Things that interest ME
I'll be blogging about things I find interesting. If they offend you, please feel free to just pass on by. If they interest you too, then I hope you'll enjoy it here.
A blog about Business & Finance.
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Al Qaeda's Message Spreading Through English-Language Sites Very sad news from a blogger friend Live from New York, a terror trial we'll regret - Jacoby Fox gets interview with obama Lou Dobbs explains why he left CNN Obama and 'The Great I Am' Fresno State Bulldog Football game on at 1 PM today, Channel 45 Would you like a joint with your fries? A joke for you, may be old, I dunno. Don't stop me if you've heard it. What's going in at the old 3Way Chevrolet place on California? August 06 September 06 October 06 November 06 December 06 January 07 February 07 March 07 April 07 May 07 June 07 July 07 August 07 September 07 October 07 November 07 December 07 January 08 February 08 March 08 April 08 May 08 June 08 July 08 August 08 September 08 October 08 November 08 December 08 January 09 February 09 March 09 April 09 May 09 June 09 July 09 August 09 September 09 October 09 November 09 
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A US Air Force C-141 is scheduled to leave Thule Air Base, The young man finally gets to the air base and makes his way to the aircraft, only to find that the latrine pump truck has been left outdoors and is frozen solid, so he must find another one in the hangar,which takes even more time. He returns to the aircraft and is less than enthusiastic about what he has to do. Nevertheless, he goes about the pumping job deliberately and carefully (and slowly) so as to not risk criticism later. As he's leaving the plane, the pilot stops him and says, "Son, your attitude and performance has caused this flight to be late, and I'm going to personally see to it that you are not just reprimanded, but punished." Shivering in the cold, his task finished, he takes a deep breath, stands up tall and says, "Sir, with all due respect, I'm not your son; I'm an Airman in the United States Air Force. I've been in CLIMATE OF FEAR By Jeff Jacoby The Sunday, December 24, 2006 http://www.boston.com/news/... Remember The Twilight Zone? Back in 1961, Rod Serling wrote an episode that was set in The story revolves around a few desperate New Yorkers struggling to survive the murderous heat. As the temperature climbs, social order crumbles. An intruder, crazed with thirst, breaks into an apartment to steal water. An elderly woman collapses and dies. Thermometers shatter, their mercury boiling over. Finally Norma, the main character, screams and passes out. Then comes the "Twilight Zone" twist: Norma wakes up to find that it's snowing outside. She'd been having a nightmare. The Earth isn't hurtling toward the sun, after all; it's spinning *away* from the sun. The world isn't going to end in searing heat, but in a dark and deathly deep-freeze. Fade to credits. Well, that's climate change for you. Maybe Mother Earth is warming up, or maybe she's cooling down, but either way it's always bad news. Here, for example, is former vice president Al Gore in 2006, on the threat posed by global warming: "Our ability to live is what is at stake." It doesn't get much more dire than that. Yet here is climatologist Reid Bryson, in Fortune magazine's award-winning analysis of global *cooling* in 1974: "There is very important climatic change going on right now, and it’s not merely something of academic interest. . . . It is something that, if it continues, will affect the whole human occupation of the earth -- like a billion people starving." It doesn't get much more dire than that, either. Bryson's article is quoted in "Fire and Ice," a richly documented report by the Business & Media Institute, an arm of the Media Research Center. Climate-change alarmism, the report shows, is at least a century old. A few examples: "Geologists Think the World May Be Frozen Up Again," asserted a New York Times headline in February 1895. Worrisome if true, but just seven years later, the Los Angeles Times reported that the great glaciers were undergoing "their final annihilation" due to rising temperatures worldwide. By 1923, though, it was the ice that was doing the annihilating: "Scientist says Arctic ice will wipe out So it was curtains for the Canadians? Er, not quite. In 1953, The New York Times reported that "nearly all the great ice sheets are in retreat." Yet no sooner did our neighbors to the north breathe a sigh of relief than it turned out they