Mainstream media has ignored more than 400 scientists
Posted 12/27/07
•Merry Christmas to all and to all a good morning! (I'm writing this Saturday morning, so forgive the groggy thoughts.) I'm listening to chef Jasper Mirabile's cooking and food show on 710 KCMO this morning and he has Mike Murphy and actor Jeff East (he played the adolescent Superman in the '70's movie starring Christopher Reeve), and it is the most entertaining radio talk show in the area.
•Did you notice that more than 400 scientists have challenged claims by former Vice President Al Gore and the United Nations about the threat of man-made global warming? Funny. That wasn't picked-up by the mainstream media.
The scientists, many of whom are current or former members of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that shares the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Mr. Gore for publicizing a climate crisis, cast doubt on the "scientific consensus" that man-made global warming threatens the continued existence of the planet.
"I find the Doomsday picture Al Gore is painting a six-meter sea level rise, 15 times the IPCC number entirely without merit," said Dutch atmospheric scientist Hendrik Tennekes, one of the researchers quoted in the report.
Once again…none of this was picked-up by the mainstream media.
Sen. James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, who is the ranking Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee, observed that the report debunks Mr. Gore's claim that the "debate is over." What scientific debate is “over?” I mean…really.
After a quick review of the report, Gore spokeswoman Kalee Kreider said 25 or 30 of the scientists may have received funding from Exxon Mobil Corp. Oooh…that’s damning alright. Give me a break!
Exxon Mobil spokesman Gantt H. Walton dismissed the accusation, saying the company is concerned about climate-change issues and does not pay scientists to bash global-warming theories. I could see Exxon-Mobile saying in some boardroom high aloft the Texas plains, “Let's pay some scientists to tell the world we aren't destroying the earth. That way when the earth does explode, it will soften the blow on the people.”
You just gotta laugh at liberals.
•Lynne Spears' book about parenting has been delayed indefinitely, her publisher said Wednesday. No one would go on the record whether the delay was connected to the revelation that Spears' 16-year-old daughter, Jamie Lynne, is pregnant. (Nah, couldn't be related to that.)
The book is entitled, "Pop Culture Mom: A Real Story of Fame and Family in a Tabloid World" was initially scheduled for release May 11, Mother's Day. Spears, the mother of three children with ex-husband Jamie Spears, definitely has some stories to tell after raising children under a massive glare of media watchfulness.
The really idiotic part of this is the now-impregnated Spears, star of Nickelodeon's "Zoey 101," is being considered by Nickelodeon as the subject of a “teaching lesson” for the network to address the subject of teen pregnancy for the young fans of the show.
Are you kidding me? Why does the entertainment industry always think it is their responsibility to teach responsibility? That's kind of like asking Steven Hawking to teach dance classes.
•And they are trying to charge Spears' 19-year old boyfriend and father of the child, Casey Aldridge, with statutory rape. I think their only chance is if they can prove the girl was impregnated in the state of Tennessee.
•And on that subject, if there is any family deserving to be cut some slack re: pregnancies to unwed mothers, it is one who has access to millions of dollars at a moment's notice. If they want to raise their clan in this manner, who am I to say no? At least they aren't killing the babies.
•Finally, I need to know something. Lynne Spears is being excoriated for her daughter being pregnant at 16. She's a “bad mother,” they say. “She has raised irresponsible tramps.” Where is the news story about the parents of the baby's father, Mr. Aldridge. It's that double standard again.
•Pox on Congress and pox on President Bush for mandating that automakers be forced to make cars achieve 35 mpg average fuel efficiency. You people don't know what you are doing. Automakers should make cars more efficient because the market makes it profitable for them to do so. They're going to take this to the point where we're propelled down the road at 55 miles per hour in a 250 horsepower engine in a car with the crash resistance of a pop can. All to save the world from a threat that does not exist. I hope every mother's son of them spends eternity burning in hell fueled by the heat of my built-up consternation.
•And for the nice Christmas topic of the week, syphilis is back: The sexually transmitted disease long associated with 19th Century bohemian life is making a comeback in Europe. The disease used to be rare, thanks to modern medicine.
Most cases of syphilis are in men, and experts point to more risky sex among gay men as the chief cause for the resurgence. But more cases are being seen among heterosexuals, both men and women, too.
A little history: syphilis was the sexual scourge of the 19th Century, and is believed to have killed artists like poet Charles Baudelaire, composer Robert Schumann, and painter Paul Gauguin. But the widespread use of penicillin in the 1950s all but wiped it out in the Western world.
In the last decade, however, syphilis has unexpectedly returned, driven by risky sexual behavior and outbreaks in major cities across Europe, including London, Amsterdam, Paris and Berlin. In Britain, syphilis cases have leapt more than tenfold for men and women in the past decade to 3,702 in 2006. Among men in England, the syphilis rate jumped from one per 100,000 in 1997 to nine per 100,000 last year alone. Among German men, the rate was fewer than two per 100,000 in 2003, to six per 100,000.
France had 428 cases in 2003, almost 16 times the number just three years earlier, so we know where this apparently all started (another reason to hate the French!). Similar trends have been seen in the United States.
In 2000, syphilis infection rates were so low that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention embarked on a plan to eliminate the disease. But, no doubt sensing the threat, human irresponsibility stepped to the fore. About 9,800 cases were reported in 2006.
Though these days it mainly affects urban gay men, experts worry that the disease could also rebound in the general population if stronger efforts to fight it are not taken soon. I think it would also help (And be more effective) if people would stop running around on their spouses and try monogamy for a change!
•I need another week on my Big 12 basketball predictions Kansas is losing at home to Miami of Ohio.
See you in 2008!
(Reach Brian Kubicki anytime at bkubicki@kc.rr.com)
Can Herm Edwards really be so public relations stupid?
Posted 12/24/07
•I realize that this is a week late, but did I hear Herm Edwards tells Chiefs fans in his weekly press conference “to get over it” regarding fans' chagrin over the team losing 6 straight games? Are you kidding me!? Did he really say that the people who have suffered longest, for the least reward, and with the greatest degree of patience-without-redemption of any fan-base throughout the entire NFL have got to learn to LIVE…WITH…IT? I'm almost convinced he's actually trying to speed his way out of KC. Can he be that P.R. Stupid?
•Now that we are entering the heating season, let's talk refrigerant. It won't be too technical, I promise. Refrigerant is the “fuel” that drives the cooling of your home and car when temperatures are high outside. Every air conditioner and every refrigerator-freezer has a run of copper tubing that runs between a compressor and the coil and a couple of valves inside the house. Inside that copper tubing is a liquid-gas compound that gets really cold and then warm as it is run through these devices.
The point of course, is heat transfer. The refrigerant liquid-gas stays inside that tubing for a very long time. Sometimes, a tiny leak will allow a little bit of that refrigerant out into the atmosphere. But for the most part, unless you are really diligent in your air conditioner maintenance, most of the refrigerant stays out of the atmosphere.
Now, did you know that there are people out there (Al Gore) that believe the tiny bit of refrigerant that gets into the atmosphere is causing a hole in the earth's ozone layer? As a matter of fact, these folks have so hoodwinked the liberal socialist part of the world, they have convinced entire governments to stop making certain kinds of refrigerants and certain kinds of compressors.
Acting in accordance with an international treaty called the Montreal Protocol, the U.S. EPA (one department I would eliminate in a heartbeat were I President) has mandated the eventual phase-out of R22 refrigerant. By 2010, the manufacturing of heating and cooling equipment using R22 will be prohibited, and by 2020 the production of R22 itself must cease. There are many, many R22-driven refrigeration systems out there. Many are going to have to be replaced before their natural lives are over, or face being recharged with ever-rapidly-increasing old stockpiles of R22. And of course, many, many air conditioner sellers are more than happy to sell you a new compressor at a moment's notice to avoid those nasty high old refrigerant re-charge costs. Ahhh…the natural wonder of capitalism!
The main “brass-tacks” reason for this regulatory action is “…that R22 is a hydrochlorofluorocarbon (HCFC) compound, which contains ozone-depleting chlorine….” They say chlorine, yes that stuff we douse our swimming pools and laundry with, is the real demon. Chlorine? What about all the chlorine that goes into water treatment systems in huge reservoirs at the water plants? What about every single home that has a swimming pool? Hell, I personally have farted more methane into the atmosphere than the sum total of all the R22 that has leaked into the atmosphere around the entire country.
The politics of scale. This is all about the politics of scale. If they can scare you into more taxes, or a new compressor, using a fear most of us do not understand then they feel their actions are justified.
•Joe Horn, the septuagenarian in Houston that shot and killed two burglars with his shotgun that were trying to break-in to his neighbor's home, is about the coolest guy to flash across the media screen in the life of 24-hour media. They're toying with the idea of charging him? To hell with that! I want to give this hero the inaugural Charlie Bronson Award of Freedom.
•Jennifer Love Hewitt was complaining recently when somebody photographed her from behind in less-than-model-trim shape (Actually, she looked like she was smuggling saddlebags of cottage cheese in the back of her bathing suit, but I digress…) and then shot the photos across the blogosphere. An enraged Hewitt shot back, decrying the evil standard setup for young women in society that requires them to be thin to an unrealistic degree. She told those women with boobs and a butt to go ahead and stretch into their bikinis and start cavorting on the beach without remorse.
