After Bible study on Tuesday night I went to Culver's for dinner. I ordered my usual--Deluxe Double, large fry, large diet Pepsi--and then went home after getting my food.
As usual, I stopped in the kitchen to get a disposable plate with ketchup on it, for the fries. Sat at the computer, got everything going, went to dump the fries out on the plate...and there were no fries. No; somehow I had instead gotten a large order of their fried cheese curds.
The cheeseburger was, at least, correct.
Now, there's nothing inherently wrong with Culver's fried cheese curds. One got into my order of fries once and I ate it, and it was pretty tasty. I like fried mozzarella sticks. It's pretty good stuff.
But this was an enormous wad of fried cheese I had on my hands. It was bigger than the hamburger! My stomach was set for french fries; furthermore one doesn't put ketchup on fried cheese. (Marinara, yes, but I had none of that.) Realizing that the Culver's is too far away to take the stuff back and get french fries--my cheeseburger would get cold--I sighed and decided just to eat some (not all) of the cheese curds.
The cats, of course, were milling around and wanting me to share, as always. I usually don't, but IttyBit likes french fries and I had more fried cheese than I'd expected or wanted, so I gave some to the cats.
Now, I said IttyBit likes french fries--but she chewed on one of the cheese curds and then turned her nose up at them.
Luna--Luna, who will only eat french fries if she can steal them from IttyBit--Luna was all over the cheese curds. I didn't count how many she ate, and I should have, because it was a nontrivial number. She even came back later and begged for more, after they were cold, and I let her have them because I did not want to eat two f-ing pounds of fried cheese.
At that I ended up throwing out about half of the damn things.
Now, I know what happened: someone else at Culver's got my large fries. Considering how much more the fried cheese curds cost, I bet that person came back or called them or something. This is the first time they've made a mistake with my order. (They did put tomato on my burger once; and I belatedly realized that I hadn't said "no tomato" when I ordered it, yet somehow that sticks out in my mind as their fault, when it's not.)
Eating "low carb" does not mean stuffing your face with two pounds of fried cheese on top of a double cheeseburger. Let's not be silly.
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A $500,000 fine for letting school buses idle too long.
Doug Powers at Michelle Malkin's blog.
DPUD. "Ayn Rand and Robert Heinlein are probably kind of embarrassed wherever they are right now, even they didn’t have a low enough opinion of gov’t tools/busybodies to have predicted this."
...because obviously there are no other pressing issues for our government to worry about!
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The 10 worst of Obama's energy policies. "10 worst" because they're all bad.
...except for number 8, "Terminating the Nuclear Waste Repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada."
First off, Yucca Mountain has always been the wrong answer to the question, "What do we do with our nuclear waste?" The answer has always been not to store it, but to recycle it, since only about 0.25% of a load of nuclear fuel is turned into energy before the fuel is poisoned with reaction byproducts. Remove those neutron poisons and the fuel load can go right back in; and the handful of extremely nasty stuff you filter out would (obviously) take up a lot less room in on-site storage facilities than an entire core's worth of fuel rods does.
Second, completion of Yucca Mountain keeps being blocked because Nevada really doesn't want a high-level radioactive waste storage facility there, no matter how safe it may be. The federal government was wasting money on this nonsense--well, the entire thing was a waste of money, anyway. Point is, the feds were spending money on defending what is, in fact, an entirely useless facility if our nuclear energy policy can be made to make sense.
Third, George W. Bush cancelled Carter's executive order outlawing the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel. I don't recall for certain but I do believe Congress also overturned the law that was passed after Carter's EO that also outlawed it; and why would Bush veto a law that echoed his own EO? (Did Bush ever veto anything?)
Everything else on that list is dead-on accurate, but (as usual) the nuclear power related bits are dead wrong.
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"It has to be more than a quarter percent of the fuel that gets used up! How can you replace a hundred trainloads of coal with 0.25% of a load of nuclear reactor fuel??"
Simple:
That's how. That 0.25% of the fuel load is converted into energy which is itself then harnessed to boil water to make steam to turn turbines which turn generators.
One gram of matter, turned entirely into energy, will yield about 25,000,000 kilowatt-hours. (Or 25 gigawatt-hours.)
...if you precisely measure the weight of the fuel load before it's used, and after, you will find that the mass of the fuel load has decreased. It will not have decreased by much--perhaps tens of grams out of hundreds of kilograms--but the difference is measurable. That missing mass was turned into energy that powered homes and factories.
That's why nuclear power is such an efficient and clean source of energy.
