Recycled Sip

Ten Years Later

2011-09-11T08:31:00.000-04:00

If the anniversary of 9/11 can't get me to write something here, nothing will.

It hardly seems possible that it's been ten years since that awful day, but in some ways it is almost impossible to remember what life was like before the airplanes hit the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon and the field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where the passengers of Flight 93 managed to avert a fourth strike on symbols of American power.

I look back at the path our country has taken, and I see both successes and failures. Success in preventing any further significant attacks on our nation, in deposing the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, in neutralizing some regimes like Iraq and Libya that sought to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Failure to overcome political correctness in identifying the enemy, which is not some nebulous "terror" that struck us for unknown reasons, but Islamic extremists who oppose everything America stands for and who make up a non-negligible portion of the Muslim world. You will not hear the M-word or the I-word today at all. Guaranteed.

And failure to remake the countries that our armed forces quickly defeated militarily, but failed to change politically. While the power of Muslim terrorist groups to attack us has been degraded, their militant Islamic ideology has not changed. The governments of Iraq and Afghanistan are not secular, nor are they ever likely to be; the same thing is likely to happen in Libya as well. It is quite apparent that nation-building in the Middle East is a fool's errand, a waste of vast quantities of American money and American lives. We've been in Afghanistan for almost ten years and it's still one of the world's armpits. Iraq is better, but only marginally so. We would have been better served if we simply crushed our enemies and then left them to rebuild themselves, with the warning that if they ever messed with us again, we'd come back and hit them twice as hard and make the rubble dance. That's the kind of lesson that once applied, seldom needs to be repeated. But such ruthlessness is unfortunately not in the American character.

Osama Bin Dyin'

2011-05-02T08:00:00.004-04:00

I was at work last night when I got the good news that Osama Bin Laden had been killed by Americans in Pakistan. I heard around 11:30, and when I went on break at midnight, I watched the coverage on television.

One thing struck me as odd: They were showing taped footage of a bunch of college-aged people celebrating in front of the White House, waving flags and shouting "U.S.A.! U.S.A.!" Now, that's the appropriate response, of course, but the timing was very, very strange: This group supposedly spontaneously appeared in front of the White House less than twenty minutes after President Obama made the announcement of Bin Laden's death, with flags on poles, ready to parade around in front of the television cameras.

Do you believe that? I don't, and if you do, I'd like to sell you some nice vacation land in the Everglades. I'd bet dollars to donuts that the supposedly spontaneous crowd was bussed in by Democrat political operatives and supplied their flags when they arrived.

People were wondering why Obama took so long to come on television to make the announcement. It was obviously because his crowd hadn't arrived yet. It was a made-for-television political event with all of the spontaneity of a Kim Jong Il rally in North Korea, and frankly, I find it disgusting and cynical that the Democrats would do something like that, although not surprising.

I am, however, glad that Osama Bin Laden has assumed room temperature. I'm also glad that they were smart enough to bury him at sea, so there would be no shrine for Al Qaeda terrorists to visit. It's too bad that they didn't sew him up in pigskins, but you can't have everything.

Surfacing

2011-05-01T08:36:00.002-04:00

Well, well, well. What have we here? A moribund blog. No posts in almost five months. Any faithful readers have probably long since given up on the blogger's return, and who can blame them?

When I first started this blog, I felt a need to write. Over the past couple of years, that need waned, even though there was plenty of material being provided by the current administration. But if the desire to write isn't there, or if it's being channeled elsewhere, then even the most amusing material in the world won't make the writer write.

But enough of my sorry excuses...

I watched some of the British royal wedding the other day, not because I'm a big fan of weddings or British royalty but because I can appreciate a grand spectacle. I watched some of this morning's beatification mass from the Vatican for Pope John Paul II for the same reason, even though I'm not Catholic. Both events also featured people wearing fancy hats, although the "Cthulhu hat" worn by Princess Beatrice (daughter of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson) was just a bit over the top...

What I'm listening to: The Meat Purveyors - Someday Soon Things Will Be Much Worse! This alt-country album from 2006 features an interesting mix of bluegrass and punk sensibilities, and has some interesting cover songs. My current favorite is their cover of Loretta Lynn's "Fist City," which some might say is better than the original.

They are a band from Austin, a notoriously left-leaning area, so it's not surprising that there are a couple of political songs decrying the state of the country at the time and lambasting the President at the time without calling him by name. I'm from the "shut up and sing" school. Don't try to tell me who to vote for and don't get all preachy about the environment, eating meat or the evils of Corporate America. I really hated it when the band Boston did that; their last couple of albums were almost unlistenable compared to their earlier "good time" music that wasn't weighted down with political baggage.

Anyway, most of the stuff the Meat Purveyors has put out falls into the "good time" music category. I especially liked their 2004 album Pain By Numbers, which features songs like "How Can I Be So Thirsty Today?" "It Won't Be Long (and I'll Be Hating You)," "Paint By Numbers," and a great cover of "Daydreams About Night Things."

The Good Life

2010-12-10T15:40:00.002-05:00

"So I don't mind saying
"This is how the good life's supposed to be,
"The good life
"For you, for me..."

-- Cracker, "The Good Life," Gentleman's Blues, 1998

A lot of the news in this country lately has been about how bad things are, about how economic conditions are the worst they've been since the Great Depression, about how many people are struggling to make ends meet. For those who are unemployed or are living from paycheck to paycheck, it probably feels that way. I suppose it's sort of like getting hit by a hurricane: It doesn't have to be a Category 5 to mess things up for a while; even a minimal hurricane is a disaster if it happens to you.

