You've Been Warned | Ain't Complicated

Cell Phone Peril

This is a public service warning to all cellphone users and photographers and videorecorders living in or visiting Oregon: Get permission for the audio part!

Oregon law allows audio material to be recorded only if one of the parties is aware the recording is taking place. Judge said Vang was recording video and audio using his cell phone camera. Only the audio recording violated Oregon law, she stressed.

And failing (or opting not) to get permission for the audio, turn it off before shooting your video.

If you’re reading this from an Oregon prison cell due to your video indiscretions, be advised to read Ain’t Complicated daily.

BwaHaHaHa!

Going veggie can slash your carbon footprint: study

Giving up meat could drastically reduce your carbon footprint, with meat-eaters’ diets responsible for almost twice the emissions of those of vegetarians, a German study said on Tuesday.

A diet with meat is responsible for producing in a year the same amount of greenhouse gases as driving a mid-sized car 4,758 kilometres (2,956 miles), the Institute for Ecological Economy Research (IOeW) said.

But the food a vegetarian consumes in 12 months is responsible for generating the same emissions as driving 2,427 kilometres, the IOeW said in a study commissioned by independent consumer protection group Foodwatch.

😆

OK, I’m sure that’s a serious study. But I still think it’s kinda funny.

Oh, and if you’re wondering about the “photo” at the top, it goes with this story:

Neanderthals were not stupid

Neanderthals were not as stupid as they have been portrayed, according to new research Tuesday showing their stone tools were as good as those made by the early ancestors of modern humans, Homo sapiens.

When I saw that headline, I wondered if it had some sort of potentially-humorous connection to the veggie/carbonfootprint story. I assumed ole Neander and Friends were meat consumers…and look what their carbon footprint got them.

Anyway, I went beyond the headline into the story itself and found this gem of a concluding paragraph:

Other studies have claimed that Neanderthals may have died out because they struggled with changing conditions brought by increasingly cold temperatures, failing to adapt their hunting methods when species such as mammoth and bison fled south and a once-forested Europe changed into a sparsely vegetated landscape during the last Ice Age.

So there you are. If they would have increased their meat consumption, they would have increased their carbon footprint. That would have resulted in more global warming which might have reversed those “increasingly cold temperatures.”

Maybe they weren’t so smart after all. 🙄

Oh well.

West Coast Sunset

No, I’m not posting any of my spectacular sunset pictures. Not in this post, anyway.

License to Kill:

Most inhumanities start small, like the beginning of a tsunami, but then build, as they head toward inevitable and unstoppable destruction.

It is difficult to pinpoint the precise beginning of the cultural tsunami that has devalued human life. Did it begin with the subjugation of women? Did it begin with slavery? The Nazis made their contribution with the Holocaust and Josef Mengele’s hideous human experiments. Surely unrestricted abortion added to the growing list of inhumanities.

Now we have the next wave. Randy Stroup is a 53-year-old Oregon man who has prostrate cancer, but no insurance to cover his medical treatment. The state pays for treatment in some cases, but it has denied help to Stroup. State officials have determined that chemotherapy would be too expensive and so they have offered him an alternative: death.

Adds new meaning to what Governor Tom McCall famously said on national TV way back in the 70s:

“Come visit us again and again. But for heaven’s sake, don’t come here to live.”

Yup, we’re the Pacific Wonderland, alright.

Got Colgate?

Companies import poisonous Chinese toothpaste in disguise

Four defendants pleaded guilty yesterday to importing from China more than a half million tubes of toothpaste falsely labeled as the popular brand Colgate and containing a toxic chemical found in antifreeze.

According to a U.S. Department of Justice statement, the defendants were responsible for 518,028 tubes of toothpaste worth an estimated $730,419 that were shipped into the country and distributed to bargain retail stores in several states last year.

[…]

The toothpaste itself was nearly indistinguishable in its packaging color and design from Colgate, but a few spelling errors and a false label statement that the product was made in South Africa identified the counterfeit.

