Archives for October 2012

The road to hell may be paved with good intentions, but it becomes a super highway when bad intentions are involved. I’ll give you a humorous example. On May 9th, in a resounding repudiation of President Obama’s support of marriage equality, North Carolina passed Amendment 1. Yes, I know, the name is so trite it sounds like it escaped from a 1950’s horror flick swathed in echo. In their attempt to avoid the gay bacchanal that was clearly poised to overrun Raleigh, they kind of over shot their mark and stripped all rights from any couple not in a traditional marriage. As I noted then that means child support cannot be enforced. That means unwed mothers are now, both legally and morally, the progenitors of bastards who will have no rights. And so on. Divorced couples could find themselves in a wonderful legal quagmire. It is still floundering in various courts. I wish I had the time to head down there to hear the justifications.

Not to be outdone, on May 26, 2012, the Kansas state legislature decided to stop the influx of Sharia laws that were clearly overrunning our lands, they passed Senate Bill 79, which outlawed any foreign, or religious, interference with the laws of their fine state.

Allow me to share my earlier summation of that train wreck.

For those of you who slept through school, the New Testament section of the Christian Bible (part of the basis for banning gay marriage) was written in Greece and Rome. Mostly Rome. Its original (written) language was Greek and its first translation of value was into Latin and it was used as the basis for numerous onerous laws that led to the social perversions of the Middle Ages. The other half of the Christian Bible, the Old Testament, was written in Aramaic and is the basis for existing laws in Israel. In other words, it is in clear violation of Section 2 above.

And the denial of marriage rights, or any other rights, to gays or anyone else is a clear violation of Section 3. Especially if the denial of those rights is based on any Biblical admonition.

So Kansas, in its attempt to return to the Dark Ages, has just managed to make San Francisco look like Utah.

GO KC!

Yeah, as you might have guessed, lots of lawyers are having fun in Kansas.

Especially when people, who actually stayed awake in school, start pointing out that “gay marriage” predates the bible.

But even before these messes I took a look at what happens when hardcore immigration – ahem – reform is instituted. Back on December 9, 2011, I cataloged the death of Postville Iowa. Once the home of immigrants from numerous lands it is now a ghost town. Companies have been forced to close and relocate. Jobs dried up. The local meat packing plant, which paid $19 an hour now pays around $8 to locals. And it’s prices to consumers rose as it was taken over by “honest American” people and not them “dern forners.”

Yeah, try living on $8 an hour.

So, that experience would seem to be a clear warning sign to most people to tread carefully and consider the consequences of their actions.

Who am I kidding?

Last year Alabama passed HB 56 which has led to the arrest of executives from Mercedes Benz for having foreign accents (German) and the recreation of Exodus as even legal immigrants feared for their lives and livelihoods.

The result?

Alabama is teetering on total insolvency. Van Le, an alleged American, has the whole story.

This time last year, Alabama had just begun implementing its worst-in-the-nation anti-immigrant law, HB 56, causing chaos in the state and forcing neighborhoods full of immigrants to flee. At the time, state senator and HB 56 sponsor Scott Beason rationalized the law as “a jobs bill,” one that would drive immigrants out of the state and return American jobs to Americans.

A year later, it turns out that Alabama has the worst economy in the Southeast.

“Worse than Louisiana,” wrote Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Joey Kennedy at the Birmingham News. “Worse than South Carolina. Heck, worse than, my goodness, ThankGodforMississippi.”

“There is a saving grace,” however, as he noted. “While Alabama’s economy sucks more than any other in the Southeast, it’s only the fourth worst economy in the United States. Yea us! We’re No. 47!”

The slowdown in Alabama’s economy can be traced back to HB 56 and its incredibly harsh anti-immigrant measures. A few months after Alabama began implementing the law, University of Alabama economist Dr. Sam Addy released a report finding that HB 56 could ultimately cost Alabama as much as $11 million in economic output and as many as 70,000 to 140,000 jobs. It turns out that when immigrant laborers and field workers left the state, American workers—contrary to Beason’s theories—didn’t want to do back-breaking manual labor, and crops suffered severe labor shortages. And when all these workers leave, suddenly there are fewer people buying the products they would’ve bought, and needing the services they would’ve needed—and economic output goes down.