weren't off the hook after all: "The rapid advance of some glaciers," wrote Lowell Ponte in The Cooling, his 1976 bestseller, "has threatened human settlements in Alaska, Iceland, Canada, China, and the Soviet Union." And now? "Arctic Ice Is Melting at Record Level, Scientists Say," the Times reported in 2002. Over the years, the alarmists have veered from an obsession with lethal global cooling around the turn of the 20th century to lethal global warming a generation later, back to cooling in the 1970s and now to warming once again. You don't have to be a scientist to realize that all these competing narratives of doom can't be true. Or to wonder whether any of them are. Perhaps that is why most Americans discount the climate-change fear-mongering that is so fashionable among journalists and politicians. Last spring, as Time magazine was hyperventilating about global warming ("The debate is over. Global warming is upon us -- with a vengeance. From floods to fires, droughts to storms, the climate is crashing"), a Gallup poll was finding that only 36 percent of the public say they worry "a great deal" about it. Still, there is always a market for apocalyptic forebodings. Paul Ehrlich grew rich writing jeremiads with such titles as The Population Explosion and The Population Bomb, which predicted the imminent deaths of hundreds of millions of human beings from starvation and epidemic disease. The Limits to Growth, the Club of Rome's 1972 bestseller, warned that humankind was going to experience "a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline" as the world's resources -- everything from gold to petroleum -- ran dry. Jonathan Schell and Carl Sagan forecast a devastating "nuclear winter" unless atomic arsenals were frozen, or better still, abolished. Those doomsday prophesies never came to pass. Neither have the climate-change catastrophes that have been bruited about for a century. "The whole aim of practical politics," wrote H.L. Mencken, "is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." Mencken was writing in 1920, but some things never change. (Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.) -- ## --
I've used this for a long time and I have it on the wall by my desk. Blognroll brought up the subject of going into the new year and I thought this was a good piece to go along with it. For those who don't have faith in thier lives..maybe this will give food for thought. I wonder why it is necessary to go through this hullabaloo EVERY single Christmas. Why is it so hard to just enjoy the season no matter what your beliefs are? It's a holiday and I would be just as happy over Hanukah. What other time of the year do people actually smile and wish you a happy holiday? (insert yours here). I was out this morning and the stores weren't even crowded...yet. People were cheerful and happy. I loved it !!!! I wish everyone a happy whatever you want to call it and a merry day. A merry season in fact. It's Christmas for me and by golly, this morning it was a white Christmas even if it was fog. It's great! Christmas shouldn't be warm and sunny. I'll be with family tonight and again tomorrow when they come to eat all the stuff I cook. My one day to feed my troops and spend a noisy time with them. I'm happy. I'm blessed. And I thank MY God for every bit of it. You should thank whoever you believe in that you're alive and that you have people to share this season with. Even if it's just us bloggers. We're part of your family too even if we are dysfunctional most of the time. Bless you all for being here and for allowing me to share your life in some small way. . Claim: Special one-time federal excise tax credit in 2006 rebates tax overpayment on phone bills.
Status: True. Example: [Collected via e-mail, 2006]
Origins: In November 2006, the snopes.com inbox began filling with forwards about a tax credit available in 2006 for overpayment of a federal tax charged on phone calls. For once, an Internet forward is on the The tax in question, the Federal Excise Tax, was first imposed in 1898 to help fund the Spanish-American War. One of the things it taxed was This is a one-time tax credit, so those who fail to file for it on their 2006 returns will likely lose their shot at claiming it. It therefore makes very good sense to let your friends, neighbors, and Barbara "in one half year and out the other, I guess" Mikkelson Last updated: 22 November 2006 My first great grandchild. Born 12/13/06 Boy, 8 pounds and gorgeous. Grandpa Mark (motopoet) will be along before long to share more pictures I'm sure.
