Tuesday Overnight Open Thread (9/24/19)

Quote I

“In most cases, dry cleaning comes under whatever regulations are involved in consumer protection laws. Abandoned property is not specific to dry cleaning; people who run storage operations have the same issue, shoe repair shops, eyeglasses that people never come back for. Nora Nealis

Quote II

“It would remove green card limits on workers from other countries, but what that means is big countries like India and China principally would overwhelm the H1B visa list, and guess what? They would be taking American jobs at lower pay, historically 27 percent lower than prevailing wages in the United States for American labor.” Lou Dobbs

Quote III

“For those of us who know you can’t beat Mother Nature, there is great concern’ “You have to imagine what the losses would be in today’s dollars if Hugo transpired again.’John Richards

Quote IV

‘I Have The Immense Privilege Of’ Representing ‘A Nation That Prizes Liberty, Independence, And Self Government For All’…President Donald Trump

Only Russians interfere with elections, amirite? Apparently not. So do Democrats or so it is alleged.

Michigan State Police have arrested a recently celebrated Democratic Party official on several felony charges related to voter discrepancies.

The Michigan official who earlier this year received an award from the state’s Democratic Party is now facing six felony charges for reportedly forging records and falsely marking absentee ballots as invalid during the 2018 election, reported The Detroit News.

Sherikia Hawkins, 38, city clerk for the city of Southfield, was arrested Monday after the Oakland County Clerk’s office noticed discrepancies in voter counts while certifying absentee ballots from Southfield. State police investigated and found that records had been altered so that nearly 200 voter files were improperly listed as invalid.

“Our elections are the foundation of our democracy, and under my and Attorney General [Dana] Nessel’s administration there will be no tolerance for any actions that undermine that foundation — anywhere, anytime, by any person or official,” Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said in a statement.

The Silicon Valley, the site of multiple super-fund sites.

Sometimes it feels hard to remember that Silicon Valley is an actual place, a collage of parched suburbs, and not just the collective noun for information-technology companies. But before it was the idea center of the internet, it was a group of factory towns, the blinking heart of “clean” manufacturing, the hallmark of the Information Age.

Silicon Valley was a major industrial center for much of the 20th century. Semiconductors and microprocessors rolled out of factories scattered all over the area (known on maps as Santa Clara County) from the 1950s to the early 1990s—AMD, Apple, Atari, Fairchild, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Xerox, to name just a few. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, Santa Clara County added 203,000 manufacturing jobs, 85 percent of them in tech. Beginning in the 1980s, as government contracts disappeared, Silicon Valley companies moved toward creating software, and beginning in the 1990s, companies there largely focused on internet-based applications. Now the area trades mostly in the rarefied and intangible realm of apps and software.

It's not nice to fool Mother Nature or mess around with the legal system. Your mother is your mother and your father is your mother.

A court awarded damages Wednesday to a woman in her 30s who broke up with her same-sex partner because of infidelity, recognizing their common-law partnership despite same-sex marriage not being legal in the country.

The Mooka branch of the Utsunomiya District Court in Tochigi Prefecture ordered the former partner to pay ¥1.1 million ($10,170) to the plaintiff, who was seeking damages of ¥6.3 million.

According to the suit, the plaintiff and defendant moved in together in 2010. After acquiring a marriage certificate in the United States in 2014, the couple held a wedding ceremony in Japan the following year.

Soon afterward, the defendant revealed her desire to raise a child with the plaintiff and was artificially inseminated after finding a sperm donor on a social networking site.

However, the relationship between the couple broke down in January 2017 following the revelation that the defendant had an affair with the sperm donor.

The defendant subsequently gave birth, while the sperm donor went on to have gender reassignment surgery, and is now recognized as a woman.

Hunter Biden, quite the capitalist. And Naval expert.

And while Hunter Biden had "no experience in China, and little in private equity," the Chinese government for some reason thought it would be a great idea to give his firm business opportunities instead of established global banks such as Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs.

