A Mystery and a Tragedy.

From the New York Daily News. I'm with these people. The poor 22 year old baby boy brought a realistic looking gun to a school and commenced with waving it around. In spite of the fact that several police officers showed up and had their guns pointed at him AND instructed him to drop the gun, he disregarded their instructions and pointed the gun at them. SOMEHOW, mysteriously and tragically, the police shot him thinking it was not only a real gun but that he intended to shoot them. I cannot BELIEVE that something like this could ever happen.

George D'Amato, 22, pointed the gun at the officer outside the Sheepshead Bay school and refused orders to drop it, police sources said. "[The officer] fired three times," one of the sources told the Daily News.
Maureen Quinn, who lives nearby, said she ran out of her house and "saw a body laying down on [Knapp] St."
"I heard a cop tell another, 'He pulled a gun on me,'" she said. "He was not moving. It was scary," Quinn said.
"It's a shame," said another nearby resident, Joe Vigilant, 51.
"It really is. He looked young, too," he said of D'Amato.
D'Amato is the son of George D'Amato Sr., a 62-year-old retired senior criminal investigator with the state tax department.
The elder D'Amato and his wife, Maria, were heartbroken and neighbors were baffled by the shooting.
"They [cops] thought it was a good idea to shoot several bullets outside a school around children!" shouted the 56-year-old mom, a Brooklyn courts worker, outside their Gerritsen Beach home last night.
"They cut a life too short for not thinking outside the box," Maria D'Amato added.
"He was kindhearted," the distraught dad said. "He was a good kid. He was waiting for a job." [uh... "waiting" for a job? WTF does that mean?]

Family friend Janice Torres, 22, said the D'Amatos have no idea how their son ended up in the deadly faceoff.
"His parents have served in the justice system," Torres said. "He did not deserve this."

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2010/03/08/2010-03-08_cops_shoot_dead_man_pointing_suspected_toy_gun_after_he_refuses_orders_to_drop_i.html#ixzz0hgjz9gG0

I Smell a Rat.

From CNN:

The driver of a Toyota Prius says he was taken on a wild ride Monday after the car's accelerator became stuck, reaching speeds in excess of 90 mph on a winding, hilly portion of a southern California interstate.
It took the California Highway Patrol to bring the car safely to a stop.
The driver, Jim Sikes, said he was traveling east on Interstate 8 outside of the San Diego area when he attempted to pass a slower vehicle.
"I pushed the gas pedal to pass a car, and it just did something kind of funny ... and it just stuck there," he said at a news conference outside a Highway Patrol office. "As I was going, I was trying the brakes ... and it just kept speeding up."
Sikes said he called 911 for help, and dispatchers talked him through instructions on how he might be able to stop the car. But nothing worked.

 Okay, for the record, I'm by no means "pro-Toyota" but this guy's story sounds like bullshit. First, and most obviously, the report was that he traveled at speeds in excess of 90mph for 30 miles on the highway. Even if he traveled at 90mph for the entire 30 miles, that's still 20 minutes of time. I suspect that he wasn't going 90mph the entire time so that leaves him even more time to try the other obvious procedures for stopping a car- turning off the engine or shifting into neutral.

He apparently did neither of these things. You might argue that he was too busy trying to control the car to think of these things but keep in mind that he said he called 911 for help. One thing to consider is that since much of the systems on a Prius are "drive by wire", a systemic electronics failure could conceivably cause these tactics not to work but I doubt it. I'm not an expert on Priuses but it seems completely illogical to me that you can't turn a mechanical key due to electronic failure.

Of course, there's also the "emergency brake" you know- for emergencies- which is invariably a mechanical device using a cable to control the rear brakes. I'm guessing he didn't try this either.

Car & Driver did an expert report on this phenomenon.