You know, on the surface without perspective I agree with Ms. Hewitt. We are too tough on our young women in asking them to starve themselves in order to have the proper shape. But that argument would be more convincing coming from Jennifer Love Hewitt if she hasn't been plastered across the internet for the last 10 years hawking skimpy wares in a body that would make a garden rake suck-in its stomach. She made a lot of money advertising that shape. If she wants to “enjoy” it now by living a little, good for her. Just don't turn on the people that bought all that crap you sold with the tiny body now that you are embarrassed to be caught with your hand in the vat of ice cream.
•Next week is my Big 12 basketball finish predictions. You will be surprised at my No. 1 pick coming out of the regular season.
(Brian Kubicki brings you a weekly surprise with his Parallax Look. Surprise him with an email to bkubicki@kc.rr.com)
Come on, Paul Morrison, employees sometimes eat lunch at their desks!
Posted 12/13/07
•National polls on the presidential election are irrelevant. They keep popping-up on every political news channel and all they measure is how the popular vote might look nationally which, as Al Gore will tell you, is not a good predictor of who will win the election.
(Hint: look-up “ELECTORAL COLLEGE.”)
•The world of Kansas Attorney General Paul Morrison appears to be crumbling down around him like Fred Phelps’ clan melting in a vat of sulfuric acid.
A sexual affair with an employee in the Johnson County District Attorney’s Office that carried-on for two years has been revealed and the woman is claiming Morrison pressured her to use her ties to the Johnson County District Attorney’s Office to gain him an advantage against his enemy in the Johnson County DA’s office.
There have been a ton of observations on talk radio and in the blogs about this and it’s going to have a very long shelf life, I’m guessing.
The best two I saw are: Morrison said on Sunday in response to the allegations that he has been working for the past year to heal his broken marriage over this issue. But the affair allegedly ended only last month according to the woman involved. He must not have been too singularly focused on the healing process during that year.
The second one involved the specific allegations that the two had been “engaged” physically during the affair in a number of offices in the Johnson County Courthouse that were not specifically theirs – like a judge’s office and an attorney’s office. You know, people sometimes eat lunch at their desks. That’s just gross!
•Have you noticed that whenever the Chiefs do something bad, like play football, Herm Edwards just kind of talks about it in the third-person narrative, kind of like none of it is his doing?
•As I “pen” this, the ice storm of 2007 is rolling through town and weather forecasters are falling all over each other to try and claim title to the actual temperature that was going to be achieved tonight and the impact of that measurement on the degree of icing to occur. The most laughable part of the whole thing is they were arguing over a mere 2-3 degrees.
One guy says 29, another says 31, and a third says 30. Folks – their daily predictions of temperature are never that close. Nobody can predict temperature that accurately.
•Where is global warming when you need it? I made my carbon footprint as large as possible Monday in an effort to raise the temperature.
You’re welcome.
•Michael Vick was sentenced Monday to 23 months in federal prison for his role in running a dog fighting operation. Still amazing to me that were he fighting rats, he’d be playing football today.
•Mike Huckabee’s meteoric rise in the polls continues as we crawl within a month of the first Presidential primaries. This is not going to last.
People are bored and distracted by Christmas. The fact that Huckabee is an ordained minister and the date proximity to the most popular religious holiday of the year is no coincidence when you look at the polls.
You know what happens when the New Year rolls around? People realize they have to pay for Christmas. Watch for Huckabee’s numbers to shrink as the year turns.
•Al Gore accepted his part of the Nobel Prize (He shared it with the IPCC, which I believe stands for the Incontinent People who Cackle about Climate) this week and good golly he is getting large! I’m guessing, but Al has to be pushing three bills! His morning methane-laden flatulence blasts have got to be opening a hole in the ozone where he walks.
•Incidentally, for the record, the Nobel Prize has become a political joke in recent years. United Nations panels have won several in recent years. Yes, that’s the same UN that has been embroiled in the Oil for Food Scandal and the Congo Rape Scandals (Whatever happened to that? See http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article405213.ece for a refresher.)
•For the record, the earth is a little bit warmer over the last 50 years or so down close to the ground – but not up in the atmosphere. The warming is not caused by mankind.
•Big 12 basketball is nearing the end of the non-conference schedules. Kansas and Texas are tops in the conference. Texas A&M looks tough. Oklahoma is intriguing. Missouri is as tough defensively as any team in the conference. Kansas State is the most interesting to watch because they have what will likely be the National Player of the Year in Michael Beasley. Every team in the Big 12 has at least one “quality’ win. This should be a very competitive Big 12 basketball season.
(Brian Kubicki has a very long shelf life as our Parallax Look columnist. Reach him at bkubicki@kc.rr.com)
When it comes to candidates, Huckabee is just like George W. Bush, so why the love?
Posted 12/6/07
•The BCS is a sham. I say that every year at this time because every single year the money people behind the college football bowl system use the stupidest method possible to determine who is the best team in college football.
This year is the poster child. Everybody but Hawaii is undefeated. (And they are really good!) But the undefeated team isn’t even one of the two teams in the game that are supposed to be playing for the championship. One of the teams in the “championship” game didn’t even play in a conference championship game! They shouldn’t even be considered. If you play in a championship game, you have earned a benefit. Testing yourself in a manner others don’t shouldn’t hurt you in the long run.
Hell, why play anybody tough in the non-conference? Decline to play in the conference championship. MU would have been better off.
This whole thing is just ignorant. There’s no defense. Defending the BCS is like nominating any episode of The View for an Emmy Award – like judging the least-offensive smelling pile of dog poo – why bother?
Missouri lost to OU, as I predicted, but since they beat Kansas, they should have been selected for a BCS bowl – especially instead of the Jayhawks who they beat nine days previous. Yeah, I know, they say that the BCS is about matchups and not necessarily about the best teams. Well, at least they are consistent in that thought, because LSU and Ohio State (screw that THE Ohio State garbage – that’s dumb!) certainly aren’t the two best teams in the nation. That much we know for sure.
•You know what, this is kind of outside my frame of reference, but light rail is not needed in Kansas City. We are a metropolitan area of approximately 1.2 to 1.3 million people if you count everybody — O.K. 2 million if you add more outlying counties – but by that count, Chicago might fall into the KC population.
The problem is the City of Kansas City Missouri is stupid enough to allow a petition campaign require only 4,000 signatures in order to gain approval to be placed on the ballot. Hell, that’s easy. I could get anything passed with that criterion. As a matter of fact, here’s my favorite alternate proposals that need to get passed and would get huge support if they got on the ballot:
1. All women under the age of 50 should receive breast implants. I say 50 because Kim Delaney was on the cover of one of those women’s magazines in the supermarket check-out line and she looks hot at 50.
2. Parents shall have GPS devices implanted in their children’s bodies when they are sexually mature. The connected internal taser would be an option that parents could choose to have added.
3. The Chiefs’ Herm Edwards would be forced to restore the parts of the Vermeil Playbook that he took out because he thought it was too risky. This garbage about making plays is classic defensive coach-speak for a coach that doesn’t understand offensive scheming in football.
4. Clay Chastain would be banned from setting foot into any part of Kansas City Proper.
•Mike Huckabee seems to be the Flavor of the Month in the liberal media and in the polls, at least in Iowa.
Why? I thought the media, and conservatives in general, hated George W. Bush. Mike Huckabee is George W. Bush. He is socially conservative and fiscally liberal-leaning. He supported tax increases as governor of Arkansas. He is in favor of some form of amnesty for illegal immigrants.
I thought we were trying to distance the party’s nomination from moderate conservatives?
•Any religious voter that believes Mormonism, the religion of Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, is a cult needs to look in the mirror and at their own religion.
People call religions cults when they feel threatened by the apparent ferventness of that faith’s flock. It’s really nothing more than that.
A cult is defined, generally, as any belief system that requires absolute adherence to certain specific criteria. All organized religion meets that definition, at least to some degree.
•Well, now that college football is behind us, time to start focusing our sporting eyes on college basketball. The Big 12 is becoming very interesting. I won’t get into game predictions until the conference season starts, but here are the headlines so far:
Kansas is going to be in the top 3 in the polls and is looking as strong as ever. When Collins returns to the backcourt, they’re going to be hard to trip-up.
Texas just knocked-off top ranked UCLA in Westwood. Yes, the Texas that just lost the best player in college basketball to the NBA. Texas looks every bit as good as Kansas.
WOW!
Texas A&M was in the top ten of the polls before losing last week to Arizona.
The rest of the league, thus far anyway, looks better – with the possible exception of Oklahoma State which is having some issues. Kansas State has the best all-around player in all of college basketball mixed in with the poorest group of shooters this side of a Don Knotts movie. As a result, Michael Beasley is leading the nation in rebounding and has already set the Big 12 freshman rebounding record for a single game.
Beasley will only be around the NCAA for a year, so catch him when you can. He’s a good one.
