Daily Downers Exclusive Rocks New York Times

A few days ago, on January 8th, I released an exclusive here on Daily Downers about the fact that dogs can actually think. So today, the slowpoke New York Times finally woke up and printed the same exact story. Of course they don't explicitly acknowledge Daily Downers, but come on, where do you think this came from? Just some article floating around for days and someone at the Times finally decides to print it? I don't think so.

This is a coded message, letting me know I'm right, wink wink, but don't tell anyone. Sweet vindication. It's camoflauged in here I tell you, an article about a dog doing a trick. Don't believe it. The trick is hiding their intelligence behind a wagging tail for hundreds of years, biding their time. Waiting to strike! Or bite!

Who knows what really lurks in the hearts of these dogs? Are they just sucking up because they want another meal? They really hate us, right? They call them "man's best friend" but if they can do a "Heil Hitler" salute and smile God only knows what they'll get into when they finally take over.

The case of the businessman who taught his dog to raise his paw at the command “Hitler” may never go down in the annals of Third Reich history as consequential, but it has given people here a reason to laugh, not at the nation’s sinister deeds but at those who were responsible.

It was 1941, shortly before the invasion of the Soviet Union, and an anonymous source tipped off the Nazi authorities: A businessman named Tor Borg, of Tampere, Finland — a country that was friendly to the Nazis but not occupied by the Reich — had a black-and-white spotted dog that he taught to mock Hitler. The German vice consul in Helsinki, Willy Erkelenz, wrote that “a witness, who does not want to be named, said he saw and heard how Borg’s dog reacted to the command ‘Hitler’ by raising its paw.”

“This is a funny story, but it is a Nazi story which tells how they were looking for enemies everywhere,” said Mr. Hillenbrand, who is also the longtime managing editor of the German newspaper Die Tageszeitung.

[The New York Times]

Glock and Load

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Greg Wolff, the owner of two Arizona gun shops, told his manager to get ready for a stampede of new customers after a Glock-wielding gunman killed six people at a Tucson shopping center on Jan. 8.

Wolff was right. Instead of hurting sales, the massacre had the $499 semi-automatic pistols -- popular with police, sport shooters and gangsters -- flying out the doors of his Glockmeister stores in Mesa and Phoenix.

“We’re at double our volume over what we usually do,” Wolff said two days after the shooting spree that also left 14 wounded, including Democratic Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who remains in critical condition.

[...]

“When something like this happens people get worried that the government is going to ban stuff,” Wolff said.

Arizona gun dealers say that among the biggest sellers in the past few days is the Glock 19 made by privately held Glock GmbH, based in Deutsch-Wagram, Austria, the model used in the shootings.

[...]

Arizona law allows anyone to carry a gun in public if it’s in full view, making it what’s known as an open-carry state. Until recently, gun store owners say, it was common to see people carrying weapons in grocery stores or coffee shops. That’s less true today, because last year that state passed a law allowing individuals to carry a concealed weapon without a permit.

Daniel Vise, senior attorney with the Brady Campaign, said Arizona received a score of two out of 100 on the organization’s rating of state gun laws, and that the rate of gun deaths in the state is one and a half times the national average.

[Bloomberg]

Tragedy Brings Out the Best in People

It's always heartwarming to see the selfless, charitable side of humanity rise to the surface in the face of catastrophe. In Colombia, it's been pouring rain for several months without let up, causing massive flooding, destroying hundreds of thousands of homes, displacing untold numbers of people and killing several hundred. It's been described as the worst natural disaster in the history of that nation and they are in desperate need of donated clothing for millions of people left with nothing but the soaking wet shirts stuck to their backs. It's truly wonderful to see people rising to the challenge and sending destitute Colombians what they so desperately need.

Volunteers of Colombia's Red Cross found a tiger outfit, stained thongs and a wedding dress among goods that were donated for victims of floods that have devastated large parts of the country.