Certainly the most natural reaction to a stuck-throttle emergency is to stomp on the brake pedal, possibly with both feet. And despite dramatic horsepower increases since C/D’s 1987 unintended-acceleration test of an Audi 5000, brakes by and large can still overpower and rein in an engine roaring under full throttle. With the Camry’s throttle pinned while going 70 mph, the brakes easily overcame all 268 horsepower straining against them and stopped the car in 190 feet—that’s a foot shorter than the performance of a Ford Taurus without any gas-pedal problems and just 16 feet longer than with the Camry’s throttle closed. From 100 mph, the stopping-distance differential was 88 feet—noticeable to be sure, but the car still slowed enthusiastically enough to impart a feeling of confidence. We also tried one go-for-broke run at 120 mph, and, even then, the car quickly decelerated to about 10 mph before the brakes got excessively hot and the car refused to decelerate any further. So even in the most extreme case, it should be possible to get a car’s speed down to a point where a resulting accident should be a low-speed and relatively minor event.

But Toyota could do better. Since the advent of electronic throttle control, many automakers have added software to program the throttle to close—and therefore cut power—when the brakes are applied. Cars from BMW, Chrysler, Nissan/Infiniti, Porsche, and Volkswagen/Audi have this feature, and that’s precisely why the G37 aced this test. Even with the throttle floored and the vehicle accelerating briskly, stabbing the brakes causes the engine’s power to fade almost immediately, and as a result, the Infiniti stops in a hurry. From speeds of 70 or even 100 mph, the difference in braking results between having a pinned throttle or not was fewer than 10 feet, which isn’t discernible to the average driver. As a result of the unintended-acceleration investigation, Toyota is adding this feature posthaste.

 The rest of the article is here.

A wise man suggested to me that it's very curious that all these foreign car manufacturers (Toyota, Honda, Volvo, and Volkswagen) are suddenly having serious issues with their cars now that the U.S. Government U.S. taxpayers have taken ownership of American auto manufacturers. I'm certainly not a conspiracy theorist. It's probably just a coincidence. Right?

What If a Republican Had Said It?

In this video, Dan Rather makes a comment about Obama and watermelons. Judge for yourself but I thought it was very telling how Chris Matthews realizes what he's about to say and abruptly leaps to make the rest of his statement completely unintelligible thus protecting him from further shame (as if Liberals can experience the feeling of shame).

If it were a Conservative saying it, I imagine that Mr. Matthews would have sat back and let the man finish and then repeat what he said incessantly while asking for further clarification. Furthermore, he'd insist on further clarification no matter to what degree the statement was crystal clear already until the credits started rolling.



From HotAir

Darwinian plant pruner

Natural Deselection is an instrument that competes plants against each other. The device empowers plants to control the fate of others using sensors and mechanised shears in a Darwinian race for survival. The sensors set above the plants detect the first to grow to a specified height, at which point it is saved, and the others fatally chopped.

From Make Magazine

LOST Hilarity To Hold You Over Until Tuesday Night

For those of you who are Lost fans. If you're not, go ahead and skip these videos.

Lost: Baywatch

 

Hurley’s Party In The USA

Thanks, YepYep

Yes. Right.

"Right now is the time to put pressure on our governments. Make them come up with radical laws or radical changes. Changes that will make major companies join this battle."

It sounds to me like a 9 year old's war cry demanding no more bed time, no more vegetables and "free ice cream for all!" I love this kind of talk. It only seems to come from the misguided and the weak. Rather than doing the work, they use this overly aggressive rhetoric so when their idiotic plans fall apart, they can proclaim "well we put up a good fight" at the cocktail parties where they try to impress their friends.

Christopher Walken Is Cool

What a great video. And I hate hip-hop. Sorry - embedding denied.

Elinor Burkett Pulls a Kanye.

From BreitbartTV (no embedding possible, sorry).

MTV: Producer Elinor Burkett borrowed a move from Kanye West's playbook at the 82nd Annual Academy Awards when she stormed the stage and interrupted her "Music by Prudence" collaborator Roger Ross Williams' acceptance speech for the Best Documentary Short award.