That’s why, Kennedy writes, “Unemployment [in Alabama] is down to about 8.3 percent, from last October’s 8.8 percent, but economists attribute that to jobs that have simply disappeared, not to jobs having been created.”

And yet the state leaders who got Alabama into this mess seem unwilling to recognize the consequences of HB 56. As Kennedy writes:

Our state leaders are nothing if not in profound denial. There is no telling how many business opportunities we’ve missed because companies took Alabama off their lists of possibilities after our hateful law was passed and our national reputation as an open and accepting state was destroyed…

Alabama has self-inflicted this economic wound, just so a group of self-serving politicians could score political points at election time by pandering to our worst natures. They accomplished their goal. Meanwhile, Alabama’s weak economy continues to suffer, unable to reach even the most modest of its goals.

A few months ago, the US 11th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down much of HB 56, declaring it mostly unconstitutional while tentatively leaving a “show me your papers” component standing. The move came too late for Alabama, though, where it seems the damage has been done.

The three states worse off than Alabama are Nevada, West Virginia and Mississippi. Oddly enough all four states have minimal diversity in their economies or populations.

I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.

Until later, I remind you that the world is round and what we do forward will always come up from behind.

One Day on Earth – Motion Picture Trailer from One Day on Earth

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.

But what does she charge? BWAH HA HA HA HA! Yeah, I’m 12, what of it? I just thought that with the east coast about to be swallowed by the biggest blow job that nature can give, they might need a smile. And since nothing evokes a smile from me more than a blow job, I’ll just rudely assume that everyone agrees with me and move on. A surprising stat found was that women who perform oral sex, and swallow, are at lower risk of developing preeclampsia. Not just that, researchers also found that it can help lower blood pressure. My guess is that last part applies to men too. I know they relax me. Just as importantly, from a female’s point of view anyway, is this nugget that was reported in the New York Daily News;

One academic is proposing a cure for morning sickness that some moms-to-be might find in bad taste — sperm.

Gordon Gallup, a psychologist at SUNY-Albany has a theory that pregnant women who are continually exposed to the father’s semen are less like to suffer from AM nausea.

Gallup, who specializes in human reproductive competition and behavior, offers the theory that expectant women become ill and vomit because their bodies are rejecting the semen’s genetic material as something foreign and unfamiliar.

That’s right honey, embrace my genetic material and make it a part of you.

How would you like to be in that research group. I mean, what possible placebo could they use as a baseline?

Okay ladies, spitters to the left ….. (??)

Sign me up Gordon, I’m all about the science and stuff.

Okay, obviously Hurricane Sandy – which, despite what you may have seen on FOX! News, is not named after the squirrel from Spongebob – is set to land in Atlantic City before sunrise tomorrow and do millions upon millions of dollars worth of damage. Hopefully, since they got the evacuation orders out early, no one will be injured or killed.

Oddly enough, considering that America gets hammered with a few hurricanes every year, most people are ignorant about what they are.

Well, a lot of people are just ignorant in general, but that’s another blog.

Anyway, the nice people at Hurricane Facts have, and I know this is shocking, facts about hurricanes that they are willing to share.

The word hurricane comes from the Taino Native American word, hurucane, meaning evil spirit of the wind.

The first time anyone flew into a hurricane happened in 1943 in the middle of World War II.

A tropical storm is classified as a hurricane once winds goes up to 74 miles per hour or higher.

Hurricanes are the only weather disasters that have been given their own names.

All hurricanes begin life in a warm moist atmosphere over tropical ocean waters.

A typical hurricane can dump 6 inches to a foot of rain across a region.

The most violent winds and heaviest rains take place in the eye wall, the ring of clouds and thunderstorms closely surrounding the eye.