"What use is a wedding dress for a flood victim?" a Red Cross volunteer rhetorically asked newspaper El heraldo.

Apart from the wedding dress and tiger outfit, volunteers found gala dresses smelling of moth balls, soiled thongs and smelly underwear.

"It looks like people were using the campaign to get rid of their stuff," another volunteer told the newspaper.

[Colombia Reports]

Right Minded People Cheer as Kids Finally Face the Music

I know, how many times have you been pulled over or hassled by the cops? Just minding my own business. An innocent man.

"Officer, I just found that and was bringing it in to the police station."

"Yes Officer, I had two beers."

"Officer please stop choking me!"

Ordinarily if someone was getting hassled by the cops, I'd be on their side. But these are kids. They take advantage. If you're a six year old kid, the world is your oyster. You can shit all over everyone, right? Well, not anymore, at least in Texas. Jig is up little dudes. You start to pay early now. That cute stuff will only get you so far, and then you have to learn math and science, and we are falling way behind there as a nation according to published reports. So stop letting us down.

It's time to learn how to toe the line, or at least learn where the damn line IS. Damn!

School police officers in Texas are doling out more tickets to children as young as 6, who under past disciplinary practices would have been sent to the principal's office instead, according to a report by a Texas nonprofit.

"Disrupting class, using profanity, misbehaving on a school bus, student fights, and truancy once meant a trip to the principal's office. Today, such misbehavior results in a Class C misdemeanor ticket and a trip to court for thousands of Texas students and their families each year," says the Appleseed Texas report (PDF). It examined data from 22 of the state's largest school districts and eight municipal courts.

Over six years, school police issued 1,000 tickets to elementary school children in 10 school districts.

[Yahoo! News]

"I'm French, Fuck You!"

The gall of this Gaul, mon Dieu! That said, The Captain can't help but appreciate this guy's esprit libre. Vive la France, motherfucker!

In what will only enforce the belief that some French citizens are saddled with an insufferable insouciance, federal air marshals had to subdue an intoxicated man flying to New York from Nice when he repeatedly shoved a female flight attendant who caught him smoking in the plane’s bathroom.

After being handcuffed, suspect Franck Lebrun announced, “I’m French, fuck you!”

[...]

When Lebrun--screaming, yelling, and smelling of “cigarettes and alcohol”--got into a fighting stance opposite an air marshal (one of three on the transatlantic flight), he was handcuffed and moved to the rear of the airplane. During the trip, Ambrisco noted, Lebrun had been “speaking in a confrontational manner using expletives in English and made other comments in French.”

[The Smoking Gun]

"I Can't Hear You!!!"

It turns out that when you tell people "your children are going to die and it's your own damn fault," they don't respond positively.

The use of dire predictions to encourage action on climate change may be backfiring and increasing doubt that greenhouse gases from human activities are causing global warming.

[...]

Matthew Feinberg at the University of California, Berkeley, wondered whether presenting children as the main victims of climate change, a common feature of warning messages, might be viewed as unfair because children have not caused global warming. He speculated that this, along with the apocalyptic descriptions of global warming's possible consequences, might threaten people's natural tendency to believe that the world is a fundamentally fair and stable place. Undermining that belief has been shown to increase the likelihood that people will ignore reality and allow events to unfold around them without intervening.

[...]

So Feinberg and his colleague Robb Willer, also at Berkeley, asked 45 online participants spread across 15 cities in the United States to engage in what was ostensibly a sentence-unscrambling activity.

Half of the volunteers were asked to unscramble sentences such as "Somehow justice will always prevail", whereas the others were given sentences such as "Often, justice will not prevail". This activity primed them to have either a strong or weak belief in a just world. The participants then completed a survey that measured their scepticism over climate change, asking questions such as "How solid is the evidence that the earth is warming?" and requiring participants to rate their answers on a six-point scale, in which six was not at all solid and one very solid.