Salon interviewed Elinor Burkett: "What happened was the director and I had a bad difference over the direction of the film that resulted in a lawsuit that has settled amicably out of court. But there have been all these events around the Oscars, and I wasn't invited to any of them. And he's not speaking to me. So we weren't even able to discuss ahead of the time who would be the one person allowed to speak if we won. And then, as I'm sure you saw, when we won, he raced up there to accept the award. And his mother took her cane and blocked me. So I couldn't get up there very fast."

If you're interested in the story behind the awkward moment, click here.

Politico Shocked That Right-Wing Refuses to Accept Responsibility for Left-Wing Violence

Politico seems shocked and surprised that the conservative right refuses to take responsibility for the Pentagon shooting. I mean, so what that the shooter was a Bush-hating registered Democrat who believed the Bush-Cheney crime family was behind 9-11. The left promotes a circular logic meme that Tea Parties patriots are violent, and therefore anyone who commits an act of violence must be a Tea Partie patriot. But reality stubbornly refuses to cooperate with the left's meme.

• Joseph 'Kamikaze' Stack's manifesto bashes banks and insurance companies in language that might have been lifted from an Obama speech.
• Obama-loving professor Amy Bishop guns down six colleagues, but
• The only violence at Townhall meetings has come from SEIU union thugs assaulting Tea Party patriots.

BTW, nutjob progressive radio host Mike Malloy and hate-filled atheist Bill Maher are both trying to tie Glenn Beck to the Pentagon shooting through the indisputable logic that... um... they hate Glenn Beck.

From Moonbattery

Genius

Eddie got so desperate that he went to his friend and said, "I will give you $1000 if you let me have sex with you."

The girl looked at him shocked and said, "Hell no!" He said, "I'll be real quick; I'll throw the money on the floor, you bend over to get it, and I'll be finished by the time you've picked it up!"

She thought for a moment and told him that she had to ask her boyfriend. So she called him and explained the situation. Her boyfriend says, "Ask the guy for $2000, that will pay off our credit cards. Pick up the money really really fast, and he won't even have time to get his pants down!" She agreed and accepts the proposal.

2 hours go by and the boyfriend is still waiting for his girlfriend to call back. Finally after another fifteen minutes he calls and asks, "What the hell happened?!" Heavily panting, she managed to reply, "It's all in quarters!"

Something That Didn't Make the News.