Every second, a large hurricane releases the energy of 10 atomic bombs.

Hurricanes can also produce tornadoes. They are not as strong as regular tornadoes and last only a few minutes.

Slow moving hurricanes produce more rainfall and can cause more damage from flooding than faster-moving, more powerful hurricanes.

Hurricane Floyd was barely a category I hurricane, but it still managed to mow down 19 million trees and caused over a billion dollars in damage.

Most people who die in hurricanes are killed by the towering walls of sea water that comes inland.

In the Pacific Ocean, Hurricanes are generally known as typhoons. In the Indian Ocean they are called tropical cyclones.

The man who first gave names to hurricanes was an Australian weather forecaster named C. Wragge in the early 1900s.

The first hurricane of the year is given a name beginning with the letter “A”.

Hurricane season is from June to November when the seas are at their warmest and most humid, which are ripe conditions for a hurricane to develop.

The planet Jupiter has a hurricane which has been going on for over 300 years. It can be seen as a red spot on the planet. This hurricane on Jupiter is bigger than the Earth itself.

Okay, “Earth itself” is a redundant phrase (what else could be the Earth?) but this is a hurricane blog not a grammar quiz.

Now, since you’re too lazy and I’m having too much fun, let’s talk about C. Wragge for a moment. Besides naming hurricanes, Clement Lindley Wragge was patently insane. He hung out with Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (a guy who claimed to be the reincarnation of Jesus) and was a devotee of Theosophy (the study of the divine).

Not sure how you study the divine.

“Hey, God, how ya’ doin? Cool, just take a seat here and we’ll begin …”

Nope. That doesn’t seem like it’s going to work.

Don’t get me wrong, Wragge was brilliant. He had a degree in law as well as meterology and founded a museum. He just happened to be nuttier than grandma’s fruitcake as well.

On the other hand, we could probably use a few more people who are nutty like he was.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.

This week has seen a series of scientific announcements that might boggle lesser blog readers, but not you. We can start with the Italian scientists who were convicted by an Italian court of, well – nothing really, and sentenced to seven years in prison. This is a great example of what happens when religion and science collide. The court made the assumption that science was magic and that, as magic, it should be able to do the stuff it had seen in the Harry Potter movies. For the record, officially, the scientists were convicted for not being able to do what no one has ever been able to do; predict an earthquake. Not since the Spanish Inquisition have logic and facts taken such a beating.

Meanwhile, while the Italian court system was adhering to the logic espoused by a homophobe in a bedazzled hat, science was finding stuff that could scare the pants off of you. Just in time for Halloween NASA has announced the discovery of the first ever ZOMBIE PLANET!!!

MU HU HA HA HA …. etc.

An enormous alien planet that some astronomers thought was dead and buried has come back to life, a new study suggests.

A new analysis of observations from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope found that the bright nearby star Fomalhaut does indeed host a huge exoplanet, which scientists dubbed a “zombie” world in an aptly Halloween-themed video on the alien planet. This conclusion contradicts other recent studies, which determined that the so-called planet — known as Fomalhaut b — is actually just a giant dust cloud.

“Given what we know about the behavior of dust and the environment where the planet is located, we think that we’re seeing a planetary object that is completely embedded in dust rather than a free-floating dust cloud,” co-author John Debes, of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, said in a statement.

Okay, so it’s the perfect zombie, it brings its own mist, it lurks in the shadows and … well, I don’t know if planets eat brains or not.

Probably not.

Of course, while the zombie planet is is a safe distance away, Mars is much closer to home. In fact it’s close enough now that we can make our first visit there a shining example of genocide.

Wait? What?

It seem some scientists are worried about the effect we will have on the local microbes, which, as of this writing, don’t exist.

Humanity has long dreamed of putting boots on Mars, but those boots have the potential to stomp all over any lifeforms that may exist on the Red Planet.

A seething, swarming mass of 100 trillion microbes will accompany every astronaut who lands on Mars. This diverse “microbiome” has evolved with humans for eons and provides a number of services, from helping people digest their food to keeping pathogenic bacteria at bay.

