J's Cafe Nette

Archive for October 13th, 2007

…That’s what little boys are made of. Now we can add cars.

In one case six year old Josh Barber of Broomfield, Colorado, woke up hungry.

His mother was recovering from surgery and his grandmother was in charge of the little guy. She was still asleep.

Josh decided he was hungry and wanted to go to Applebee’s to get something to eat.

He took Grandma’s keys, unlocked the car door, moved his car seat to the steering wheel area, turned on the car, put it in reverse and stepped on the gas.

He didn’t get very far as he ran into a transformer and knocked out the power in the neighborhood.

Word has it little Josh has given up driving…for now.

In the other instsnce three year old Justin Will of Omro, Wisconsin, decided to take his battery operated Mustang (with all the frills including sound system and chrome wheels) for a spin with his two year old friend.

Neighbors saw them stopping at a stop sign, crossing the road and entering a bridge, where one of the neighbors gave chase and kept an eye on the tots until the police pulled them over.

Josh’s keys and battery have been removed from him and he is stuck without wheels for awhile.

While these stories may bring a chuckle to you we all must remember to be very careful with our little ones. They just don’t understand the dangers of what they do.

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This gentleman must have been “flush” with excitement upon completion of of his dream home.

SEOUL (AFP) – Sim Jae-Duck was born in a restroom and now he plans to live and die in one — a 1.6 million dollar toilet-shaped house designed to promote his tireless campaign for cleaner loos worldwide.

Sim will open what is billed as the world’s one and only toilet house on November 11 to mark the launch of his World Toilet Association.

The 419-square-metre (4,508-sq-foot) concrete and glass structure is rising on the site of Sim’s former home in his native city of Suweon, 40 kilometres (24 miles) south of Seoul.

Before he moves in, anyone who is flush with funds can rent it for 50,000 dollars a day — with proceeds going to his campaign to provide poor countries with proper sanitary facilities.

Apart from two bedrooms, two guestrooms and other rooms, the two-storey house — of course — features three deluxe toilets. Unlike the giant “toilet” in which they are located, they will not be see-through affairs.

“A showcase bathroom screened by a glass wall is located in its centre, while other toilets have elegant fittings or water conservation devices,” Sim told AFP.

The showcase loo will feature a device producing a mist to make users feel secure. An electronic sensor will raise the lid automatically when people enter, and there will also be music for patrons.

The house, complete with a stream and small garden in front, is named Haewoojae, meaning “a place of sanctuary where one can solve one’s worries”.

Solve ones worries indeed..and probably do a bit of reading as well.

Just a little lighter fare for the weekend.

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Sometimes there simply are no words to express how you feel as you read a news article.

This is one of those times.

AN Indian couple has been charged with the murder of one of their sons after they tried to transfuse his blood into his elder brother to make him smarter.[Emphasis added]

The Indian Express newspaper said the couple were both doctors and the mother had a dream in which a guru advised blood transfusion to make their elder son do better at his studies.

Police said the couple initially claimed the 11-year-old boy was killed in an attack on the family, but later the father confessed.

Seriously, no words, although many come to mind and those I would not insert in a post on this blog.

HT: Lucianne

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Short, intricate and enjoyable. Have a great Saturday!

*For those who might be interested, here is a description of the company which produced this ad.

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We all read of the corruption in politics in Washington. The bloated earmarks from which many of us never see any benefits, problems with lobbyists who get their hooks into elected officials and never cut them loose and constant campaign mode for all offices which precludes accomplishing anything worthwhile for citizens is rampant.

Well, in Atalantic City, New Jersey, the word corrupt has been the standardbearer for local politics for what seems like forever. If you are aware of the abuses of power there, they seem to far exceed those at the federal level.

When Bob Levy announced his resignation on Wednesday, he became the third mayor since the dawn of casino gambling 30 years ago to leave office under a cloud.

His departure, which is expected to set off a political donnybrook over a successor, capped a 14-month period in which corruption, scandal and outlandish behavior reached an unprecedented level even by local standards.

In a little over a year, city residents have seen:

Three members of City Council, including the former council president, convicted of accepting bribes in a cash-for-contracts scheme.

Another City Council member videotaped having sex with a prostitute in a motel room, in a plot to force him out of office hatched by his political opponents – including the aforementioned former City Council president.

