One Man's Vote

USPS screws the pooch again. No wonder dogs dislike postmen.

Collectors Discover Flag Stamp Has 14 Stripes

Wednesday, August 06, 2008

By Sara Bonisteel

Fox News

NEW YORK — The devil, as they say, is in the details.

So when an astute stamp collector recently discovered that one of the Old Glorys in the U.S. Postal Service's "Flags 24/7" series appears to have 14 stripes, it was bound to send a wave of excitement through the philatelic community.

"Is there any icon better-known to Americans than their own flag?" said Fred Baumann, a spokesman for the American Philatelic Society. "This is something somebody should have caught along the way."

Er. No kidding. But at least the artist doesn't appear to be at fault:

David E. Failor, a manager of Stamp Services for the Postal Service, said the extra stripe came from a design flaw. A white line, he said, was added to provide definition to the flag.

"It was not part of the original artwork," Failor said. "Normally we would send the change back through our fact-checking process. In the case of this change we didn't do that so the mistake was not recognized. It was brought to our attention after the stamps were issued."

(...)

The Postal Service plans to let the "Flags 24/7" series stay on the market, extra stripe and all, and will continue to be printed until the next stamp-price increase.

"They will remain on sale as is," Betts said. "But we acknowledge the error."

Well, that's good. I'd hate to see all those stamps go to waste and the price of postage have to go up AGAIN.

Let's face it: Most police work is reactive, not proactive. If you think for one minute that the police authorities anywhere are spending the vast majority of their time trying to prevent rather than to solve crime, I think you are living in a dream world.

So it's nice to see this in today's Indy Star:

"Indy's just getting nuts, man," said Byron Alston, director of Save the Youth, an Eastside neighborhood social services program. "We can't blame the police no more. It's up to us."

Well, regardless of bad grammar, no shit, Sherlock. The fact is that you never could blame the police. The problem was right there on your doorstep, in your community, and you should have dealt with it firmly.

If people had taken that attitude back in 1998 when we had 162 murders (one of them the lady who lived right across the hall from me, who was shot dead in the common foyer by her idiot ex-boyfriend about six feet from where I was sleeping in my bedroom) instead of whining about how the police weren't doing their job, maybe we wouldn't be in this situation today.

And this is in the running for "most stupid thing I've ever heard of."

The harsh reality of the rise in recent homicides will be on display today as a procession of hearses winds through Indianapolis streets.

Marion County funeral directors will lead the "Stop the Violence -- Peace in the Streets" hearse caravan starting at 5:30 p.m., from Glendale Town Center.

"The overall purpose is to promote peace in the streets and to show the community, especially the young people, that death is final," said Angela Grundy-Sallee, who helped organize the event.

The line of up to 20 hearses will leave the mall at 6101 N. Keystone Ave. from the parking lot facing Rural Street. The 32-mile route around the city's Eastside is expected to take a little more than an hour.

And absolutely no criminal is going to care.

This brings to mind my recent post on the futility of political action. Don't make big splashes in hopes of Jesus moments amongst the criminal class -- it's not going to happen. Go home and bring your children up to respect life, authority, and other people's property. Keep them off drugs and off the streets. Make sure they don't drop out of school. And insist that communities police their own instead of expecting the police to do it for them.

Online shopping seems to be the way I buy just about anything these days except clothes (and I just bought a new Geoffrey Beane tux shirt through Amazon, so even that isn't sacred) and groceries.

The only problem is: What the fuck do you do with all the boxes?

I hate flattening the damn things and then you have to either bundle them up for the trash or find someplace that accepts them for recycle. While we certainly do save on gasoline by ordering online, it seems like all that one-time-use cardboard is a serious waste. (Yeah, I know, it's probably recycled to begin with. I still have to dispose of it, and the recycling industry is probably one of the biggest polluters on the planet, so I don't recycle unless I am a guest in your home and you're militant about it.)

It's a conundrum.

Indeed.

Via Kathy. (Happy Birthday to Kathy's blog! Be sure to hit her tip jar, she needs the cash to fight the Power.)

Observe:

A British judge trying a knife-crime case stunned the court by pulling out a blade.

Campaign groups blasted Judge Roger Connor after he brandished a knife in front of a teenage defendant charged with wounding someone with a blade.

The 16-year-old’s lawyer asked Connor if he was committing an offense — and was told it was acceptable because the blade was less than 3 inches long.

Connor got out the folding black-handled knife at Oxford Crown Court to show how it worked. The boy, who denies wounding with intent and assault, had admitted using a knife and claimed he needed only one hand to open it.

Connor asked: "It happens I have a folding knife in my pocket. You need two hands to open it, don’t you?"

Under English and Welsh law it is an offense to carry in public a blade longer than 3 inches without good reason.

Furious anti-knife crime campaigners called last night for the judge to be fired.

