No Runny Eggs

The repository of one hard-boiled egg from the south suburbs of Milwaukee, Wisconsin (and the occassional guest-blogger). The ramblings within may or may not offend, shock and awe you, but they are what I (or my guest-bloggers) think.

Archive for June 9th, 2008

The Morning Scramble – 6/9/2008

by @ 10:04. Filed under The Morning Scramble.

What I was doing all weekend…

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_bOsDasw2s[/youtube]

As such, this is going to be a bit abbreviated, but I still consider myself extremely lucky. Only very minor seepage into the basement from a disconnected downspout (no damage), and the water on the streets in the subdivision only got to the top of the curb at the height of the storm. Elsewhere both in Oak Creek and the state, things got far, far wetter.

Oak Creek flooding continues

by @ 8:47. Filed under Weather.

I just got back from a two-hour tour of town after a weekend that saw 8.5 inches of rain at the MMSD plant at 5th Ave. and Puetz Rd and 7 inches at the bunker, and the following major roads are closed:

– E. Puetz Rd. between Maize Dr. and Pennsylvania Ave.
– S. Pennsylvania Ave. between Puetz Rd. and Oakwood Rd.
– E. Forest Hill Ave. between Shepard Ave. and Pennsylvania Ave.
– E. Ryan Rd. (the old Ryan, not the new Hwy. 100) between 15th Ave. and the dead-end west of Nicholson Ave.
– S. 15th Ave. between Ryan and State Hwy. 100
– S. Nicholson Rd. between Puetz Rd. and State Hwy 100, and again at County Line Rd going south into Caledonia.
– E. County Line Rd. between 10th Ave. and Nicholson Rd. (note; Caledonia still has a barricade eastbound at 10th Ave., closing eastbound between there and Chicago Rd.)
– E. Elm Rd. between 10th Ave. and Nicholson Rd.
– S. Howell Ave (State Highway 38) at Elm Rd. going south into Caledonia (presumably 7 1/2 Mile Rd.)
– S. 13th St. at the Milwaukee/Racine county line going south into Caledonia
– S. 27th St. (State Highway 241) south of Elm to I-94 (this includes the off-ramp from north/westbound I-94 to 27th St.)
– W. Drexel Ave. between 13th St. and 27th St.

In addition, E. Drexel Ave. at and just east of Clement Ave. and S. Shepard Ave. just north of Ryan Rd. had significant standing water as of 6:00 am to 6:30 am, but were still passable (unless one is driving a Corvette).

Mayor Dick Bolender conducted an interview with WTMJ-AM this morning, and WTMJ was kind enough to put up a podcast (even if they misspelled the mayor’s name). Even though he had 5 inches of water in his basement, he was out there helping to put up barricades.

On a personal note, I got extremely lucky with nothing more than a bit of seepage from a downspout that got disconnected in the height of the storm.

A New Class Of Human?

by @ 5:02. Filed under Miscellaneous.

On March 31st, at a town hall meeting in Pennsylvania, Barack Obama made the following statement:

When it comes specifically to HIV/AIDS, the most important prevention is education, which should include "” which should include abstinence education and teaching the children "” teaching children, you know, that sex is not something casual. But it should also include "” it should also include other, you know, information about contraception because, look, I’ve got two daughters. 9 years old and 6 years old. I am going to teach them first of all about values and morals. But if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby. I don’t want them punished with an STD at the age of 16. You know, so it doesn’t make sense to not give them information."

Amongst other things, this statement shows that contrary to Barack’s earlier contention,

No one is pro-abortion and I do not sanction infanticide

That he made at Benedictine University in October, 2004, he is not only pro-abortion but also believes that abortion is an acceptable means of birth control.

I’ll admit that having a Senator with the most liberal Senate voting record, supporting abortion and its use as a contraception may not be big news. But even the most liberal Senator must have limits?

In August 2002, President Bush signed the Born Alive Infants Protection Act (BAIP). The act confers the status of “human being” on any child who survives an abortion attempt. The implications of this is that it imposes a requirement on doctors to take necessary action to support the life of the child and not “perform an abortion” by simply “shelving” the child and allowing it to expire as a result of neglect.

Interestingly, the Born alive Infants Protection Act was was passed by unanimous voice consent of the US Senate. It was passed even though Barabara Boxer was unable to confirm or reconcile in her own mind that a baby; breathing, heart beating and separated from its mother was actually alive.

While his time in the Illinois Senate and particularly while he was Chairman of the Illinois Health & Human Services Committee, Barack Obama had an opportunity to pass a similar bill for Illinois. Obama had numerous reasons why he didn’t want to pass a BAIP bill for Illinois. Jill Stanek  does a fantastic job of deconstructing Barack’s objections to passing such a bill. As Jill points out in her article, all the objections that Obama had were removed by the wording of the Federal bill which the Illinois bill mirrored, except for one. When “Born Alive” was defined as having the child separated from the mother, Obama balked. He refused to amend the Illinois language to mirror the federal language because a: the bill would have surely passed and b: any definition of “life” in a bill that deals with an abortion issue is seen as being the start of a slippery slope that radical abortion rights advocates don’t want to go near.