Next, participants watched two short global-warming warning videos created by the Environmental Defense Fund, a charity based in New York that campaigns on green issues. The first showed a train speeding towards a small girl as a metaphor for the impending catastrophe that awaits the world's children. The second showed anxious children verbally simulating a clock ticking while describing the climate devastation that is coming. After watching, participants again had their degree of skepticism over climate change measured. They were also asked to rate how willing they were to take action to reduce their carbon footprints.

Feinberg and Willer found that participants primed to have a stronger belief in a just world reported levels of skepticism that were 29 percent higher, and a willingness to reduce their carbon footprint that was 21 percent lower, than those primed to see the world as an unjust place. Their findings are reported in Psychological Science.

[Scientific American]

Father Doesn't Know Best

If your child is being rushed to the hospital, one way not to help matters is by crashing your car head-on into the ambulance that's carrying her.

Five people were sent to the hospital after a vehicle collided with an ambulance late Friday night in Luzerne County.

Hunlock Creek ambulance officials said they were transporting a young child to the hospital after a seizure when her father, while rushing home, collided with the ambulance carrying her.

[...]

Emergency officials said they were taking a four-year-old girl to the hopsital after she suffered a seizure. Her father was rushing home on Sorbertown Hill Road in Hunlock Township when he collided nearly head-on with the ambulance around 11 p.m. Friday.

EMS crews said the father admitted to police he was driving too fast.

[WNEP]

E.T. Wants to Eat Us and Steal Our Stuff

That's the latest news from our friends in the Science community. Don't be fooled, silly humans, the Captain has warned you.

When considering the prospect of alien life, humankind should prepare for the worst, according to a new study: Either we're alone, or any aliens out there are acquisitive and resource-hungry, just like us.

These two unpalatable options are pretty much the only possibilities, according to the new study. That's because evolution is predictable, and alien biospheres should thus produce intelligent creatures much like us, with technological prowess and an ever-increasing need for resources.

[...]

Further, Conway Morris [of Cambridge University] says, evolution operates predictably, producing relatively predictable outcomes. These two suppositions argue that alien life, if it exists, should be fairly similar to terrestrial life, generating intelligent beings much like us. These aliens may look unfamiliar, but any differences would be skin-deep.

There is reason to be wary of such creatures, according to Conway Morris.

"If intelligent aliens exist, they will look just like us, and given our far-from-glorious history, this should give us pause for thought," he writes in the study, which was published today (Jan. 10) in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A.

Other researchers have raised this same point. The eminent physicist Stephen Hawking, for example, recently warned that aliens may be more interested in mining our planet for vital resources than in getting to know us.

[Live Science] [Space.com]

"That's How God The Avenger Rolls!"

Ah, the Westboro Baptist Church is spreadin' God's word again. Lovely folk, they are.

[Wonkette]

Daily Downers Exclusive - Dogs Can Think!

Every once in awhile the truth is buried in an article and even though the focus is elsewhere, the truth will out! As they say. Look at this one. On the surface it's about how the Nazis were pissed off that this dog did a "heil Hitler" salute. They thought it was some kind of trick, like "roll over" or whatever. The reality is buried in here, because it's like the Martians. If they told people the truth, they couldn't handle it. They would completely freak out!

But here it is. Dogs can think. This dog was not executing a parlor trick. He had analyzed the political landscape and gave his opinion. "Heil Hitler!" The dog was a Nazi! The truth is buried, right here in this article. Of course the Nazis were obsessed with this dog. They KNEW they had seen the truth and were figuring out how to use it for their nefarious ends!

If you have a dog, just imagine what it's thinking right now. What are its political beliefs? What does it think of YOU? Really. Deep down. Can you deal with a world of thinking dogs? You can adjust to this slowly, but please America, start adjusting now, otherwise the dogs are going to get together and take over.