Still, the vast majority of Americans have it pretty good. I was having lunch with Dad today, and we talked about him growing up on a cotton farm in rural west Texas in the 1940s and 1950s. When he was a kid, there was no electricity, no indoor plumbing, no hot and cold running water, no central heating, let alone air conditioning. He was in elementary school when he saw his first flush toilet. His mother cooked on a pot-bellied stove that burned coal. When the family got a bit more affluent in the early '50s and electricity arrived, one luxury was an oscillating fan. And remember, folks, west Texas is as hot as the Devil's tail in the summertime, but the people who lived there then persevered without air conditioning. They were made of sterner stuff then. Even our poor people now live in luxury compared to the vast majority of Americans several decades ago.

We also have access to more information in more ways than we ever have had, and the vast majority of our recent cultural history is available to us at a very reasonable price. It wasn't that long ago that the music you could listen to was limited by what your local radio stations played and what was available for you to buy at your local record store. Today, you can go on Amazon.com or similar online stores and find just about any type of music you want to find, as well as vintage movies and television shows from recent to ancient. You have the ability to find most albums by most artists somewhere on the internet, and to discover "new" artists that sometimes may be decades old. If you haven't heard them before, they're new to you.

Case in point: I'm on a bit of a Gram Parsons kick lately. I'll write some reviews later, but suffice it to say that if you like Americana/alt-Country, then his solo albums as well as the Byrds' Sweetheart of the Rodeo are something you would want in your music collection. I've become more interested in the Americana music over the past several years, exploring my musical roots and discovering great music from decades past that I missed the first time around because it wasn't my style at the time. Times change, styles change, but those old albums are still out there, now digitized instead of on vinyl. And you can get them, often cheaper now than they were when they first came out.

Yes, life is pretty damn good.

Buh-Bye, Nancy!

2010-11-03T07:27:00.002-04:00

We didn't want what she's been cooking anyway!

Credit: Coraline.

Election Day

2010-11-02T09:09:00.003-04:00

Well, here it is, the first Tuesday in November in an even-numbered year again.

Two years ago, things looked pretty gloomy. And considering what's happened since then, there was good reason for gloom. The American people had given the Democrats not only the White House, but also overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress; they were only a turncoat in Pennsylvania and some vote-counting shenanigans in Minnesota away from a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, and they quickly achieved both of those goals. They were in position from that point on to do any damn thing they pleased, and they knew it. And unless they totally screwed things up, they would probably be in the majority for years to come.

Despite the fact that Obama had posed as a "centrist" who would extend his hand across the aisle, both the President and his Congressional leaders quickly proved themselves to be left-wing radicals who wouldn't even consult with the Republicans on any of the legislation they were writing on health care, card check, cap and trade, etc. Instead, the Democrats rammed their health care bill down America's throat, despite the fact that none of them had read the whole thing.

And a funny thing happened: The American people, who didn't want this particular health care bill rammed down their collective throats, didn't want trillion-dollar bailouts for Democrat cronies, didn't want stimulus bills that didn't create jobs, etc., got angry. Big government was getting bigger and bigger, and ever more arrogant, drunk on its own power.

Had Obama, Pelosi and Reid managed to buy off a few Republicans and get so-called bi-partisan legislation passed, then it wouldn't be only the Democrats with their seats on the line today when those policies proved to be hugely expensive abject failures. But in their greed and pride, they felt that they didn't need to cooperate with Republicans at all. They "won," after all, and they wanted to get all of the credit for the "wonderful" things that they had done.

Today, we get to see Hubris meet Nemesis. The only real question is how big a drubbing the Democrats are going to take today.

The Republicans, however, should take little comfort in their likely victory. It's not about them; it's about putting a stop to the Democrats' madness. As P.J. O'Rourke wrote recently, "This is not an election; it's a restraining order." Most of us aren't particularly in love with the Republicans, but we're hating what the Democrats are doing to this country.

The Republicans will be on probation: The American people want a return to fiscal sanity. They want an end to Frankenstein bills that are as thick as a phone book and as unread as a novel from the slush pile, and waste money like water over Niagara Falls. They want no more job-killing stupidity like cap-and-trade and EPA regulations that protect some stupid fish while preventing irrigation to grow crops, like in California's central valley. And they don't want taxes raised on anyone during a recession. If Republicans take over Congress and go back to business as usual, their days will be numbered, and that number will end in 2012.

Aloha!

2010-08-31T09:42:00.003-04:00

So yesterday I was reading online about how CBS is remaking the old TV series Hawaii Five-O for the new TV season, and also that the Spike TV cable channel was running a five-day, 45-hour marathon of episodes from the original series. Well, I flicked it on and watched a couple of episodes from the first season, 1968-69. The first show (which I joined in progress around 12:20) was the fifth episode of the season, "The Samurai," guest starring Ricardo Montalban as a Japanese-American businessman who fakes his own death. Perhaps the most jarring moment from a 2010 perspective is when McGarrett goes to the Navy base to talk with one of the officers there about an old Japanese sub that had been found and recovered by divers off Molokai. The officer was probably in his late 40s, and McGarrett asks him, "You were here at Pearl Harbor during the attack, right?" And it is at that moment that I realized just how old that show was. It aired in October 1968. At that time, not only was LBJ still the President, but Nixon hadn't even been elected yet. The Beatles were still making records. And Americans had yet to walk on the moon.

Another interesting moment came in the next episode, which was actually the second episode of the first season, shown out of sequence. In the first episode I watched, the Japanese guy's daughter was wearing a lime-green dress with white lace. The next show was about a couple who preyed on wealthy widows by having the man romance them, get access to their money, then bump them off. Well, the first wealthy widow at the beginning of the show was wearing the exact same dress, lime-green with white lace. They must have had a small wardrobe budget that first season. Most people probably wouldn't have noticed it in 1968, with the episodes airing some three weeks apart, but when it's only fifteen minutes later, it's easy to say, "Hey, I remember that dress!" But in the original broadcasts, the widow wore it first.