Maybe you’d like to hear about something other than idiot Reservists and naked Iraqis. Maybe you’d like to hear about a real American, somebody who honored the uniform he wears.
Meet Brian Chontosh.
Churchville-Chili Central School class of 1991. Proud graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology. Husband and about-to-be father. First lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps.
And a genuine hero.
The secretary of the Navy said so yesterday.
At 29 Palms in California Brian Chontosh was presented with the Navy Cross, the second highest award for combat bravery the United States can bestow.
That’s a big deal.
But you won’t see it on the network news tonight, and all you read in Brian’s hometown newspaper was two paragraphs of nothing. Instead, it was more blather about some mental defective MPs who acted like animals.
The odd fact about the American media in this war is that it’s not covering the American military. The most plugged-in nation in the world is receiving virtually no true information about what its warriors are doing.
Oh, sure, there’s a body count. We know how many Americans have fallen. And we see those same casket pictures day in and day out. And we’re almost on a first-name basis with the pukes who abused the Iraqi prisoners. And we know all about improvised explosive devices and how we lost Fallujah and what Arab public-opinion polls say about us and how the world hates us.
We get a non-stop feed of gloom and doom.
But we don’t hear about the heroes.
The incredibly brave GIs who honorably do their duty. The ones our grandparents would have carried on their shoulders down Fifth Avenue.
The ones we completely ignore.
Like Brian Chontosh.
It was a year ago on the march into Baghdad. Brian Chontosh was a platoon leader rolling up Highway 1 in a humvee.
When all hell broke loose.
Ambush city.
The young Marines were being cut to ribbons. Mortars, machine guns, rocket propelled grenades. And the kid out of Churchville was in charge. It was do or die and it was up to him.
So he moved to the side of his column, looking for a way to lead his men to safety. As he tried to poke a hole through the Iraqi line his humvee came under direct enemy machine gun fire.
It was fish in a barrel and the Marines were the fish.
And Brian Chontosh gave the order to attack. He told his driver to floor the humvee directly at the machine gun emplacement that was firing at them. And he had the guy on top with the .50 cal unload on them.
Within moments there were Iraqis slumped across the machine gun and Chontosh was still advancing, ordering his driver now to take the humvee directly into the Iraqi trench that was attacking his Marines. Over into the battlement the humvee went and out the door Brian Chontosh bailed, carrying an M16 and a Beretta and 228 years of Marine Corps pride.
And he ran down the trench.
With its mortars and riflemen, machineguns and grenadiers.
And he killed them all.
He fought with the M16 until it was out of ammo. Then he fought with the Beretta until it was out of ammo. Then he picked up a dead man’s AK47 and fought with that until it was out of ammo. Then he picked up another dead man’s AK47 and fought with that until it was out of ammo.
At one point he even fired a discarded Iraqi RPG into an enemy cluster, sending attackers flying with its grenade explosion.
When he was done Brian Chontosh had cleared 200 yards of entrenched Iraqis from his platoon’s flank. He had killed more than 20 and wounded at least as many more.
But that’s probably not how he would tell it.
He would probably merely say that his Marines were in trouble, and he got them out of trouble. Hoo-ah, and drive on.
“By his outstanding display of decisive leadership, unlimited courage in the face of heavy enemy fire, and utmost devotion to duty, 1st Lt. Chontosh reflected great credit upon himself and upheld the highest traditions of the Marine Corps and the United States Naval Service.”
That’s what the citation says.
And that’s what nobody will hear.
That’s what doesn’t seem to be making the evening news. Accounts of American valor are dismissed by the press as propaganda, yet accounts of American difficulties are heralded as objectivity. It makes you wonder if the role of the media is to inform, or to depress – to report or to deride. To tell the truth, or to feed us lies.
But I guess it doesn’t matter.
We’re going to turn out all right.
As long as men like Brian Chontosh wear our uniform.

- by Bob Lonsberry © 2004

From Bob's Blog. 

What Do We Want? Universal Healthcare! When Do We Want It? NOW!!!!

Emphasis is mine. My comments in red.

A man of 22 died in agony of dehydration after three days in a leading teaching hospital.
Kane Gorny was so desperate for a drink that he rang police to beg for their help.
They arrived on the ward only to be told by doctors that everything was under control.
The next day his mother Rita Cronin found him delirious and he died within hours.
She said nurses had failed to give him vital drugs which controlled fluid levels in his body. 'He was totally dependent on the nurses to help him and they totally betrayed him.'

Kane, aged 11.

A coroner has such grave concerns about the case that it has been referred to police.
Sources say they are investigating the possibility of a corporate manslaughter charge against St George's Hospital in Tooting, South London.
Mr Gorny, from Balham, worked for Waitrose and had been a keen footballer and runner until he was diagnosed with a brain tumour the year before his death.

The medication he took caused his bones to weaken and he was admitted to St George's for a hip replacement in May last year. The operation left him immobile and unable to get out of bed.

His 50-year-old mother says that he needed to take drugs three times a day to regulate his hormones. Doctors had told him that without the drugs he would die.

