TechnoChitlins

Yeah, these guys seem like they’re right on top of things…

Rules to remember this election season:

Dave's voting guide: 1. Identify America's most inept, corrupt, insolvent state & local govts. 2. Identify the party in charge.

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) September 6, 2012

Michael Clarke Duncan has died. Sorry to see him go, I loved him in Armageddon, Sin City, and The Green Mile.

I guess technically it’s the second R.I.P. for John Coffey.

UPDATE:

Apropos of nothing at all, here is a statement by Shouting Thomas, a regular commenter at Althouse. I focused on this, not because of any relation to the post he commented on, but it struck me that ST had a particularly wise wife-

My late wife, Myrna, hailed from a culture that never seems to entirely be at peace, the Philippines.

Her take on war reminded me of the environmental outlook on brushfires in the wilderness.

Myrna viewed blood lust as an innate, essential part of the human condition. Efforts to completely suppress that blood lust are doomed to failure, and ultimately produce a far worse result.

If you accept that brushfires are a part of nature’s scheme in the wilderness, the mammoth conflagration occurs less frequently. If you try to eradicate the brushfires completely, you only increase the severity and frequency of the mammoth conflagrations.

Violence and war have a purpose, else they wouldn’t exist. If you suppress your sanctimonious response for a moment and think about this, you’ll see that this is a Buddhist outlook.

I found that I have been in essential agreement with this for longer than maybe I realized. Though I am essentially a right-wing libertarian (small-l) with a large dash of social liberalism (seasoned by experience I hope) I’ve never had a problem with sublimating violence so that the real beast isn’t released. A lot of my fellow-travelers have railed against things like hyper-violent first-person-shooter games – I well remember the huge controversy about Postal when it was released- but I always felt it was better to release these impulses with fake blood in a fantasy world than to act them out for real. Hence football, hockey, and the Call of Duty franchise. Am I wrong?

15,000 barrels worth of maple syrup have gone missing from a Saint-Louis-de-Blandford warehouse in Ontario. This wouldn’t be such a chuckle except that this is a really small town- some 900 souls- and a really really huge amount of maple syrup. From Bloomberg:

The puzzle is how the culprits managed to siphon off almost C$30 million ($30.4 million) of syrup. That’s the equivalent of 10 million pounds or roughly 15,000 barrels of syrup. And the stock didn’t vanish somewhere in the supply chain of a major city. It’s missing from a warehouse in Saint-Louis-de-Blandford, a tiny town of 903 people, according to the 2011 Census. They’re usually more focused on cranberries, whether it’s harvesting them or celebrating them in cranberry festivals.

So imagine the surprise when a “routine inventory check,” as the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers (FPAQ) calls it, revealed evidence of a massive heist. Row after row of barrels were empty, filled with nothing but sweet-smelling Quebec air.

Now it’s the federation that has some explaining to do. These are the protectors of the sap, the maple barons who have an OPEC-like sway in syrup circles and represent some 13,500 producers. Along with handling bulk syrup sales and marketing, the federation is responsible for what it calls the “global strategic maple syrup reserves.” Much like oil reserves, those backup supplies are supposed to protect against the vagaries of bad weather and volatile prices. Last week, everyone thought Quebec was heading into the winter with 37 million pounds in reserve. More than a quarter of that is now gone.

Catch that? The “Global Strategic Maple Syrup Reserves” have been most scandalously debauched, nay, ravaged in a most uncivilised manner! Heads must roll! Seriously, though- that is one sticky mess of syrup. If your waffles feel unwanted- if your flapjacks are naked- you know who to blame…

Blame Canada!

To which there is but one answer:

Ace is doing handstands and backflips over at AOSHQ-

I know I’ll catch hell for this, but the election is over. This week Romney/Ryan will move ahead in the polls and they will not relinquish that lead, save for the occasional outlier. Polls will tighten and widen; but from this moment forward, the preference cascade begins.

In a way, Ryan shouldn’t be over-praised because he had so damn much material to work with. But he worked with that abundance of riches masterfully. Watch him gracefully segue from the stimulus to ObamaCare, and from ObamaCare to Medicare. He’s talking about discreet economic policies, but he knits them together so you barely even realize he’s shifted topics.

His poise was enormous. He delivered a Mortal Kombat fatality on the Obama presidency and he did it with “aw, shucks, ma’am” earnestness and goodwill. He seemed like such a nice boy as he spoke, and each and every word he said wasdeadly.

It doesn’t matter what Romney says tomorrow. I suppose we should all hope, of course, for the Speech of His Life. Perhaps he’ll deliver; one thing about Romney is that he is intensely competitive.