What was the Nazi plan? We need to know this NOW. Right away. Or else dogs will be dressing US up in stupid costumes like the poor mutt in this picture. You think an entire species will forget this kind of humiliation? Not me. This shakes me up almost as much as the zombie thing. What if the dogs go with the zombies? Oh my God. I can't even think about it right now.

Newly discovered documents have revealed a bizarre footnote to World War II: the Nazis' dogged obsession with a Finnish mutt who gave not a howl, but a heil. And, just as absurdly, the totalitarian state that dominated most of Europe was unable to do much about the canine's paw-raising parody of Germany's Fuehrer.

In the months preceding Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, Berlin's Foreign Office commanded its diplomats in the Nazi-friendly country to gather evidence on the dog and its owner — and even plotted to destroy the owner's pharmaceutical business.

Historians were unaware of the scheme until some 30 files containing correspondence and diplomatic cables were found by a researcher in the Foreign Office archives.

Klaus Hillenbrand, an expert on the Nazi period who examined the documents, called the episode "completely bizarre."

"Just months before the Nazis launched their attack on the Soviet Union, they had nothing better to do than to obsess about this dog," he told The Associated Press.

The Dalmatian mix named Jackie was owned by Tor Borg, a businessman from the Finnish city of Tampere. Borg's wife Josefine, a German citizen known for her anti-Nazi sentiments, dubbed the dog "Hitler" because of the way it raised a paw high in the air, much like Germans greeting the Fuehrer with a cry of "Heil Hitler!"

[Associated Press]

The Old Rope A Dope

I know exactly what you'll think when you read this one. The same thing I'm thinking - the movie "PENITENTIARY." In the movie they have boxing matches in the jail and the winner gets to have sex in a trailer with a friendly prostitute. A classic. I know you've seen it.

So obviously what happened here was, old man Stanford was fighting to get to the trailer, and he lost. His brilliant legal team is now able to delay the trial by saying he's hurt. Now, you're looking at the $7 billion number, and you're thinking "man that's a lot of money." But the legal team knows where the real money is at - in the rematch between Stanford and the guy he just fought in jail. They can stall now and keep Stanford in jail long enough to clean up on the next fight.

See, everybody will figure Stanford will lose, based on this phantom "brain injury." But he is a mortal lock in the rematch. If you want to see some real money, not like the money you make in these Ponzi schemes, you bet Stanford in the rematch with both hands, either in Vegas or wherever you can. It's the old "rope a dope." After getting that first fight under his belt, there's no way Stanford loses the rematch. It's impossible.

I just can't believe this sucker judge is falling for it. I can see how he may not have seen "Penitentiary," but someone on his staff must have seen it. Maybe they are all in it and betting on Stanford? Man they would clean up! That would explain a lot.

A judge has delayed the trial of former Texas billionaire and financier R. Allen Stanford, who is accused of bilking investors out of $7 billion in a Ponzi scheme.

U.S. District Judge David Hittner determined that Stanford is not mentally competent to go forward with his case. The financier's trial had been set to begin Jan. 24.

The judge agreed on Thursday to delay the start of the trial until Stanford can be treated for medical problems affecting his competency. The judge did not say how long the delay could last.

Hittner ruled after a daylong hearing during which three psychiatrists testified that Stanford is not competent because of medical issues including a brain injury he suffered during a jail fight in September 2009.

[Associated Press]

Officer I Swear I Am Not Dazed and Confused

Sometimes I just don't understand what's going on. What exactly did this guy do wrong, beyond driving drunk? He's got some kind of connection to the military and he's collecting some weapons. And? What's the problem? Guy sounds enterprising to me is all.

When I'm "dazed and confused" I'm more inclined to zone out on Jimmy Page bowing that guitar, but if this guy is dazed and confused with his handguns and his knives who am I to judge? Live and let live baby. Nothing wrong with that. Why the media/police bias against the heavy metal thing? Zeppelin had other things going too, right? Maybe we need to get past using Zeppelin songs to label what some people view as deviate behavior, and we should make some effort to really understand each other? Huh? Yeah!

