Non Sequitur shoots and scores!

Jared Loughner, the waste of protoplasm that thought it appropriate to assassinate a federal judge and wound a congresswoman while shooting up a crowd of people, has been found to be too bugnuts crazy to participate in his own defense.  He’ll be sent off to a psychiatric facility for a few months where doctors will try to fix him enough that he can contribute to his defense and understand why he’s on trial.  If they’re successful, they’ll keep him lucid long enough for his trial, and then he goes into the slow moving queue towards the needle.

If I were a betting man, I’d put a few dollars on him never coming out of the psych facility.  Just from the things that are reported in the media, it’s not hard to see that this guy is as crazy as an outhouse rat.  But just because this sick bastard is as nutty as a PayDay bar doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be held responsible for his actions.   If you want my opinion on what needs to be done, re-read the title.

Macho man Randy Savage 1952 – 2011

Several members of the Internal Revenue Service have been busted for tax fraud.  Apparently these fine upstanding public servants falsely claimed a credit for first time home ownership.  Pardon me if I don’t seem surprised.

This is a problem you find with large organizations.  There is a sort of herd immunity from culpability, so it becomes easier to abuse the trust of those they are pledged to serve.  If you’re just one of several thousand people who do your job, then it’s easy to either coast at a minimum level of effort or to abuse your position for personal gain and not get caught.

One of the reasons I support a winnowing of the government workforce is that a smaller workforce will be easier to monitor for such corruption and malingering.  If there are fewer IRS employees, it will be easier to find those who are not serving the public in the way they should.

The same goes for every other government bureaucracy.  My formula for making government cheaper and cleaner is not complicated:  Simplify the laws, cut the staff, ruthlessly enforce standards of conduct, and improve efficiency.

Wanna buy a bridge?

On today’s date in 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge opened to the public.  15 minutes later, sales of the Brooklyn Bridge began in earnest. 

Contact your neurologist.

A recent study found that administering sildenafil to animals with symptoms of multiple schlerosis can reduce damage to the nervous system.

If given shortly after disease onset, the scientists say they observed the drug reduced the infiltration of inflammatory cells into the white matter of the spinal cord, reducing damage to the nerve cell’s axon and facilitating myelin repair

The optimist in me sees hope for people who suffer from a crippling disease.  Sildenafil has been in wide use for years, so the side effects are well known.  Taking it for MS would probably be as safe as taking it for sexual disfunction.  A friend of my family died slowly from MS, so any treatment that could give these people a few more years of life is a good thing.

The cynic in me notices that Viagra will be going off patent early in 2012, so Pfizer might be looking at a way to extend their revenue stream.  I wouldn’t be surprised if a new MS treatment wasn’t brought to market soon which combines sildenafil with another MS drug, and therefore can be patented.

Hopefully this research leads to a new treatment for MS.   And if the quality of life for patients is improved, then who can begrudge the company who brought the drug to market from making a few more shekels?

But the term “Surprise aerial insertion into the enemy rear” got me giggling like a fiend just now.  Worst part is, I wrote it about 15 years ago, with no comedic intent.

Dear Creepy Guy at the Playground,

Yes, I know I gave you the hairy eyeball a few times as you sat on the bench at the playground this afternoon.  You see, it’s a bit unusual for an older man to walk alone into a fenced-in playground and sit on the park bench watching the children while holding a bicycle pump.  Plus your chosen attire of a loose fitting hawaiian shirt over a tee shirt screamed “cover garment” to me, and I was looking for the print of a weapon on you.  Not that I have a problem with a parent carrying concealed when they take their kid to the playground. But since I was able to match every child on that playground with an adult that wasn’t you, and you didn’t interact with any of the other adults but were very interested in seeing what the kids were up to, you made my Spidey sense tingle enough to wonder if you had a gun under that shirt along with the openly carried bicycle pump.

I’d say that I was just being paranoid, but you see, all of the other parents seemed to be making sure their kids stayed away, and I heard several mention you to their co-parents.  It’s kind of a herd mentality.  You see, a childless adult, especially a lone male, who is showing a strange amount of attention to our children makes the herd nervous.

I’m glad that nothing happened, and all you did was creep me out a bit as I made sure I kept myself between you and BooBoo.  I hope you enjoyed your walk as you picked up your bicycle pump after a few minutes and headed back the way you came.

Have a nice one,

Daddy J. Bear

Speaking of breathless reporting, scientists in England have found a way to layer polymers in such a way that the resulting material is intricate, beautiful, and difficult to counterfeit.  

By using highly ordered polymer layers, the researchers were able to create any color in the rainbow from two non-colored materials. The color also changes depending on the viewing angle.

The complexity of the chemistry involved in making the polymer means they are very difficult for counterfeiters to copy, they said, making them ideally suited for use on passports or banknotes.

While this is impressive, and if adopted, would make counterfeiting printed materials harder in the short term, I think these guys are forgetting a couple of things:

1. Anything we can do or make, hostile nation states such as North Korea can either copy outright or make a facsimile of that’s close enough to pass all but the closest scrutiny.
2. Anything that requires a university or industrial lab now will be done in a high school lab in 10 years, and at a kitchen table in 20.