Neither my kids nor any of my clients were alive when this went down

D. B. Cooper may finally be identified.  The 1971 hijacker, who almost certainly died when he jumped from the plane, might be identified this week.  Fascinating to me, but it does remind me of when I taught Kaplan LSAT courses:  I’d refer to Shakespeare*, authors who wrote before 1980 or even TV shows from the 1960’s and get blank looks. So it’s a different world. Still, I’m curious to see who this guy was – maybe my kids will be interested to learn his identity, if I can come up with a YouTube on him.

*old joke: Shakespeare would have been a great writer, if only he hadn’t used so many clichés.

More spending, no cuts. Obummer wins

They’re claiming a trillion dollars in spending cuts. There’s not a single real dollar in there.

This doesn’t seem right to me

Biden is charging the Secret Service rent for a cottage they occupy while protecting him. $2,200 a month so they can protect his family. It’s the principle, of course, but also the pettiness that offends me.

The Jets give Plaxico Burress a second chance

They sign the receiver and each should gain. As someone who has received a couple of “second” chances, I’m all for people being allowed to restart their lives. Burress was dumb, no doubt, but he had a legal permit to carry a pistol in New Jersey – he shouldn’t have carried it into New York, granted, but his accidental firing injured himself and no one else. I think his 18 month sentence was outrageous, imposed solely because of who he was, rather than what he’d done.

That said, he’s done his time in prison, the NFL has reinstated him and now he’s a Jet. I wish him well.

Who knew SUVs helped anyone, let alone developed reputations?

SUV known for helping others

Where is Henry Kravis?

There’s a very short fellow roaming New York City, peering up women’s skirts and generally causing trouble. The one and only time I met Mr. Kravis I found him quite cordial and a true gentleman but he was er, rather short. He’s probably in the Hamptons but how many midgets are there in NYC? I’d at least check his alibi.

They just don’t get it

There’s a dearth of volunteers for the “Big Brother” program and men are being blamed for lacking an “altruism gene”.  That’s not it.

As a lawyer, I read many decisions overturning child abuse allegations against men whose lives had been ruined, including spending years in prison, on specious charges brought by angry children, parents with a grudge and prosecutors on a mission. It’s certainly a fact that child abuse does exist and it’s a horrible thing – I’ve written here before of Ken Walker, a Maine Guide, who diddled young boys – I’d be tempted to shoot him were I to see him today for what he did to one of my friends. But would I volunteer to be a Big Brother and expose myself to the potential liability of a false claim of child abuse? Not on your life.

I usually scoff at the “we’ll save money by cutting fraud and waste ” argument but …

The Pentagon makes Medicare look like skinflints. Our budget woes are far larger than wasted money, but when the Pentagon pays $80 for a $1 pipe, there are bound to be some savings there. If we could only get federal bureaucrats to think of the dollars they were spending as their own, rather than other people’s money, we’d make some progress.

Destroying Northwestern communities for no purpose

No logging, no spotted owl, either. As a certified, back-packing tree-hugger, I am not in favor of polluting trout streams, wiping out forests or exploding the world in a nuclear war. But I also don’t like environmental regulations that destroy small towns and wipe out entire categories of jobs for no reason. The EPA did this when it shut down logging in the Northwest to “save” the spotted owl. I was out there in the early 70’s, when there was a vibrant collection of small towns and I’ve been back there since and seen the difference. Yet no one cares -pass another regulation.

Bring us more mountain lions!

Escaped wild boars killing pets and chasing people in Sullivan County (New York).  Any pig will go feral in a generation or two, I believe (I generally trust my knowledge but maybe you shouldn’t and you may want to research this further) but these tuskers are escapees from game farms and are raring to go. They breed like rabbits, although the results are dramatically different.

In the south, pig hunting’s considered a great sport – don’t know what the status of these New Yorkers is – open season? Protected species? Certainly not the latter, I should think. Large caliber required.

UPDATE: Good article here on hunting these creatures. And I love the writer’s inclusion of this quote from one of my favorite authors:

I decided that unless I become a vegetarian, I’ll get my meat by hunting for it. … I’ve seen slaughterhouses, and anyway, as Sitting Bull said, when the buffalo are gone we will hunt mice, for we are hunters and we want our freedom.

—Thomas McGuane

The first domino

Central Falls, Rhode Island going belly up on Monday, most likely. Watch for this adventure to be repeated throughout the country in the coming year.

The Hobbits say we need some rehab, Dems say no, no no

Senate kills Boehner debt plan.