(Brian Kubicki makes plays for Team Landmark 52 weeks a year. Reach him at bkubicki@kc.rr.com)
Autism isn't really what public schools are telling you that it is
Posted 11/29/07
I caught, while perusing my favorite newspaper, The Landmark, the story about the Park Hill School Board hearing a report on autism. (See last week’s edition, Page B1.) In the report, the board was told that Autism diagnoses have increased by 2000 percent over a 10 year period. The reasons given for the increase (of course, environmental exposure factors was one of them!) completely avoided the fact that the DSM (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is a mental health handbook that lists different categories of mental disorders and criteria for diagnosing them, according to the American Psychiatric Association) changed the definition of Autism to include children with Asperger’s Syndrome.
Kids exhibiting Asperger’s traits are typically socially inept, have difficulty reading non-verbal communication without instruction, and have difficulty integrating socially. Notice I said, “difficulty” not “inability.” They can be as intelligent or average intellectually as any other group of kids. Having Asperger’s traits is no more like having Autism than having a daydream is akin to being schizophrenic.
The important thing to remember is most kids typically associated with Autism (now called “Low-Functioning Autism”) are profoundly disabled mentally. Kids exhibiting Asperger’s traits are not. They are often linked with so-called, “High-Functioning Autism” but such a tie has not been proven. There is even evidence that the label has wrongly become a catch-all diagnosis for badly-behaved children. In 2000 in Great Britain, the lead clinician and autism specialist at Northgate and Prudhoe NHS Trust in Morpeth, Dr. Tom Berney, published a paper commenting on this. He wrote in the British Journal of Psychiatry: “There is a risk of the diagnosis of autism being extended to include anyone whose odd and troublesome personality does not readily fit some other category. Such over-inclusion is likely to devalue the diagnosis to a meaningless label.”
Kids with Asperger’s traits do not need to be segregated from other students. They can learn normally. As long as parents are aware what they are working with, a kid with Asperger’s traits can have a normal educational career. The problems occur when the school districts try to interject their definitions of “normal” into the lives of these kids. The social stigma such a designation carries with it is the worst effect these kids face.
It is further unfortunate that these kids, and what we have learned about social intelligence and awareness, has become the next leverage public schools have used to squeeze more funds out of government. Isn’t that what it always comes back to in public education?
If any of you parents are facing Asperger’s and the public school system, email me. I would be pleased to be of assistance in any way possible. It isn’t what they are telling you it is.
•December is going to be a rowdy month in the political campaigns. The Democrats are going to have four debates. The Republicans will have three debates. Both sides are hosting particular battles within their respective parties. The Democrats are seeing Hillary Clinton try to fend off the advances (How’s that for an unlikely illustration?) of the men trailing close behind her. The Republicans are trying to stay united against The Pant-suited Beast in Comfortable Shoes while also trying to gain a foothold that can be maintained from one week to the next. This is going to be a fun week politically.
•Have you ever noticed that those On-Star commercials illustrating the service’s ability to help you by calling for an ambulance when you’re in an auto accident always involve women? I’ve yet to hear a man in one of those spots. Now, is that because women are notoriously bad drivers, or is it because men never ask for help?
•It’s been nice reading Greg Hall’s Off the Couch columns these past few days. I forgot how much I missed those media sound bite recaps penned with Hall's acerbic observations. The original is MUCH better than the imitator column Jeffrey Flanagan of the Star tries to pass off as entertainment each week after Chiefs’ games.
•By the way, about our local dog poop picker-upper (“Fish wrap” is so dated!): I have heard that the tree-killing version of the newspaper will not use the word “Redskins” for the name of the Washington, DC NFL franchise. Their policy is to avoid the word because it is supposedly insensitive to the race of the various Indian tribes that populated this land in North America before the European settlers moved in.
Whatever – it’s an old, silly argument that really has no merit. But why does the newspaper’s Sunday TV section use the term consistently, and why does the website use the term, “Redskins” when referring the DC’s team? Seems to be a bit inconsistent, doesn’t it?
•The story on the Drudge Report last week involving a 35 year old British woman who “relentlessly hunted down a doctor” who would perform irreversible sterilization surgery on her for no other reason than to “protect the planet,” has got to take the cake as the most idiotic form of expression resulting from Al Gore’s environmental whacko religion.
Her boyfriend (now husband number 3) presented her with a congratulations card after the surgery. Her reasoning for such drastic measures include: “Having children is selfish. It’s all about maintaining your genetic line at the expense of the planet;” “Every person who is born uses more food, more water, more land, more fossil fuels, more trees and produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases, and adds to the problem of over-population;” “We both passionately wanted to save the planet - not produce a new life which would only add to the problem;” “It would have been immoral to give birth to a child that I felt strongly would only be a burden to the world;” and the particularly telling, “ “(We) married in September 2002, and have a much nicer lifestyle as a result of not having children.”
Yes…the old faithful of this generation – the “convenience” argument. What an incredibly selfish bunch of little snots these people are! I, for one, am supremely pleased that: Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Neils Bohr, Marie Curie, Linus Pauling, Louis Pasteur, Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, Ronald Reagan, Mark Levin, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, George Washington Carver, Eddie Van Halen, and Angus Young didn’t have the likes of this woman as a mom.
•The New England Patriots appear to be headed for the first undefeated season in the NFL since the 1972 Miami Dolphins. That team’s former coach, Don Shula, has stated publicly that if the Pats get the record, it ought to be asterisked in some fashion in the record books because the team’s coach, Bill Belichick, was fined earlier in the season for violating NFL rules when an assistant coach was caught videotaping coaching signals on the sidelines. Would there be any more fitting way to tell Shula to shut-up than for the Pats to roll 100 points on the hapless Miami Dolphins in Week 16 on December 23?
•Congratulations to the Missouri Tigers for winning the Big 12 North division Championship. They heartily earned the honor after tossing aside all the accolades foisted upon their unbeaten, yet untested, interstate rivals, all the perennial doubts laid at the feet of every Missouri team for never really winning anything of note, and all the hype and pressure of a winner take-all game such as this was, and taking care of business. Missouri looked good. They looked REALLY good.
In fact, they looked SO good; they’re going to have a massive letdown next week in San Antonio against the Oklahoma Sooners. Sorry, Tigers fans. This one is textbook.
Sooners by 10.
(You'll never get a massive letdown reading Brian Kubicki's Parallax Look, which you can only find in your Landmark. Email him at bkubicki@kc.rr.com)
Does anybody really care what methods of extraction are used on enemies?
Posted 11/21/07
Did you know that the amount of rat excrement we allow be in our bread is three times the amount of CO2 that exists in the atmosphere?
Remember last week when I told you that the earth’s atmosphere is composed of only 0.038% (that’s 38 thousandths of one percent) carbon dioxide and that mankind generates only 3% of that? Now there are some that will argue that even a teeny-tiny amount of a gaseous poison can do damage to human life – at least some aspect of it. True…true. A few cc’s of strychnine can knock a strapping man to his knees.
Let’s consider rat feces. Almost anybody would acknowledge that munching on the poop of a dirty rodent – in any amount – would be deleterious to that person’s general physical welfare. We can universally agree to that. Well, did you know that the Federal Government mandates that the levels of rodent feces in wheat cannot exceed 0.090%?
That is nearly three times the composition of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere and nearly 80 times what humans put into the atmosphere by breaking wind and exhaling.
This is simply further proof that we aren’t all that we think we are.
•I was reading this story in a work-related trade magazine called, Amusement Business, recently and the author of the article related how there are several occurrences every year of young women collegiate athletes concealing their unplanned pregnancies and then doing irreparable harm to their babies after they are born. One woman was facing criminal prosecution for suffocating her newborn baby. In another case, a member of a collegiate golf team placed her newborn baby in a garbage bag and dumped it in a toilet.
After going into these horrific examples, the author of the article makes the call for colleges to institute programs for supporting female athletes who turn-up pregnant by mandating that they may keep their scholarships while their pregnancies progress.
Does anybody really believe that a person who would commit an act of murder on a living, breathing, innocent, and totally dependent little baby would be persuaded away from committing that grievous act by the idea that you could be put on an “Injured/Pregnant Reserve List" for nine months while the pregnancy develops?
Are they serious? Is Title IX going to step-up and advocate for equal participation for male athletes?
Then again, when a society begins to devalue life from its beginning, is it too much of a stretch to see the desire for extension of that devaluation into the next stage of human development?
•Wednesday-Thursday evening in on-line edition of The Star, our purported local newspaper, included the headline that Matt Damon was named by People magazine as the Sexiest Man Alive.
So this is the top story? No mention is offered on the fact that the War in Iraq is being won and that violence is significantly reduced. Nothing is offered about the bravery exhibited by American troops on the battlefield every single day.
If you haven’t cancelled your subscription to that putrid piece of politically one-sided Papp, you better get to that soon.
•And for those of you pointing to apparent hypocrisy for my reviewing the on-line edition of The Star while exhorting readers to cancel their subscriptions, I have to responsibly report how bad that newspaper really is if I’m going to convince anybody.
•By the way, do any of you really care what methods our government or armed forces uses to extract information from captured enemies in the War on Terror? Do you care whether the Architect of the 9/11 Attacks is water-boarded, denied sleep (I’d be good at resisting that one), made to stand in one place for long periods of time, made to eat very hot habanero peppers, forced to eat earthworms, had his fingernails trimmed really short so that they just start to bleed, are administered paper cuts in sensitive skin areas, forcibly made really drunk so as to loosen their resistance?
Just get the information. We don’t care what you have to do.