While these microbes are intimately tied to humans, many of them will jump ship if transported to the Martian surface — with unknown consequences for a planet that may or may not host life of its own.

“We have the responsibility to Mars, I think — even if it’s just Martian microbes — not to kill them by the act of detecting them,” Cynthia Phillips of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute said at the SETICon 2 meeting in June in Santa Clara, Calif.

“If you have human astronauts there,” Phillips added, “there’s no way to sterilize them. They’re spewing out thousands of microbes every second. So it’s a real problem.”

Umm, okay, nice way to hit the alarm button with no real facts to back up the panic. As to the effect we would have on an alien world, my guess it would be about the same as when the friendly Spanish came to visit the happy Mayans.

Oh, wait, that resulted in the near extermination of the Mayan race.

Of course, there has to be something complex enough living on Mars to be effected and, so far, such a being has not been found.

So why am I bringing all this up? As I noted before, scientists have been discovering new planets almost every day thanks to the Kelper telescope. And more and more scientists want to go visit some of them. And while isolationists will worry about our polluting the local microbes, real scientists will be worrying about the important stuff like “How can I get laid on an interstellar flight?”

In September of 1992 astronauts Jan Davis and Mark Lee became the first married couple to leave the planet together. But NASA didn’t originally plan on it happening that way.

NASA had an unwritten rule that married astronauts couldn’t be sent into space together. Davis and Lee had been assigned to the mission in 1989 but were later married in January 1991. After the agency learned of their marriage, NASA took two months to review the situation and believed that both were too important to the mission (the second flight of Space Shuttle Endeavour) for either of them to be removed. The couple had no children and NASA explained that if they had, they most certainly wouldn’t have flown together.

Their flight was a minor public relations scandal because of an obvious question that reporters of the time were not shy about asking: would they be having sex in space? The answer from the astronauts and NASA was an unequivocal “no”.

Outside of science fiction, the topic of sex in space has received surprisingly scant attention. But it was science fiction that inspired Dr. Robert S. Richardson to write an article in the March 1956 issue of Sexology: The Magazine of Sex Science, wherein he describes his vision of what sexual relations might look like when space travel is a reality. This was a year and a half before the launch of Sputnik, so the Space Age wasn’t even firing on all thrusters yet. But Dr. Richardson opens his article by discussing his frustration with the fact that sex is never addressed in any of the sci-fi shows on TV. Given the reputation of 1950s broadcasting as a sexless environment — where married couples on programs like I Love Lucy had to sleep in separate beds, and wouldn’t even say the word “pregnant” — Richardson’s surprise comes across as a bit disingenuous. Nonetheless, Richardson makes his case for what he believes the future of sex in space might look like.

From the introduction to the 1956 article:

Recent announcements by the United States and Soviet Governments that they are planning space satellites and space rockets have stimulated universal interest in the problems of space travel. Space voyages to Mars will take a long time, and settlements on the distant plants will be lonely. While much has been written about the various scientific aspects of space travel, this is the first article which deals with the important medical problem: How will the natural sexual needs of early space travelers be met so as to provide a modicum of mental health for the space pioneers?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Dr. Richardson’s views on women in space aren’t the most enlightened. He writes under the assumption that only men will be astronauts and that these men will have certain carnal needs to be met during long missions in space. Many of Richardson’s ideas about space, and especially Mars, clearly come from the Collier’s series of articles on space travel from 1952 to 1954. Interestingly, Richardson becomes fixated on Mars throughout the article, ignoring the moon — a place humans wouldn’t even sink their boots until a full 13 years after his article was published.

Richardson compares the establishment of an inevitable Martian base to the experience of military men in remote regions of the Arctic. But unlike relatively short tours in Greenland of a year or less, he acknowledges that a trip to Mars would be an adventure of three years or more.

But can healthy young men work efficiently and harmoniously for long without women ?

