Vin Suprynowicz

Attempts to contact Vin at his former work email address or phone number may appear to go unanswered. Ditto, possibly, with snail mail … we haven’t checked. But it does seem that emails sent to him are going into a black hole somewhere — and the answering machine will take a message though he’ll never get it. He’s not ignoring you.

Surely an oversight on the part of his former employer, but it does create an awkward situation.

If you’re determined to get in touch, chances are you’ll find a way without too much trouble … in the meantime, we’re working on a way for legit emails to get through via the blog without the inevitable barrage of spam.

Thanks, Heidi, Mitch, Mama, and Ralph for your comments (sorry if I’ve missed anybody, I don’t approve comments and may not have seen them all.)

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The daily paper as you’ve known it is going the way of the drive-in movie, the party line, and black-and-white TV.

The financial reasons are well known: The Internet and tax-subsidized direct mail have sucked up much of the advertising revenue — by providing better, more efficient targeting — and significantly altered the business models of many former large advertisers. (In fact, when customers use your store merely to check out merchandise that they then rush home and purchase for less, online, the advertisers themselves are doomed. See “Circuit City.”)

But there’s another reason daily newspapers are failing. A hundred years ago, readers could choose among as many as a dozen newspapers in large cities, two or three even in medium-sized towns. They tended to choose papers whose editorial philosophies matched their own, wherever that might lie on the socialist-to-libertarian or -conservative spectrum.

Now they’re doing that again, choosing politically and philosophically agreeable sources of news and commentary … on cable TV, and especially on the Internet.

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The Mojave Desert Tortoise is listed by the federal government as a “threatened” species, which allows extreme environmentalists and their co-religionist government thugs to impose restrictions on land use by humans in Southern Nevada, supposedly to protect the tortoise’s delicate wild habitat.

Anyone not familiar with this particular exercise in lunacy might draw the conclusion that the tortoise prospers only in untouched arid desert, that upon sight of an approaching human or cow, let alone a human-generated dirt road or house or barn, the poor reptiles just roll over and shiver until they die of fright.

But anyone drawing that conclusion might be puzzled by the new Nevada state regulation set to take effect May 1, allowing owners of pet tortoises to keep only one such animal at a time.

Why? The Nevada Wildlife Commission, which adopted the regulation last month, says the problem is that when allowed to pair up the tortoises breed, and the last thing the government wants is any bigger population boom among this “threatened” species.

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The discredited Left can find little to say, save that she was “divisive.” How refreshing, then, to hear the enthusiasm in the equally widespread reports that former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who died Monday at age 87, managed in her remarkable 11-year tenure at Downing Street to vanquish socialism and restore the free market to Britain.

She was indeed a remarkable leader who did what many considered impossible. Unfortunately, these good-hearted reports could seem to declare victory in a struggle yet ongoing.

Yes, socialism calls for collective ownership of lands and factories, and Mrs. Thatcher’s success at privatizing many state-controlled industries — British Telecom, British Gas, Rolls-Royce, British Airways, British Coal, British Steel, the water companies and electric system, even privatizing some public housing — breathed new life into the foundering economy of the United Kingdom in the 1980s, even as her victory in the Falklands restored much of England’s lost prestige and credibility.

But tax-funded old-age pensions, tax-subsidized housing and schooling (no matter how enervating), and especially a sharply graduated income tax designed to punish the wealthy and shower the poor with the earnings of others (no matter how this discourages work and job creation) are also basic tenets of socialism, and those remain stubborn fixtures in Britain, as well as here.

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Nevada voters approved medical marijuana at the polls, placing it in the state constitution in the year 2000 and instructing “The Legislature shall provide by law for … appropriate methods for supply of the plant to patients authorized to use it.”

Now, sick Nevadans can pay a $150 fee and acquire a physician’s recommendation for the medicinal plant. Then — they can’t get any.

Oh, some do. They can grow their own, with an absurd limitation on the number of seedlings grown at any time. (Imagine a gardener trying to grow a crop of carrots … while being limited to seven seedlings.)

But police have continued to bust well-meaning souls who have tried to help patients acquire this medicinal plant, threatening Biblical prison terms.

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A regular reader writes in to protest my assertion that America now has enough proven fossil fuel reserves to last for centuries, warning “Fracking technology isn’t sustainable.”

As with other shorthand terms designed to eliminate case-by-case by analysis, when “unsustainable” comes to mean merely “bad,” the results can get silly.