The toothpaste was actually manufactured in China, which has a long and grisly history of manufacturing poisonous toothpaste, prompting the FDA last year to warn consumers from using any toothpaste made in the communist country.

[…]

Colgate-Palmolive, which sells toothpaste and toothbrushes in more than 200 countries, according the Department of Justice report, has inspected several thousand discount stores over the past year to identify and remove the counterfeit toothpaste marketed under its name.

FYI: Border Crossing

U.S. tracking citizens’ border crossings

The U.S. government has been using its border checkpoints to collect information on citizens that will be stored for 15 years, raising concern among privacy advocates, the Washington Post reported on Wednesday.

[…]information may be shared with federal, state and local governments to test “new technology and systems designed to enhance border security or identify other violations of law,” the Post reported.

[…]

Information on international air passengers has long been collected this way but Customs and Border Protection only this year began to log the arrivals of all U.S. citizens across land borders, the Post said.

Privacy advocates raised concerns about the expanded collection of personal data and said safeguards are needed to ensure the system is not abused.

[…]

DHS spokesman Russ Knocke told the paper that the retention period was justified.

“History has shown, whether you are talking about criminal or terrorist activity, that plotting, planning or even relationships among conspirators can go on for years,” he said. “Basic travel records can, quite literally, help frontline officers to connect the dots.”

Nukes for Radicals?

Brace yourself: Pakistan’s Musharraf said ready to quit

Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf is ready to resign rather than face impeachment but is seeking immunity from prosecution and agreement on a safe place to live, coalition government officials said on Friday.

Speculation has been mounting that the former army chief Musharraf and firm U.S. ally would quit since the ruling coalition, led by the party of assassinated former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, said last week it planned to impeach him.

A spokesman for the president has repeatedly denied media reports that he was about to quit, and he did so again on Friday, saying “baseless and malicious rumors” about the president’s plan to resign were damaging the economy.

“They” have said for the last several years (or longer) that if Musharraf goes, Pakistan will likely become a radical Muslim nation. And it already has nukes.

Maybe “they” will be wrong.

Either way, enjoy today. And make today enjoyable for others.

Oh, and where is this verse fragment found?

“I will trust and not be afraid.”

Russia vs Georgia

And it’s not at the Olympics:

Russia seizes South Ossetia

Russian troops backed by tanks and fighter jets seized control of South Ossetia on Sunday as fears grew of a wider conflict with Georgia over the separatist region.

Georgia said it had withdrawn most of its troops from South Ossetia in the face of a build-up in Russian firepower and that it had lost control of the near-destroyed regional capital, Tskhinvali.

[…]

“We’re being driven away. The place was in flames and we couldn’t stay,” Pavlik, an elderly man travelling by foot, told AFP as he fled from the conflict zone.

[…]

Russia backs the separatist government in South Ossetia and sent in tanks and troops on Friday in response to pro-Western Georgia’s military offensive to take back the province which broke away in the early 1990s after a separatist war.

[…]

“We have left practically all of South Ossetia as an expression of goodwill and our willingness to stop military confrontation,” Georgian National Security Council Secretary Alexander Lomaia told AFP.

[…]

The movement of Russia’s naval fleet from their base in Ukraine to positions near Georgia also threatened to destabilise the region.

Ukraine’s foreign ministry threatened to prevent the warships from returning to their base in the Ukrainian port of Sevastopol.

[…]

Georgia’s army of less than 25,000 men is confronting a Russian force which can count on more than one million troops and has dominance of both skies and sea.

On the diplomatic front, a meeting of the UN Security Council on Saturday failed to agree on a call for an immediate ceasefire.

Russia on the move. Imagine that.

Georgia may be an ally of the US. But the US is rather occupied elsewhere these days.

Next thing you know, we’ll hear Iran moved against Israel. And China against Taiwan. And North Korea against the South. And Iran against the US.

Or something.

Wars and rumors of wars, you know.

You can run, but you can’t hide.

So face it.

Well, anyway. What shall we Christians in America do?