Gillespie: What Would a Sensible Drug Policy Look Like?



Finally, via the most admirable Jake Sullum of Reason Magazine:

A couple of weeks ago, the Obama-Biden transition team's website solicited policy questions from the public. Over two days, the site "processed over 600,000 votes from more than 10,000 people on more than 7,300 questions," and this was the top question:

Will you consider legalizing marijuana so that the government can regulate it, tax it, put age limits on it, and create millions of new jobs and create a billion dollar industry right here in the U.S.?

Obama's terse answer:

President-elect Obama is not in favor of the legalization of marijuana.

So see, once again one of these former dope-using politicians (who would never have been elected dogcatcher if they had been caught and prosecuted) chump out on repealing the stupid laws that put hundreds of thousands of their constituents in prison every year for doing the same thing they did. That's because politicians get high on power, and the invitations, free travel, sex from political groupies, and fantastically lucrative business opportunities that accompany political success -- while the carpenters, the store clerks, the people who do the real work in American society and want to get a buzz on after hours have to pay Prohibition prices and risk jail for using weed, which is far less dangerous both to its users and especially to bystanders than legal alcohol.

So in this too, Barack is following in the footsteps of the chickenshits Bill Clinton and Al Gore in forswearing reform of the Drug War. I pointed out in an email to Al Gore, whom I used to smoke marijuana with, that he never would have made Vice-President if he had been caught under these bad laws. He never responded, but what do you expect from the kind of hypocrite who tries to style himself as a big environmentalist after having FOUR children?

Obama, so far you're another HUGE DISAPPOINTMENT!

Terminal Tuesday -- The Stooges

Huh? Well, the original guitar player for The Stooges, Ron Asheton, was found dead today, so there may be "No Fun" no mo' like what they created.

It was way back when, and someone turned me on to this album, The Stooges, and I ended up listening to it all messed up on the floor, over and over, because they had something special, and a big part of it was the originality of the guitar player, and the rest of it was the attitude displayed by the material and (for other people than me) the innovative stage diving and moshing of the singer.

Their anthem (in my opinion), "No Fun," became a stage-rushing tour de force worldwide. To memorialize them, I have chosen a live performance in the Netherlands that shows several bold Dutch people rushing the stage and stripping down totally nude. You can hear Iggy Stooge calling Ron Asheton out to deliver the participatory, orgiastic, sonic voodoo that made them special.

Here's the original recording.

Beating Urine Drug Tests

I promised my fellow attendees at a criminal law Continuing Legal Education program that I would share this story of how a crusading U.S. Attorney made a vendor stop selling a simple device by stretching federal statutory language to intimidate the vendor. This is the same Republican U.S. Attorney who put poor Tommy Chong in prison for selling bongs online for people to smoke their tobacco with. I wonder if this fascist bitch will try to prosecute me for exercising my freedom of speech to observe that individuals could just buy one of these new realistic looking Cyberskin dildos and rig it up to do the same thing as the Whizzinator. I guess we'll see, although I doubt even the most ill-intentioned holdover U.S. Attorney would bother, what with Obama comin' in demanding her resignation if it isn't offered routinely. Oh well, not exactly cowering in my boots, ladies and gentlemen, via the stalwarts at Reason Magazine, I present the Whizzinator:

They brought the charges after investigators ordered the Whizzinator, along with a more female-friendly device called Number 1, and had them delivered to western Pennsylvania, where Buchanan is based. In addition to charging Wills and Catalano, Buchanan is seeking to seize Puck's assets, including its domain names.

Don't bother to click the product link in Jake Sullum's October 2008 article: it returns an error now.

"Land of the free," huh? Don't kid yourself!

Sublime Saturday -- Concrete Jungle

This won't be many people's favorite Bob Marley song. Most will go for "I Shot The Sheriff" or "No Woman, No Cry" or one of many other great songs. But this one is -- as my sister the former record label executive said after I turned her on to it some years ago -- "exquisite." On top of the perfect match of words and music and the ultimate in Jamaican reggae orchestration and arrangment, there's the out-of-sight chug-a-chug clavinet riff and, floating above it all in the break, Peter Tosh's sensuous, on-the-verge-of-feedback sustain in a guitar solo to die for.

I've picked out the live video that's closest to the perfect original recording I just described, but don't worry, I link you to the record audio below.



OK, here's the original record. Is it not just as I describe? But that's why you come here, isn't it?

FGF -- I Can See Clearly Now

You need to hear this Johnny Nash 1972 #1 smash hit song, "I Can See Clearly Now," every year or so, just to maintain:



Here's the original recording. If you like Jimmy Cliff (as I do), here's his 1993 movie soundtrack version that went to #18 in 1994 as a single.