Archive for the 'WTF' Category

Shine on you (hic) crazy diamond…

Tuesday, September 9th, 2008

Discussed today at the office: Moonshine found in truck stopped for weaving

Why exactly is this noteworthy? From the article:

Guffey told authorities he parked his truck with nearly $3,000 inside it in Flag Pond, took a walk and came back to find it full of moonshine.

He said he has been buying whiskey like that in eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina for a decade.

Honesty FTW.

Supreme Court Justice != climatologist

Monday, April 2nd, 2007

Government must deal with greenhouse gases: US Supreme Court

“The harms associated with climate change are serious and well recognized,” said judge John Paul Stevens as the ruling was carried by five votes in favor to four against.

Reeeeally. A recent documentary “The Great Global Warming Swindle” (Google Video, YouTube, Wikipedia info) offers some of the most compelling counter arguments to the manmade global warming meme that I’ve come across in quite a while.

What makes the Supreme Court story so ridiculous is a) the idea that our esteemed USSC judges are even remotely qualified to evaluate the case for manmade global warming and then issue judicial decrees based on their evaluations and b) it makes heavy use of the idiotic “consensus of scientists” argument. I won’t even touch a), but I’ll address b) …loudly, for those of you in the cheap seats: REAL SCIENCE HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH CONSENSUS. Wake up, before it’s too late.

Why Mommy is a Democrat

Monday, October 23rd, 2006

Forwarded to me, with the note “In case you needed to get your heartrate up…”.

He wasn’t kidding: http://littledemocrats.net/

Be sure to see the sample pages — my “favorite” is the illustration used to show mommy keeping her children safe: preventing them from being trampled by an elephant. What a quaint and clever jab at ye GOP, doing it’s part to make this book even more trite and worthless than the concept alone could achieve. Like, well, nearly everything else the Democrat party has produced. I have to give them credit for sticking to the program, though: one of Marx’s key stepping stones was the institution of a government education system (sound familiar? I’ll take “The Department of Education” for $1000, Alex) to “instill” proper socialist values in budding young minds. If we can start the brainwashing before they’re even potty trained, all the better! Workers Socialists of the world, unite!

Bored? Look at strangers’ photos!

Wednesday, August 30th, 2006

Stumbled across this tonight. Replace the 8 “N”s in the following link with a largish 8-digit number (numbers starting with 4021 were working reasonably well) to find random peoples photo albums on PhotoWorks:
http://www.photoworks.com/util/slideShowLarge2.jsp?stackID=NNNNNNNN
A lot of numbers don’t work …but some do.

It’s a not un-weird experience. I can’t say that I recommend that you try it, or that I would suggest that you try it …but it was just too bizarre of an experience not to share. Not a new concept, manually munging URLs, but in this case, since it was with people’s semi-private (insofar as they were anonymous) photo galleries, the weird factor was waay up. At least for me. YMMV.

And I’m hoping to elicit some strong opinions (pro or con) from my readership. Things like that are good for traffic :)

Tears to your eyes

Friday, April 14th, 2006

Neal tipped me off to this article at IndustryWeek.com: Tax Cheats Snub Spend-Crazy Feds. The article (obviously) focuses on people who cheat on their returns, but the groundwork numbers the author lays at the beginning are staggering:

  • 2005 total compensation earned: $8.2 trillion
  • 2005 federal income taxes: $932 billion ($6,650 per employee)
  • 2005 other federal taxes (mostly Social Security): $1.286 trillion
  • 2005 total state/local taxes: $1.14 trillion
  • 2005 total taxes: $3.358 trillion (~$24,000 per employee)
  • 2005 total federal defense expenditures: $495 billion
  • 2005 total federal goods/wages expenditures: $272 billion
  • 2005 total federal distributions (Social Security, Medicaid, etc): $1.69 trillion

So 40% of what we earn goes to taxes ($3.358 trillion), of which just over 50% ($1.69 trillion) is then ..given to someone else.

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