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House Committee Hearing Tomorrow! Your pets are in danger!

I almost let this one slip by. Contact your representative today if you love your pets.

Anyone with pet fish, birds, reptiles, or small mammals will be affected by this bill. Any company selling product or services for pet fish, birds, reptiles or small mammals will be affected by this bill. Would you be impacted by "The Nonnative Wildlife Invasion Prevention Act"?

  • Virtually all fish in an aquarium are not native to the United States
  • Most pet birds are species not native to the US
  • Most reptiles kept as pets are not native to the US
  • Hamsters, gerbils, guinea pigs and ferrets are not native to the US

[Source, NoHR666.com]

I think this comment from Facebook sums it up well:

Mandy Kilpatrick at 12:25am April 19
It’s really backwards. They need to work on this. I’m all for protecting native wildlife and plants from harmful imported critters…but every area will have different problem animals. The problem critter that might thrive in Florida more than likely won’t be a problem in Minnesota. This is a ridiculous way of facing the problem. Needs work. Write your reps!

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Nothing to see here – go outside

Watch this video and then you’ll have no reason to look at anything else on the Internet for at least 24 hours. So yYou are free to go outside and enjoy this beautiful Earth Day! I’m going to get back to work.

Update: That video quit being amusing the second the person was revealed as a registered sex offender.

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Knox County Schools Wastes Students Time

Knox County Schools wasted an hour and a half of our children’s lives today by having every student walk through a metal detector as they entered Bearden Middle Schoool and randomly searching every eighth student. This waste of money, teacher resources, and student time produced no weapons. Randomly searches are ineffective and counterproductive which is why I begged that that the school board vote no to random searches. This is the beginning to the end of your civil liberties. The principal went so far as to say that we need to get used to this because one day we will have to walk through metal detectors just to get in the grocery store. Seriously?! Are you really that scared?

The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics.

The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.

And we’re doing exactly what the terrorists want.

[Source, Bruce Schneier – Security Expert, Refuse to be Terrorized]

Know what I fear? The emotional damage you are causing my child by putting him through the stress of a pointless random search.

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Quite Neighborly

My wife had a meeting this morning. She called shortly after leaving to let me know that our neighbor’s girlfriend who parks at the end of our street was out at her car wearing only cowboy boots, panties and a white, open bathrobe. I really have to get out of the basement more often!

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Stephen Hawking Very Ill

[audio:http://realityme.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/stephenhawking.mp3]

The 67-year-old physicist, who is the Lucasian professor of mathematics at the university, was undergoing tests at Addenbrooke’s hospital, Cambridge, after being taken there by ambulance today. He has been fighting a chest infection for several weeks. [Source, Guardian, Stephen Hawking ‘very ill’ in hospital]

Audio for this post generated by AT&T Labs Text-to-Speech(TTS) Demo software.

Update: Looks like Stephen Hawking is going to recover from the chest infection!