Polyurethane police

You can also thin solvent-based poly by adding up to 10 percent mineral spirits, but only if you live in a state that allows it. Some East Coast states and California prohibit users from adding solvents after the can is opened. In that case, you’ll have to recycle the old stuff and buy a fresh can.
–Family Handyman, October 2009, p. 75

I figure FM is just covering their butts legally, but I found this statement to be mindboggling. First. how does anyone propose to enforce such a law? Do the state EPAs have special sniffers that can tell the difference between various organic solvents? Are they going to do warrantless surprise searches to look for tampered polyurethane? Has anyone ever been prosecuted under such a law?

Second, what were they thinking? What is the purpose of such a law? Was it lobbied for by poly manufacturers to move more product? Wouldn’t buying a new can release just as much solvent into the air, plus incur the ecological costs of producing another and disposing of the old?  Somebody fill me in here.

I am certain that virtually nobody in the affected states knew that this law existed. And now that they know it exists, I’d wager that nobody will actually obey it. It’s not like anyone would actually know, unlike Billy Beck’s hypothetical shed. I guess that if you can’t build it, then how you can’t finish it is irrelevant.

ELF topples 2 radio towers in Snohomish

This seems to be an all-sports station. I had thought there’d be s political reason (conservative talk radio) but no, they just don’t like radio waves. And the station apparently has a news piece on this, but all that’s coming up is the title.

Hippie bastards.

PETA spares Columbus

…from fake “factory farm” exhibit. They’ll be bringing the cowshit to D. C. instead.

Coals to Newcastle, either way.

Latest on Dorothy Richardson

…the 75 year old woman accused of beating a fawn to death with a shovel. There’s been an article on her arraignment, with a picture, and I said, OMG! She’s black!” (Why this should have surprised me, considering that it’s Euclid, is a question I am meditating upon.) So of course I had the evil thought: “Of course, it’s all racism.”

It turns out that the same thought occurred to George Forbes, local head of the NAACP:

Dorothy Richardson, 75, was treated differently by Euclid officials because she is black, NAACP President George Forbes said Friday.

“It’s a goddamn deer,” Forbes said. “It’s not a human being, it’s a deer. The way this lady is being treated is unfair.”

Euclid officials have not been impartial with Richardson, he said.

“It’s typical Euclid,” Forbes said. “It’s what they do in Euclid.”

Personally, I think it’s a lot more about class than race, as such things often are. But I never thought I’d see the day when I was agreeing with and cheering on the slimy, race-baiting Forbes.

In related (?) news, the black bear that has been wandering around Streetsboro tore a chunk out of somebody’s house. If that had been my place, I’d have been out there with shotgun slugs. Tell me, why is it that when homo sapiens invades your house, you have a right to shoot them, but when ursus americanus does so, it’s supposed to be protected?

UPDATE: I evidently inspired Beck to look into this.

There’s another similar mob going on about a 20 year old (now former) employee of Petland who drowned two injured rabbits, had her manager take a picture of her holding them, and then put it on Facebook, where PETA et al found it. She and the manager both got canned, which one can’t complain about since there’s a corporate policy against employees euthanizing animals. I even understand why they closed the franchise; it’s overkill, but I can see how it might be necessary PR (esp. if the branch was not doing well and was expendable)

What I don’t understand is the howling mob demanding to do things to a particular homo sapiens that they would not for a minute countenance being done to any other animal. It’s an odd kind of moral inversion. Other species get to be as cruel as they want to other species, and that’s just business as usual, but let a human do it, and the Iron Maiden is way too kind.

Ohs boys! I kin haz policy tools?

Steve Malloy busts Cato senior fellow Alan Reynolds for wanting to use an excise tax against SUVs:

Where in the Constitution does it say that the government has the power to discourage legally made and sold transportation choices?

Cato supports your right to use recreational drugs but not your right to purchase the sort of car or truck you want without government interference?

Uh, Steve, where in the Constitution does it say that the government has the power to make any transportation choices legal or illegal? And what is a libertarian doing citing the “goddam piece of paper” anyway?

You’re right to call him out on that, but the trouble with minarchism is: how min is min? Apparently, at Cato all you have to be is to the right of Obama, whereas Malloy thinks you should be to the right of the Republicans. That’s a good start, but it’s a long and winding road.

Coon hunting in Detroit

Around 20th Century General Motors, life is getting a bit feral.  I hope that “Glemie Dean Beasley” is a pseudonym, and that he has covered his tracks,  because the Bludge will be after him for making the city look bad…as if that were still possible.

A beaver was spotted recently in the Detroit River. Wild fox skulk the 15th hole at the Palmer Park golf course. There is bald eagle, hawk and falcon that roam the city skies. Wild Turkeys roam the grasses. A coyote was snared two years ago roaming the Federal Court House downtown.

Only ONE coyote?

Hmmm, and I love that writing. Shouldn’t that be “There ARE bald eagle…”?  And while I’m sure that Wild Turkey roams the ghettos, the turkeys in the grasses are uncapitalized.

Al Gore Memorial Blog Post

I left a half hour earlier than I thought I needed to for my 8:30  dental appointment in downtown Cleveland. I met the plow, making its first pass on Silica Sand, and drove British-style to the end of that road.

I got there 3 hours later, an hour and a quarter late. They took me anyways. At 8:30 I was still on I-480, a mile from the Valley View Bridge. After, I did my shopping at the West Side Market, went to work, dumped my car in the first convenient snowbank with a meter.

Now I hear we’re closing at 3.

Anti-drillers are racists!

Hollywood’s Sundance Kid is hurting poor people.

So say some East Coast ministers and conservative activists, who took to the streets in front of a downtown Salt Lake City theater on the eve of Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival to accuse the actor of holding down low-income Americans with his opposition to oil and gas drilling near national parks in Utah.

The protesters, led by the Congress of Racial Equality’s national spokesman Niger Innis, suggested Redford should “relinquish his wealth” and live like a poor person. They complained that the filmmaker’s anti-drilling stance could lead to higher energy prices for inner-city residents, forcing them to accept a lower standard of living.

The clergymen prayed for Redford “to see the light” and linked his environmental activism with racism.

“The high energy prices we’re going to see this winter are essentially discriminatory,” said Bishop Harry Jackson Jr. of the Hope Christian Church in Beltsville, Md., chairman of the High-Impact Leadership Coalition, a petroleum industry advocate.

The article is a riot. Patty Henetz starts off with “East Coast ministers” (= carpetbagger troublemakers). It was a black thang, and I’ll bet that both of Salt Lake City’s black ministers were there. (One from Ogden was, as we find out wayyy down in the article) After presenting the bare bones of CORE’s argument, she spends the rest of the article refuting it,AND includes a sidebar on CORE’s political and industry connections. It’s so great that she covered both sides of the story; I’d hate to see biased coverage.

Rusty explains the cold snap

“People have been saying for years that we’d have a Black President when Hell freezes over. We will, and it has.”

Weather Channel fires propaganda arm

There’s a silver lining in the economic dark cloud:

NBC Universal made the first of potentially several rounds of staffing cuts at The Weather Channel (TWC) on Wednesday, axing the entire staff of the “Forecast Earth” environmental program during the middle of NBC’s “Green Week,” as well as several on-camera meteorologists…
Forecast Earth was hosted by former CNN anchor Natalie Allen, with contributions from climate expert Heidi Cullen. It was the sole program on TWC that focused on global climate change, which raises the question of whether the station will still report on the subject. Cullen’s future role at the network is not known.