•Let me make it clearly understood that this KU-MU Border Showdown to end all border showdowns is enacting absolute hell on Kansas State fans the world over. I don’t care if you are manning a global temperature monitoring station in the most remote part of Pinauik; your week is going to be in the crapper just knowing that KU is battling MU for a chance at a trip to the BCS Title Game.
•That piece of business out of the way, Kansas is hotter than bacon grease right now and has not been stopped significantly since last season’s 6-6 campaign. They are charmed. But Missouri is talented and experienced and hungry enough to take everything the Jayhawks can dish out and return with s desire for more.
Tigers over KU by 7
By the way, college basketball is underway!
(The Landmark's resident expert on, among other things, global warming, rat feces and breaking wind, Brian Kubicki can be reached via email to bkubicki@kc.rr.com)
Schools are incorrect in their teaching of 'global warming' to your kids
Posted 11/16/07
•I learned this week about a “subtle” form of indoctrination going on in our elementary and middle schools. Apparently, global warming is being introduced in science classes at these levels with the tag-line that it is universally accepted and proven that man, though industrial activity, is causing global warming. Teachers are telling kids that carbon dioxide and coal are bad things that mankind should avoid. They are telling kids, quite erroneously, that man is exterminating polar bears through global warming. Such is simply not the case. In fact, polar bear populations are soaring right now due to limits placed on hunting.
Parents, you’ve got to get to your kids and tell them the truth. Man does not cause global warming – it is simply impossible. If you are looking at the carbon dioxide argument these loons use, the global atmosphere is composed of only 0.038% carbon dioxide. Of that miniscule 0.038%, man produces only 3%. To show them how little, really little, that amount is, take a pie. Cut the pie into as many uniform slices as you can manage, showing them along the way what half of the pie looks like…what one-fourth of the pie looks like…on and on until you get down to the most you can practically manage. Then explain that you could, with a very tiny long knife, cut the pie into 1000 equally sized pieces. Take 38 of those one-thousandth sized pieces and set them on a plate (there are 962 pieces left in the pan. Then cut that group of 38 one-thousandth size pieces into 100 equally sized pieces. Take 3 of those pieces. Hold them in a spoon (a really tiny spoon) and hold that over the entire pie.
Then they will understand why man doesn’t cause global warming. It is really that simple.
•In Tustin, California recently, a tree trimmer feeding branches into a wood chipper was pulled into the shredding machine and killed. The accident in the Los Angeles suburb is being investigated by OSHA. Police were called to the residential area just after 4 p.m. and found the worker’s body inside the wood chipper. It isn’t clear if the victim was a man or a woman. (Yuk!) Thirty-one people have been killed in wood chipper accidents between 1992 and 2002, according to a 2005 Journal of the American Medical Association report.
This story goes to show that landscaping is serious business. Look for the Clinton campaign to propose mandatory torque limits and rubber blades on all wood chippers.
•Political handicappers may be pulling back from their too-early pronouncements of Hillary Clinton as assumed nominee for the Democrat Party. Recent polls suggest that her lead in the early primary states has been significantly reduced, cut in half in one case (New Hampshire). Her definite overall negatives are coming to roost, and if Obama doesn’t mount a significant charge, he is going to fall back in the race for the Democrat nomination faster than Rosie O’Donnell in the Olympics 100 meter dash.
•By the way, did you hear that Rosie was vying for a TV talk show on MSNBC but tanked the opportunity at the eleventh hour when she let her mouth get in the way of her head? She apparently said something that ticked off the MSNBC folks and they told her never mind.
Somehow, I just can’t picture that.
•Can the Republicans offer a more competitive race? Here we are 6 weeks before the first primary and there are still nearly a half-dozen viable candidates. Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, Mike Huckabee, and John McCain all have varying degrees of electability. Most importantly, they aren’t at each others' throats in the campaign. That’s important for the Republican Party’s chances because the party that wins this thing will be the party that can keep the various camps amenable enough to bury their petty animosities and vote for the party’s nominee.
If the Democrats could offer this degree of diversity among their candidates, 2008 would truly be an election that defines what positions the majority of this country holds.
*A particularly intriguing aspect to this election is that both the executive and legislative branches of Congress are uniformly unpopular (though, we all know that the only polls that matter are those among actual voters), and they each represent different political parties. So what happens when you match rampant dissatisfaction with government as a whole with an election supposedly intended to sweep all of them out?
I don’t know what it means, but anyone that declares that the ‘American people speak’ in anything resembling a coherent thought through elections doesn’t really understand the average American voter. Folks, Conan the Barbarian is governor of this nation’s largest state.
•Robert Redford’s new anti-war movie opened with a massive ad campaign and rapidly sunk (O.K. IS sinking after one week) into the cesspool of Hollywood opinion-masked-as-entertainment. Do these Hollywood liberals really think America, going into the holiday season, gives a hoot what they believe about war and national defense?
•The Chiefs looked putrid against the Broncos, and have now announced that Brodie Croyle is taking over the QB spot for Damon Huard. That move is widely believed to be one that Herm Edwards has wanted to see all season, but he was over-ruled by his boss.
Herm has always said he didn’t want the offense to score so quickly because he wants his defense to get their proper rest. He’s working against that though by starting Croyle because thanks to his faster footwork, the interceptions come much quicker with Croyle.
This week in Indianapolis is going to be nasty.
•In the Big 12, nobody’s paying attention because all that matters is MU-KU at Arrowhead next week.
But MU trounces KSU.
KU trounces ISU.
OU trounces Tech; and
Oklahoma State trounces Baylor.
Lots of trouncing going on.
(Brian Kubicki trounces the global warming loons on a weekly basis here in your Landmark. Email him at bkubicki@kc.rr.com)
Is there hope that obesity can be switched off at the genetic level?
Posted 11/8/07
All those people constantly fretting that China is going to overtake the United States as an economic power can cool their heels. The latest look at the consumption of oil among the developed nations of the world shows the US at the top at about 21 billion barrels a day. China is next at about 3.5 billions barrels a day. This panoramic look at the appropriate scale of life is brought to you by the Association to Counter Anything Said By Al Gore – Brian Kubicki, Treasurer.
•Isn’t it funny how, now that the Kansas Jayhawks are in prime position to ride their wave of confidence won through a carefully-structured non-conference football schedule that took full advantage of a young team’s growing abilities on the football field, the easy schedule route to the BCS is just fine-and-dandy with the Jayhawk faithful.
Remember when Bill Snyder, who pioneered this path to the mythical college football championship in his task at the helm of the greatest resurgence of a college football program in history at Kansas State, and his faithful, were readily skewered by every Jayhawk with two brain cells aligned side-by-side for getting where they were on false pretenses because they never played anybody with a pulse in their non-conference schedule? Funny how the perception changes when a Bill Snyder disciple leads them toward the Mythical Promised Land.
Credit KU head coach Mark Mangino, who saw this season’s Big 12 conference slate lining up on the easier side of the coin and bolstered that with four non-conference foes with nary a pulse among them. The Jayhawks are riding a wave of success that might just put them over the top.
•If Missouri wins out coming up to the final tilt with Kansas, they will win the North.
•All this hooey about Hillary Clinton being picked on by all the mean old boys in the Democrat Presidential Debates is nothing more than an attempt by her campaign to subvert the real scandal rising around the Clintons yet again.
Whenever some controversy begins to surface around the Clintons, as they have always done and no doubt will continue to do, up comes a diversion from within her campaign. Before, it was the rhetoric about her cleavage right about the time that the FBI began looking into the donations her campaign had been receiving from a ramshackle tenement in San Diego. Now, all the boys are picking on her right about the time that a former donor files suit against her for what he claims are stolen favors.
•And why, whenever a Clinton enters big-time politics, Chinese and Korean Asian donors are everywhere?
•Scientists at Case Western Reserve University are toying with have genetically engineering mice that are bigger, stronger, faster, and more virile than ordinary mice. The effect seems to last well into old age.
The tale of the tape is the fascinating part of this study. The genetically modified mice were seven times more active than normal mice. The genetically engineered mice ran for 32 minutes non-stop, while the ordinary mice topped out at only 19 minutes. Interestingly enough, the genetically engineered mice ate 60% more than the other mice, but they were lean and light, and weighing half of the normal mice and their bodies had 90% less body fat.
This last fact is the most relevant for humans, if this data can be translated to humans at all. If obesity can be switched off at the genetic level, will obese Americans be obliterated from the statistics and early graves? This will be interesting to watch. Look for the findings in the latest edition of The Journal of Biological Chemistry.
•All this weeping and gnashing of teeth over the Chiefs loss to the Packers last Sunday is wrongly applied. The Packers are a good team. They are one of the better teams in the NFL. The Chiefs aren’t. The Chiefs were supposed to lose this game. The Packers have a better offense than the Chiefs’ defense. The Packers' defense was way better than the Chiefs offense. That’s the way the NFL goes.
Now as for the Denver Broncos this week, The Rat’s going down.
•And what in the world are all these Brodie Croyle fans crying about? Damon Huard is the best player the team has available at the quarterback position. Huard is a better player, taking all things important to being a QB in the NFL into account, than Croyle – right now. That may change. The problems in the Chiefs offense are more about the offensive line, blocking schemes, and play-calling than who is lined-up behind center.