Finally, in watching the promos for the 2010 series reboot, I'm kind of dubious about it. The new McGarrett just doesn't have the same gravitas as Jack Lord. And they Starbucked Kono! (That's when they switch the gender of a secondary recurring character, as they did to Starbuck from the original Battlestar Galactica series to the reboot version a few years back.) Gotta get at least one hot babe into the cast.

Murphy's Law Strikes Again

2010-08-04T09:36:00.003-04:00

I was hanging out with Dad at his hospital room yesterday. Just before lunch time, the nurse came around to remove a couple of the "pacer" wires that were still under his skin from the operation. She hooked him up to a monitor and said that they would check his vitals every fifteen minutes for an hour, then every half hour for another hour, then every hour for the next two hours. After the wires were removed, he had to stay in bed for the next hour.

Well, about half an hour after the wires were removed, Dad started having an irregular heartbeat. The doctor who came by later said that this is fairly common and usually returns to normal on its own. However, while this was going on, the monitor's alarm was beeping incessantly. The nurse turned the volume down, but couldn't turn it off completely. Although Dad is somewhat hard of hearing, he had no trouble hearing the beeping and it was driving him bonkers. When his friend Dick came by to visit a little later, I was sent out to find Dad some earplugs to block out the beeping.

I went to the nearby Walgreen's drug store and found several different types to choose from. I got some foam earplugs that looked like they would do the trick. I also saw some cans of store-brand mixed nuts, on sale 2/$9. "Well, why not?" I thought. Impulse buy. And so, with purchases in hand, I returned to the hospital, only to find that the earplugs were too small and didn't solve the problem. So, back out I went to try again.

This time, I decided to try the CVS drug store instead. I found some earplugs that looked like the biggest ones available. I also picked up a bottle of Fuse Banana Colada drink (another impulse purchase). I managed not to buy the Godiva chocolates, though.

Back to the hospital! In the hallway, the nurse told me, "He's back in rhythm." And sure enough, the beeping had stopped. I muttered a choice oath under my breath and went down to hall to Dad's room.

I gave him the new earplugs anyway, just in case the beeping started back up again. And then I sat down to drink my Banana Colada and snack on cashews, almonds and pecans. A word of advice: You are better off sticking to name brands when buying nuts. The house brand nuts were covered with big chunks of sugar and salt. Let me just give a shout out to Planter's, since their quality is usually pretty high.

Off Kilter

2010-08-02T09:18:00.003-04:00

There are times when one's existence is thrown off balance, when the normal routine is broken, when the regular schedule is altered not by choice but by necessity. When it happens, the only option is to go with the flow, which is what I've been doing for the past several days.

Dad had valve repair surgery on his heart last Tuesday and has been recovering in the hospital since then. His progress hasn't been quite as fast as we hoped that it would be. Originally, we hoped he would be able to go home from the hospital early in the weekend, but due to some minor complications, that hasn't happened. I took vacation time this week so that I'd be able to help him out once he got out of the hospital. Hopefully that will be in the next couple of days.

I spent several hours at the hospital over each of the past few days, mostly in the late afternoon and evening. Those are ungodly hours for me, since I'm normally asleep at that time of day. I did get the chance to see some nice sunsets from Dad's room. (I see the sunrise almost every morning, but rarely see a sunset.) Last night's was especially dramatic, and I watched as the western clouds turned blood-red. Then the sky began to crackle with lightning. My original plan was to stay until around 11 p.m. when Dad was asleep. Then, shortly before 11:00, it began pouring down rain. My umbrella was in my car. I went back to reading my book and waited until the rain had ceased around midnight. When I left, it was cooler outside than I remember it being in weeks. The rain had dropped the temperature all the way down to 73 degrees, according to my car's thermometer. In a steamy Florida summer, that's what passes for refreshingly cool.

"Of Course You Realize, This Means War!"

2010-07-19T08:46:00.005-04:00

'Nuff said.

Thoughts on the "Barefoot Bandit"

2010-07-13T07:57:00.002-04:00

Over the weekend, police in the Bahamas arrested fugitive American teen Colton Harris-Moore, also known by the pictureseque moniker "the Barefoot Bandit." 19-year-old Harris-Moore had been on the lam for two years, stealing cars, boats and planes in his elusive cross-country flight from the law. His mother observed that he was a genius-level intellect, supposedly "one point less than Einstein," she said. He managed to elude the cops for a couple of years, but I'd have to say that going to the Bahamas was not the act of a genius.

Why? Well, a criminal on the lam wants to try to blend in as well as he can, to "swim in the sea of the people." A 6'5" white teen is likely to stand out just about anywhere he goes, but especially in the Bahamas, where 85% of the population is black, according to the CIA World Factbook. And it's always a bad idea to flee to an island, where the authorities can patrol off shore and close down airfields to cut off escape options.

Harris-Moore's other mistake was in continuing his criminal career past the age of 18. Prior to that, non-violent offenders usually have their records expunged once they reach adulthood. It's like baseball's Grapefruit and Cactus League exhibition games: They don't really count for anything in the standings. Once the regular season starts, though, everything counts. And so it is for an 18-year-old criminal. No more juvenile courts, no more halfway houses, no more slaps on the wrist. The wisest course for a 17-year-old with larceny in his heart is to "go straight" -- and enter politics if he still feels those larcenous impulses after age 18. John Dillinger was a piker compared to the average congressman.

It Suddenly All Makes Sense

2010-07-12T07:33:00.005-04:00

Instapundit pointed me to this post at The Onion (yes, I know it is a satire site): Obama's Weekly Video Addresses Becoming Increasingly Avant-Garde

It's good for a chuckle and the bizarre video clip is pretty good, too. But it also made me think about President Obama and how he has been doing a lot of things that don't make sense from a political standpoint, like having his Democrats in Congress ram through legislation that the majority of Americans oppose, his worse-than-Katrina response to the oil catastrophe in the Gulf, his administration's willingness to overlook illegal racist behavior when perpetrated by non-whites (see New Black Panther Party voter intimidation in Philadelphia on Election Day 2008, for instance) while focusing like a laser on Arizona's immigration law, bowing to foreign leaders, offending traditional allies like Great Britain and Israel, etc.