A fifth councilman who was arrested on a drunken-driving charge on the beach at 2:30 in the morning, in his city-issued vehicle.

A sixth councilman indicted by a county grand jury along with the former council president and two of the president’s brothers on conspiracy, coercion and invasion of privacy charges stemming from the motel sex-video scheme.

The most recent City Council president, who two days ago became mayor, refusing to return his share of an $850,000 settlement he was awarded in a civil suit filed against the city. The New Jersey Supreme Court, in overturning the settlement, ruled that it was “so infected with conflicts of interest that it is void as a matter of state law.”

Two long-time political operatives charged in the cash-for-contracts scheme pleading guilty amid reports that they are now FBI cooperators. But not before one was found collapsed behind the wheel of his car from what police said was a self-inflicted bullet wound to the chest in a botched suicide attempt.

And Levy disappearing for two weeks while in a rehab clinic, then surfacing to resign on Wednesday as his lawyer acknowledged he is the target of a federal probe into allegations he had enhanced his military record to collect a larger pension.

The Philadelphia Inquirer happens to be our local paper. It has consistently over the years detailed the difficulties in Atalntic City, which makes one wonder how the voters can continue to find these less than scrupulous individuals appealing at the ballot box.

Now I am left to wonder how they will feel about their “acting Mayor”:

Hours after being sworn in as acting mayor, William “Speedy” Marsh asked a state judge to delay a decision on how and when he must repay a $363,000 debt to the city “until this little mayoral thing works itself out.”

Marsh, the City Council president, took over from former Mayor Bob Levy who resigned Wednesday, citing health problems and a federal investigation into veteran’s disability payments he received stemming from his Vietnam war service. With Levy’s resignation, which followed his two-week disappearance, Marsh became acting mayor.

The $363,000 Marsh must repay the city is his portion of a payout to him and a former mayor to settle a lawsuit they filed claiming they had been fired from board of education jobs due to political retaliation.

In May, the state Supreme Court ruled that Marsh and Lorenzo Langford, who would later be elected mayor, should not have received the settlement, which the court termed “infected by intolerable conflicts of interest.” (Langford was in office as mayor when City Council approved the payments.)

Marsh says he needs a little breathing room before he repays the money.

“I absolutely will pay it back,” he said in an interview with the Associated Press yesterday. “I’m not going to duck it. We’re just asking for it to be suspended until this little mayoral thing works itself out.”

He needs “breathing room” as “this little mayoral thing works itself out”? Does that sound like a bad joke or am I being a bit cynical here?

It seems to me that any city deserves far better representation than what Atlantic City has come to accept. Perhaps when the Democratic Party nominates its individuals to replace the disgraced Mayor Levy, they will think twice about permanently installing Mr. Marsh.

Marsh said he is interested in being named mayor until a special election can be held next year.

“I hope I do a good enough job, and maybe I can pursue it,” he said. “If I can get a month under my belt, and people like what I’m doing, maybe I’ll continue on.”

The local Democratic Party has 15 days to nominate three people to serve as mayor. If the council picks one, that person will serve until a special election next year. Another mayoral election will be held in 2009.

Or perhaps this assurance from the acting mayor will be enough to catapult him permanently into the office.

“The residents and the business community don’t have to worry,” he said. “The embarrassment has to stop, and we have to have good leadership.”

Uh-huh.

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From Friday’s Omega Letter by Jack Kinsella:

Oscar-Winning Nobel Prize Laureate Almost-Next-President Al Gore

Alfred Nobel was a Swedish chemist, engineer and armaments manufacturer who made his fortune by his invention of dynamite.
In 1867, Nobel discovered that when nitroglycerin was absorbed into an inert substance, it became more stable and less volatile than liquid nitro. Ten years later, he improved on his invention, creating gelignite, or ‘blasting gelatin’.

In 1888, a newspaper prematurely released his obituary on an erroneous report of his death. Nobel was scandalized when he read his own obituary’s headline:
“Le marchand de la mort est mort” (“The Merchant of Death is Dead”.

His death notice read: “Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday.”

Nobel, who saw himself as a great humanitarian and philanthropist, was shocked to find his historical legacy would be summarized as ‘the merchant of death’.

In 1895, in a ceremony at the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris, he signed his last will and testament, leaving the bulk of his fortune to set up the Nobel Prize Committee.