•The Big 12 roundup is winding down. The North is coming down to a monstrous KU-MU rivalry tilt in a few weeks, and the South is OU’s to lose. Last week, KU and MU authored pummelings of epic proportions. Iowa State did too.
This weekend…
Nebraska edges Kansas State in the Toilet Bowl of the New Millenia; Huskers by 7.
Missouri will dismember A&M; Tigers by 31.
Iowa State nips Colorado; Cyclones by 3.
Oklahoma disembowels Baylor; Sooners by 28.
Texas levels Tech; Horns by 14
Kansas stumbles to Okie State; Cowboys by 3.
(We know this: A weekly Parallax Look can't be stopped at the genetic level. It appears each week only in your Landmark. Email the author at bkubicki@kc.rr.com)
Apparently men can look forward to bigger 'equipment' by the year 3000
Posted 11/1/07
•The surge in Iraq is working. Violence is down and Iraqis are stepping up to assume responsibility for their country. Do the “War is Lost” Harry Reid-led Democrats acknowledge those very basic facts? No. They say the surge was implemented too late. Are any of you surprised?
•Is anyone noticing that when Democrat candidates for President announce something to try to garner interest from the media, they’re always offering some massive government entitlement program that nobody can afford and requires class envy to drive the revenue stream? Hillary is almost literally handing out cash for votes. Edwards wants to give free college tuition to everybody. Obama promises he’ll give even more than Hillary.
•Have you also noticed that whenever a Republican is trying to attract attention, they’re usually reminding Americans how much Hillary’s entitlement give-aways are going to cost?
•My absolute favorite junk story of the week is the report that was forwarded by Oliver Curry from the London School of Economics, an evolution theorist (at an economic school – I’m drawing a blank on that one).
Curry claims that the human race will one day split into two separate species, an attractive, intelligent ruling elite and an underclass of dim-witted, ugly goblin-like creatures.
Supposedly, the human race will have reached its physical peak by the year 3000. We will reach between 6 ft and 7 ft in height and our life spans will grow to 120 years. Also, men will have symmetry in facial features, deeper voices and bigger reproductive “equipment” (those stats will still be self-reported however), according to Curry.
Women will all have glossy hair, smooth hairless skin, large eyes and pert breasts, according to Curry. No word on whether their reproductive “equipment” will be smaller.
You know, I think I read/saw this drama already played-out in HG Wells’ Science Fiction novel, The Time Machine, and later adapted into two films.
I’m hoping to be currently in the goblin branch…it would be depressing to think that what we are right now is the best it’s ever gonna get.
•I acknowledge that most of you readers couldn’t give a hoot about the La Raza Blackmail Extortion Scheme being foisted upon the Mayor of Kansas City, MO, (Doesn’t that sound like a better and more relevant title than the Frances Semler Issue?) and frankly, neither do I. But I thought it worth a mention that we unincorporated Platte Countians are proud of backbone exhibited in the Midwest. And backbone is certainly abundant in the skeletal makeup of the Mayor and Ms. Semler. Kudos.
•Finally, an environmental movement I can get behind! Apparently, a group of people in Maine has eschewed the traditional embalming and burial in hermetically sealed Tupperware-like coffins, for cremation or internment in simple pine boxes and into the ground you go within a couple of days.
Apparently, 60% of dead people in Maine choose cremation.
The funeral industry contends that there are bacterial concerns with not embalming a body, but unless you’re a Necrophiliac that pretty much seems to be a moot point. Six feet of earth is a pretty good bacterial insulator. They also claim that winter funerals face frozen earth in cold climates.
Yeah, I guess they’ve never discovered back-hoes for digging? Give me a break on that point. I like the thought that we came from the earth, put our corpses back into the ground so we can make something else grow.
•Unless a dramatic flurry of tropical storm activity occurs in the next couple of months, 2007 will rank as the weakest hurricane-potential year for the Northern Hemisphere in the last 30 years. Only 1977, 1981, and 1983 have had less activity to date. So much for the theory that man causes global warming and global warming causes hurricanes.
•You know, all this hoo-haw over the Chiefs being in first place in the division at nearly the half-way point (being solidified as the Broncos fall at home to the Packers at press-time in a game that was much more exciting than it was first looking to be), is not what it’s cracked-up to be. This team and season is being graded on the curve, and it’s being weighed down by a bunch of Troglodytes trying to master Basic Algebra. The NFL – particularly the AFC West--aaais down this year…way down. The Chiefs might back-in to a playoff berth, like they did last year. But even if they do, they’ll be looking at a pair of buzz saws in Indy and the Patriots, so don’t get your hopes up.
•Now if Herm unleashed his Marty-ball influence on the offense, all bets are off. This team could be special if that were to happen.
•Have you noticed the strange similarity between The Star’s Jeffrey Flanagan’s column on the media’s observances of the week’s Chiefs game delivered in very similar fashion and tone to a certain Off The Couch column created by The Landmark's beloved columnist emeritus, Greg Hall? I guess the statute of limitations has passed on theft of literary styles.
•The Big 12 saw Kansas continue their Al Bohl-enabled Magical Mystery Tour. Missouri had a strange degree of trouble with an undermanned opponent. Kansas State did what Ron Prince’s teams seaaaaaem to do – play really well when all the pressure is off. Colorado impressed in Lubbock.
This week:
Kansas State handles Iowa State, KSU by 10
Nebraska ends the tour in Lawrence, Huskers by 3
Tech handles Baylor, TT by 28
Texas falls at Okie State, Cowboys by 7
Oklahoma handles A&M, Sooners by 24
Mizzou falls at Boulder, CU by 2
(The sharp eye of Brian Kubicki gives you a Parallax Look every week. Email him at bkubicki@kc.rr.com)
Get out of the way of wildfires and let nature do its thing
Posted 10/25/07
I’m sinking in the Pigskin Picks standings faster than a “Barack Obama in 2008” button in a toilet at the Republican Debates. But I don’t care! The Chiefs are going to start losing again!
•The wildfires in our nation’s West have been dominating the news cycle lately, as they typically do this time of year. It might surprise some of you in this hyper-environmental ether we’re currently awash in to learn that wildfires have occurred for millions upon millions of years in territory such as this. Wildfires are uncontrollable fires which occur in desert-type environments that have a significant amount of shrubbery and tree growth. They are nature’s way of clearing brush and overgrowth and keeping the soil suitably fortified with nutrients.
Now Al Gore’s folks (his minions, not his parents) are completely ignoring the fact that these wildfires are putting many hundreds of times more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than the entire population of the west portion of the United States could on a particularly gassy day. It is equally hilarious that we humans, who are supposedly so very influential on the planet and its environment, can’t even make a dent in fighting these fires. Get out of the way, people, and let nature do its thing.
•What was this Ellen Degeneres deal with the dog re-gifting? I haven’t really paid attention to the whole issue much, but it seems that she took a dog off of the Doggie-Death-Row-Conveyor and then for some reason gave the dog to another family. The Doggie-Death-Row-Jailers came and took the dog back onto Death Row because they don’t want people re-gifting their dogs.
What’s the big deal? It’s not like she gave the dog to a restaurant (Ha-ha….got you on that one Pitch! I just said it was “a” restaurant). Seriously, what is the big deal? I wonder if the dog has gotten The Needle yet.
•The Chiefs are 4-3 and alone at the top of the really crummy AFC West. Some are making this into a Herm-Edwards-Is-Really-A-Genius argument, which is really ridiculous when you consider that the teams the Chiefs have beaten are really terrible, while the teams that have beaten them handily have also been trounced by the top teams in the league.
The truly salient point about where the Chiefs are and what Herm Edwards has accomplished is seen in the defense, which truly is better. But Herm should really pay at least some degree of homage to Dick Vermeil for the maturation of non-offensive players that he drafted, like Derrick Johnson, Jared Allen, Keyaron Fox, Bennie Sapp, and especially Dustin Colquitt. All are playing important roles on this team.
Just imagine how good this team would be if Herm hadn’t dismantled the offense this team once had.
•On an election note, help me out with something. Pollsters are hammering away at our phone lines. Get a caller ID box and don’t answer the calls that are from political pollsters. If you accidentally answer one, hang up when you realize what they are. Don’t answer political polls. Don’t let the media, or the organization that is going to use your responses to craft some kind of scatterbrained conclusion, know what you are thinking. The only poll that matters is the one on Election Day. Remember that.
•Did you see where Bill Maher’s HBO show, Real Time with Bill Maher was interrupted by protesters that were spouting the conspiracy theory that President Bush actually intentionally orchestrated the attacks of 9/11? In a truly hypocritical display, Maher was seen helping security shove the protesters from his audience. He also uttered a most interesting line to the effect that, “…I may have to fire my audience staff…”
Audience staff? So HBO shows intentionally craft the content of their audience, much like liberals contend the administration does? They also manhandle those that disagree with them, taking it to the point of forcibly silencing them from expressing their views.
Isn’t that what liberals have accused the Bush Administration of doing, particularly in not heeding the cries of the liberal anti-war left to get out of Iraq?
•The Republican debate Sunday night was an interesting expression of unity. The candidates have all accepted and vociferously expressed a theme of Hillary-Must-Be-Destroyed.
Mrs. Clinton has been accepted as the target of the Republican Party and though the various and numerous candidate array remains at odds on a number of issues, they all understand the central goal is to keep Hillary Clinton out of the White House.