But suppose for a moment that Barack Obama is really a performance artist, someone like the late Andy Kaufman, or Sascha Baron Cohen playing one of his characters like "Borat" or "Bruno." He's been building up this "Barack Obama" character for years, since he was in college. The reason his transcripts were never allowed to be scrutinized is that they would have shown that he was studying acting and associated skills. He's taken on this "Barack Obama" character like Sascha Baron Cohen did Borat when he was publicizing his film, and he never comes out of character. He plays it straight, just exactly as he would if he were a real politician, but his real motivation has been to see just exactly how many people he can fool and how many he can offend by screwing things up, again, just like a Sascha Baron Cohen character. He's someone who literally took in anti-Americanism with his mother's milk (she was an expatriate who didn't like America or its people). He doesn't like capitalism, or business (large or small), or the bourgeois people of America (especially those living in states that didn't vote for him). He got 53% of Americans to vote for him in November 2008, but in the ensuing year and a half, he's been doing all kinds of things to piss off more and more people, and he's done it deliberately. As Alfred the butler told Batman in The Dark Knight, "Some people just want to watch the world burn."

Because, you see, a performance artist doesn't care about whether he's liked or not. It's all about the performance. Kaufman and Cohen had characters that many people despised, but they were successful for all that. And this "Barack Obama" character seems to be the most successful of them all. He's partying all the time, out on the golf links, rubbing shoulders with the glitterati, vacationing hither and yon (in Maine this week, his third vacation since the oil disaster began on April 20th). He's Living The Life. It's good to be the President. And he knows that no matter how bad things get in the country, when he leaves office, he'll do so with a big pension and a Secret Service detail. Even screwups like Jimmy Carter get that.

Sure, it sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory. But ask yourself: If Barack Obama really was a performance artist playing a role, deliberately trying to destroy the country as part of the greatest prank of all time, what exactly would he be doing differently from what he's done over the past eighteen months?

Happy 4th of July!

2010-07-04T11:28:00.002-04:00

Here's wishing you a fine Independence Day, no matter where you are. It's a great day to celebrate our good fortune to be living in America. (If you don't, that's okay; you're welcome to celebrate your own national traditions as well.) If you're not feeling fortunate, well, November's coming. Fortune favors the bold -- especially at the ballot box. If you don't like the direct this country has taken recently, well, vote the rascals out! They may think that they are undefeatable like King George III probably did, but they will be proven to be just as wrong.

I hope that you are having better weather than we're getting in Florida this weekend. It's been overcast and rainy the last couple of days, and today doesn't promise to be much better. It could be a washout for the local fireworks displays. Some things may happen "rain or shine," but fireworks aren't among them.

Qualified?

2010-06-29T08:17:00.002-04:00

The Senate began confirmation hearings yesterday for Elena Kagan, who was nominated by President Obama to fill the upcoming vacancy on the Supreme Court. One Republican Senator noted that she may be the least-qualified candidate for the Supreme Court in half a century. That might be a bit harsh, but there are reasons to wonder how well-qualified for the job she is, because she has no judicial experience. That's not a pre-requisite for becoming a Justice, but it is valuable experience. Making someone a Justice who has never been a judge is similar to calling a rookie ballplayer up to the big leagues without any minor league experience. The difference is that if the rookie flops, he can be sent back to the minors for more seasoning. A Supreme Court Justice, however, is appointed for life. If she flops, we're stuck with her until she either retires or dies.

Ms. Kagan has spent most of her career either in academia or working as a Democrat party political operative during the Clinton administration. She has a little experience as a lawyer in private practice, but that's a very different role than being a judge. A lawyer advocates for her client; she has a definite point of view. A judge, however, is supposed to be impartial, seeking only to make sure that the law is applied fairly to all. Ms. Kagan has not shown that ability. A Supreme Court Justice not only is part of the most important appellate court in the land, but also must rule on the constitutionality of laws written at the federal, state and local levels. It's a task which should be given to the ablest legal minds in the nation, not just those who happen to meet certain group quotas for identity politics.

From the News: Richard and Cynthia Are Actually Boris and Natasha

2010-06-29T07:43:00.005-04:00

Scenario: You're an ordinary American kid. You live with your parents and your sister in a New Jersey suburb, and attend the local elementary school. Your family is curiously nuclear: No grandparents, no aunts or uncles, no cousins. Just your parents, your sister and you, seemingly a typical suburban family. And then, one day, it all falls apart: The FBI raids your house, arrests your parents and drags them out in handcuffs. You and your sister are driven away by a family friend. And you learn that your parents actually aren't Americans at all; they are "illegals," deep cover Russian intelligence agents living in the country under false identities and spying on America. Your entire life has been a shining lie. And who knows what is going to happen to you?

That is pretty much non-fiction, by the way. It describes what happened to the daughters of a couple in Montclair, New Jersey, who claimed to be "Richard and Cynthia Murphy." According to the article I read in the USA Today, the kids probably had no idea about their parents' true identities. And ironically enough, if they were born here, then they're just as much American citizens as any Mexican anchor baby.

I don't feel any sympathy for the spies, but I do feel sorry for the kids. How horrible would it be to discover that everything you thought you knew about your family and yourself was a lie? It's like something out of Alfred Hitchcock or The Twilight Zone.

This Byrd Has Flown

2010-06-28T07:32:00.004-04:00

In the news, Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia has died at age 92. He had been in Congress since 1952, and was the longest-serving Senator in American history. He was perhaps best known for bringing home the pork to West Virginia, no doubt a major reason for his continuing to be re-elected.