Reactions to this question vary widely. There are some who think it outrageous that sex should enter into the question at all. Just forget about the women. Keep busy and you won’t need to worry.

Others recognize sex as a disturbing factor, but feel it is not too serious. In the old days, sailors made long voyages without women and still managed to perform their duties and bring the ship into port. They admit there was sexual over-indulgence soon after the sailors got on shore, but that was only to be expected. The remark heard most often is that the men turn to homosexualism and auto-eroticism during extended voyages.

None of these answers meets the problem squarely. They either side-step the issue or suggest some degrading compromise solution.

Richardson’s solution to the problem of loneliness for astronaut men sailing towards Mars is rather offensive, proposing that women tag along as sex objects with a mission to serve the crew (and take dictation when necessary).

In our expedition to Mars, let our healthy young males take along some healthy young females to serve as their sexual partners. (Of course it would also help if they could operate a radio transmitter and take dictation.) These women would accompany them quite openly for this purpose. There would be no secrecy about this. There would be nothing dishonorable about their assignment. They would be women of the kind we ordinarily speak of as “nice girls.”

“But then they wouldn’t be nice girls any more!” people will object.

Judged by the arbitrary standards of our present social reference system, they certainly would not. But in our new social reference system they would be nice girls. Or rather, the girls would be the same, but our way of thinking about them would be different.

It is possible that ultimately the most important result of space travel will be not what we discover upon the planets, but rather the changes that our widening outlook will effect upon our way of thinking. Will men and women bold enough to venture into space feel that they are still bound by often artificial and outmoded conventions of behavior prevalent upon a planet fifty million miles behind them ? May not men and women upon another world develop a social reference system — shocking as judged by us on earth today — but entirely “moral” according to extra-terrestrial standards?

This last bit of speculation — of proposing that on other planets people may develop their own set of cultural and moral standards by which to judge sexual activity — would certainly be an interesting discussion to have, if it weren’t predicated on the notion that women would necessarily be secretaries and sex objects acting at the pleasure of the all-male astronaut crew.

As far as we know, no one has yet had sex in space. But when they inevitably do, I suspect neither party will need to supplement their astronautic duties by taking dictation.

The Russians have had a co-ed space station for decades and it contains vodka. All that’s missing ins the press release folks. It has happened.

And to make it work they had to resort to velcro straps, restraints and harnesses. In other words, astronuats are super perverts.

God, I do love science!

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.

If you’ve had the chance to visit a maternity ward in the last decade or so you noticed a new sign reminding people not to have conjugal relations in the prep room where the woman is being monitored to see when she will be ready to give birth. The reason these signs exist is because it had become a problem. “Aww, honey, your contractions are still five minutes apart, let’s slip one more in for old times sake.” Who said romance was dead? What I’m saying is that some rules are necessary, even if they are painfully obvious to others. They are put in place not by overly officious poltroons but by people who realize that there are those who walk among us who might not be as socially adept as the rest.

That being said, there are rules that seem to be the famous solutions in search of a problem. Like the Voter ID laws or cell phone banking. The former could disenfranchise 20,000,000 or more people to solve the horrible problem of the 10 people who have tried, and failed, to commit voter fraud this century. As to the latter, who really needs to pay a bill that fast? As it has turned out, almost no one.

Although, to be fair, Thomas Edison invented the phonograph so dying people could easily record their will. He saw no other uses for the device. So, maybe these other ideas will find uses just as his did.

But …..

These next set of rules just baffle. IN an effort to keep our children safe governments around the country are drafting, and passing, reams of legislation that will have the desired effect. If the desired effect is to turn all children into self absorbed sociopaths with severe self esteem issues. TruTV has released the 14 dumbest laws out there right now.

No Hugs
Plain ol’ hugging is “inappropriate” according to school officials in New Jersey, who have banned the evil practice. Students need to be “focused on academics” (because hugging takes a lot of time, apparently.) Other schools have instituted “no hugging” policies, with punishments that include suspension.

