The storm split west of us, and went to the north and south of us.  We got lucky.  Couple of towns north of here are pretty much wiped out.

Working on something, and I can’t find the law, amendment, or precedent that says that Constitutional protections extend to non-citizens in the United States.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Apparently the Daytona 500 went off the other night, after a delay due to rain.  There seems to have been quite a few crashes, at least one of which included a fireball made when a racecar collided with a tank of jetfuel.

I’m not much of a NASCAR fan.  I watch it when I’m visiting friends and family and want to sit and drink beer with the menfolk, and I’ve worked at a couple of races at Kentucky Speedway.  I’m not really a “car” guy, and “Go fast, turn left” gets boring after a while.

But if NASCAR was to go back to its roots, I’d quickly become a fan.  Here’s what I think should be done to jazz up the races:

1. Quit racing on super speedways.  Race on two-lane country roads that are laid out to form a five mile course.  This should include hills, right and left turns, and trees.
2. Make all cars have a trunk.  Put a couple hundred gallons of denatured alcohol in the trunk to replicate the rum-running experience for today’s drivers.
3. Race unless there are tornadoes in the area.  Rain, shine, snow, whatever.  Bootleggers had to get the moonshine to market no matter what, so today’s drivers can do it.
4. Every so often, put a chase car out there to take a lap.  Any car that gets passed by the chase car has to stop in pit row until the leader has done one lap.  That will simulate the experience of being chased by revenuers and county sheriffs.

These simple things would make NASCAR much more interesting to me.  

In Arizona, a man has been charged with a raft of crimes.  While what he is accused of is pretty ordinary, his name stands out:  Nubian T. Amon-Ra.

Someone please tell me that his mother didn’t do that to him, and for the love all that is holy, please tell me that the ‘T’ stands for ‘Tutankhamun’.  Just how big an ego do you need or how much weed do you have to smoke in order to consider changing your name to copy an ancient Egyptian god?

Maybe it’s his secret identity, like in Batman. We could have a whole pantheon of arch-criminals named after gods:

• Apollo – An athletic, attractive young man who uses his charms to get into the checking accounts of rich women.  His female counterpart could be Aphrodite, who would do the same thing to older men.  Heck, they could be in a friendly competition to see who can steal the most money from the richest people.
• Thor – A bank robber who uses a gigantic hammer to just bash in the door on the vault rather than bother with what’s in the teller’s drawer.
• Mercury – A lightly built man who runs numbers faster than anyone else.
• Cthulhu – A big scary guy who runs protection rackets against whole continents

Heck, maybe we’re looking at a public display of an entire underworld here.

A Louisville Metro policeman probably owes his life to luck and good training:

The police badge Officer Washington was wearing actually deflected one of the bullets. That, combined with the fact that he was wearing a protective vest, kept his injuries from being much worse.

 I didn’t know this, but LMPD doesn’t require patrolmen to wear a vest all the time.  Officer Washington was trained to wear it in school, so he got in the habit of doing something smart that wasn’t absolutely required.  That probably saved his life last night.

I’m Scandinavian enough to believe in luck.  But I’m enough of a realist to believe that we usually make our own luck.  You put on your seat belt, make sure your kids are belted into car seats, do a chamber check on your firearm before you put it in the holster, and a myriad of other things every day that if they’re ever needed, someone is going to say “You were lucky you did X this morning.”.

I’m glad Officer Washington is alive, and yeah, he got lucky when a wildly fired shot hit him in the badge and the vest.  But his training and good sense made his luck much more potent.  We can all learn from that.

I don’t do a lot of “This Day In History” posts, but glancing at the list for today showed that this date has been a pretty exciting time.

1903 – The U.S. signed a permanent lease on Guantanamo Bay.
1942 – A Japanese sub shelled the coast of California, which I believe is the last time a foreign power attacked the U.S. mainland until 9/11.
1945 – The U.S. flag was raised over Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima by Marines fighting to capture the island.
1997 – Scottish scientists debuted their cloned sheep, Dolly.
2005 – Efforts to identify remains from the 9/11 attacks end.