It will be interesting to see who replaces him in the Senate. I'm sure that President Obama and his cronies are worried that the "Byrd seat" might go the same way as the "Kennedy seat" in Massachusetts, also held by a superannuated Democrat politician who died in office; shockingly, a Republican was elected in a statewide race in the deep-blue Bay State. That scenario is not beyond the realm of possibility, given the current unpopularity of Obama and congressional Democrats.

And let me say, right here and now, that this is a good example of the need for term limits in both the Senate and the House, as well as the Supreme Court. We have term limits for presidents, after all. We figure that eight years is enough, and after that amount of time, we're usually tired of them anyway.

Unfortunately, the ones who would need to write the legislation to limit the number of terms that members of Congress can serve are also the ones who would be affected by it. Power and the perks that come along with it are sweet. Senators and Congressmen tell themselves that they are doing important things, and should be allowed to stay on as long as they can persuade their constituents to keep re-electing them. They feel that they are irreplaceable. Well, there are no irreplaceable people in this country. Not them, not me, not you, and certainly not members of our government. When the time comes for you to retire, your company will continue on just fine without you. When Presidents, members of Congress and Supreme Court Justices retire or die in office, the country also goes on just fine without them as well.

And if we can't term limit people like Sen. Byrd, Sen. Kennedy or Chief Justice Rehnquist, well, the Grim Reaper can -- and will.

The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good

2010-06-27T20:52:00.002-04:00

Most infuriating thing I've read today: Avertible Catastrophe

In sharp contrast to Dutch preparedness before the fact and the Dutch instinct
to dive into action once an emergency becomes apparent, witness the American
reaction to the Dutch offer of help. The U.S. government responded with "Thanks
but no thanks," remarked Visser, despite BP's desire to bring in the Dutch
equipment and despite the no-lose nature of the Dutch offer --the Dutch
government offered the use of its equipment at no charge. Even after the U.S.
refused, the Dutch kept their vessels on standby, hoping the Americans would
come round. By May 5, the U.S. had not come round. To the contrary, the U.S. had
also turned down offers of help from 12 other governments, most of them with
superior expertise and equipment --unlike the U.S., Europe has robust fleets of
Oil Spill Response Vessels that sail circles around their make-shift U.S.
counterparts.

Why does neither the U.S. government nor U.S. energy
companies have on hand the cleanup technology available in Europe? Ironically,
the superior European technology runs afoul of U.S. environmental rules. The
voracious Dutch vessels, for example, continuously suck up vast quantities of
oily water, extract most of the oil and then spit overboard vast quantities of
nearly oil-free water. Nearly oil-free isn't good enough for the U.S.
regulators, who have a standard of 15 parts per million -- if water isn't at
least 99.9985% pure, it may not be returned to the Gulf of Mexico.

When ships in U.S. waters take in oil-contaminated water, they
are forced to store it. As U.S. Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, the official in
charge of the clean-up operation, explained in a press briefing on June 11, "We
have skimmed, to date, about 18 million gallons of oily water--the oil has to be
decanted from that [and] our yield is usually somewhere around 10% or 15% on
that." In other words, U.S. ships have mostly been removing water from the Gulf,
requiring them to make up to 10 times as many trips to storage facilities where
they off-load their oil-water mixture, an approach Koops calls "crazy."

The Americans, overwhelmed by the catastrophic consequences of the BP
spill, finally relented and took the Dutch up on their offer -- but only partly.
Because the U.S. didn't want Dutch ships working the Gulf, the U.S. airlifted
the Dutch equipment to the Gulf and then retrofitted it to U.S. vessels. And
rather than have experienced Dutch crews immediately operate the oil-skimming
equipment, to appease labour unions the U.S. postponed the clean-up operation to
allow U.S. crews to be trained.

A catastrophe that could have been averted is now playing out. With oil increasingly reaching the Gulf coast, the emergency construction of sand berns to minimize the damage is imperative. Again, the U.S. government priority is on U.S. jobs, with the Dutch asked to train American workers rather than to build the berns. According to Floris Van Hovell, a spokesman for the Dutch embassy in Washington, Dutch dredging ships could complete the berms in Louisiana twice as fast as the U.S. companies awarded the work. "Given the fact that there is so much oil on a daily basis coming in, you do not have that much time to protect the marshlands," he says,
perplexed that the U.S. government could be so focussed on side issues with the
entire Gulf Coast hanging in the balance.

Unbelievable. And that's why the Obama administration is being faced with their very own Katrina, or perhaps more accurately, their very own Iranian hostage crisis.

Return to Blogging

2010-06-26T13:54:00.002-04:00

Okay, I've been slacking long enough. It's time to return to blogging more regularly than I have this year. I know that are still some people who check in here every so often and want to know, "When is he going to write something new?" And, hopefully, interesting?

Well, dear readers, your request has been answered. Today, let me tell you the most laugh-out-loud funny thing I read last week. I'm sure you all heard about Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-born terrorist who attempted to blow up an SUV in Times Square, being in court in New York last week. He defiantly pleaded guilty, claiming that he was a "Muslim soldier." The part that made me laugh out loud, though, was when I read the name of the judge: Miriam Cedarbaum. A Jewish woman! How do you like them apples, Faisal? I'm sure that it was just random chance that assigned the case to her.

A close second for the funniest thing of the week was Peggy West, the dimbulb Democrat county supervisor in Milwaukee who was opining on the Arizona immigration laws. She said that she could understand the need for something like that if Arizona was a border state, like Texas. Remedial geography classes for you, sweetheart.

We won't even go into the allegations against "crazed sex poodle" Al Gore by the masseuse in Portland, Oregon. Although I found the part where he was singing along, karaoke-style, to Pink's anti-Bush song to be a creepy bit of verisimilitude. If she's not telling the truth, she has a vivid imagination!