A young life snatched away: Kane with his mother Rita while being treated for a brain tumour

Rita said nurses had failed to give her son vital drugs which controlled fluid levels in his body

Although he had stressed to staff how important his medication was, she said, no one gave him the drugs.
She said that two days after his hip operation, while Miss Cronin was at work, he became severely dehydrated but his requests for water were refused.
He became aggressive and nurses called in security guards to restrain him.
After they had left, he rang the police from his bed to demand their help.
Miss Cronin, who is divorced from her son's father Peter, said: 'The police told me he'd said, "Please help me. All I want is a drink and no one is helping me".
'By this time my son was confused due to his lack of medication and I think the nurses just ignored him because they thought he was just being badly behaved.
'They were lazy, careless and hadn't bothered to check his charts and see his medication was essential.' Either that, or because they're nurses and not doctors, they couldn't properly interpret the information on the charts. Some of you may say that it doesn't take a doctor to understand the charts. You're probably right. I'm only suggesting that it takes a doctor to understand the charts and to act upon the information in the charts in such a way that the patient doesn't die from something so completely avoidable as dehydration.
That evening, Miss Cronin visited him. She said: 'I told Kane to behave himself because I thought he had been causing trouble - and I feel so bad about that now. I thought maybe he was having a bad reaction to the morphine he was on but in fact it was because he had not had his medication.'
The next morning she visited him before going to work. 'He was delirious and his mouth was open,' she said. 'I gave him a drink of Ribena.
'I told three nurses there was something wrong with my son and they said, "He's fine" and walked off. I started to cry and a locum doctor who was there told me not to worry.
'Eventually the ward doctor came round, took one look at Kane and started shouting for help.' Where was the doctor up to this point?
Miss Cronin was asked to leave her son's bedside. 'He died an hour later,' she said. 'I didn't even realise he was dying. I didn't even have a chance to say goodbye.'
The death certificate said Mr Gorny had died because of a 'water deficit' and 'hypernatraemia' - a medical term for dehydration.
His mother added: 'When I went back to the hospital I was told that all the nurses had been offered counselling as they were so traumatised, but nothing was offered to me. Wouldn't it be more productive to offer them training rather than counselling? Of course, when I say "offer training", I mean insist that they get proper training before they're responsible for the care of any patient.
'The whole thing is a disgrace. This hospital has a brilliant reputation and boasts of its excellent standards and safety record.
'But as soon as my son walked into that ward, his death warrant was signed. Of the 32 people who were involved in my son's care, every one made a mistake that ultimately led to his death, from the consultant to the care assistant. It makes me wonder how the mother stood idly by and let 32 people make at least 32 mistakes without asking for her son's care to be escalated to someone competent. I mean, sure, these people are professionals, but do you really expect them to care more about your son's well-being than you do? I don't expect people to hold medical degrees but I do expect them to actively participate in their medical care and in the medical care of their loved ones or family members.
'There has been an internal investigation but St George's never made it public and it was a whitewash-After his death the hospital never phoned me or wrote to me to apologise. How could this happen in the 21st century?'Apologies are an admission of guilt. Thank the lawyers for that one. Of course, thank the liberals for encouraging the lawyers via their frivolous lawsuits.
A Metropolitan Police spokesman said: 'Detectives from the Homicide and Serious Crime Command are investigating the death of Kane Gorny at St George's Hospital after this was referred to us by Westminster Coroner's Court.'
A spokesman for St George's Hospital said: 'We are extremely sorry about the death of Kane Gorny and understand the distress that this has caused to his family. Brace yourself, anonymous spokesman. You're in for a lawsuit.
'A full investigation was carried out and new procedures introduced to ensure that such a case cannot happen in future. Yes- a "full investigation". Seems to me that if you need an investigation at all, the whole lot should be fired and replaced with people who don't need an investigation to understand the cause and effect of dehydration.
'We have written to the family to explain the actions that have been taken and to answer their concerns about Mr Gorny's care. The family has also been invited to meet with trust staff to discuss the case in detail.'
The tragedy emerged a week after a report into hundreds of deaths at Stafford Hospital revealed the appalling quality of care given by many of the nurses.
This week a task force called on nurses to sign a public pledge that they will treat everyone with compassion and dignity. Oh thank the Lord. Case closed.