Ben Stein..Confessions Herewith at this happy time of year, a few confessions from my beating heart: 'CONVERSATIONS' WITH THE ENEMY By Jeff Jacoby The Boston Globe Wednesday, December 6, 2006 http://www.boston.com/news/... Second of two parts Should the United States turn to Iran and Syria for help in reducing the violence bloodying Iraq? James Baker's Iraq Study Group, out this week with its well-leaked recommendations, thinks direct talks with Tehran and Damascus would be a fine idea. I think so too -- right after those governments switch sides in the global jihad. As things stand now, however, negotiating with Iran and Syria over the future of Iraq is about as promising a strategy for preventing more bloodshed as negotiating with Adolf Hitler over the future of Czechoslovakia was in 1938. There were eminent "realists" then too, many of whom were gung-ho for cutting a deal with the Fuehrer. As Neville Chamberlain set off on the diplomatic mission that would culminate in Munich, William Shirer recorded in *The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,* Britain's poet laureate, John Masefield, composed a paean in his honor. When the negotiations were done and Czechoslovakia had been dismembered, the prime minister was hailed as a national hero. FDR saluted him in a two-word telegram: "Good man." The Nobel Committee received not one, not two, but 10 nominations proposing Chamberlain for the 1939 peace prize. But 1939 would see neither peace nor prize. Chamberlain and his admirers had been certain that Munich would bring "peace in our time." Instead it helped pave the way for war. How many times does the lesson have to be relearned? There is no appeasing the unappeasable. When democracies engage with fanatical tyrants, the world becomes not less dangerous but more so. That wasn't the fashionable view in 1938, however, and it isn't popular today. According to a new World Public Opinion poll, 75 percent of Americans agree that to stabilize Iraq, the United States should enter into talks with Iran and Syria. "I believe in talking to your enemies," James Baker declares. "I don't think you restrict your conversations to your friends." But with totalitarian regimes like those in Iran and Syria, the effect of such "conversations" is usually negative. It buys time and legitimacy for the totalitarians, while deepening their conviction that the West has no stomach for a fight. No one was more pleased with Chamberlain's diplomacy than Hitler, for it proved that Germany was in the saddle, riding the democracies -- that the momentum was with Berlin, while London and Paris were flailing. The Baker panel's recommendations will bring similar satisfaction to Tehran and Damascus. Shortly after 9/11, President Bush famously declared that every nation "now has a decision to make: Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." At every step of the way, Iran and Syria have unambiguously been with the terrorists. As the world's foremost sponsors of radical Islamic violence, the State Department reported in April, "Iran and Syria routinely provide unique safe haven, substantial resources, and guidance to terrorist organizations." While the Assad regime engineers the assassination of Lebanese politicians, Iran's rabid president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, calls openly for "death to America" and demands that Israel be "wiped off the map." Syria was Saddam Hussein's most dependable Middle East confederate, and almost from the moment the Iraqi insurgency began it was clear that Damascus was pouring fuel on the fire. Iran, too, works overtime to intensify the Iraqi bloodshed. ABC News reported last week on the discovery of "smoking-gun evidence of Iranian support for terrorists in Iraq: brand-new weapons fresh from Iranian factories." Among the finds: "advanced IEDs designed to pierce armor and anti-tank weapons." In other words, to murder US troops. No regimes on earth have more to gain from an American defeat in Iraq than the theocracy in Iran and the Assad dictatorship in Syria. They have every incentive to aggravate the Iraqi turmoil that already has so many Americans clamoring for withdrawal. "There is no evidence to support the assumption that Iran and Syria want a stable Iraq," writes Middle East Quarterly editor Michael Rubin, whose experience in the region runs deep. "Rather, all their actions show a desire to stymie the United States and destabilize their neighbor. More dangerous still . . . is the naive assumption that making concessions to terrorism or forcing others to do so brings peace rather than war." The war against radical Islam, of which Iraq is but one front, cannot be won so long as regimes like those in Tehran and Damascus remain in power. They are as much our enemies today as the Nazi Reich was our enemy in an earlier era. Imploring Assad and Ahmadinejad for help in Iraq can only intensify the whiff of American retreat that is already in the air. The word for that isn't realism. It's surrender. (Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.) -- ## -- To subscribe to (or unsubscribe from) Jeff Jacoby's mailing list, please visit http://www.JeffJacoby.com. To see a month's worth of his recent columns, go to http://www.boston.com/news/.... Jeff Jacoby welcomes comments and reads all his mail. Unfortunately, he receives so many letters that he cannot answer each one personally. Fighting to win in IraqFirst of two parts One such blunder was the stubborn refusal to support independence for the long-subjugated republics of the Soviet Union, culminating in the president's notorious "Chicken Kiev" speech urging Ukrainians to stay in their Soviet cage. Another was the appeasement of Syrian dictator Hafez Assad during the run up to the 1991 Gulf War, when Bush and Baker blessed Syria's brutal occupation of Lebanon in exchange for Assad's acquiescence in the campaign to undo Iraq's occupation of Kuwait. When Chinese tanks massacred students in Tiananmen Square, Bush declared: "I don't think we ought to judge the whole People's Liberation Army by that terrible incident." When Bosnia was torn apart by violence in 1992, the Bush-Baker reaction was to shrug it off as "a hiccup." Worst of all was the betrayal of the Iraqi Shi'ites and Kurds who heeded Bush's call to "take matters into their own hands" and overthrow Saddam Hussein -- only to be slaughtered by Saddam's helicopter gunships and napalm while the Bush administration stood by. Baker blithely announced that the administration was "not in the process now of assisting . . . these groups that are in uprising against the current government."
In the late 50's there was a building on Washington in Oildale named The House Of Rasmussen. I've always wondered what kind of business it housed and what happened to it. I found a reference to the Rotary Club and a meeting that was held there in the 50's. Anyone know anything about it?
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