Milestones

2010-04-22T08:29:00.002-04:00

"Fifty is the new forty" is my new mantra. Yes, today is the big 5-0. Aloha! Although technically I'm just another day older than I was yesterday, turning fifty is a major milestone. When you turn fifty, you can no longer kid yourself about still being somewhat young. You can't even really say that you're middle-aged, unless you really think you're going to live to be 100. That's not impossible, but it's actuarially unlikely. Nope, fifty is the beginning of the long slide into geezerdom.

All is not entropy and decrepitude, however. Yesterday afternoon, I was hanging out with my Dad and my younger brother, Kurt, who flew in from Kansas City yesterday specifically to help me celebrate my birthday. We were waiting for news from my other brother, Karl, in New York, who was at the hospital's maternity ward with his wife, awaiting the arrival of their first child. Around 4:30 in the afternoon, we got a call from Karl, letting us know that little Maya had arrived. An everyday miracle, of course, but a miracle nevertheless. We were all smiles at Dad's place.

Maya has an interesting heritage: Her mother, Monika, is a first-generation American who immigrated with her parents and sister from Poland after the Cold War ended. Our family has been in the U.S. going back to colonial times, with the most recent known immigrants being one set of maternal great-great-great-grandparents who came from England and Scotland respectively before the Civil War. Maya is the first member of our family to be born on the East Coast in at least two hundred years.

Karl sent us a text message with a baby picture around 6 p.m. Technology is a wonderful thing.

I Told You So

2010-03-22T10:54:00.003-04:00

For those who voted for Barack Obama in 2008, thinking that he'd be a centrist and try to govern from the center in a bi-partisan fashion: Fooled you, didn't he?

He didn't fool me. I told you the day after the election that America had just given the keys to the liquor cabinet and the Ferrari to their teenager. Well, I forgot to mention that you gave him the family credit card as well. So now the liquor cabinet is empty, the car is wrecked in a ditch somewhere with a bunch of empty booze bottles in the back floorboard, and your credit card bill just came in. Could you imagine the kid spending THAT MUCH in 14 months? And now he and his no-good friends have just stuck their tongues out at you and said that they're passing their health care insurance reform scheme whether you like it or not. And for the majority of Americans, it was "not."

I watched much of yesterday's circus in Congress and found myself nauseated. Indeed, I found myself yelling at the television whenever that lying crone Pelosi came on. (You don't even want to know what I called her.) And now, this unconstitutional travesty has been forced on the American people by the barest majority of Democrats in the House, with not a single Republican voting for it. This is unprecedented in American history. Never before has such significant social legislation been passed without a single vote from the minority party. There are a lot of congresscritters who should be festooning lampposts. Unfortunately, the best that we can do is to try to make sure that they are voted out of office in November.

"Hope and Change," huh? Here's your "Change":

2004: "America, Fuck Yeah!"

2010: "America, Oh Fuck!"

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

A Safety Tip

2010-03-03T10:16:00.003-05:00

Don't urinate on downed power lines.

You might think that one's pretty obvious, but some poor schlub up in Washington state managed to electrocute himself by doing exactly that. It seems that Roy Messenger wasn't seriously hurt when his car collided with a power pole and knocked it down, but his car was stuck in the ditch. He called a relative to come and pull his car out, but when the family members arrived, he was dead. It seems that he felt the call of nature and answered it in the ditch -- and didn't see the downed live power line. Oops. The medical examiner said that the burn marks showed how the electricity traveled up the stream and zapped him. Can you say "Darwin Award"?

So, rule of thumb: If you should accidentally knock down a power pole, be very, very careful about what you do with your bodily fluids. Don't even spit!

A Harbinger of Spring

2010-03-03T09:31:00.004-05:00

I watched the first spring training baseball game on the Major League Baseball Network yesterday, between the Atlanta Braves and the New York Mets. It was a raw, windy day in Port St. Lucie, on the east coast of Florida. A cold front had just come through, dumping rain across the entire Sunshine State, and the Mets decided not to send their regulars out to play on the slick grass. They still won the game, 4-2. It didn't mean anything, of course, since it was just an exhibition game, but it was an opportunity to see a couple of the Braves' top young players in pitcher Tommy Hanson and rookie outfielder Jason Heyward. If you're a baseball fan, you'll be hearing those names a lot in coming years.

More importantly, especially for those who live Up North, the beginning of spring training baseball means that winter is probably on its last legs. And given the historic severity of this winter, its demise will no doubt be welcome from sea to shining sea. Baseball means that there's a warm, sunny light at the end of the tunnel.

Stormy Weather

2010-03-02T08:02:00.001-05:00

Yesterday, I was reading in the news about the winter storm in Europe that had killed over 50 people in France and had brought flooding and hurricane-force winds to parts of the continent. The storm was named "Xynthia," which I thought was kind of strange. "They're already on their X storm?" I wondered.

Well, I was curious, so I did a little research to find out how they name their storms in Europe. It turns out that in Europe, every high and low pressure system gets a name. It's not like the names given to tropical storms, where they have to reach a sustained wind speed of at least 39 miles per hour before they get a name. This year, the low pressure systems are being given women's names and the high pressure systems are being given men's names. This alternates from year to year.

Not just that, but the Free University in Berlin, which monitors and names the systems, sells the naming rights to them at the beginning of the year through its "adopt-a-vortex" program. They go through the alphabet about three or four times per year. I'm not sure how much it costs to buy your own storm. Here is the list for the 2010 low pressure systems. Note that names can be reused multiple times in the same year, unless they are attached to a storm that is so destructive that the name is retired, as they do with hurricane names on occasion.