But unless he says something remarkably stupid — something I’m pretty sure he won’t — the media coverage on him will be “safe and solid as usual, but nothing like the power of Paul Ryan’s address.”

Which is just fine, because Ryan eviscerated the Obama Presidency tonight. Romney doesn’t need to do bonus damage to it. It’s done.

Yikes!

I think the election is over. I think it is so over we need a new Latin tense to describe how over it is, the Past Pluperfect Noncontinuing Historical Past Tense.

So, what the hell are we going to do for two months?

That’s where Romney and Ryan are going to have to step the hell up. To make this entertaining, and not just a snoozer of a blowout, they’re going to have todeliberately make some bad choices. They’re going to have to fight to keep this close, to keep it interesting.

They’re going to have to schedule some gaffes.

Man, I hope he’s right- I’ve been down so long politically I feel like the subject of a blues song.

Ace does have some suggestions as to how to, er, spice up the next few weeks…

* Paul Ryan should arrange for himself to be photographed leaving an American Legion bathroom, with the American flag stuck to the bottom of his shoe.

* Whenever Ann and Mitt Romney appear in joint interviews, Ann should flinch at Mitt’s slightest movement, and then whisper frantically to the interviewer: “Sometimes he gets so very angry with me.”

* Paul Ryan should make frequent, cryptic references to “my side-piece in Madison.”

* Mitt Romney should start saying things like “Joe Biden makes me so angry I want to punch him right in the wife.”

* Whenever Paul Ryan doesn’t like the premise of a reporter’s question, he should sharply say “Zionist lies!!!,” with sibilants a-crackin’.

Snorfle. Gawd I hope it’s really happening. Oh yeah, and this-

[jwplayer mediaid=”314″]

via Ace

It looks like most of ‘Bama escaped relatively unscathed, Mississip not so much, especially Biloxi, where the mayor wishes he’d called called for an earlier evacuation. New Orleans and its environs didn’t fare so well. From Brendan Loy:

Those pictures are, to my mind, a helpful reminder of what the true “worst-case scenario” for New Orleans — which Katrina emphatically was not — would look like, but across a much broader area. As opposed to being trapped in attics or on rooftops hours after the storm, folks are trapped and threatened while the storm is still raging. As opposed to a slow leak, caused by breached levees, which gradually fills the “bowl” to regular sea level (finishing long after the storm leaves), what Plaquemines Parish is experiencing is a rapid, in-storm flash-surge-flood caused by overtopping of the levees, which fills the “bowl” up to, in essence, the level of the storm surge at or near its peak, and then leaves the water there, hemmed in by the very levees that were originally there to keep it out. For this reason, officials are considering deliberately blowing holes in the levees to assist with drainage. That is precisely the sort of scenario envisioned in the pre-Katrina literature about the worst-case possibilities for New Orleans. In NOLA’s case, it would take a Category 3 or 4 storm to do it, but someday it will happen. Folks need to understand that, and not treat “Katrina” as synonymous with “The Worst Thing That Can Possibly Happen,” because that just isn’t so.

Plaquemines’ situation is also an object lesson in why, when authorities order you to evacuate, you evacuate. You don’t sit there and carp about “hype” and “hysteria,” and about how “it’s just a tropical storm” or “it’s just a Category 1″ or “we survived [insert previous storm here], we’ll be fine.” You don’t make up your own amateur weather forecast, in contradiction to the actual experts, based on gut instinct and life experience, and then make life-or-death decisions based on that self-forecast. No. You know what you do? YOU LEAVE. If you’re in a low-lying area vulnerable to surge flooding and the authorities tell you an evacuation is necessary, you get the Hell out of dodge. Period.

The people who stayed behind, despite mandatory evacuation orders, and then ended up predictably needing to be rescued, are endangering not only their own lives, but also the lives of the heroes — first responders, yes, but regular private citizens too — who came to their rescue. That’s inexcusable. However, I’m not saying this to berate them; they’ve suffered enough, and have undoubtedly learned their lesson. I’m saying it to the next group of people who might be tempted to do the same thing when the next storm threatens. Don’t. Do. It.

He’s right, and now they’re reaping the results, same as in Biloxi. All the false bravado in the world won’t help you when the water starts rising- and if you end up in your attic, you better by Gawd have an axe… from the comments at the same post:

And for God’s sake, if you are going to stay in a flood prone home, store a hatchet in your attic. Yes, you may have to chop out and weather the storm on your roof. Learn from the dead. That’s the horror the media obsession with New Orleans after Katrina didn’t show you. The family found drowned in their attic. But bucket trucks to get the dead out of the trees. The mother with two kids tied to her belt, all drowned. That happened in Mississippi where the national media was absent. But they are serious lessons to learn.