Hand-Holding Is Too Sexy
For teens, hand-holding is just one step away from having sex. That is, according to Tennessee’s abstinence-based sexual education program, which includes warnings about “gateway sexual activity,” a.k.a. hand-holding. The legislation also prohibits teachers from demonstrating any “gateway sexual activity.” So, to recap: hand-holding can lead to sex, students must be warned that hand-holding can lead to sex, but teachers cannot demonstrate how hand-holding. Got that?

No More Bike Rides
For one school district in the South Bay Union School district of San Diego County, safety concerns outweigh any potential health benefits of bicycling; students are not permitted to ride bikes to school.

Banned Home Cooking
One Chicago school has banned all packed lunches from home, stating that school lunches are more nutritious and better quality. That not only gives the school unprecedented power over children’s nutrition, it also lines the pockets of the district caterer who now has a fixed and captive market.

Baggy Pants
If your pants are kinda baggy, they might violate a new school dress code in Chicago. If the school isn’t able to enforce the dress code, some city council members even want to instate citywide ordinance to control the pant problem.

The End Of Bake Sales
Massachusetts has been working to combat childhood obesity, removing vending machines from school hallways and potato chips from the lunch line. But banning bake sales? Currently, the state law prohibits junk food on school grounds during the day, but some are pushing to make the ban a 24/7 operation, which would prevent school groups from raising money (to fund healthy sports teams) by selling baked goods.

Spying On Lunchboxes
At preschools in North Carolina, children are required to have a balanced lunch consisting of one serving each of meat, dairy, and grain, plus two servings of fruits or vegetables. This regulation covers cafeteria lunches as well as those brought from home. In order to enforce this regulation, government employees actual travel to preschool and daycare centers to examine kids’ lunch boxes and force parents to pay to supplement their child’s “unhealthy” lunch.

Tight Or “Revealing” Clothes
In case baggy pants aren’t your thing, be careful that your pants are not too tight either. A school in Ohio banned yoga pants for being too revealing. In addition to tight skirts or low-cut tops — if comfy cotton pants are too tight, they might also be distracting. Students that wore the pants anyway in protest received in-school suspensions.

Dreads And Cornrows
Hampton University’s Business School and its high-ranking MBA program don’t permit cornrows and dreadlocks in class. The school claims they are preparing students for corporate life. When confronted with accusations of racism, the dean of the business school retorted: “When was it that cornrows and dreadlocks were a part of African American history?” Guess he hasn’t heard of Bob Marley.

Recess Is Over
Remember those days of carefree running around the playground playing tag? Those days are over for schools in several states: tag might cause injuries — or worse, hurt feelings. One school allows kickball to be played, but only if the score is not kept. At least they get to play with balls: after a Toronto, Ontario parent was hit in the head with a soccer ball and suffered a concussion, the local school board banned the use of all hard balls on the playground.

Applying Sunscreen
If you do not have a doctor’s note, you cannot apply sunscreen at schools in New York and other states. A doctor’s note and a signed parental permission slip are required to apply sunscreen, since it is considered a medication by the FDA. Cough drops, Vaseline, Chapstick, and antibiotic ointment… all require sign-offs. However, after two girls were hospitalized for severe burns because the school refused to let them wear sunscreen, it seemed like the policy would be repealed.

No Boobies
Raising money for Breast Cancer is a noble cause, but not if the fundraiser includes a bracelet that says “I (heart) boobies!” In one Pennsylvania school district, students were told of this policy, which they claim violates their freedom of speech rights. District officials say that the word “boobies” is vulgar.

Got Milk?
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is currently entertaining a proposal to ban milk in school. According to the proposal by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, milk is “high in sugar, high in fat and high in animal protein that is harmful to, rather than protective of, bone health.” They say instead that kids should just eat broccoli, tofu, or collard greens. So refreshing.

So this will be the result; your unloved, fashionalbly dressed, conservatively coiffed, future serial killer who has no clue how to show or receive afeection, will be set loose on the world as a shining example of what regulations have wrought.

