Watching the Michael Jackson Memorial Coverage

I'm watching the Jackson coverage, and they just showed some politicians being photographed on the red carpet. It seems to be a very "L.A." kind of thing, very Hollywood. I think that many of those people aren't necessarily going to the shindig to remember Jackson but to benefit their own publicity. They've all got an angle, something to sell, something to shill. The circus is in town and the carnies are swarming. It's simultaneously unseemly and fitting, and I doubt that it could happen in such a way anywhere else.

And a golden casket! What, did they think he was the Boy King?

Where's Steve Martin when we need him?

Now, when I die,
Now don't think I'm a nut,
Don't want no fancy funeral,
Just one like ole King Tut.

Greta and Shep are talking about empty seats in the arena. "There wouldn't be empty seats like this at a Lakers game," said Greta. To which I quipped, "The Lakers had a better year."

Comedian/Senator Upstaged

If a tree falls in a forest and there's nobody around to hear it, does it make a sound? The political corollary: If new U.S. Senator Al "Landslide" Franken gets sworn in at noon EDT as the media focus on the Michael Jackson memorial service in Los Angeles an hour later, will anyone notice? All eyes will be on the Jackson family (and probably the hearse carrying Jackson's coffin) as they make their way from Forest Lawn Cemetery to the Staples Center. The former funny man definitely has been upstaged today.

Picking a Losing Fight?

I was reading in the news about the ethnic turmoil in China's Xinjiang province, where the native Uighurs rioted over treatment by China's ethnic Han majority. About 150 people were killed and a lot of property was destroyed, and now the Han Chinese are up in arms, wanting blood vengeance. I read on the CIA World Factbook web site page on China that about 91.5% of the country's population of 1.338 billion people are Han Chinese -- which would be about 1.224 billion. Is it a good idea to pick a fight with that many of your neighbors if you're the Uighurs?

And just in case you were wondering, the average person in the world is a Chinese man.

Thoughts on Sarah Palin

Like most political observers, I was surprised by Sarah Palin's announcement on Friday that not only was she not going to run for re-election as Alaska's governor in 2010, but that she was stepping down from the job at the end of this month.

Most pundits seem to think that it's political suicide, since from their point of view, it marks her as a "quittter." Others say that she might be crazy like a fox, since it will put an end to the parade of baseless ethics complaints against her (which have built up a $500,000 legal tab to defend against, even though all of them have been dismissed), as well as taking her family out of the public eye, where they have been subjected to almost unprecedented nastiness by the mainstream media in its role as the propaganda arm of the Democrat party.

As someone who strongly agrees with Governor Palin's message of smaller, less intrusive federal government, lower spending by our prodigal Congress, and more personal responsibility rather than whining about unfairness, which should be the core values of the Republican Party, I would like to see her take a larger role on the national stage. Is she ready to be president? Probably not, but neither was the guy who got elected last November. Can she be the voice for conservative values? Yes, she can!

In many ways, Sarah Palin is the anti-Obama. The president was elected by offering blandly inspirational slogans like "Hope!" and "Change!" and "Yes, We Can!" He never really articulated what he actually stood for or what he would do if elected. Well, after a few months of his rule, we have a pretty good idea. He stands for a larger, more intrusive federal government that will take more of your money and make your decisions for you, "for your own good." They, after all, are the Best and Brightest, graduates of elite Ivy League universities, who know all the proper theories of how things are supposed to work. Never mind that none of them have ever run a business or had to make a profit. Indeed, "profit" is a dirty word for many of them. And really, why wouldn't you want the same people who ran the economy into the ground to run the climate and your health care? What could go wrong?

All of those Beltway insiders, Democrats and Republicans alike, hate Sarah Palin, hate her with a white-hot passion. Why? Because she scares the crap out of them, because she connects with a large portion of the electorate. She's not an Ivy League lawyer, a Beltway insider, someone who is there to feed at the public trough and enrich themselves and their cronies through politics as usual. She's a hockey mom, state-school educated at the University of Idaho, for chrissakes, who got into politics at the local level to fix local problems and continued to advance against the odds and the old boy's network.