We know where the term came from. Demonstrating the genius of central planning by distant bureaucrats, when the Soviets in the 1950s and 1960s decided they had better uses for the river water flowing into the landlocked Sea of Aral (namely, cotton production), and proceeded to divert the rivers into canals where more than half the water was wasted through leakage or evaporation, the results for the Sea of Aral proved “unsustainable,” in the sense that the sea is now more of a saline puddle, while the ships that once sailed her now sit rusting on salt flats, miles from any water.

(From another view, I suppose the Kazakhs or whoever now dominates this area can “sustain” their cotton irrigation indefinitely, so long as the local legal system prevents those who have suffered economic consequences through the destruction of the Aral Sea from collecting full damages. In this way, the situation is similar to the way the Owens River in southeastern California now flows through a big tunnel to thirsty Los Angeles — former Owens Valley farmers may not like it, but this setup is “sustainable” so long as Los Angeles has the political muscle to keep anyone from blowing up their pipe.)

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Officials in Elko County have approved a pilot project designed to keep sage grouse off the endangered species list by killing ravens with poisoned eggs and reducing wildfire threats through livestock grazing.

Elko County commissioners say the program, set to begin on the 15,000-acre Devils Gate Ranch, is needed because wildfires and ravens pose the biggest threat to the chicken-sized bird. Fires destroy sagebrush the birds rely on, while ravens are by far its most common predator.

Ted Koch, state supervisor of the Fish and Wildlife Service in Reno, agrees that wildfires and ravens are factors in the bird’s decline, The Associated Press reports. Mr. Koch also said more needs to be done to reduce ravens, saying Nevada alone has seen a 600 percent increase in the scavengers in the past three decades.

Sage grouse populations are estimated to have fallen 90 percent in the past century, even as cattle grazing has been systematically reduced by government regulators under pressure from absentee environmentalists, allowing the buildup of dry brush, which has fed more frequent and severe wildfires.

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By a disturbingly slim 5-4 majority, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled March 26 that police cannot bring a drug-sniffing police dog onto a suspect’s property to look for evidence without first getting a search warrant.

The ruling upholds a Florida Supreme Court ruling throwing out evidence seized in the search of Joelis Jardines’ Miami-area house. That search was based on an alert by Franky the drug dog from outside the closed front door.

Writing for the majority, Justice Antonin Scalia said an American has the Fourth Amendment right to be free from the government’s gaze inside their home and in the area surrounding it. “The police cannot, without a warrant based on probable cause, hang around on the lawn or in the side garden, trawling for evidence and perhaps peering into the windows of the home,” Scalia wrote for the majority.

He was joined in his opinion by Justices Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

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In Northwest Las Vegas, I motor from time to time along Lone Mountain Road between Jones and Decatur boulevards.

Recently, these streets have been repainted with solid white lines designating bicycle lanes. In addition to the re-striping, the city of Las Vegas has posted reflective metal “Bike Lane” signage, 10 to the mile.

When the city marked bicycle lanes on the stretch of West Charleston that leads to the popular recreational route past the Red Rocks, that was fine by me. I have nothing against bicyclists.

But I drive these streets I’m talking about in the Northwest at all hours of the day and night, and there are no bicycles. Maybe an occasional teen-ager peddling a few blocks from home to the convenience store (mostly sticking to the underused sidewalks, which I happen to think very wise of them, even though that’s now apparently illegal.) But in effect, streets that once carried three lanes of motor vehicle traffic in each direction have now lost a full motor vehicle lane on either side, with that space now dedicated to the use of imaginary bicyclists.

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Envisioning cars that can go “coast to coast without using a drop of oil,” President Barack Obama on March 15 urged Congress to authorize another $2 billion over the next decade to expand research into weaning automobiles off gasoline.

“The only way to break this cycle of spiking gas prices — the only way to break that cycle for good — is to shift our cars entirely, our cars and trucks, off oil,” the president said.

But the recent track record of politicians attempting to fight the twin realities of physics and economics to force-feed such a change is littered with the bankruptcies of heavily subsidized enterprises.

Fisker Automotive halted work on a Delaware auto factory to make plug-in sedans a year ago after the U.S. Energy Department blocked access to its federal loan, citing unmet milestones. Chinese automakers last week pulled back from talks to buy Fisker, the dispute hinging on that federal loan. A123 Systems Inc., a Massachusetts-based manufacturer of batteries for electric cars that received a $249-million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, filed for bankruptcy last October. Also apparently gone are Bright Automotive, Aptera, Think Automotive (a Norwegian firm that hoped to build electric cars in Indiana), and battery maker Ener1.

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