Also in December 2014, a Chinese state-backed conglomerate called Gemini Investments Limited was negotiating and sealing deals with Hunter Biden’s Rosemont on several fronts. That month, it made a $34 million investment into a fund managed by Rosemont.

The following August, Rosemont Realty, another sister company of Rosemont Seneca, announced that Gemini Investments was buying a 75 percent stake in the company. The terms of the deal included a $3 billion commitment from the Chinese, who were eager to purchase new US properties. Shortly after the sale, Rosemont Realty was rechristened Gemini Rosemont.

Chinese executives lauded the deal. -New York Post

"Rosemont, with its comprehensive real-estate platform and superior performance history, was precisely the investment opportunity Gemini Investments was looking for in order to invest in the US real estate market," said Li Ming, chairman of Sino-Ocean Land Holdings Limited and Gemini Investments. "We look forward to a strong and successful partnership."

Three years later, a crack pipe, two DC driver's licenses and other paraphenelia would be found in a rental car Hunter Biden returned to an Arizona Hertz location in the middle of the night.

The morning after the car was dropped off, a phone number belonging to a renowned local "Colon Hydrotherapist" called the Hertz. The caller identified himself as "Joseph McGee," who told the employees that the keys were located in the gas cap as opposed to the drop box.

Thank God for Mollie Hemingway, otherwise no other prominent conservative would call out Mitt Romney.

Did the US make a promise to the UN to adopt universal health care?

Every single member of the UN doubled-down today on a commitment to provide universal health coverage to their citizens. The fact that the US will be among them is perhaps evidence of how disconnected these declarations can be from actual domestic political agendas.

Yet the issue is important, and it shows just how out of line the US approach to health care coverage is compared to the rest of the world. Only about half the world’s population has access to the kind of affordable health care services that don’t require crippling out-of-pocket costs. Most of those people are in mid- and low-income countries. Or they are in the wealthiest country on Earth: the US.

Ten facts about homelessness in America.

The homeless represent the most vulnerable portion of Americans living in poverty. The latest U.S. government report on homelessness shows that a culture of secularism and statism is depriving Americans of church philanthropy, curbing the free market's ability to provide, and leaving the most vulnerable reliant on the government – or the mercy of the streets.

The Council of Economic Advisers detailed their conditions in its report on “The State of Homelessness in America,” released last week. It found that “rent controls” may have priced homeless Americans out of an affordable home, permissive policies may increase homelessness, and those with no connection to a church or faith community are 60 percent more likely to end up homeless.

When teenagers aren't busy telling us how to live, they are gluing their lips.

Oh look, just when I thought the trends were over, another one rolls on by and knocks us off our feet. Cool, cool, cool. This time around, it’s exactly what it sounds like. Turns out these teenagers are apparently gluing their upper lip to make them fuller.

Yes, you read that right, gluing their lips. So dumb, that I don’t even have the energy to make a stupid joke about it. Because that’s exactly what it is…stupid. Apparently, women are now using glue as their new “superpower beauty tool” to pucker up their top lip, to look like Kylie Jenner. I hate the internet.

Wishful thinking? Or a practical use for drones? Drones to be used in roofing homes.

But speed isn’t necessarily the primary reason for replacing humans with drones for jobs like this. Climbing up onto a roof to install shingles is a dangerous task, and having to haul a heavy automatic nail gun up with you definitely doesn’t make it any safer. Eventually, a swarm of drones could be deployed on a new house, laying shingles and nailing them into place, and they could quickly move from house to house in a new neighborhood to streamline at least part of the long construction process.

Wonder how those old shingles are going to be removed.

Scouring the internet day in and day out looking for ONT content is a challenge. Today was no different. Joe Mellen, not my kind of do-it-yourselfer.

Joe Mellen is a 76-year-old former beatnik who turned on, tuned in, dropped out, and used an electric drill to make a hole in his skull.

"This is the story of how I came to drill a hole in my head to get permanently high."