What could possibly go wrong?

Well, besides everything?

Do you remember the “don’t keep score” mania? It was so children would be spared the pain of losing. It also prevented them from knowing the joys of winning or a job well done. An entire generation for whom accomplishment was anathema. I worked for companies that were forced to hire those mutant spawn. It usually took about three months, on average, to beat that crap out of them and teach them to succeed.

Not how to be the next Trump, just how to set a goal, achieve it and move on.

No, I am not kidding. They had no clue.

On the plus side, none of them insisted on speaking French, which is a side effect of sociopathic behavior.

Or so I’ve heard.

Sociopathe – Marre (2011) from Wesh Conexion

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.

This site has long proposed that it would benefit everyone if people made educated choices. I know it sounds like a simple idea but its implementation has been woefully lacking. The current presidential election is a shining example of this phenomena. I don’t care if you vote Republicrat or Demican, but please do so based on the facts. For the record I can assure you that Governor Romney is not now, nor has he ever been, a unicorn. I can further assure you that President Obama is not now, nor has he veer been, a Muslim. That’s not to say that a Muslim unicorn wouldn’t make a fine candidate in the future. Even so, both claims can still be found, and clung to, on the web.

Before we get to the main thrust of today’s blog, I’d like to share a little political advice my grandmother gave me long ago.

“It is the politician’s job to make you like him. Ignore him and look at the people who support him directly. They will let you know what kind of person he is.”

Of course, when my granny was young there were almost no female politicians so I’d hope you’d cut her some P.C. slack on this one.

Even so, it’s good advice.

That simple amount of research can save you years of anguish. In many other cases the same principle holds true as well. For example, if you’re a nurse, knowing that injecting a patient with coffee instead of blood might be a bad idea is knowledge worth having. It’s a pity that no one told Rejane Moreira Telles that.

A student nurse in Brazil has been charged with involuntary manslaughter after allegedly injecting a patient with coffee, rather than a blood drip.

Rejane Moreira Telles, 23, had been working at a Rio de Janeiro clinic for only three days
when the incident occurred, the New York Daily News reports.

“Anyone can get confused,” Telles told TV Globo, pointing out that the blood drip and a feed drip filled with a coffee and milk mixture were right next to each other. She also noted that she had not received training in this particular procedure.

The patient, 80-year-old Palmerina Pires Ribeiro, died last week, hours after the mix-up, according tot he Daily Mail.

Nutritional specialist Dr. Armando Carreir told the network that Ribeiro’s death “would have been as if [she] was suffocating.”

Two nurses and other student at the clinic have also been indicted for manslaughter.

A similar incident occurred in Rio de Janeiro in late September, when a nursing technician allegedly injected a patient with soup.

For the record, soup really is good food. It’s just a lousy blood substitute. See? Knowledge is power

Here’s some more advice; if you rob a bank don’t go back and tell them you were shortchanged.

Going back to a bank you just ripped off to claim you’d been shortchanged isn’t likely to end well.

That’s what police say led to an arrest Monday in upstate New York.

Syracuse police say 28-year-old Arthur Bundrage, of East Syracuse, went into a bank at about 9 a.m. and demanded $20,000. Authorities say a teller initially refused, but relented and gave him some money, even though he never showed a weapon or made a threat.

Investigators say Bundrage left but returned when he found he hadn’t been given $20,000. Officers say they found him at the bank’s locked front door, trying to get back in.

Bundrage is in jail awaiting arraignment Tuesday on a charge of fourth-degree grand larceny. Police say he doesn’t yet have a lawyer.

But these are examples of individual stupidity. Let’s take a look at group stupidity. And we are talking on an epic scale here. The Arizona legislature wants to force the Grand Canyon to secede from the United States and become their personal property.

No, I am not drunk.

When voters in Arizona go to the polls next month, they will be asked to decide a landownership tug of war: Should the Grand Canyon belong to all Americans, or just the residents of Arizona?