"He should lose his job. One teenager a week is being murdered on the streets of Britain and here he is brandishing a knife," Lyn Costello, co-founder of the Mothers Against Murder and Aggression campaign group, said.

"Enough is enough – we need to get tough on knives in this country and our judges should be handing out tough sentences, not brandishing their own."

"We need to get tough on knives in this country."

Just like you got tough on guns? And see how well that worked out.

Any country that coddles its criminals and jails self-defenders gets what it deserves. The judge should have stabbed the little shit and let him die in a pool of his own blood. That would have sent a message. (Just kidding. Sort of.)

Oh, and I can open my electrician's knife one-handed. But it has a four inch blade, so I guess I'd be in violation in England.

Fox News headline right now: "Homeowners In A Vice"

Call the cops.

Or maybe you meant a vise?

Jeez.

Glenn Reynolds sometimes posts the oddest shit, makes a personal comment regarding it, and pretty much leaves you wondering, "huh?"

Maybe he ought to read this about that.

My best guess is that if his niece had an allergic reaction to chlorine fumes, one or more of the following were the case:

- The pool had recently been shocked due to a fecal incident.
- The pool was just plain over-chlorinated.
- The ventilation of the room was sub-optimal.

My wife works daily in an indoor pool (two indoor pools, actually), and while you certainly get the scent of chlorine in the air, it doesn't overwhelm you. I can vouch for the fact, though, that one of the pools used to use an older system for chlorination that not only smelled much worse, but left Sally herself smelling like chlorine until she showered. When they switched that pool to a more modern liquid chlorine system, it made a noticeable difference. They also replaced the ventilation system in that pool room a couple of years ago and that cut the odor even more.

Sally did once have a nasty reaction to the bromine they used to use in the hot tubs, but that was also changed to liquid chlorine after a number of people had skin issues from it. No problems since then that I know of (and she would have told me).

When I read the article Glenn linked to, I was unimpressed (most greenie blogs strike me that way -- all emotion, little actual science). The one research link inside that article appeared to go to a site maintained by a professor at some university who has a feather up his butt about the dangers of chlorine. What intrigued me was that with the exception of one paper he cited that was published in 2003, all of the papers he cited were a decade or more old.

Bottom line: If you want people to get sick and die, stop chlorinating water.

Otherwise, you are invited to STFU.

(I will make the point that I believe Veolia Water heavily over-chlorinates city water in Indianapolis. When the shower room smells like a swimming pool after running water for a couple of minutes, they're putting way too much chlorine into the system.)

Instapundit also reports that "Obama Campaign Prints German-language Flyers for Berlin Rally" (see here).

Frankly, I couldn't give a damn about what the Germans think when it comes to our elections. This kind of crap ought to automatically disqualify B. Hussein Obama from holding any elective or appointive office in the United States, as far as I'm concerned.

A spokesman said that out of 2 billion passengers screened nationwide since 9-11, there have been only 110,000 abuse complaints.

One complaint is too many.

Full outrageous story here. H/T: Instapundit, who notes, "When the airlines collapse, this will be why."

Amen to that.

Brian Jensen at Hoosier Access has a piece comparing Gary's reduced murder rate to Indianapolis's murder spike, and wondering when Indy denizens are going to get "mad as hell" and "not take it anymore". Leaving unspoken my thought that the per-capita murder rates probably don't compare quite the same way between our two glorious cities, I commented there more or less as follows:

It’s really easy to say that we as citizens are mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore. It’s a lot harder to actually figure out how mitigation of what we’re mad as hell about is going to be accomplished.

Maybe we should, I dunno, like, give Ballard a chance. He’s only been in office for six months. Eight years of Peterson/Democrat incompetence is not going to be overcome easily in the short term.

But as I think Matt Tully said in his GannettStar column the other day, at the same time, where are the churches? Where are the community organizations? Why is everybody sitting on their butt waiting for the Mayor to magically produce salvation? If you want to clean up the town, get out there and start cleaning it up. Stop waiting for the government to do it for you (they usually screw it up anyway). Take some bloody responsibility for a change. No matter what plan the Mayor comes up with, I’ll bet it’s going to require public participation.

P.J. O’Rourke reported years ago after the first Gulf War that after entering Kuwait City, you couldn’t even go out on the roof of your hotel without wearing a helmet and body armor because of all the idiots firing their guns in the air in celebration. This eventually caused one of his companions to lean over the parapet and shout, “STOP IT! STOP IT! STOP IT! Get a f***ing broom and a mop and CLEAN UP THIS F***ING COUNTRY!”

OK, then. Everybody, let’s get a broom and a mop, and let’s clean up this effin’ city. Run the bums off the sidewalks, get the panhandlers out of the medians, and lock up the drug dealers and the hookers and the gamblers. Tell the gang-banger teens and twenty-somethings to pull up their pants, turn their hats around, and get haircuts and jobs. Remind people that nobody is too poor to pick up their yard, and that the dole is meant to be temporary. And so forth. Bottom line, teach people to take pride in themselves, their neighborhoods, and their city.