She's not one of THEM; she's one of US. And there are a hell of a lot more of us than there are of them. They know this and they fear this; why else would the Democrat media continue its despicable attacks on her and her family?

I don't know if she'll run in 2012 or not, but if she does and she is articulating the same message she is now, then I would certainly consider voting for her. In the end, 2012 is going to be a referendum on the policies of Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and the other Democrats who are spending money like there is no tomorrow, and doing their best to control more and more of the lives of Americans. If things are as bad as I suspect they will be, any Republican who is for smaller government and lower spending will stand a very good chance of winning. If the economy improves, then Obama will probably be re-elected, Sarah Palin or no Sarah Palin.

Vacation's Over

It's always nice to take some time off from work to decompress. I tacked an extra week onto my late June vacation in the vain hope that perhaps things would be back to normal at work when I returned. Regrettably, that is not yet the case. The grapevine says that there may be reason for hope, but it hasn't happened yet.

I'm still reading on Atlas Shrugged. I'm about 750 pages into it now, about 2/3 of the way through. As I'm sure I've noted before, it's very topical due to the current political regime in power. The book does strike some anachronistic notes that let you know that the book is fifty years old: The ubiquity of trains as the way to travel long distances (Eisenhower's Defense Interstate Highway System was in its infancy), classical music as the highbrow music of the day (our heroine Dagny Taggart has a favorite composer), and especially, the common acceptance of cigarette smoking in all social situations. Ayn Rand's cigarettes in the book are so omnipresent that they are almost a minor character.

Still, it is the objectivist philosophy that the book conveys that makes it a must-read. Their enemies, the "looters," are everywhere, and just as in our society today, they tell the productive people that it's their duty to produce for those who leech off of them and give them nothing in return but scorn for their "greed" and "selfishness." The looters promote policies to "make the rich pay their fair share," and in the book, it provokes a strike by the people who make the motor of the world run. In real life, we may be seeing the beginnings of the same thing, as more and more people realize that it is foolish to work harder in order to be taxed at a higher rate.

When Dagny gets to Galt's Gulch, the strikers' secret hideaway in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, she meets a number of productive people who have gone on strike. One of them is a famous doctor. She asks him to give her his reasons for doing so (p. 744):

"I quit when medicine was placed under State control, some years ago," said Dr. Hendricks. "Do you know what it takes to perform a brain operation? Do you know the kind of skill it demands, and the years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to acquire that skill? That was what I would not place at the disposal of men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout the fraudulent generalities that got them elected to the privilege of enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun. I would not let them dictate the purpose for which my years of study had been spent, of the conditions of my work, or my choice of patients, or the amount of my reward. I observed that in all of the discussions that preceded the enslavement of medicine, men discussed everything -- except the desires of the doctors. Men considered only the 'welfare' of the patients, with no thought for those who were to provide it. That a doctor should have any right, desire or choice in the matter, was regarded as irrelevant selfishness; his is not to choose, they said, only 'to serve.' That a man who's willing to work under compulsion is too dangerous a brute to entrust with a job in the stockyards -- never occurred to those who proposed to help the sick by making life impossible for the healthy. I have often wondered at the smugness with which people assert their right to enslave me, to control my work, to force my will, to violate my conscience, to stifle my mind -- yet what is it that they expect to depend on, when they lie on an operating table under my hands? Their moral code has taught them to believe that it is safe to rely on the virtue of their victims. Well, that is the virtue I have withdrawn. Let them discover the kind of doctors that their system will now produce. Let them discover, in their operating rooms and hospital wards, that it is not safe to place their lives in the hands of a man whose life they have throttled. It is not safe, if he is the sort of man who resents it -- and still less safe, if he is the sort who doesn't."

Topical? You make the call.

In Threes?

I've heard that "deaths come in threes," and this week, for the world of entertainment, that certainly seems to have been the case, as three icons of the 1970s and 1980s have died.

On Tuesday, we got the news that Ed McMahon, longtime second banana to Johnny Carson, had died at the age of 86. It wasn't really a surprise, because he had been in ill health for some time, and besides, once you get to the age of 86, you're playing with the house's money.