If you look at it, you'll notice that the name list has a definite Teutonic flavor. (The men's list is heavy on Gerhards and Karlheinzes as well.) Several women purchased the naming rights and named the storms after themselves. I'm guessing the men who bought the names on this list were doing it for their wives or girlfriends. That begs the question: Is it a compliment to name something windy and potentially lethal after your wife/girlfriend, or is it an insult? It could be taken either way. One wonders what Xynthia's feelings are about having her name attached to such a destructive event. It's not her fault, of course. Blame it on Wolfgang.

In Like A Lion

2010-03-01T20:54:00.002-05:00

It was 36 degrees outside when I got home from work this morning. 'Nuff said. I'm really looking forward to the lamb-weather due to arrive sometime later this month.

I was looking at my friend Mary's blog this morning. She lives in northern New Jersey, and had several pictures of the increasing accumulation of snow in her yard over the past few days. By the end, there was three feet of snow in her yard. One of the earlier pictures in the series showed snow falling on the skeletal trees outside her window. My comment was that snow is very pretty when it's outside someone else's window.

Chilling Out

2010-02-28T12:40:00.002-05:00

It's been several weeks since I posted anything. I blame the winter blahs, which have lasted pretty much the whole month of February. This has been the worst winter I can remember since I moved to Florida 21 years ago. Of course it's been worse in about every other state than Hawaii, so I guess I can't complain too loudly. We aren't the ones coping with record snowfalls and downed power lines. Still, compared to the mild winters we've had in the past, this one stands out.

The good news is that we may soon be returning to a warmer climate, if the increase in sunspot activity is any indicator. It seems that about the beginning of this year, the sun finally decided to end its long quiet period. Last year, there was no sunspot activity at all on 260 days (71%), according to SpaceWeather.com. However, since the beginning of this year, there have only been 2 days with no sunspot activity (3%). The solar minimum may be over. Since long periods of time with no sunspot activity correlate with colder weather on Earth, the increase in sunspot activity may herald some climatic warming. The length of the solar minimum that appears to be ending was starting to become a little disturbing. The sun is a variable star, after all, and from humankind's perspective, the less variability the better. We don't want another Little Ice Age, although chances are when the next one comes, we won't have much choice in the matter.

One Year Later...

2010-01-20T08:35:00.003-05:00

How things have changed! Well, that's what President Obama promised us, wasn't it?

If someone had told you a year ago that Teddy Kennedy would die within the year, and that a Republican would be elected to fill his seat, what would you have said? After you got up off the floor where you'd been rolling around laughing, of course. The Republicans were supposed to be dead, a tainted brand, doomed to wander in the political wilderness for a generation. And in one short year, Barack Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and their cronies have completely turned that around. One of the bluest states in the country, one that did not have a single Republican in its entire congressional delegation, just elected Scott Brown, a Republican, to fill a Senate seat that had been held by a Kennedy or one of their family retainers since 1953. To say that this is shocking is an understatement.

I turned on MSDNC... Oops, MSNBC, last night to see how people like Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow were holding up. You never saw such long faces! I have to admit feeling a certain amount of schadenfreude.

So, anyway, it's morning in America again. Oh, what a beautiful morning, oh, what a beautiful day!

Help For Haiti

2010-01-15T09:43:00.005-05:00

If you've seen those gut-wrenching images coming from earthquake-ravaged Port-au-Prince, Haiti, then you probably want to do something to help those poor people, if you haven't already. Last night, I read a blog post from Tony Woodlief's Sand in the Gears blog (via Instapundit) who told the story of the BRESMA orphanage in Port-au-Prince. There are about 150 orphans there, desperately in need of supplies. The orphanage is affiliated with Kentucky Adoption Services. There's a link on the blog post above if you feel moved to make a contribution by PayPal or credit card. You can't save all of Haiti, but you can help save those children. And of course, there are numerous other worthy charities trying to help the suffering people of Haiti. Do what you can.

Here is another blog which has information about the orphanage and the two young women who were running it and are trying to get the children to safety in the U.S.

Cold Enough For Ya?

2010-01-06T07:54:00.002-05:00

If it's freezing here in southwest Florida, which it is, then you, dear reader, are probably even colder. It was 29 degrees in my driveway this morning when I got home from work. My car windows were covered in frost this morning, and since I don't own an ice scraper, I had to turn the heater all the way up and blow it full blast on the windshield to melt the ice. It only took a few minutes.

To put this into focus, we are looking at the possibility of tying or breaking some long-standing records. We set a record low in Fort Myers this morning at 35 degrees, and it's colder east of I-75 where I live.

Even more interesting, I saw on the local news yesterday that record for the longest number of days where the high temperature doesn't reach 70 degrees as 12 days. I think it happened twice, once in the 1910s and once in the 1930s. They showed a graphic of the longest stretches of nine days or longer, and there were only about eight or nine of them since the beginning of the 20th Century, with the most recent occurrences being three times in the 1970s.

Well, the high last Friday was 77 degrees. Since then, over the past four days, the highs haven't gotten out of the 60s, and the forecast for the next week, through next Tuesday, is for the temperatures to stay below 70. That would be 11 days, which is highly unusual. We normally get one or two blasts of cold air every winter that drop the temperatures down around freezing, but usually, it warms up in a couple of days or so. This time, it's been one cold front after another and it isn't warming up.

I know that most of you would take high temperatures in the 50s and 60s and lows around freezing with gratitude, but you probably don't live in a place with palm trees and other subtropical vegetation. We aren't used to this kind of extended cold, and to get an idea of how the weather feels to us, subtract 40 degrees or so.

I'm ready for spring now, please.

First Observation on 2010

2010-01-04T07:54:00.002-05:00

It's cold. Yesterday's high of 52 degrees was 23 degrees below the normal average high for the date. It's in the 30s this morning, and will be down around freezing tomorrow morning. It's supposed to be colder than normal for at least the next week. Global warming, my foot. For all you people Up North who were expecting to have palm trees and hibiscus bushes in the near future, guess again. I'm not saying that we're facing the onset of an ice age, but then again, I can't say we aren't.