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Libertarian candidate for President wants to lower the drinking age. I'm of two minds on this point. One, we have a higher drinking age for a reason. Two, it's stupid to restrict the drinking age when we can't keep kids from getting booze or drugs anyway.
Amy Alkon discusses how alcohol was dealt with in her family--which approximates how it was treated in mine. If a child wanted to try Dad's beer or martini, he let the kid have a sip--and generally the kid went, "Yuck!" and never cared to have more.
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Markos has another story in the "The mere presence of money--even a lot of it--does not itself constitute a crime" category.
How’s that War on Drugs coming, America? This kind of stuff happens too often to report.The quote I cite in these cases comes from a court decision. I've described it before: acting on a (faulty) tip from an informant--and of course you can always trust those informants, don't you know!--cops raided a pizzeria which they suspected of selling drugs.
***
Asset forfeiture is evil. It was intended to strip assets from drug kingpins, but like RICO, it has been expanded to fit the needs and desires of the state, and now it’s the default position of LE that if you carry more than an average amount of cash on you, it must be drug-related.
No drugs were found, nor any evidence of drug trade; but they did find $250,000 in cash stored at the bottom of a disused dumbwaiter shaft. The money was seized as "drug money"; no charges were filed and no one was arrested.
The owner of the pizzaria had to sue to get his money back, and the judge agreed, hence the bit of text I quoted.
Unfortunately, we have allowed our government--in the name of the "war on drugs"--to give itself the power to seize money from us whenever it wishes solely because it has decided to take it. Because that much cash "must be drug money". Without trial, without due process--and you must sue to have it returned to you.
The "war on drugs" has been so successful--for the drug runners--I'm convinced that the best way to fix the unemployment problem in this country is to have the US government declare a "war on employment".
I oppose the "war on drugs" because it's clearly not working and we're giving up too much essential freedom in its name.
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The Obama administration's war on women continues! Yeah, they're paying their female employees an average of 16% less than their male counterparts. NOW cannot be reached for comment.
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Speaking of double standards, Bad Example has a pretty good one.
Apparently this is the case in identity politics today:
One parent black, one parent white = blackThis is why Barack Hussein is black and George Zimmerman is white.
One parent white, one parent Latino = white
...besides, if George Zimmerman is latino it doesn't fit the narrative.
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Borepatch has a rant about how "energy efficient" and "eco-friendly" things work. Or don't, as the case may be.
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To spite me, gasoline has now dropped to $4.16 per gallon in the Fungal Vale. This has happened for two reasons:
1) I filled up last week at $4.20 per gallon
2) I said gas would definitely hit $5 per gallon before July.
Apparently Obama's work with the magic Gas Price Computer is more sophisticated and nuanced than I thought. See, he raised prices really high so we'd all think and say it was gonna hit $5 per gallon this year; now he's gone and backed off the prices so the fools out there who don't know any better will think that he's done something to make gas less expensive.
Eh?
Now, wait a minute! Every time gas prices increased in 2007-2008 we were told by the mainstream media it's ALL BUSH'S FAULT BECAUSE HE'S PAYING BACK HIS OIL BUDDIES CHENEYHALIBURTONEXXONETC!!!! We're also told that Obama isn't in the back pockets of Big Oil, that he's against them; further the man ran on higher energy prices and his Secretary of Energy recently had to walk back his comments expressing a desire for gasoline to cost $8 per gallon. If the President was in charge of gas prices during the Bush years, why suddenly is he not in charge of them now?
Or maybe--just maybe!--the sudden decline in gas prices is a reflection of the sudden decline in demand for gasoline. And if the demand for gasoline has dropped precipitously it is not a good thing for anyone, least of all Barack Hussein "$10 per gallon!" Obama.
I don't know if this means I'm right that gas won't hit $5 per gallon this year, or if this is just a temporary decline in fuel prices. I suppose we're going to have to wait a few months until that 700,000 barrels-per-day of refining capacity on the east coast gets shut down to see what effect that'll have on fuel prices, but I'm telling you now that is not exactly going to help matters much.
I do, however, feel confident in predicting that gasoline will hit $5 per gallon next year--irrespective of what it does this year!--when it's not an election year, regardless of who wins the election.
Hell, it may hit $5 by the end of November.
ADDENDUM:
So after I publish this post with its included "war on drugs" rant, I see this WORM post on a huge Mexican drug lord bust.
It's actually a bunch of old pictures of a single Mexican drug lord's home after he was busted.
...scroll down far enough and you see the pile of American currency he had stashed in various places around the house: a mere $22 billion worth.
TWENTY-TWO BILLION DOLLARS.
Yeah. War on Drugs: FAIL.