Earlier today, I heard that Farrah Fawcett lost her very public battle with cancer. She was 62. Those of us who were old enough to remember watching her on "Charlie's Angels" and seeing the poster of her in the swimsuit will never forget her.

And then, when I got up this evening, I heard the shocking news that Michael Jackson had suffered a massive cardiac arrest and died. Very talented and equally controversial, he was only 50 years old. I suspect that all of the plastic surgeries he had may have taken some kind of physical toll on him. To me, watching him morph from a young black man into some kind of sideshow freak made him a very tragic figure, because it showed that he was incapable of being happy with himself as he was. For all of his money and fame, it was apparent that he was still deeply unhappy. He might have been better off if his father hadn't hustled him and his brothers into show business when he was a kid. He never had a chance at a normal life.

RIP, Ed, Farrah and Michael.

Watching Iran

As did many people in the West, I watched the weekend's demonstrations in Iran with fascination. These were people who were literally putting their lives on the line to protest against an oppressive, thuggish government. To be honest, I don't know what kind of a government the protesters might choose to replace it with should they win, but it could hardly be anything worse. If you want to gauge how evil a government is, look at how they treat their citizens. A government whose agents shoot down teenage girls in the streets is too vile to stand. It's my sincere hope that Neda's death won't be in vain.

A Stressful Week

Have you ever had your boss decide to shake things up just for the sake of doing so, even though things were running smoothly and people, if not necessarily happy, weren't angry or unhappy either? Well, that's my week in a nutshell.

Starting on Tuesday, he decided that we would start rotating people onto different machines than the ones that they have worked on almost exclusively for the past several years. In my case, I had been on my machine since early 2000, when efficiency experts had been brought into the plant to make suggestions, and they had suggested putting people on specific machines and leaving them there. This was recommended in order to develop a sense of "ownership" as well as to allow the operators to become so familiar with the day-to-day operations of that machine and its sort plans that it would become second-nature to them. This worked extremely well.

When you've worked on a machine for nine years, you know what kinds of mail cause problems, any little quirks in the sort plans, what needs to be done with special holdouts, etc.

It is, of course, possible to gain that sort of information about multiple machines over a period of time, but there's really no reason to do it. If a person is an expert at a particular job, it is best to leave him on it, rather than trying to make him a utility guy.

It's like a baseball manager telling his star shortstop that today, he wants him to pitch, and tomorrow, he's going to play catcher. This despite the fact that the team has experienced pitchers and catchers, and could best make use of his skills at his best position, shortstop. No, the manager wants everyone to be able to play every position.

The problem with this fallacious idea is that while I can give a yeoman effort on any machine in Automation, I am an expert on the machine that I've run for the past nine years. I could run it without even having to think about it, because I knew at a bone-deep level what needed to be done at all times. I don't have that instinctive knowledge on any other machine, and it means that I have to stop and take time to think about how to do things. During a slow period like the middle of the week in the summer off-season, we can get away with that kind of inefficiency. On a busy Monday or Friday in season, we can't. It may be the difference between making dispatches on time and not making dispatches on time.

Even worse, this violation of the classic rule of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" has adversely affected morale. A lot of people are unhappy with the changes. Morale is in the toilet. People who would go the extra mile, make the extra effort on their regular machines are saying, "Hey, it's not my problem" when they're assigned somewhere else. People who previously strove for excellence are now willing to settle for adequacy.

My own personal observation: Working on a different, unfamiliar machine is like wearing someone else's clothes -- and they don't fit very well.

Thought For the Day

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." -- George Santayana

Regarding my upcoming week at work, all I will tell you is the following joke:

A hillbilly goes to the railroad office to apply for a job. The man interviewing him asks him, "If you see a train coming westbound at fifty miles per hour and another train coming toward it eastbound on the same track at sixty miles per hour, what would you do?"

The hillbilly replies, "I'd go get my brother Clem."

The interviewer asks, "Why?"

The hillbilly tells him, "'Cause he ain't never seen a train wreck like that before."

And that's all that I have to say about that.

Update: Second bonus thought for the day: "Stupid doesn't have a sharp end."

One More Thought On Dinosaur Rockers

I guess the best reply they could make would be:

"Well it's all right, even if you're old and gray,
"Well it's all right, you've still got something to say..."

