Let’s hope his mind has deteriorated since he held office

 

Find ’em, Jay, and neuralize the old bastard

Former Canadian Defense Minister, ninety, says there are aliens among us.

 …. Hellyer begins to list where they’re coming from. It turns out that our alien visitors come from near (one of the Saturn moons) and far (the Pleiades and Zeta Reticuli star systems). Oh yeah, and they get here via a portal in the Andes mountains in Peru. So there you have it, folks. Aliens are real, according to a nonagenarian man who at one point had access to highly classified information during the height of the Cold War.

Wait, you mean it depends on what you choose to eat?

 

And who knows better than your government?

Teacher eats nothing but McDonald’s for 90 days, loses weight, lowers his cholesterol 

A teacher who ate nothing but McDonald’s for three months was shocked to discover that he was healthier than ever.

John Cisna, a science teacher from Iowa, saw the 2004 documentary “Super Size Me” and was curious to see if his health would deteriorate the way filmmaker Morgan Spurlock’s did, he told local news station KCCI 8.

So Cisna began eating at the fast food chain for every meal and working on an amateur documentary with a team of students. But rather than ordering huge meals, he tried to adhere to a 2,000-calorie diet.

By the 90th day, Cisna reports he had lost 37 pounds and his cholesterol dropped from 249 to 170.

Here’s what he’d eat on a typical day:

Breakfast: Two Egg White Delights, a bowl of maple oatmeal and a bottle of 1% milk.

Lunch: Salad.

Dinner: A Value Meal with fries. Cisna said his favorite is the Big Mac.

Cisna said his unconventional diet proves that fast food isn’t evil.

“It’s our choices that make us fat not McDonald’s,” he toldthe news station.

In the Progressive World, individuals have no responsibility for anything bad that happens to them as the result of their actions: unemployment is caused by evil capitalists, not that meth addiction, illiterate children by failing schools, not illiterate drunk parents, and obesity by ads for Captain Crunch on TV.

Same thing for good things, by the way. Steady employment, success at school, have nothing to do with individual effort but are due entirely to the helping hand of government.

Sales reported

The links probably won’t work, but try them here.

10 Spezzano Drive

10 Spezzano Drive closed at $1.250 million. This house was never worth the $2.095 it asked when it was a new spec house in 2007, but $1.250? A real steal. I told at least two of my clients looking in this price range that but they couldn’t see it. Someone did. As an aside, for readers in the low $1 price range, either adjust your demands or give up looking in Riverside, even north of the Post Road.

 

12 Baldwin Farms S.

12 Baldwin Farms was sold after foreclosure for $5.125 million. Very much not my cup of tea, and $5 million’s a lot of money, but it makes more sense at $5 than it did in 2008 at $12.495.

 

 

 

 

88 Birch Lane

88 Birch, $1.9 million. Eh.

36 Widgeon

36 Widgeon, $1.580. Widgeon’s a nice street, but over $1.5? The market’s picked up, considerably.

Works for me

 

U.S.D.A. headquarters, Omaha

Senatorial candidate Ben Sasse suggests moving federal government to Nebraska to weed out lobbyists and hangers on. Can you imagine Chris Dodd packing up and moving to Wahoo? Love it.

It’s all natural, so look for these on your Whole Foods shelves soon

In Asia and here, d.i.y. plastic surgery.

In September, CBS anchor Julie Chen stirred up attention when she admitted to undergoing the double-eyelid procedure in her 20s at the behest of her boss, who thought she looked too Chinese.

As an alternative to plastic surgery, some people, primarily teens, are now turning to a low-tech solution: torturous-looking products that claim to mold the users’ features into the “ideal” standard of beauty.

Cosmetic surgeons worry such products can harm natural development in adolescents who are barely in their teens. Dr. Hong Jung Gon, of the Metro Plastic Surgery Clinic in Seoul, recently revealed to the GlobalPost that his clinic has occasionally treated teenagers who’ve inflicted damage on themselves by using the face-shaping gadgets, and interviews with users found they experienced bruising and pain. “We want to become pretty without spending all the money,” a 17-year-old South Korean teen told the GlobalPost. “We know that these methods aren’t approved of, but lots of our peers do it.”

“These kinds of devices usually make claims that have no basis in studies or scientific fact,” a Long Island doctor told a beauty blog in December. ”At the very best, you end up completely wasting your money. At the very worst, you can injure yourself resulting in infections, permanent scars, or other irreversible facial deformities.”

New Listing at 597 Round Hill Road

Sold for $8 million (after asking $15) in 2008, pretty much as a land sale of its 18 acres. Today it’s back, still as land (house is still being sold “as is”) for $11.9 million. Has Round Hill property appreciated that much since 2008? We’ll find out.