A controversial ballot measure backed by Republicans in the state legislature is seeking sovereign control over millions of acres of federal land in the state, including the Grand Canyon.

Proposition 120 would amend the state’s constitution to declare Arizona’s sovereignty and jurisdiction over the “air, water, public lands, minerals, wildlife and other natural resources within the state’s boundaries.”

The measure is the latest salvo in the so-called “sagebrush revolt” by Republicans in the West aiming to take back control of major swaths of land owned by various federal agencies, much of it by the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management.

State Senator Sylvia Allen, one of the Republican backers of the measure, argues that federal retention of the land hurts the economy of the Western states and leaves them struggling to fund public education, nurture their economies, and manage their forests and natural resources.

“We do not have the ability in rural Arizona to provide jobs for our citizens due to the fact that the federal government controls all the land,” Allen told Reuters. “It leaves us at a great disadvantage. We’re not able to bring in industry and provide for the jobs that we need,” she added.

The exact area of public land targeted by the measure – which excludes American Indian reservations and federal installations such as arsenals – was not immediately clear on the Arizona Secretary of State’s website.

The Sierra Club pegged the area at between 39,000 and 46,700 square miles (101,000 and 121,000 square km) – or 34 percent to 41 percent of the entire state.

BATTLE OVER LAND

The ballot measure is just the latest move in a decades-old federal-state skirmish over control of a wide range of natural resources in Western states, often pitting mining, drilling and logging companies against those seeking to protect the environment.

The efforts have had mixed success. In May, Arizona’s Republican Governor Jan Brewer vetoed a state bill calling on Washington to relinquish the title to 48,000 square miles (124,000 square km), arguing that it created uncertainty for existing leaseholders on federal lands in difficult economic times.

But similar legislation was signed into law by Governor Gary Herbert in neighbouring Utah in March, despite warnings from state attorneys that it was likely unconstitutional and would trigger a costly and ultimately futile legal battle.

Opponents of the latest drive to assert Arizona’s ownership say that, if successful, the initiative could undermine protections provided by federal environmental laws such as the Clean Air Act, Endangered Species Act, and Clean Water Act, and would saddle Arizona with lands for which it would be unable to care.

“They can’t even fund and ensure that their (state) parks are protected, so how they would take on an additional 25 to 30 million acres of land is a big question mark,” Sandy Bahr, director of the Sierra Club Grand Canyon Chapter, told Reuters.

No polls have given a sense of whether Prop 120 will prosper during the November 6 election. But Bahr cautioned that, should it pass, it would inevitably trigger fresh litigation for Arizona, which recently fought a legal battle over its tough 2010 crackdown on illegal immigrants all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“This one is just blatantly unconstitutional,” Bahr said of Prop 120. “Does Arizona really need another lawsuit?”

Problem #1; (click this to see a map) The Grand Canyon is also in Nevada.

Nevadans are fun loving people but they might be a bit miffed at seeing a 20th of their state taken away from them.

Problem #2; see the excuse above: “We’re not able to bring in industry and provide for the jobs that we need.”

So, to solve that problem they would have to pave over the Grand Canyon. Or use it as a dump. Either way my guess is that people who rely on the Colorado River (whcih flows thorugh it) and Lake Mead (which is entirely in the canyon) for water might be just a touch miffed.

Given the fact that the Southwest is in a state of perpetual drought in even the best of times I could easily see this leading to armed conflict.

Problem #3; Arizona doesn’t even come close to having the resources to poperply manage the thing.

In fact, the state already has millions of acres of unused land. The fact that they have, thus far, used that land to build publicly funded baseball parks and money losing strip malls is not the fault of the federal government.

Nor is it the fault of the Grand Canyon.

Not that I wish to impugn the intelligence of the average Arizonan – well, I guess I do, actually, now that I think about it – I would like to remind them of this bon mot from H.L. Mencken, “People deserve the government they get, and they deserve to get it good and hard.”

Nyle “Let The Beat Build” from Last Pictures

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.