But it's that damned drunk driving that sinks so many otherwise great guys. Like Mel Gibson. It's a shame. This guy was such a menace to society that they released him on his own recognizance. And I'm fine with that. Ramble On brother!

In an embarrassing security breach at the Florida military base where U.S. Central Command is headquartered, a man masqueraded as a top military aide to procure housing on the base, where he stored a large weapons cache in his home, The Smoking Gun has learned.

The brazen scheme was discovered last year by military investigators only after Scott Allan Bennett, 39, was arrested for drunk driving at an entrance gate to MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa.

At the time of his bust, a “dazed and confused” Bennett was carrying a concealed, loaded handgun, and his vehicle contained a second loaded gun, seven knives, a machete, a collapsible baton, mace, a stun gun, ammunition, a sling shot with BBs, and a box of throwing stars, according to a Tampa Police Department report and a criminal complaint filed last month in U.S. District Court.

Bennett, pictured in the mug shot at right, was released Tuesday on his own recognizance following a court hearing. Charged with making a false statement, he is scheduled for an appearance later this month at the Tampa federal courthouse. Prosecutors and military officials have, not surprisingly, done nothing to publicize the case against Bennett, the details of which were discovered by TSG.

[The Smoking Gun]

Whaddaya Mean You Didn't Want Your House Bulldozed?

Looks like this Pittsburgh man learned one of life's lessons the hard way: dreams are like rainbows -- only idiots chase them.

PITTSBURGH — One man's dream was crushed, literally. A bulldozer leveled his home by accident.

It happened in Pittsburgh. Andre Hall returned after a week of holiday vacation to find the house he bought for his family had been demolished. Hall had begun making repairs to the home and planned to move in with his girlfriend and her children.

"It's just a crushed dream," Hall said. "I always wanted a piece of Pittsburgh. I finally got it. Now it's gone."

[...]

"Why did they demolish the house?" Hall said to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. "They could see I had put in new windows and had slabs of drywall."

The city blames the contractor and said they will no longer be issuing contracts to that company. The contractor did not comment on this story.

[Fox4KC.com]

Horny Old Man

No, the Captain isn't talking about Hugh Hefner.

Huang Yuanfan, 84, said the odd growth started two years ago as a small bump but just grew and grew.

The old goat said: ‘I tried picking at it and even filing it but nothing changed it. The horn just kept getting bigger.’

Yuanfan says it has now reached three inches and is showing no signs of stopping.

He added: ‘Doctors say they don't know what caused it but if they try to take it off it will just come back. I try to hide it beneath a hat but if it gets much longer it will be sticking out the top.’

[Metro]

Coma-stricken Girl Given Ticket for Jaywalking

Talk about adding insult to injury.

LAS VEGAS -- A 13-year-old girl is recovering after being hit by a car. The accident happened Tuesday afternoon and the girl's mother says she is in a medically induced coma. But while at the hospital, her mother was given a ticket because her daughter was jaywalking.

The accident happened at Durango and Rochelle. Takara Davis was walking home from school when she was hit. Police won't speak about the case, saying it's an ongoing investigation, but witnesses say the teen was lagging behind friends when she was crossing the street.

[...]

Davis is an 8th grader at Lawrence Junior High School, which is only a few blocks away from where the accident took place. Davis was issued a jaywalking citation. It was handed to her mother at the hospital.

"He said, 'Takara was jaywalking. She has got to go to court on March 6th,'" said Obong. "If she was jaywalking, then she was jaywalking. But maybe you give it to me at a later time. Don't give it to me when they are rushing her into the operating room."

A spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police Department issued a statement about how the citation was issued, saying, "Our officers conduct themselves in a professional and compassionate way. We wouldn't do anything deliberately insensitive."

[8NewsNow.com]