So, when do we start?

In response, another commenter yclept "IndyRacer57" suggested a big public meeting, perhaps on the Circle, to put criminals on notice, comparing it to the tax protests of last summer and fall. I commented further, more or less, that I for one am not interested in an "event". As noted above, I’m interested in people taking a hand in their own neighborhoods and cleaning them up. The time for discussion is over -- everybody with a lick of sense knows what needs to be done. The problem is, nobody seems to want to do it.

All an "event" does is make people feel good that they "did something". But after the "event", they go back to their neighborhoods and continue to live in fear. Yeah, "events" are fabulous. But they accomplish absolutely nothing.

In particular I have to laugh at IndyRacer57's assertion that he "would like to see citizens fill the circle to let the criminals that we are not going to take this lying down". While you fill the Circle, the criminals will undoubtedly be breaking into your homes, raping your daughters, and stealing your cars, and laughing at you for leaving your home undefended.

The fact of the matter is that criminals don’t give a damn about public meetings. But they will give a damn about a neighborhood watch and a concerned citizenry that isn’t afraid to call the police when they see someone skulking around their neighborhood who shouldn’t be there. If the neighborhood is vigilant, the criminals will move on.

I’d also make the point that politicians didn’t seem to give a damn about public meetings, either. I didn’t notice a difference in my property taxes. What they really fear is a concerted effort to go to the polls and vote their sorry asses out of their comfy statehouse chairs. But you don’t need a public meeting to come to the conclusion that it’s time to send most of them packing.

Remember November. And pay attention to what’s happening on your block.

Gas stations in our area finally drop the price below $4/gal. Just saw it at $3.89 at 86th and Michigan about an hour ago; it was still $4.05 yesterday (and still $4.14 in Nora this morning).

They're quick to raise it when the price for oil that's not even in the pipeline yet goes up, but not quite so fast to lower it ditto.

BTW: Thanks, President Bush, for revoking the executive order on Monday that led to this. Not that any of the drive-by media have noticed cause and effect.

if you think raising the federal gas tax another dime won't make you dead meat in November.

When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. Don't ask the taxpayers for a longer ladder.

They may hand you a shorter rope.

I scored a 40.

Which either is no surprise at all, or completely invalidates the methodology of the quiz. My guess is that there's mission creep in the diagnosis of Asberger's Syndrome, just like the diagnosis of ADHD in elementary school kids. Kids act up, ipso facto they are ADHD. Kids are withdrawn, bookish, centered on particular things, so clearly they're OCD or Asberger's.

Social scientists and psychologists really need to find a new hobby, I'm afraid.

(but meaner.)

That 40 MPH speed limit sign is not there for your health, assholes.

30 in a 40 is just wrong. And even wronger is slowing down for the 25 MPH school zone IN THE MIDDLE OF SUMMER WHEN THERE IS NO SCHOOL.

If you can't drive the speed limit, GET OFF THE ROAD.

That is all.

Bottom fucking line.

OMAHA, Neb. — A hearing-impaired woman has filed a federal lawsuit against a local McDonald's, saying workers there refused to let her order food at the drive-thru window.

Karen Tumeh of Lincoln says they insisted she either order at the electronic speaker along the drive-thru lane or come inside to order.

Tumeh wears a hearing aid but still cannot hear while using the drive-thru ordering box at fast-food restaurants, according to the lawsuit.

At least three times since September 2007 workers at a Lincoln McDonald's refused to let her place her order at the drive-thru window, Tumeh said.

In denying her service, McDonald's violated the federal Americans With Disabilities Act, she said. Tumeh's lawsuit seeks to force McDonald's to make accommodations for hearing-impaired people to order food in restaurant drive-thrus.

Sorry, but this is bullshit. Get out of the fucking car and go inside. People used to deal with their disabilities, you know, back before Papa Bush signed that abortion of a bill known as the ADA.

I know plenty of folks with disabilities more severe than hearing loss who managed to get by without the government forcing businesses to make special accommodations for them.

You don't realize it, Ms. Tumeh, but you're one of the reasons this country is in the fucking mess it's in.

Other McDonald's restaurants in Lincoln have accommodated Tumeh, Mora James said.

"We have attempted to resolve this on many occasions and have unfortunately been unable to resolve this," [her attorney, Shirley Ann] Mora James said. "So we were forced into litigation."

No, you weren't. Instead of taking your business elsewhere, you decided to throw a tantrum and sue. That is NOT the American way, and I question your patriotism, Ms. Tumeh and Ms. Mora James -- as well as your motives, which I imagine are all about redistributing a bit of McDonalds' wealth into your own pockets.

Fuck a bunch of people like you who capitalize on their disabilities to line their pockets.