That gave me a very warm feeling.
•Whew…the Big 12 has become topsy-turvy with traditional bottom-dwellers on top and traditional powers heading for the bottom. Kansas escaped from Boulder with a hard-fought victory on the road over a questionable foe. Missouri took on the nation’s top offense and pounded them. Kansas State scored 39 points on the road and still lost thanks to a porous run defense. Nebraska got pounded again at home (what!?!). Texas and Oklahoma rolled.
This week:
Colorado loses to Tech in a nail-biter; Tech by 7
Iowa State gets pummeled by Mizzou in Columbia; Tigers by 21
Nebraska gets annihilated at Texas; Horns by 21
K-State heals against Baylor; Cats by 18
Kansas falls for the first time at College Station; A&M by 3
OU and O-State are sleeping in this week.
(Like a wildfire, Brian Kubicki does his thing in a natural way each week for The Landmark. Email him at bkubicki@kc.rr.com)
You won't always get small government from GOP, never get it from Democrats
Posted 10/18/07
We are nearing perhaps the most important time in any presidential election. That is the last few months before the presidential primaries begin.
I mark this time as important because typically, this is the last time you can talk to a supporter of another candidate in your party and know that they are listening to what you are saying. Once the primaries kick off, war is on and you’re as likely to gain sympathy from the other side within your party as you are getting Al Gore to admit he really doesn’t know anything about global warming.
So before the gloves come off, listen up folks. I’m not sure which Republican I am going to support for president. It’s coming down to Fred or Mitt. I know that I will not support any Democrat in 2008 (or ever for that matter – brain surgery wouldn’t devolve me to that degree). That’s the only sure thing. But the key is this…no matter who wins the Republican nomination, they will get my vote. I disagree with much of what Rudy, McCain, etc. believe – and I disagree with darn near everything Ron Paul espouses.
But even if Paul gets the nomination, he gets my vote. He gets it because even he is worlds better than any Democrat and especially Hillary Clinton. Look at the platforms of each party. These elections are not about a particular candidate. They are about the party and what the party stands for. Think of it this way: if you want small government from your candidate, you may not always get it with a Republican, but you will never get it with a Democrat in office. It’s really that simple.
So stay friendly with your neighbor Republicans – we’re all pushing the cart in the same direction.
You Democrats keep on hating each other. You’re good to go.
•As I’ve mentioned before, we have a dog. I’ve also often maintained that I am not a dog person, but this one’s O.K. He’s a cross-breed between a beagle and a pug, but he’s more on the side of a beagle because he’s small-to-medium sized and he’s really quick and fast. If he’s done something wrong, like grabbing a pair of socks out of the dirty clothes hamper, he’s nearly impossible to catch. As dogs go, he’s no Steven Hawking.
So the problem we’re having is the dog will climb up on the furniture. The dog trainer told us dogs do that in an effort to gain dominance in the house – kind of like the alpha dog gaining the high ground. So we’re supposed to command that the dog get off the furniture as soon as we see him jump on it. That’s fine. As soon as I see him jump on the couch, I clap my hands and he gets down. He gets back up, and I clap and holler and he gets back down. It’s to the point where he sees me and he jumps off the couch.
The problem is, when I come downstairs, my family is lounging around watching TV or playing on the computer and the dog is looking at me from his comfortable perch on the couch? I can keep the dog off the couch. My problem is I can’t get the family to pay attention long enough to keep the dog off the couch! I need a Family Whisperer.
•A new study on abortion worldwide recently published revealed that one in five pregnancies ends in an abortion.
The study noted that raw abortion numbers have fallen in recent years. “Unsafe” abortion, it was noted, is concentrated in developing countries. The study included the statement, “Ensuring the need for contraception is met and that all abortions are safe will reduce maternal mortality substantially and protect maternal health.”
I take it from that statement we are to assume that fetal health statistics are pretty much constant. As a matter of fact, whether the need for contraception is met or not, fetal mortality remains at 100%.
Please, someone explain to me, what is a “safe abortion?” How exactly is an abortion safe for the baby?
•Why did Al Gore get the Nobel Peace Prize? Is there anything more ridiculous? How is advocating worldwide socialism and death to market-driven capitalism an advocacy of and for peace? I thought global warming was a scientific issue. How can a scientific issue be fodder for a peace award?
Dr. William Gray, a pioneering climatologist at Colorado State University, has long maintained that global warming is a natural cycle and man is not enough of an influence on the global environment to even be mentioned in the same breath as one required to say, “global warming.”
Your factoid of the week to bring up the next time somebody around you cries about global warming: if man is causing global warming, and this recent slight warming is not a natural cycle, how did the planet escape from no less than 7 global ice ages before man was ever around?
•Last week in the Big 12, Nebraska melted-down, Kansas maintained the impression of a leader, Missouri stumbled, Kansas State handled Colorado, and Iowa State assumed the position.
This week:
Baylor takes one on the chin from Texas, Horns by 28
Nebraska takes another one on the chin. Aggies by 7
Missouri gets hit again, Tech by 14
Kansas State gets poked, Cowboys by 10
Kansas slips, Buffs by 3
Iowa State is helped over the fence rail, Sooners by 21
(Landmark columnists will never win a prize for peace but will answer your emails. Talk to Brian via email to bkubicki@kc.rr.com)
Constitution says nothing about protection from telephone sales pitches
Posted 10/11/07
•You know, every time we read about or hear a news reader talking about the presidential campaign we’re told that a particular candidate is “leading” or “has opened up a lead.”
No they haven’t.
Presidential elections are not races. They are one-day polls. The only polls taken that mean anything are perhaps the ones taken days before the elections – but even they pale in importance to the election.
Races are what horses run. And in those, the finish is all that matters.
•The Federal Do Not Call List is about to expire. Stop! Let it die. This is a classic example of allowing the federal government to step into an area where it isn’t needed. The Constitution says nothing about protecting us from sales pitches delivered by telephone. Control it yourself. Buy an answering machine. Get caller ID on your phone line. Don’t answer a cell phone call from a number you don’t recognize. Retain your God-given liberty. Reduce the size and scope of government!
•Has anyone just told Chiefs play-by-play voice Mitch Holthus that calling Larry Johnson, “The Centaur” is incredibly childish and just plain lame?
Maybe it’s just that nobody’s told him. Just take him aside and let him know
•Human remains were recently found in a wooded area just off of a main highway exit south of KC….a human skull is found in the Little Blue River…they’d have never found little Sam and Lindsey Porter had the police not found something their father feared and used it to get him to tell them where they were. We all seem to think this kind of thing is more prevalent now because it’s on the media all the time. I tend to believe it’s just because the media is going all the time and needs to fill air time with this stuff.
You ever wonder how many people are killed and their remains are never found? I’ll bet there are more people who are dispatched in relatively discreet manners and are never found than those that die through somebody else’s hand and are found. I’ll have to look into statistics for that. I wonder if there are stats on missing people that are never recovered.
•In the case of the skull found in the Blue River, the story goes that there were two fishermen casting their lines into the Little Blue River, when they noticed an object floating in the water nearby. They apparently recognized it as a human skull at some point and contacted the police.
•What the “official” record doesn’t impart is that (I’ve gotta believe anyway) these two guys set the skull on the bank, went back to fishing for awhile, thought about keeping the skull as a souvenir, drank a couple more beers, then called the police, sometime around 3 p.m.
•In a surprising case of empathy, Michael Devlin, the accused kidnapper and child molester pled guilty to the charges that would keep him in prison for the rest of his life. He did so, foregoing a trial, because he said (in part) that he wanted to spare the boys the emotional pain of a long and drawn-out trial.
You suppose there’s a criminal defense lawyer out there waiting in the wings ready to file an appeal that Devlin was not properly represented because his public defender “failed” his client by not formulating a completely falsified and convoluted defense? Let’s hope not.
•We learned recently that the percentage of the U.S. population under age 65 without health insurance increased last year to about 18 percent, or about 46 million people. 15% was the previously accepted figure, translating, of course to 85% of the population, or almost 250,000,000 people, DO possess some form of health insurance.
Some relevant details: Nearly 63 percent of the uninsured workers or 29,000,000 are self-employed or working in private-sector firms with fewer than 100 employees. O.K, so small companies, are clearly deciding that health care is not in their affordable range. Speaking as a small business man, I’ve been there. I’m cool with that. Can we call them, “self-insured?”
Also, about one-third of all the uninsured persons last year were in families with annual incomes of less than $20,000. So since Medicare or Medicaid covers 45 million people suggests that Medicare or Medicaid is being used by people that make more than $20,000 per year.
Further, about 7 percent of people in families with annual incomes of $75,000 or more were uninsured. So there indeed ARE people that clearly CAN afford health insurance that simply choose not to. Again, I am fine with that. I’ve been there in my life.
So once you pare-out those that are simply self-insuring, those that use Medicaid, those at the entry to the workforce that are young and healthy and don’t need insurance, all the 13 million illegal aliens who shouldn’t be insured, where is the problem that we need social healthcare to fix?
•Were any of you surprised by the Chiefs performance against the Jags Sunday? Jacksonville is a good team – especially on defense. The Chiefs are not a particularly good team. They have no cohesive offensive plan. They have the equivalent of a competent offense with its arms and legs cut off.
