One of the most popular stories today is about the ill-advised nature of allowing people to build homes on barrier islands.

“Every year there’s reporting on the foolishness of building on barrier islands, but people are going to do it anyway,” Morton told LiveScience. “We don’t learn from the past. If you look at the barrier islands on the Mississippi coast in particular, after both Hurricane Camille in 1969, and Katrina, what did they do? They rebuilt. It’s a perfect example of a coastal area that did get hit as bad as it can get, and they just go back and rebuild.”

Barrier islands tend to be even riskier places to live than coastal areas, because they bear the brunt of any approaching storm impact.

“If you think about their location, they’re basically lonely sentinels that serve as barriers for the mainland,” said Clark Alexander, a marine geologist at Georgia’s Skidaway Institute of Oceanography. “Basically you’re in a vulnerable spot, because you’re located where you get the first effects of anything coming in off the ocean.”

Setting up residence in these vulnerable spots is particularly perilous.

“From a safety standpoint, it’s silly,” Alexander said. “Because the lifespan of a typical house is something like 60 years. But if you live on a barrier island, you can’t guarantee you’ll have land under your house in 60 years. It’s trying to put something permanent in a place that’s very dynamic.”

How come no one is saying anything like this about a place like New Orleans?

Political pandering and the socialist mentality. If two million people want to live in a place where hurricanes naturally land, below sea level and run by a base criminal named Ray Nagin whose management skills are far below those of an average kangaroo, want to continue to live there, then a freedom loving society should let them. The caveat is that they should be on their own the next time nature strikes.

More than half the people in this country say the flooded areas of New Orleans lying below sea level should be abandoned and rebuilt on higher ground.

An AP-Ipsos poll found that 54 percent of Americans want the vast sections of New Orleans that were flooded by Hurricane Katrina moved to a safer location. About 80 percent of the city was flooded at the height of the flood. The city, home to about 484,000 people, sits six feet below sea level on average.

Six feet below sea level. In this country, all productive citizens are expected to pay for the problems of all citizens. I disagree with this mentality but it is the fact of our times.

Why then are we not discussing moving populations out of the way of natural disasters. We wouldn’t build on an active volcano. Yet we build in active earthquake zones. We continue to insist on rebuilding cities and towns below sea level. Why? I do not want to pay for this foolishness when nature takes it course and wipes these population centers out.

Let these people build where they want, by all means. However, they should recover on their own when the ill-advised nature of their decision catches up with them. I am not heartless but this country is trillions of dollars in debt and cannot afford to continue to pander.

This mentality is bankrupting us and pushing the country towards the brink of a disaster that will wreak more havoc than every hurricane that ever was.

People have always been afraid of things they don’t understand. They’ve made many dire predictions of doom and gloom. Thankfully, most of those turn out to be wrong. Hopefully that will be the case with the Large Hadron Collider.

When the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) begins smashing protons together this fall inside its 17-mile- (27-kilometer-) circumference underground particle racetrack near Geneva, Switzerland, it will usher in a new era not only of physics but also of computing.

Before the year is out, the LHC is projected to begin pumping out a tsunami of raw data equivalent to one DVD (five gigabytes) every five seconds. Its annual output of 15 petabytes (15 million gigabytes) will soon dwarf that of any other scientific experiment in history.

The challenge is making that data accessible to a scientist anywhere in the world at the execution of a few commands on her laptop. The solution is a global computer network called the LHC Computing Grid, and with any luck, it may be giving us a glimpse of the Internet of the future.

On September 10, 2008 we’ll find out whether the latest end of the word predictions are right. I’m expecting a very large explosion - of knowledge about the nature of matter.

The cult of Obama apparently doesn’t extend to everyone. Four idiots are being held on suspicion of plotting to kill our next President. The story itself is highly suspect. The parts don’t add up.

Law enforcement sources told Maass that one of the suspects “was directly asked if they had come to Denver to kill Obama. He responded in the affirmative.”

The story began emerging Sunday morning when Aurora police arrested Tharin Gartrell, 28. He was driving a rented pickup truck in an erratic manner, according to sources.

Sources told CBS4 police found two high-powered, scoped rifles in the car along with camouflage clothing, walkie-talkies, wigs, a bulletproof vest, a spotting scope, licenses in the names of other people and 44 grams of methamphetamine. One of the rifles is listed as stolen from Kansas.

A 750-yard shot from a high vantage point is very difficult on a human sized target, even with an high caliber rifle and an appropriate scope. You’d need to pre-sight your weapon from your actual vantage point, or have a spotter assisting you. Maybe both.

The last person who could make such a shot is a methhead. Look carefully at these two individuals. They are supposedly charter members of the Methhead Presidential Assassin’s Club. These doofuses don’t look competent enough to tie their own shoes, let alone carry out the type of plan that would end the life of Barack Obama from 750-yards away.

I think there are two possibilities.

A) These idiots were actually plotting to kill Obama. If so, they had a snowball’s chance in hell. I’d put 200,000 to 1 odds on failure.

B) This is just some sort of publicity stunt set up by the campaign to help further the cult of personality Obama seems to have become.

Either way, Obama was never in danger. He’ll be the next President and I’ll be irritated by most of what he says and does for the next four years. Remember kids, drugs and hitmen don’t really mix. Competent assassins don’t get high and drive around in pickup trucks with their weapons waiting to be arrested.

This whole story is just a plot to distract us from the fact that Obama’s only meaningful contribution to society is that he promises to take money away from some people, take a cut, and give the remainder to other people - all in the name of fairness.

Author’s note: photo and story are completely unrelated. Photo is just here to piss off people searching for the term “angry hummer” on the Internets.

There really isn’t anything like giving someone a Hummer to show how much you care.

Of course some people may argue that ramming your own Hummer into a house you own in order to let your renters know they should pay is is a real boner of a move, so to speak.

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="450" caption="Angry Hummer loses battle with bus"][/caption]

NEWARK, Del. - Police have arrested a Newark area landlord who allegedly rammed his Hummer into a renter’s house, claiming the tenants were behind on their rent.

New Castle County Police spokesman Cpl. Trinidad Navarro said the 30-year-old landlord crashed the SUV into a home on Lute Court in Harmony Woods about 3 a.m. Thursday.

I’m not sure how intelligent it is to damage your own rental property with your personal vehicle all because your renters didn’t pay. Seems counter productive to me.

As this American nation enters the same end state that Rome did before it fell, we begin to see signs and portents. When guns are not readily available, battleaxes will do in a pinch.

Two men were arrested Tuesday by Salt Lake County sheriff’s deputies after investigators say they attacked a teenager with a medieval battle ax.

The key to catching the men was their apparent affiliation with Juggalos.

The men, both 21, were booked into the Salt Lake County Jail for investigation of aggravated assault. The two were at the home of a 17-year-old Kearns boy at about 4:30 a.m.

One of the men was jealous of the victim text messaging a girl, according to jail documents. He also believed he contracted a sexually transmitted disease from the girl, which she in turn got from the victim, jail documents state.

During the altercation with the victim, that man stabbed the teen with a knife and the other man struck him with a medieval battle ax type of weapon in the back of his neck, said Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Lt. Paul Jaroscak. Doctors needed about 300 stitches to close the wound, he said. He was last listed in critical condition at a local hospital.

Ah, for sweet lost morality. In the age of easy porn and functionally illiterate fucktards with the attention span of the common gnat, we are bound to see many more such cases in coming years.

When children are raised by the state and by television and by the Internet they will find a four sided battleaxe, a bucket of STDs and a banal existence more often than not.