I'm going to hell

Does this qualify as a delivery exception?

boondoggles

President Obama and VP Biden have both weighed in as saying that they favor gun registries.  Canada’s Prime Minister is trying to scrap theirs, because it “became a bloated bureaucratic nightmare” that “cost taxpayers some $2 billion and it hasn’t done a thing to reduce gun crime”.

Ontario farmer and former police officer Jim Magee says the Canadian long arms registry is “a useless exercise to appease an urban population”.  That pretty much sums up most or all US gun control efforts, too — except that they’re not so much about appeasing urban populations, as appeasing a small subset of urban and suburban populations who are frightened of anyone, even the military and police, having guns and apparently unable to make the cognitive connection between crimes and criminals.

“Society does not control crime, ever, by forcing the law-abiding to accommodate themselves to the expected behavior of criminals.  Society controls crime by forcing the criminals to accommodate themselves to the expected behavior of the law-abiding.”

— Jeff Snyder

Laws to prohibit criminal acts barely even inconvenience those who already habitually disregard the law.  We call them criminals because they ignore the law and commit crimes.  Laws restrain only the law-abiding.

seen elsewhere

So you thought hybrid cars were a new idea?

Economical numbers

Richard Feynman once joked that astronomical distances were becoming quite well understood, while government spending was becoming surreal, and that we should therefore start referring to mind-bogglingly huge numbers not as “astronomical”, but as “economical” numbers instead.

Here’s an example that puts the AIG bonuses into proper perspective.

(from melvin_udall via writerspleasure)