Meanwhile, a disgruntled Larry Johnson and apparently also rookie receiver Dwayne Bowe are pouting and disrupting any semblance of team unity. This is a critical time for Herm Edwards. Will he take control of the team and straighten out the crooked arrows?
Can he?
The next few weeks should tell.
•On the Big 12 front, my prediction record is about as accurate as Elton John’s monthly cycle. But to all my KU faithful readers, I must give your team my props. They came to Manhattan and showed Ron Prince how Bill Snyder disciples coach college football in Manhattan. As a faithful K-State alum, I can only hope Ron Prince is half as smart as he talks, because he was woefully out-coached last Saturday.
This week:
Kansas has a let-down and will fall to Baylor (happened for them – it’ll happen against them) Baylor by 1
Oklahoma State shocks the wounded and bleeding Huskers in their crib…OSU by 10
Texas heals themselves at Ames…UT by 10
A&M falls to Tech…TTech by 14
MU falls to OU….OU by 7
KState falls to CU at home….CU by 10
(Brian Kubicki can't protect you from sales pitches over the phone, but he will listen to your sales pitch if you send it to bkubicki@kc.rr.com)
Clarence Thomas proves it's possible to reach heights coming from depths
Posted 10/05/07
This has been a slow week for big news. Maybe it’s just me.
•The big NASCAR race was held at the Kansas Speedway last weekend and for all the attention given to the event, (and all the global warming gases polluting the environment!) it seems like an incredible letdown for an uber-competitive event to allow the winner of the race to be determined to be the person who hasn’t got enough gas in his tank to even limp across the finish line under cautionary yellow flag (hold your positions) conditions. (Almost sounds like I know NASCAR don’t it?)
Next thing you know, somebody’s going to say I look like Jeff Foxworthy.
•Did you catch the Hillary Clinton cackle she uttered that has made the rounds of conservative talk-radio all last week? She apparently has determined in advance of these interviews that she would respond to attacks on her political positions with a guttural laughter – apparently indicating she is utterly flabbergasted at the ludicrousness of the question or inlaying assumptions.
I’m not sure what she was trying to do, but it appeared less than genuine and was actually kind of creepy….like Vincent Price in, “Dr. Phibes Rises Again” kind of creepy.
•The Chiefs learned Sunday what the NFL has been learning all season so far. That is the reality that Norv Turner is no Marty Schottenheimer. The Chargers, who have more weapons on both sides of the ball than perhaps any team in the NFL in 2007, have lost their focus, it seems. Attribute that to Schottenheimer, the fatally flawed head coach who is perhaps the best regular season head football coach in NFL history that can’t close the deal in the playoffs to save his life.
Turner has been a great offensive coordinator wherever he has gone, but has failed as head coach every time he has been entrusted with that responsibility. Was that eery hearing the Charger fans chanting “Marty….Marty…Marty…” at the end of the game or what?
That being established, the Chiefs seem to have latched onto something offensively while Herm Edwards was improving the defense. Dwayne Bowe is something very special and Damon Huard is figuring that out and Tony Gonzalez is being pushed for the position of the go-to guy in the receiving corps, and that is making Tony G. better.
LJ can’t figure any of it out, and he is back to his pouting mode.
When is Priest Holmes coming back?
•And for you Chiefs fans that are already spouting Super-Bowl-bound – take a breath. This team is hardly New England/Indianapolis good. They’re not even in that league. They’ve got a rookie receiver trying to make a name for himself. They’ve got a journeyman perennial backup quarterback that may have found a Terrell Owens to resurrect his career.
They have a rejuvenated defense that is half old/half new. And they still have a pouting and underperforming running back.
Super Bowl teams are rarely made from that raggedy old set of ingredients.
•Anybody catch the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas interview on 60 Minutes Sunday? I’m anxious to get a copy of his new book, “My Grandfather’s Son,” in which he describes how a young boy comes out of abject poverty in the racist South to end up as an Associate Supreme Court Justice.
It was particularly amusing re-watching the scolding that the then-unconfirmed Judge Thomas gave the Senate Judiciary Committee when the Democrat-controlled Congressional panel spent considerable time looking into sexual harassment claims that were made 10-years after they supposedly occurred. I cannot recall a more putrid collection of looks on a panel of senators than we saw on the mugs of Sens. Biden and Metzenbaum when Thomas declared their investigation, “…a hi-tech lynching of uppity blacks…” That was historically priceless.
On that subject, it has been difficult for me to find the “right voice” in warning people why Hillary Clinton as president of the United States sends a very bad message to young people. But this Clarence Thomas book seems to have wafted the chaff off the top of the pond.
You see, I am happy, and eager, to take the message of the story of Clarence Thomas to my children, and to young people in general, as a clear message of hope that no matter how far down you start, you can make it in this country. Because of the free market, freedom, and liberty, a poor child born in a house without electricity or indoor plumbing and shackled by mid-20th century racism, can reach the Supreme Court of the United States. When a person reaches heights like that from the depths that this country has, we are eager to show others what’s possible. It’s truly inspiring.
My wife is a very smart person. She has achieved much in her personal and especially in her professional life. She has done so armed only with the strength of her intellect and the degree of persistence in her work ethic. Whatever Hillary Clinton achieves in her political life, she has gotten it the cost of her self-respect as a woman and a spouse. Her husband has wiped their marriage with a swath of rancid infidelity that any spouse can see with 20-200 vision. She has pretended to have been fooled on each and every occasion of his infidelity, apparently because he can bring her political power she cannot earn on her own.
When women of her ilk attain political power, it is seen not as the result of her intellect or work ethic, but as a compromise of her self respect as a woman and a spouse.
There are far too many women out there that have earned power and respect for their achievements through their own legitimate qualities to allow representation by the likes of a professional victim like Hillary Clinton. They deserve better. They’ve earned better.
•For all the money being spent out at the Kansas Speedway, why don’t they have lights?
•Last week in the Big 12, Kansas State set the nation on-notice that they are to be considered a contender in the Big 12 North by throttling Top 10 ranked Texas on National TV. The Sooners yakked on a bone in their prime rib in Boulder. Nebraska gave up another 500 yards but outpointed Iowa State. A&M eviscerated Baylor.
•This week, we have the slate to end all slates. This much entertainment deserves a more detailed breakdown game-by-game.
Kansas at Kansas State starts the morning off with a bang at 11 a.m. The Wildcats are coming off a head-turning performance in Austin. The Jayhawks have pummeled four non-conference opponents in Lawrence with a combined record of 4-13. This one won’t be close. KSU by 21
Oklahoma vs. Texas at 2:30 p.m. resumes their annual Red River Shoot-Out. The only difference is this time; both teams are coming off unexpected losses. Look for only the Sooners to rebound however, OU by 14
Iowa State at Texas Tech at 6pm…probably the least compelling matchup should be interesting to see what Tech can do the week after posting 75 on a cupcake. Tech by 10
Colorado at Baylor at 6:05pm…the second least compelling match-up, but a good game nonetheless. Baylor falls in a toss-up nail biter.
Oklahoma State at Texas A&M at 6:30 p.m. This one’s for the lead position in the South. Look for A&M to assume the mantle, at least temporarily. A&M by 7.
And Nebraska at Missouri at 8:15 p.m. closes out the evening with a game that will likely feature only a handful of punts. Look for MU by 10.
They’ve got more offense than the Huskers, are at home, and Nebraska is still questioning their defense, which is not what you want to be doing going into Columbia at 9:00 at night.
(Ask Brian Kubicki what he would like to do be doing in Columbia at 9 p.m. via email to bkubicki@kc.rr.com)
Empathy for Katrina victims has statute of limitations
Posted 9/28/07
My little story about the tortilla chips that gave their life for the sake of real estate commerce seems to have struck a chord with a number of you. Thanks for the input. I’ll see if there are more where that came from.
•The word is that President Bush has been counseling the Democrat hopefuls to stay fluid in their statements and positions relative to Iraq because they don’t want to pin themselves into a corner where they have only one option should they indeed win the White House
He’s such a nice fellow.
He’s also way smarter than any of the candidates out there, at least on the Democrat side of the aisle. These slow-witted, mono-thinking “GET-OUT, GET-OUT NOW” people aren’t seeing the forest for the trees.
Both sides in this country politically have got to realize that if a fledgling democracy is not given time to strengthen itself, Iraq will indeed become an al Qaida theocracy that will attract terrorists like ABC’s The View attracts the intellectually vapid. (I’m sorry – not really, but in a minimalist way — to again throw spit wads at that show but criminy, one of the hosts last week actually said that she wasn’t aware that the earth was not indeed flat.)
If they keep catering to the dreams and desires of the far left, they are going to have no recourse but to drop-and-run-away from the Middle East, and that is very dangerous for America.
•These incidents of violence among peoples divided only along racial lines, such as the Jena, LA incident and another recently in Norfolk, VA allow those that want racial separation to continue to vent their insanity on the rest of the nation. As long as we separate ourselves culturally along skin color lines, there are going to be violent acts among different races. No color lines is the only answer.
•Did you know that convicted double-murderer and Death Row inmate Scott Peterson has allegedly become pen pals with fellow Death Row inmate, the infamous mass murderer Richard Ramirez, A.K.A The Night Stalker that terrorized LA and San Francisco in the 1980’s?