Nobel left a fortune estimated at $4.3 million 1896 dollars to fund the prizes. ($4.3 million in 1896 would be worth roughly $103 million 2007 dollars)

Nobel left instructions to award annual prizes in the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and, the most incongruous of all, the Nobel Prize for Peace.

It is incongruous because the premature obituary was right. Alfred Nobel was a merchant of death. His most successful invention, dynamite, has probably been responsible for more deaths than any other invention in history.

Nobel’s armaments company, Bofors, manufactured death on a wholesale basis. Bofors anti-aircraft guns were used by all sides in both world wars, and the Bofors 37mm anti-tank gun was standard equipment on tanks used by Americans, British, Polish and Germans in WWII.

Nobel’s legacy of death continues every with every IED or suicide bombing attack. Every dollar in the Nobel Committee’s trust fund is stained in blood.

Which might explain why the Nobel Committee’s choices for its ‘Peace Prize’ are generally so-off-the-wall.

Assessment:

In recent years, the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded or shared by such illustrious luminaries for peace as Yasser Arafat, Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, Mikhail Gorbachev, Kofi Annan, and of course, former US President Jimmy Carter.

Summarized, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee has chosen to award the Peace Prize to: one unrepentant terrorist, two Marxist-Socialists, one Soviet Communist, one international thief of historical proportions — and one Useful Idiot, in that order.

In keeping with its track record, this year’s Nobel Peace Prize was jointly awarded to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — and our own Al Gore, for their evident contributions to world peace by advancing the theory that we’re all gonna die soon anyway.

The Peace Prize Committee chose Gore and the IPCC for “their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change,” the committee said.

It is worth noting that the Nobel Peace Prize Committee has, in the past, rejected nominations for Mahatma Ghandi (5 times), and Eleanor Roosevelt (5 times).
(Other examples include rejecting such nominees as Nicolae Tesla and Thomas Edison for prizes in physics.)

First off, it is hard to connect climate change to advancing world peace. In the main, the Gore model for effecting climate change involves keeping undeveloped and underdeveloped nations from contributing pollution by stopping them from developing, ie, keeping them poor.

Poor, under-developed nations are seldom peaceful.

It is significant to note, I think, that Gore did NOT get the award for science. After all, climatology is a science. If you took all the charts, graphs and scientific models out of Al Gore’s Power Point presentations, what would be left?

(“Hi. I’m Al Gore. and I used to be the next President of the United States. Thank you all for coming.”

Even the IPCC that shared the award with Gore disputed many of his key ‘facts’ when it issued its revised report.

Just last week, a UK judge, after only three days of study, identified nine separate scientific errors in Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth” and ordered UK schools to issue a disclaimer to that effect before showing it to students.

Gore’s self- reinvention as an evangelist of climate change has yet to advance any real science. So the reason Gore wasn’t included in the science category is self-evident.

But his selection in the category of ‘peace’ seems equally difficult to justify.

Al Gore’s record for advancing peace includes creating a Constitutional crisis after losing Election 2000 that nearly erupted into civil war and opened political wounds in America that have yet to heal.

Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” has advanced the international image of America as a rapacious industrial polluter whose selfish pursuit of wealth endangers the whole planet.

Al has made it his mission to scare the public into demanding that George Bush sign the UN’s Kyoto Treaty on Climate Change. The Kyoto Treaty would create a global government agency with the authority to impose punitive taxes on countries that exceed an UN-determined pollution cap.

Even if Bush signed it, the Senate already voted 98-0 not to ratify it. It has nothing to do with the environment or peace and everything to do with engendering political conflict along partisan lines.

For Al Gore, it is a convenient club to use to beat George Bush and the neocons who ’stole’ the election from him about the head and shoulders.

But to the international community, it is a method of restoring political balance in a ‘unipolar world’ by weakening the United States.

Even announcing Al Gore as a recipient engendered a lot more conflict than it did peace.

When the Nobel Committee gave Jimmy Carter the Peace Prize a few years back, it was uncharacteristically candid about the reasons. One Nobel Committee member, Gunnar Berge, told reporters Carter got the award “to give George Bush a kick in the leg.”

Selecting Al Gore as this year’s Nobel Peace Prize Laureate is another kick, aimed slightly higher.

He’s right. This should have been in the science category, but everyone knows it’s bad science.

To be included with Arafat and Jimmy Carter tells you what this award is worth.

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