I wonder what 2012 will add to this list?

I’ve had it with the new word verification system on Blogger.  I’m shutting it off and turning on comment moderation.

Moderation policy:  I will OK all comments that aren’t obvious attempts to advertise products or similar spam.  I WILL NOT edit or delete comments that disagree with me or anyone else who comments.  However, keep it civil, not that this is a problem with you all.  I reserve the right to call out an assbag who uses my blog to attack someone or be blatantly offensive.

Looks like Irish Woman has only about a year until she starts seeing a lot less of me around the house.  Cabela’s is opening a store just up the street from me.  No longer will I have to drive for 45 minutes to wander the aisles of what Irish Woman calls “The Dead Zoo“.

Looks like they’ll be hiring about 200 people.  I wonder if I could just work for store credit.

Mother Jones needs to check its shorts for skid marks.  Apparently the fact that the government is transporting nuclear weapons and other material over our nations highways in specially constructed and manned semi-trucks is causing an epic amount of PSH.  They claim that their major worry is that a road accident or terrorist attack could cause a huge amount of damage to the environment, with ancillary deaths among those filthy humans who also live along our nation’s byways.

They make some good points.  The program to transport nuclear materials, including bombs, around the country has had issues, just like every other endeavor ever taken up by humans.  Some of the drivers have had problems with alcohol, some have turned out to be thieves, and some have a problem with following rules about firearms.  There have indeed been some accidents, just like every other organization that drives trucks across the country.  They can only point to one incident where any amount of cargo was leaked outside of its containment mechanism, and that caused no significant environmental impact or any human casualties.

What I don’t see from Mother Jones is a better solution.  We as a nation have nuclear weapons, power stations, and research facilities.  Bombs, fuel rods, raw materials, and other nuclear materials need to be moved from the place where they’re manufactured and maintained to the place where they’re used and then to the place where they’re destroyed or stored.  Putting them on an airplane would probably have a higher risk of accidents and would probably make it harder to contain the material after a crash.  There’s a heck of a lot more kinetic energy in a C-17 crashing than there is in a Peterbilt jackknifing.  You could put them on trains, and that would probably have the same risk of accidents and containment failures as you would find on the interstates, and with trains you lose the flexibility of routes you have with trucks.  Nuclear cargo that gets backed up in a rail yard can’t just make a right at the next exit and route around it so it’s not sitting as a nice stationary target.

I have news for Mother Jones:  The government has been moving nuclear weapons and other material around on the roads of our country for two generations with only a very small number of minor incidents.  I grew up around SAC bases, and convoys with Minuteman missiles and their payloads moving from main bases out to silos and back were common.  To my knowledge, the young airmen who were driving them and providing security never killed anyone, lost a weapon, or caused us to worry about the groundwater.  Every so often you’d hear about a missile truck that went into a ditch, but I never saw even a small mushroom cloud or saw a missile streaking across the prairie because of it.

My gut tells me that the Mother Jones position comes down to “Don’t move them because you don’t have them”.  It’s the evolved position of the “No Nukes” crowd from the last century.  They want us to unilaterally destroy our nuclear weapons, shut down our research facilities, and turn nuclear power stations into research facilities for breeding a better manatee. 

To be honest, if we could safely give up our nuclear arsenal, I’d be all for it.  If you think that’s going to be possible before a better way to turn cities into glowing holes comes along, I’ve got a bridge you might also be interested in. 

And until we come up with something better, I’m a big supporter of nuclear power.  It doesn’t pollute like coal or natural gas, it doesn’t kill wildlife like wind, it works on cloudy days, and what waste it creates can either be re-used or stored safely. Of course, that assumes that hippies don’t make you store it in a shed behind the reactor because it would make kittens explode if you tried to have a safe, secure, centralized place to keep it out in the middle of nowhere.

So I wish Mother Jones and the other groups that are excreting masonry building materials over this luck.  If they have a better idea, I’d love to hear it.

Many thanks to Starbucks for treating me and people like me as if we were responsible adults!

And I paid cash for it too.