Are they ever going to kill these losers?
•The Monday Night Football game in New Orleans was again focused on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina – can we move along already? What about all the Florida hurricanes that have hit since Katrina? Why aren’t we revisiting them with an NFL contest? What about Greensburg, Kansas? When is the NFL going to have a benefit game for those residents – their entire town was destroyed by a natural disaster.
I’m tired of hearing about Katrina victims. I have empathy, of course, for anyone caught in a natural disaster. But my empathy has a statute of limitations. They had former Saints great Archie Manning urging people to come back to New Orleans to spend their fat, green, American dollars.
Unfortunately, Katrina reminded America that there are a lot of people that populate New Orleans that are too stupid to heed warnings to get out when the hurricane approached – and yes, they were warned in advance. I heard the warnings. They heard the warnings. They didn’t act, and those dimwits have become the face of the city. So now, nobody wants to go back to that, apparently.
I don’t blame them. There are casinos and hedonism in every U.S. city nowadays. And gumbo plus a quality etouffee is available everywhere.
•The Chiefs post-victory analysis has included a number of gems. Hey folks, you gotta admit – the defense is better. The defensive line is getting penetration. The linebacking is pretty solid. The secondary is aging but smart. They shut down a very so-so Viking offense in the second half when they had to.
The offense is…well…a unique and not-so-interesting exercise in the Carolina Tarheel Four Corners stall offense. In the first half, they seemed to be more willing to run the clock and avoid a turnover than they were to actually play football and establish a lead in the game.
You know going from the Vermeil-Saunders high-flying point-a-minute offensive juggernaut to the Edwards-Solari You-Score-Seven-Quickly-And-I’ll-Kick-You-In-The Nads offense is like going from accidentally wandering into an NFL cheerleaders’ locker room to accidentally wandering into the ladies’ restroom at the Shady Acres Retirement Home on bean burrito Friday.
•What in the name of David Duke are the powers-that-be at Columbia University in New York doing accepting Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a speaker? I don’t need to tell you everything this clown has said or stood for – you’ve heard it all. It’s enough for me that he was one of the Iranians involved with taking and holding the American hostages back in the Carter Administration.
What’s compounded this lunacy was that the Columbia University President Lee Bollinger commented in defense of the university that they would accept Hitler as a speaker, if of course (stand by for important disclaimer) he were willing to debate his controversial positions.
I’m curious if Mr. Bollinger would be debating Hitler’s various extermination techniques with the Fuhrer?
Unbelievable!
•The Big 12 is starting conference play (finally), with a semi-interesting slate:
Baylor grabs the fence rail against the Aggies. A&M by 14
Sooners roll over the Buffs by 31
Iowa State falls in a nail-biter in Lincoln, NU by 3
Kansas State falls to the Horns, Texas by 10
Tech annihilates Northwestern State by 40
Sam Houston State gives up the Alamo to Oklahoma State, Cowboys by 30.
Next week is an unbelievable slate. We will know much about the 2007 Big 12 after next week is played-out.
(Ask Brian about his other statutes of limitations via email to bkubicki@kc.rr.com)
OJ's got to think he can simply get away with anything
Posted 9/21/07
Did you hear Sen. Hillary Clinton blathering on last week about having to go through a “…willing suspension of disbelief…” in listening to what most of America clearly has no difficulty in understanding and believing – that, of course being the Senate testimony of Gen. David Petraeus, the Commander of the Multi-National Force in Iraq.
The good General gave what most believe was an honest account of the good, the bad, and the ugly in the war in Iraq, and the aspirant Senator decided before she was able to digest much of anything that she would have a purposeful desire to pretend to suspend her ability to disbelieve what she was hearing.
Nice to see that this testimony, which the Democrat-led Congress asked for in the first place, was something they would approach with open minds.
Somebody should kick Hillary in the shins with hard-soled shoes. This is serious stuff, lady. I’m no fan of the Princess of the Pantsuit, but if she wants to be seriously considered on the national stage, she’s going to have to do better than “willing suspension of disbelief.”
•The UK (not Portuguese – my bad last week) couple whose 4-year old daughter has gone missing, the McCanns, are now apparent suspects in the disappearance of their daughter.
Rumors are flying about, but apparently, the child’s DNA turned-up in a car the couple had rented 25 days after the child was reported missing. How that could reasonably happen under any circumstance is highly improbable, one would think. But, I could envision taking my child’s diaper bag or something that might have had her DNA on it previously and tossing it into the trunk of the car.
If it turns out that they did this, there is going to be some massive worldwide outrage, especially on the part of the celebrities that have contributed to reward funds.
•What is this Nanny-State BS I’m hearing over the State of Missouri mandating that children, up to the weight of 80 lbs., be restrained in child seats? Are you kidding me? Kate Moss and half of the cast of Desperate Housewives would be car seated under that scenario. Give me a cotton-picking break!
•OJ has been arrested again. The world’s luckiest-yet-dumbest man has been implicated in an armed robbery involving memorabilia that he felt still belonged to him. People seem surprised that OJ Simpson is caught up in this armed robbery case and that he could possibly risk going to jail again after his famous double murder case of the early 1990’s.
I am not the least bit surprised.
OJ Simpson got away with double murder of his wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. The criminal law system says he is innocent of the crimes. After staying out of jail on the double murder charge, OJ’s got to think he can get away with anything. That is the stupidity that leads to his doing things like being involved with an armed robbery.
•OJ wasn’t a crafty devil to get away with slashing the throats of his ex-wife and the young Mr. Goldman. His case showed how a crafty defense and an overmatched prosecution can be employed in our loopy criminal justice system to acquit a double murderer of the charges.
•My final anti-government rant is about these signs I keep seeing approaching road construction sites. “Hit a Road Worker, Automatic Fine $10,000.”
Now if I do accidentally hit a road construction worker, I’m no doubt going to face involuntary manslaughter charges, not to mention a civil lawsuit brought by the worker’s family. That $10,000 the state government is collecting isn’t going to the family. Why should the government be profiting off of the death of road workers, and if they are going to be stupid enough to do so, why is a human life only worth $10,000?
Hell, we’ve all paid individually way more than that in taxes. Why are we paying more than we are apparently worth?
•Boy, am I in trouble! We’re selling our house. So we’ve got someone coming by to look at the place and we’re all in mad scramble to get things picked up and cleaned up.
Apparently that helps sell a house. It hasn’t worked so far.
So you also have to clear the counters of most everything moveable, so all the cabinets and drawers are overflowing with stuff. We had an unopened bag of tortilla chips on the counter and no place to stash it, so naturally, I put the bag into the oven. It’s out of the way. It’s dry. No problem.
Well that is until I turn the oven on the next day to pre-heat it for a 425 degree pizza bake. My oldest son says, “Hey Dad, the oven’s on fire!” Sure enough, there’s a nice flame going in the oven and smoke beginning to billow around the oven door.
I wisely resisted the urge to open the oven door and turned off the oven thermostat/switch and allowed the flames to extinguish. I hollered to the family downstairs that we had a minor fire up here, so don’t mind the smell and I directed the son to go up and turn on the attic fan. I opened a window over the sink, creating a nice natural draft current for the smoke.
So my lovely wife comes on the scene and asks what happened. I told her how the bag of chips dove in the oven to save our lives and she goes ballistic. “What are the chips doing in the over?” I respond, “Hiding from the potential home buyers.” She retorts, sternly, “I had those stashed away in the pantry. Why did you move them?”
I mean, come on. I accidentally incinerate an innocuous bag of tortilla chips and she’s acting like I accidentally turned the oven on with one of the kids curled up inside.
I guess my wife really likes tortilla chips.
•What ever happened to Gene Gene The Dancing Machine?
•The Big 12 saw some interesting matchups last week. Nebraska got brought back to earth. Missouri, Kansas State, and Kansas did what they were supposed to do. Baylor got a win. So did Iowa State. Oklahoma State elicited raised brows, as did Texas. Colorado plays out Gary Barnett’s uber-tough schedule. OU, A&M and Tech yawned.
This week…
Texas A&M @ Miami (Fla.) A&M over the Canes in a nailbiter by 3.
Oklahoma @ Tulsa Kaboom. Sooners +40
Ball State @ Nebraska, Huskers by 10
Illinois State @ Missouri, Tigers by 21
Miami (Ohio) @ Colorado, Buffs by 7
Texas Tech @ Oklahoma State, Tech in a laugher by 24
Baylor @ Buffalo, Buffalo by 7
Florida International @ Kansas, Jayhawks by 21
Iowa State @ Toledo, Cyclones by 3
Rice @ Texas, Longhorns by 14
Leaving a four-year-old pair of two-year-olds alone unacceptable
Posted 9/14/07
•The case of these Portuguese parents that apparently lost their 4 year old daughter on an evening when the two parents left the little girl in their vacation hotel room with her 2 year old twin siblings while they went out to dinner with friends has now turned on the parents as possible suspects.
The media here in America is all over defending the parents as victims of a tragedy that apparently befell their daughter.
Many will (and have) audibly criticized the parents for the lunacy of leaving such young children alone in a hotel room in a strange place to them.
Many others have defended the parents, saying they’re | 
