They are currently out of season, but will be available again in late October/Early November.

More here, including where to buy.

http://wcco.com/local/metro.transit.vote.2.1873263.html

Why?

It’s based on the Earth’s circumference:

A nautical mile is based on the circumference of the planet Earth. If you were to cut the Earth in half at the equator, you could pick up one of the halves and look at the equator as a circle. You could divide that circle into 360 degrees. You could then divide a degree into 60 minutes. A minute of arc on the planet Earth is 1 nautical mile. This unit of measurement is used by all nations for air and sea travel.

A knot is a unit of measure for speed. If you are traveling at a speed of 1 nautical mile per hour, you are said to be traveling at a speed of 1 knot.

A nautical mile is 1,852 meters, or 1.852 kilometers. In the English measurement system, a nautical mile is 1.1508 miles, or 6,076 feet.

One of his policy initiatives (in addition to planting vegitation) was to eliminate the Gold Fringed Flags.

Always a sucker for conspiracy theories, I set out to see why Mr. .Com had it out for the fringy flag.  And I was absolutely thrilled to see that it had something to do with the missing 13th amendment.  I just love it when conspiracy theories cross over!

So, the basic conspiracy goes like this:

• Maritime Law (or Admiralty Law, or international law) dictates the rules regarding flags.  A flag on a ship indicates who has jurisdiction over you if you set foot on the ship.
• This same law is what allows embassies to operate under their own laws on foreign soil, since they are flying their flag over the embassy.
• In fact, any set of 4 walls makes an enclave, and within an enclave, if you display a flag, the laws of the power represented by the flag rule within that enclave.
• The gold fringed flag is a symbol of the U.S. Military, not the U.S. Government.
• If a gold fringed flag is displayed in an enclave such as a courtroom, you are under the jurisdiction of the military, not the constitution.
• In martial law, you are GUILTY until proven INNOCENT.  Not the other way around.

Or, to put it another way:

FLAGS DETERMINE COURT JURISDICTION AND THE LAW ATTENTION: Just as you are aware that there are two ‘united states’ one which is comprised of the ‘Republic states’ and the other comprised of the ‘United States’ which without authority of law incorporated itself in 1871 and 1874, are you aware that there are also two separate and distinct ‘flags’ for each of these ‘united states’ and it is the flag appearing within the sanctuary of the ‘bar’ in court which determines the laws applying to that court?
FLAG #1:  Flags with gold fringe, gold braid, gold eagle, gold spear, or gold ball atop the flagpole establishes the jurisdiction of the admiralty, maritime or administration jurisdiction.  President Roosevelt describes this type of flag in 1933 and it’s described by Army Regulation in 1979.  This is an article 1 (one) jurisdiction court flag “guilty until proven innocent” war powers act.

U.S. ARMY AR 840-10 MANUAL FOR COURTS MARTIAL.  Gold fringe flag is admiralty except indoors.  Indoors the gold-fringed flag only flies in military courts and therein when dealing with administrative matters are summary court martial proceedings against civilians.

FLAG #2:  Article III (three) of the united states constitution describes the jurisdiction of the court by the American flag of peace under Title 4 U.S.C. 1.  This flag is described as red, white and blue with stripes of red and white horizontally placed in alteration.  Under the jurisdiction of the American flag of peace the united states constitution is alive and well and all rights are preserved.  People are ‘innocent until proven guilty.’  The jurisdiction of the ‘American Flag’ is the determining factor upon which all citizens rights are determined.

NOTE:  This means that the gold trimmed flag must be removed from all state and state funded buildings.

So now you know.

Resources:

• The most comprehensive guide on the net (reference to 13th amendment 1/3 down the page)
• A Ron Paul message board discussion, with some useful facts
• A site that was so provocative, it’s not on the internet anymore, but thankfully the web archive project saved it
• How to Guide on challenging the gold fringed flag in court
• The Infamous Executive Order 10834

If any citizen of the United States shall accept, claim, receive, or retain, any title of nobility, or honor, or shall, without the consent of Congress, accept any present, pension, office or emolument, of any kind whatever, from any Emperor, King, Prince or foreign Power, such person shall cease to be a citizen of the United States, and shall be incapable of holding any office of trust or profit under them, or either of them.

There is some controversy regarding whether it actually passed or not.  Several states ratified the amendment, but in the process we added more states to the union.  Ultimately the whole thing was dropped, and we never accepted the amendment as part of the constitution.

A few questions come to mind.

1) Why did anyone think this needed to be an amendment in the first place?  (Napoleon, obviously.)

