Entries from October 2002
Study: Atlanta is nation’s 4th most sprawling metro area
It’s hard to believe there are three more sprawling cities (BTW: Riverside-San Bernadino, Greensboro-Winston Salem, Raleigh-Durham) than Atlanta. The suburbs reach almost to Alabama now, and I think it’s worse than that on the other sides of town. (Birmingham is 23rd; here’s the report.) Atlanta is unlike most of the rest of the top ten in that there’s an identifiable major city at the heart, rather than several smaller ones.
Least sprawling: New York. Not particularly surprising considering that most of it’s on islands and there’s nowhere to park. OK, this is an anti-sprawl group’s findings, but would you rather live in New York or Riverside?
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From the Pteropundit (Name used on trial basis)
Bird owners put on alert for Newcastle disease - 10/17/02 - NCTimes.net
While East Coast birds get to worry about West Nile, it’s Newcastle in the West. It’s a bad one, with a near-100 percent death rate in unvaccinated flocks. And there’s an invasive-species angle here: it’s thought that the disease was brought to Southern California by Amazon parrots, which are asymptomatic carriers of the disease.
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Salon.com News | U.S. backs down on Iraq demands to U.N.
Facing strong opposition from dozens of nations, the United States has backed down from its demand that a new U.N. resolution must authorize military force if Baghdad fails to cooperate with weapons inspectors, diplomats told The Associated Press on Thursday.
Instead, the United States is now floating a compromise which would give inspectors a chance to test Iraq’s will to cooperate on the ground. If Iraq then failed to disarm, the Bush administration would agree to return to the Security Council for further debate and possibly another resolution authorizing action.
Ha! That’s what we wanted all along! It’s rope-a-dope!
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washingtonpost.com: N. Korea Admits Having Secret Nuclear Arms
Oh, boy. I’d like to see some proof they actually have working nukes — though not at close range, mind you. (I’m not clear on if they say they have the bomb, or if they’re just admitting to working on it. They really shouldn’t have a big problem with it given their “civilian” nuclear capabilities.) But this is terrifying, in many ways more terrifying than if Iran or Iraq got the bomb. This is a failed state, a country on the verge of collapse and whose people are starving. Kim might feel he has nothing to lose by using his bomb to hold up his neighbors.
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Bus tour touts constitutional reform
Why is the Alabama Constitution the world’s longest constitutional document? Because of things like the proposed amendment that would allow the sheep and goat industries to pool money for a marketing campaign. (Given his unique interpretation of the US Constitution, Roy Moore will probably find it unconstitutional under Deuteronomy 22:9.) Auburn’s Wayne Flynt says that the Alabama Constitution is doing exactly what it was designed to do. And what was that?
First, it stripped blacks and poor whites of voting rights, kept taxes low and concentrated power in Montgomery. Federal intervention restored voting rights, but the constitution’s limits on taxation have kept Alabama’s taxes the lowest per person in the nation. Its limits on local control still force local governments to seek constitutional amendments to make even basic changes. The constitution has been amended more than 700 times.
Some of you may like that “low taxes” thing, but what it comes to in the end is “regressive taxation”, including ten percent sales tax in many areas.
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Moore says he fulfilled pledge
Roy “Graven Images” Moore says that he was fulfilling a campaign pledge when he put up a Ten Commandments monument in the Alabama Supreme Court building. So that makes it all right!
Moore said the commandments form part of the basis for the First Amendment and the role of government.
This must be a different First Amendment than the one with which I’m familiar. You know, the one that starts off with not establishing religion?
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I’m Switching To Birds, But Not Sure About The Name Yet
Protected bird damaging trees, plants on the Oregon coast / Northwest -The Olympian
Cormorants in this case. They aren’t doing it by eating leaves or bark or anything like that. It’s their poop:
Cormorant excrement is pretty potent stuff, according to Lowe. It is harvested as fertilizer in some parts of the world and is super-rich in nitrogen.
“It’s so hot it burns the vegetation,” Lowe said.
The trees and plants die, he said, because the foliage gets showered by the droppings, and the soil becomes saturated with nitrogen.
Kind of puts pigeons in perspective, doesn’t it?
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