As far as opening lines to memoirs go, they don't come much more compelling than the first sentence in Joe Mellen's 1970 book, Bore Hole. It tells the story of how he dropped out of the square life in 1963 to become a beatnik—how he took acid in Spain during the psychedelic 60s, before looking for a more profound way to permanently alter his consciousness: auto-trepanation, the act of drilling a hole into your skull.

While this on its own was enough to guarantee Bore Hole cult status, Mellen—who has a fantastically readable and easy style—also managed to capture something of the spirit of the true countercultural 1960s in his writing. This would go some way to explaining why the 500 copies of the book that he originally self-published have long since become sought after artifacts from a vanished age. Bore Hole has been given a luxurious reissue by Strange Attractor, and it has been doubled in length, bringing Mellen's story up to date and making the case for trepanation in the 21st century. The book is also a persuasive attempt to answer a very fundamental question about human nature: Why do we love getting high so much?

The modern world has produced intellectually lazy people. Hundreds spend their weekend at a funeral. A funeral for a glacier.

With the second mourning ceremony for a melted glacier this year, perhaps 2019 will go down as the year of funerals for glaciers murdered by climate change.

On Sunday, hundreds held a funeral for the Pizol glacier in Switzerland’s Glarus Alps. This is the first glacier in Switzerland to be removed from GLAMOS, the nation’s glacier monitoring service, according to CNN. Some 250 people dressed in black showed up to the funeral procession, hiking about a mile and a half for two hours up a mountain to reach the site of the nearly gone glacier. Since 2006, the glacier has lost up to 90 percent of its volume—and human-caused climate change is to blame.

Are there any Morons left in Germany? If so, this legal decision may make them smile. German court rules hangovers are an "illness".

Pack your bags, everyone, it looks like we are moving to Germany! Why? Because apparently, you can now get super drunk, to the point where you know you will get a hangover, and call in sick the next day, because that’s totally acceptable. Turns out a German court ruled that hangovers are indeed an “illness,” just days after the annual Oktoberfest beer festival began in Munich. Which makes me believe people are having quite an adventure.

The case landed before judges in Frankfurt where the plaintiffs claimed a firm offering anti-hangover shots and drink powders to mix with liquid (usually water) was making illegal health claims. The sober ruling from the superior regional court read, “Information about a food product cannot ascribe any properties for preventing, treating or healing human illness or give the impression of such property. By an illness, one should understand even small or temporary disruptions to the normal state or normal activity of the body.”

On this day: 24 Sep 2004
The Strat Pack: Live in Concert was held at Wembley Arena in London marking the 50th Anniversary of the Fender Stratocaster guitar. The concert featured Ronnie Wood, Joe Walsh, Gary Moore, Brian May, David Gilmour, Albert Lee, Andy Fairweather-Low, Hank Marvin and many more. via thisdayinmusic.com

He wasn't suppose to see his first birthday. Buddy Wood is Tonight's Feel Good Story of The Day.

When Buddy Wood was born back in 1954 with Down syndrome, doctors didn’t think he would make it past his first birthday. Having blown away all expectations, Wood just celebrated turning 65 years of age with a delightful photoshoot to celebrate.

Wood lives with his sister in Florida. However, when they were visiting family in Virginia in August 2019, his niece proposed a photoshoot to celebrate his upcoming birthday in September. She had even invited a 2-year-old local boy named Sutton, who also has Down syndrome, to be a part of the session.

Don't stick your dick in crazy cone. Genius Award Winner.

A man has admitted having sex with a cleaning cone at Wigan train station while drunk. Trevor Smith, 38, was found in a lift with his trousers and undies around his ankles while thrusting his hips at the cone.

When he was stopped, police noticed a white substance on the floor that was not cocaine. Smith, from nearby St Helens, admitted to police that he was worse for wear and had snorted white powder that was given to him by friends to help perk him up.

Tonight's ONT has been brought to you by Geometry.

Notice: Posted with permission by the Ace Media Empire and AceCorp, LLC. Yadda. Yadda. Yadda. Yad.

posted by Misanthropic Humanitarian at 10:02 PM

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