Today I saw this article about a boy born in the UK, despite an attempt to abort him at eight weeks. While suffering from a kidney defect, the boy is expected to live a normal life.

So here’s what I’m trying to figure out…

There was an attempted and failed abortion attempt on this boys life.
In spite of the attempt, he survived to be born.
If he lived in Illinois, what would he be? Barack Obama doesn’t believe that he is a “human person” or even that classification as “member of the species homosapiens” is applicable. So what is he, alien?

Is the definition of new species the change that Obama is always talking about?

A $3 Billion Dollar Question

by @ 5:00. Filed under Health, Miscellaneous.

Today, The Independent runs a story with the headline:  

Threat of world Aids pandemic among heterosexuals is over, report admits

The article covers how, despite predictions by the World Health Organization and UN Aids, that AIDS would become a world wide epidemic within the heterosexual population, it hasn’t.   The one exception is in sub-Sahara Africa.

After admitting that AIDS cases have been exaggerated by organizations to induce higher funding levels, the article defends the funding saying that there is still much we don’t know about aids.   It uses the sub-Saharan Africa area as an example of where the spread of AIDS is not full understood, even though it is admitted that the area has…

more commercial sex workers, more ulcerative sexually transmitted diseases, a young population and concurrent sexual partnerships

Still being stumped, the article closes by laying out the most perplexing of all AIDS issues:

The impact of HIV is so heterogeneous. In the US , the rate of infection among men in Washington DC is well over 100 times higher than in North Dakota, the region with the lowest rate. That is in one country. How do you explain such differences?

The US is contributing and granting money to figure out why the AIDS problem is worse in DC than in North Dakota? You’re kidding right? How ’bout if we give them a hand?

According to the CDC, amongst males, 72% of AIDS cases are related to male to male sexual contact, 12% to injection drug use and 16% to high risk heterosexual contact (that is sex with a person know to or likely to have HIV). Further, 66% of AIDS cases are from either Hispanic or African American ethnicity.

OK, let’s look at North Dakota and Washington DC:

  • According Gaydemographics.org, about 5% of DC’s population are same sex couples, .5% of ND’s couples are same sex. I think that’s 10X.
  • According to the US Census, African Americans were 55% and totaled approximately 325,000 people in Washington DC. They accounted for about 1% and 6,500 of the North Dakota Population. That looks like 55X.
  • According to the Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration Treatment Data Statistics, for 2002, the most recent year statistics are available, North Dakota had 7 cases reported for heroin treatment. Washington DC had 2,218 reported. That looks like 317X.

Maybe it’s just me   but one of those key factors sure seems to explain the 100X difference all by itself.   I’ll bet smarter people than I could come up with multiple combinations of the above items for numerous other simple ways that WHO could have a reasonable answer for why Washington DC and North Dakota have a   discrepancy of HIV cases.

To be sure, HIV/AIDS is a horrible disease and there are certainly cases where innocent victims i.e. children, transplant patients have contracted HIV/AIDS with no involvement on their part.   However, 99%+ of the HIV/AIDS cases in the US are contracted as a result of an individual’s decisions.   For WHO or any other organization to take another $.01, that could be used on cure research, to waste on inane research such as ND versus DC, is not only a blatant wast of resources but should be a personal insult to anyone desiring a cure for this disease.

I wonder how much of the nearly $3B that the US spent on research in FY2006 I could claim for that 10 minutes of research?

Anyone Notice A Trend?

by @ 4:35. Filed under Politics - Minnesota.

On Saturday, Minnesota Democrats endorsed Al “It’s just satire” Franken to be their candidate for US Senate.   The MSM had the usual glowing reports making it sound like  Al is the perfect candidate and that the Dems are over flowing with love for their candidate:

ROCHESTER, Minn. (AP)– Al Franken won a resounding endorsement for the U.S. Senate on Saturday from Minnesota Democrats, quickly dispatching with concerns about jokes that offended some and promising a tough challenge to Republican Sen. Norm Coleman.

However, not unlike Barack Obama’s coronation last Tuesday, not all is as the MSM would like you to believe. From the Star and Sickle:

Mari Urness Pokornowski of Cokato, president of the DFL Feminist Caucus, resigned Saturday when she learned that her group had endorsed Franken. As a mother and former teacher, she said, she didn’t see how Franken’s writings represented rural Minnesota values.

The endorsement, she said, “was a choice made by the caucus, and once that decision is made, you have to make a choice where you stand, For me, my decision was to step down.”

And further from Politics in Minnesota:

There’s no doubt that Pokornowski has had a tough week as head of the caucus.

After U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill, became the presumptive Democratic nominee for president after a bruising battle with U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-NY, Koryne Horbal, 71, who founded the DFL Feminist Caucus, said she would not support Obama and wanted to organize a write-in campaign for Clinton.

Pokornowski was forced to issue a press release distancing her group from its founder’s actions. "It was as much of a surprise to us as it was to you," the press release said in part.

How many candidates can the Democrats run that lose the vote from Minnesota Women? So far, it’s 2 and counting

 

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