As of 2011, the LLC owner was delinquent in its taxes, owing the town some $49,000. No word whether that’s been paid. Raj Rajaratnam’s house, by the way, is just a bit down the street, at 577 – wonder when that will hit the market?

While Obama snoozes

At least some patriots are striking back

Canada has sent a polar vortex our way, threatening our homes, our children and the American way of life. What does Barry care? Michelle’s in Hawaii and he’s bunkered down by the fire in the Executive wing. We need action! 1812, here we come again!

The hot stove principle in action

My criminal law professor, Loftus Becker (no kidding; from Harvard, naturally) used to preach what he called the “hot stove principle” of criminal justice: make it swift and certain and, like someone who places his hand on a hot stove, the miscreant is unlikely to do it again. Lesser punishment, but quickly applied. Vancouver’s law on drinking and driving seems to demonstrate his point. Drunk driving deaths are down 55% since its enactment.

In 2010, the Provincial Government not only stiffened penalties against driving at.08, but more importantly, it targeted drivers who fall below that level — to .05 — drivers who are not legally drunk.  The rationale?  Even a few drinks – as few as two for a woman, and three for a man — can impair your driving ability

The big change was that if you were now caught driving with a .05 blood alcohol level, the police were authorized – on the spot — to fine you, suspend your drivers license, and immediately impound your car for at least three days.  They’d get you out of the vehicle, and a tow truck would haul it away. 

In late 2010, police began enforcing the new laws, and police impound lots across British Columbia began filling up. The changes sparked an uproar.  Civil libertarians argued it gave the police too much power – and restaurant owners like  Mark Roberts said the new laws damaged the economy… he says his business dropped between 10 and 20 percent.

That sounds bad, but it works, and unlike, say, wearing seat belts, which affects no one but the driver, there’s no God-given right to endanger other people by driving around stoned. The article quotes a Canadian criminologist who explains why this law is working.

TIM STOCKWELL: These laws epitomize a perfect deterrence theory in action.  And it is very important to understand that you don’t need draconian, severe penalties. They have to be severe enough.  It’s more important that they are certain, and that they are swift.  So on the spot, losing your car for three days, a week, that’s severe enough.

Apparently it is. Loftus would be pleased.

Amazing storm pictures from Jolly Old England

The Daily Mail has some incredible photographs of the storm slamming the island. Here’s just one:

Ya think?

 

Snow job

Is de Blasio’s carriage ban a campaign contributor’s payoff? 

The bad guy in this drama, according to the carriage drivers, is Steve Nislick, chief executive officer of a New Jersey-based real-estate development company, Edison Properties. The company “employs legions of lobbyists to influence city decisions on real estate and zoning in its favor,” journalist Michael Gross reported in 2009, pointing out that two of Edison’s businesses “have multiple locations in the same Far West Midtown neighborhood as the stables where the Central Park horses are housed.” An anti-carriage pamphlet Nislick circulated in 2008 made this interesting observation: “Currently, the stables consist of 64,000 square feet of valuable real estate on lots that could accomodate up to 150,000 square feet of development. These lots could be sold for new development.”

Gross asked the obvious question: “What are the odds that good neighbor Nislick, the out-of-state real estate developer, simply covets those valuable, underdeveloped New York lots — and has teamed up with ambitious pols to use the emotions of animal rights activists as fuel for their own agendas?”

 

 

When liberals loved Wall Street (and probably still do)

 

Man of the people

De Blasio, Hillary, Barack, even Harry Reid have all gone to the master’s trough down in the canyons.

Just weeks before de Blasio’s New Year’s Day inaugural address, Hillary Clinton pocketed at least $400,000 at two Wall Street events by saying, “Beating up the finance industry isn’t going to improve the economy—it needs to stop.” In 2008, Wall Street accounted for nearly 20 cents of every dollar raised by Barack Obama. The securities industry was the No. 2 donor to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, trailing behind law firms but ahead of lobbyists in donations.

Early in the aughts, Wall Street whistled, and neither Clinton nor de Blasio barked. No, instead they brought Wall Street its slippers, coffee, and newspaper.

Will that change? Maybe not: here’s a clue to de Blasio’s strategy:

By picking Bill Bratton as police commissioner, de Blasio has signaled his concern for keeping the city’s streets safe. As Rudy Giuliani’s first commissioner and then as top cop in Los Angeles, Bratton delivered safer cities. But beyond public safety, de Blasio seems keen on playing the politics of resentment, at the expense of implementing policies for growth.

As readers pointed out in the discussion on the explosion of ultra-high-end real estate in the City, so long as the streets are safe, out-of-town buyers could care less about taxes they don’t pay and schools their children don’t attend. Smart, eh?