National Outdoor Leadership School and bears

NOLS defended by other wilderness experts. As well it should be. The quality of training I received there back in 1973 was superb and daughter Sarah reported the same back in 2007. I post this only because some parents may have doubts after the grizzly attack of last week. The only caveat, and it’s a minor one, is that i went through the course when I was twenty (as was Sarah, I think) – each kid is different, of course, but this is one tough thirty days, and I’d suggest twenty is a better age for it than, say, 16. Summer camp, it ain’t.

The “best health care in the world” now refers patients to homeopathic medicine

Former Enron adviser and NY Times columnist Paul Krugman thus described the British National Health  Service. Well not only is the NHS now rationing operations, it is referring patients to homeopathic practitioners. Kids go deaf, diabetics lose their eyesight, cripples are denied hip replacements  and the rest of the citizens are referred to quacks who practice a “medicine” that even that most liberal of organizations, Consumer Reports, calls a crock of s***.

It’s fine if Whole Food housewives want to buy homeopathic medicines because, when their kids get truly sick, they can just cart them off to a hospital with real doctors. But if you’re English, and your only choice is to drink a bottle of sterilized water with a single (claimed) molecule of what ails you, you’re friggin’ doomed. This is the future Krugman and Obama have in mind for us.

It’s Hans Isbrandtsen’s birthday today.

Not too late to send him, you know, dead flowers or something.

All Greenwich High playing fields closed?

That’s what a reader, whom I trust and who has always been accurate before, writes me. Fear of pollution. Well hell, I played on those same fields 40 years ago and I’m still here, but that was then, this is now. Of course, we were also allowed to smoke in the Student Center back then (you had to go outside to do dope), so perhaps we were protected from lesser toxins.

UPDATE: What the hell are we doing to ourselves? When I was a kid, my father and even a science teacher at Riverside School both kept big jugs of mercury for us to play and experiment with – we’d roll it out, form it, play with it, experiment with it and learn from its properties, all without harm. Ten years ago or so, some kid at Eastern Middle School dropped a thermometer on the floor, spilled a teeny bit of mercury on the floor and the entire school was evacuated while haz-mat teams came in, sealed off the area and cleaned up a teaspoonful of the material. Mercury hasn’t become more dangerous but rather, our fear of everything has increased. This is just crazy. There’s no guarantee of complete safety in this world – witness Norway – and trying to squeeze out every perceived danger is both ludicrous and limiting. Go for the gusto.

UPDATE: so what now, we rip up the million dollars worth of artificial turf we just laid down (without, apparently, testing the soil we were covering)?  Well at least we could then move the fireworks back there. Maybe pave everything and make Greenwich the basketball center of Fairfield County?

Obama solves the illegal immigration problem

With Mexico’s unemployment rate at 4.9% compared to our own 9.5%, easy credit and access to inexpensive education, Mexicans are flooding back home. What was that old expression from the Viet Nam war: “we had to destroy the village to save it”. Obama is doing that to our country, and God bless him.

Norwegian cleric supports child marriages

(In deference to Muslim supporters, this blog has decided to convert all references to Muslims to “Norwegian”, in order to foster an understanding and appreciation of multiculturalism and acceptance of the grand caliphate that our friends in the Middle East would like to impose on us all.)

Marriage, even from the crib, A-Ok, says Saudi Norwegian big chief cleric Sheik al-Fawzen, with  a caveat:

“But it isn’t permissible for their husbands to have sex with them unless they are capable of being placed beneath and bearing the weight of the men.”

Now that’s damn decent of them but, if we’re to be ruled by these people, I have a few questions:

Does “men” mean one at a time, or all together?

What if the husband uses his knees and elbows? Surely a three-year-old could withstand that weight, or does the Sheik rule this out? A girl would have to be at least five before she could bear the full weight of a camel reindeer raper, so must we wait an extra two years before enjoying our latest wife?

There are other questions, of course: must we be willing to plant bombs in our turbans and blow up fellow Muslims Norwegians?  Cut the throats of school girls? Etc., etc., but I’d like some answers to these marital issues first of all.

A liberal disillusioned with Obummer

Why, the kid has never met tough opponents! Who would have guessed? Good thing he’s not charged with international affairs or we’d really be in trouble.

Horse stall?

A fellow realtor is trying to help a friend find a place for her three horses by August 10th. I assume that (a) you can charge for this service and (b) that there ain’t no one looking for a commission on this. So if you have an unused stable or room for three more, either email me at christopher.fountain@gmail.com or just post away. Either way, I’ll pass it on.