From: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1255858/Neglected-lazy-nurses-Kane-Gorny-22-dying-thirst-rang-police-beg-water.html#ixzz0hVC3HuiL

Any volunteers (and I'm not talking about those of you from Tennessee)

Killer Whales Playing with Seals.

I guessed the Orcas released them... later... or something...

From Mysterious & Tragic post on this blog.

Tilikum could have been trying to play with Brancheau or get her attention or companionship, said Nancy Black, a marine biologist who has studied whales for 20 years. Such whales play with seals and sea lions in the wild, tossing them in the air, she said. But they do not kill them and end up letting them go.

Check out the tail-flip at the end of the video. I can't imagine any reason for doing that except to put as much distance between yourself and the seal so he can think he's got a chance at swimming for shore. That must be the height of comedy for killer whales because where does he think he's going?

Michael Moore Thinks Haiti Is a "Republican Paradise"

Morbidly obese leftist gasbag Michael Moore pontificates that the reason 250,000 people died in Haiti is because it is run by free market Republicans. Here is his stupid statement. (Translated from his native Huttese.)

Chile had an earthquake this past week that was 500 times greater than the earthquake in Haiti. But here's the big difference. In Chile, they have various -- very serious regulations when it comes to building codes. So a thousand people died, sadly, but a thousand people died with a 500 times greater earthquake. And in Haiti, where there are no building codes, no regulations -- a Republican's paradise -- a quarter of a million people died.

Michael the Hutt has it ass-backwards --- which is truly incredible considering the size of his ass. (If Michael Moore was crossing the street in front of you and you swerved to miss him, you would run out of gas.) In fact, Haiti's economy is as tightly regulated as socialists think every economy should be.

According to a World Bank report in 2006, 'In Haiti, the process of business regulations is complex and customs procedures are lengthy.' On average, opening a business took 204 days. For comparison, the average was 73.3 days in Latin America and 16.3 days in OECD countries. It took estimated 5 years and 65 bureaucratic procedures for a private person to buy land from the state. It took 683 days to register a property. All Latin American and Caribbean countries except Cuba and Venezuela enjoyed much more economic freedom than Haiti on the Index of Economic Freedom of 2006.

Contrary to what Michael the Hutt says, It is rated the freest economy in Latin America.It benefits from a free market system put in place by Augusto Pinochet, a right-wing strongman who ... unlike Marxist dictators like Castro, Mugabe, Kim Jong-Il, and Chavez... left power voluntarily. (He also did not squander Chile's resources trying to export revolution to other countries.) Chile not only has an open free market economy, it also has a privatized system of social security, and a flat tax.

In other words, Chile is the Republican model. Not Haiti.

What an ignorant FAG.

From Moonbattery

Mighty Whitey Man

PJTV (sorry- no embedding).

A Lib Friend of Mine Tracked His Mouse for 4 Days. These are the results.

I used that IOgraph software to track my mouse movements for four days. I have a dual-monitor system with a virtual 3200 x 1200 display. Here's the result of my mousing:

I only marked the first day. The other 3 days are in their raw state.

fri pins

Out With the Trash (UPDATE)

Representative Charles Rangel gave up his chairmanship of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee and a lawmaker said the panel’s second-ranking Democrat, Pete Stark of California, will temporarily fill in.
Rangel, admonished last week for breaking House rules on accepting gifts, told reporters today he asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for a leave of absence.

Once again, I am shocked (and appalled)
More of the story here.

UPDATE - Now, Rangel's replacement has ALREADY stepped down - less than a day later!

Some Democrats said Mr. Stark, among Congress' more liberal members, was too far to the left to run the panel, which is seen as one of the more business-friendly committees in Congress. Mr. Stark also has a history of making contentious comments. (From The Washington Times)