Return with us now to the tumultuous years leading up to the War of 1812, when fear of “foreign influence”—by England or France, depending on whether you were a Republican or Federalist—was a dominating issue in American politics. Jerome Bonaparte, the younger brother of Napoleon, had recently spent several years in the United States, where he married Elizabeth Patterson, the beautiful, ambitious daughter of a wealthy Baltimore merchant. In 1810, Jerome was on the throne of Westphalia, while Elizabeth was in America with their son, Jerome Napoleon. (The couple would never see each other again.) According to historian Michael Vorenberg of Brown University, having a nephew of the emperor of France growing up on American soil might have made the pro-British Federalists uneasy, or, just as likely, suggested to them a way to tie the Republicans to the French Legion of Honor, the Trilateral Commission of its day. Desiring to get out in front of the issue—or possibly seeking to score points against the Federalists, who had their own embarrassing ties to the British aristocracy—Republican Sen. Philip Reed of Maryland introduced an amendment meant to strengthen the existing “emoluments clause” in Article I, Section 9, of the Constitution.

2) Why is this coming up now?

The equally obvious answer: Iowa.  The Iowa Republican Party platform includes a plank seeking to restore the amendment.  It seems that some misguided Iowas think that if the amendment were restored, it would have some effect on Barack Obama’s Nobel Prize.

It wouldn’t.

As an aside, the “Party Platform” is one of the most useless features of a political party.  A whole ton of time is spent crafting the document, which is done through an arcane process involving proposing resolutions, and at the end, no one ever reads it or refers to it again.  Except for journalists looking to embarrass the party, of course.

When a political convention happens, there are several committees that are put together.  Among these are the platform and/or resolutions committees.  This is where you assign the crazy people.  They are the only ones with enough interest or patience to put together a several hundred page document that is utterly meaningless.  Putting the crazies on the platform is a good way to keep them segmented and off to the side.  Sometimes, they even go in another room, if you’re lucky.  At a minimum if someone introduces themselves as part of the platform committee, you know you’re talking to a nut, so you can slowly back away.  (Chances are if you engage them too long, they will hand you a sheet of paper with crazy nonsense on it about some conspiracy.)

After the document is prepared, people vote on it, and it goes into the record for journalists to review.  Everyone else ignores it until next time the convention comes around, when another round of nuts will review the document.

So there you go.  A couple crazies in Iowa added something to the party platform, and you get to learn about the missing 13th amendment.

Meek Has Taxpayer Lease His Car Because the Cars He Owns are in DC. “Rep. Kendrick Meek spent $977 a month to lease a ‘flexible-fuel’ GMC Yukon that runs on gas or a blend of gas and ethanol under a House rule requiring members to lease green vehicles. The monthly payment is high because representatives cannot use their allowances for down payments, and the lease is only for two years, coinciding with their term in office, said Meek’s spokesman, Adam Sharon. A Miami Democrat who is running for the U.S. Senate, Meek took his own cars along with his family to Washington after being elected, and needs to rent a vehicle in his district, Sharon said.” [Sun-Sentinel, 3/7/10]

I had no idea what that was, so, as is the intention of this blog, I looked into it.

The coin being referenced is a so-called Challenge Coin, which is a military tradition.  NBC explains it here:

Wikipedia explains it this way:

As the legend goes, one such student, a wealthy lieutenant, ordered small, solid-bronze medallions (or coins) struck, which he then presented to the other pilots in his squadron as mementos of their service together. The coin was gold-plated, bore the squadron’s insignia, and was quite valuable. One of the pilots in the squadron, who had never owned anything like the coin, placed it in a leather pouch he wore around his neck for safekeeping. A short while later, this pilot’s aircraft was heavily damaged by ground fire (other sources claim it was an aerial dogfight), forcing him to land behind enemy lines and allowing him to be captured by the Germans. The Germans confiscated the personal belongings from his pockets, but they didn’t catch the leather pouch around his neck. On his way to a permanent prisoner of war facility, he was held overnight in a small German-held French village near the front. During the night, the town was bombarded by the British, creating enough confusion to allow the pilot to escape.

The pilot avoided German patrols by donning civilian attire, but all of his identification had been confiscated so he had no way to prove his identity. With great difficulty, he crept across no-man’s land and made contact with a French patrol. Unfortunately for him, the French had been on the lookout for German saboteurs dressed as civilians. The French mistook the American pilot for a German saboteur and immediately prepared to execute him.

Desperate to prove his allegiance and without any identification, the pilot pulled out the coin from his leather pouch and showed it to his French captors. One of the Frenchmen recognized the unit insignia on the coin and delayed the execution long enough to confirm the pilot’s identity.

Once the pilot safely returned to his squadron, it became a tradition for all members to carry their coin at all times. To ensure compliance, the pilots would challenge each other to produce the coin. If the challenged couldn’t produce the coin, he was required to buy a drink of choice for the challenger; if the challenged could produce the coin, the challenger would purchase the drink.

So there you have it.

For anyone interested, you can see some really cool pictures of the Bush surprise greeting here.

It’s a vampire movie starring Jon Bon Jovi as a vampire hunter.  How could you not watch it?

The whole thing takes place in Mexico.  All in all, the movie was exactly what you’d expect.

Though, disappointingly, despite the fact that he shoots several vampires right through the heart, he fails to inform them that they are, in fact, to blame.