As the Traveling Wilburys put it in their song, "End of the Line."

Of course, that was in 1988. It hardly seems possible that it could have been that long ago!

Dinosaurs Still Roam the Earth

I was watching the news yesterday and they had a report from the latest, greatest entertainment expo. Among the hottest game titles is a new version of the game "Rock Band," featuring the Beatles. John, Paul, George and Ringo never looked so digitally good, and they had the two surviving Beatles* present to introduce the demo for the game. Isn't it odd that the game will mostly be played by people born ten or twenty years after the Beatles broke up? Yeah, I thought so, too.

But this ties into an article I read the other day about how some of the biggest-grossing touring attractions these days are the superannuated rockers from my youth. They're almost all in their sixties (or even early seventies!) now, with a few of the "kids" in their early fifties. They've all been AARPed (at age 50), the American ones at least. But they show no sign of leaving the stage gracefully any time soon. There's money to be made in those reunion tours! Back in the day, rockers made music so that they could meet chicks; these days, those chicks are young enough to be their granddaughters, and the ewww factor would be very high if they tried to pick them up.

Rock music used to be the music of youthful rebellion, but it's hard to get rebellious youth to identify with you when you're in your sixties. Tempus fugit, baby. Like that great head of hair and the flat belly you had in your twenties, it's gone, baby, gone.

* -- Do I really have to tell you who they are? Yes, Paul and Ringo.

Just A Thought

Isn't it a helluva note when GM stock is worth about as much as a roll of Charmin, and much less useful?

I'm reading Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, and it's amazing how timely the book is, even thought the book was published more than fifty years ago. It's a brick of a book, almost 1200 pages, and I'm making progress at more than 200 pages in.

While the characters and many of their views are somewhat archaic, the theme of the book (what happens when government policies make it not worthwhile to be a productive businessman, and the necessity for them to put social "fairness" ahead of profit) could be ripped right from our daily headlines. Why work harder if the government is going to take a bigger cut of your profits? It's better to go John Galt and do less. Of course, that means that the people you would have employed are out of a job, and the overall economy suffers.

Government policies such as putting additional taxes on the "rich" can actually be counterproductive; in Maryland, for instance, their new "millionaire's tax" resulted in the number of millionaires in Maryland dropping from 3,000 to 2,000 in the past year. Some of them may have just been victims of the economy, but others may have just voted with their feet by moving to another state rather than paying an additional 6.5% to the state of Maryland.

Obama Picks Sotomayor

Well, no real surprise here. President Obama has thrown a sop to his far-left buddies by selecting Sonia Sotomayor, the farthest-left of the various judges whose names had been bruited about as nominees to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter, as his pick. Sotomayor has a reputation as a hard-left ideologue. My guess is that he picked her because Rosa Luxemburg was already dead.

And while Obama said that he didn't have any particular prerequisites in terms of demographic groups, he did indeed pick a woman, (and a minority woman at that) as was predicted. Perhaps he thinks she's the best qualified person for the job, the brightest legal mind in the country; but perhaps she's just another affirmative action pick. When it comes to the Supreme Court, people who are appointed for life, being selected because you're a woman is just as offensive as not being selected because you're a woman.

Can You Dig It?

Who doesn't love a cutesy kid story? Did you see the story about the woman in New Zealand who was on her computer visiting an auction site looking for children's toys? Well, she went to bed after putting in some bids, but didn't log off the site. The next morning, her three-year-old daughter, Pipi, wakes up before her parents and starts playing on the computer. I think you can see where this story is going, right? Well, the mother wakes up and checks her e-mail, finds out that she's won an auction, and gets another e-mail from the seller telling her that he's sure she's going to love the digger. Was this some kind of Tonka construction toy? Well, no; Pipi had bid on a $NZ20,000 (US $12,400) digger! Fortunately, the parents were able to explain the mistake to the web site, and the seller agreed to re-auction the digger. I had the Tonka toys when I was a kid, but I never got a real honest-to-God construction equipment. Probably just as well; it can be difficult to find a place to park them.

Lessons to be learned here: Be sure to log off secure web sites when you are done, and don't let your kids surf the net without supervision!