I hate winter.

Tiger By the Tail

2009-12-09T12:57:00.003-05:00

So the real question as the women continue to flood out of the woodwork is, "How the hell did Tiger Woods still have the time and energy to play golf at all, much less play it so well?" The last I saw, the number of mistresses had risen to double-digit doxies. His stamina is impressive, even if his judgment isn't.

I read an amusing article on the Us magazine web site, when the number of mistresses was still at nine. This made for some hilarious double entendres in the comments, like: "That's a short course; everyone knows Tiger wouldn't stop after nine holes" and "First he played the front nine, then he played the back nine." And as some commentators on Fox News noted last night, this is a stunningly quick reversal of fortune for any celebrity, to go from respected athlete and pitchman to punchline and laughingstock in a matter of days.

Tiger Woods is not the first man to run into this kind of trouble, nor will he be the last. When you're rich and famous, you have to beat the women back with a stick, if you really want to. Tiger obviously didn't want to, and apparently he didn't have that club in his bag even if he had.

In other Tiger news, Gatorade is dropping their Tiger Woods-linked drink, "Tiger Focus," although they made the decision before Tiger's travails came to light. "Focus"? Was there supposed to be one U in that name or two?

Meanwhile, Tiger can just sing along with Buck Owens.

Climategate Stuff

2009-12-04T08:21:00.004-05:00

On Thanksgiving, I sent a link to a hilarious video on YouTube called "Hide The Decline" by Minnesotans for Global Warming to most of the people on my mailing lists. If you haven't yet seen it, here it is:

If for some reason you haven't yet heard about the Climategate scandal (or Climaquiddick, as others are calling it, since the drive-by media seem to be doing their best to ignore it) and don't get the "hide the decline" reference, just google it. Suffice it to say, the global warming people have been fudging the numbers, conspiring to keep opposing views on AGW from being published, their computer code that generated the scary global warming models is a bug-ridden piece of junk, and they've been deleting inconvenient data and dodging Freedom Of Information requests on both sides of the Atlantic. Other than all of that, they're all strictly on the up-and-up. Like Bernie Madoff or Enron were.

Yeah, they want to wreck our economy and impoverish us for something that "science" cannot prove is actually a problem!

Update from yesterday's Washington Times:

Gore cancels climate conference event

Former Vice President Al Gore on Thursday abruptly canceled a Dec. 16 personal appearance that was to be staged during the United Nations' Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, which begins next week.

As described in The Washington Times' Inside the Beltway column Tuesday, the multimedia public event to promote Mr. Gore's new book, "Our Choice," included $1,209 VIP tickets that granted the holder a photo opportunity with Mr. Gore and a "light snack."

Berlingkse Media, a Danish group coordinating ticket sales and publicity for the event, said that "great annoyance" was a factor in the cancellation, along with unforeseen changes in Mr. Gore's program for the climate summit. The decision affected 3,000 ticket holders.

"We have had a clear-cut agreement, and it is unusual with great disappointment that we have to announce that Al Gore cancels. We had a huge expectation for the event. . . . We do not yet know the detailed reasons for the cancellation," said Lisbeth Knudsen, CEO of Berlingske Media, in a statement posted by the company.

The ClimateDepot,com, an online news aggregator that tracks global-warming news reports, referred to the situation as "Nopenhagen," and evidence that popular momentum for the Copenhagen conference "is fading."

Hmmm... I wonder if a dish of crow qualifies as a "light snack."

Mr. Gore may be greedy, vain, venal and hypocritical, but he's not a fool. I'm sure he understood the full impact of the released e-mails and data from the University of East Anglia, unlike President Obama and his "science" czar Carol Browner who are both "full speed ahead" with fighting climate change, never mind that the scientific underpinnings have been yanked away like Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown. Nope, this time they're gonna kick that climate change football and... "AAIIIEEEE!!!" THUMP! She did it again.

In the comments, one person noted that Gore canceling was like the Pope opting out of Christmas mass. Copenhagen was supposed to be Gore's victory lap, his moment to bask in the warm glow of his acolytes' adoration. And now... He's going to be as far away from Denmark as he can get, no doubt. I saw a clip last night of Jon Stewart mocking Gore and talking about the irony of him being undone by the Internet, which Gore claimed to have invented. When you've lost Jon Stewart... It's over. As one wag put it, climate change has assumed room temperature.

December 1st?

2009-12-01T21:05:00.003-05:00

Whoa! How did that happen? I've been remiss in my blogging for the past few weeks. I blame Dragon Age: Origins, a very cool game that I got about three weeks ago that has been consuming most of my free time. Very addictive. But it has kept me from writing as much as I normally might have, especially about things like Climategate, which I hope that you have heard about. If not, I'll rectify that!

I will try to be a bit more accessible this month. More in the morning...

Twenty Years Ago Today

2009-11-09T14:23:00.002-05:00

...The Berlin Wall came down. It hardly seems possible that it has been twenty years since that momentous event. For me, as a former resident of West Berlin for almost four years, it was a joyous occasion.

West Berlin was a huge city, and there were large areas of it where the Wall was not even visible. Still, it was always a looming presence. We knew that the Wall was there, and we knew that the people on the other side of it were not free. They were held on the other side by guards with machine guns and dogs, by barbed wire and concertina wire and tank traps and mines.

And then, almost miraculously, the Berlin Wall fell, the guards and their dogs and their guns disappeared, the wire was taken down, the mines disarmed. The Iron Curtain vanished in a cloud of rust. The people in the East, who had not known freedom in half a century, suddenly emerged to blink and bask in its bright light. It was a beautiful thing to see.

Today, even twenty years later, watching the dominoes symbolizing the Wall toppling, I can't help but smile.

Why I Like George W. Bush

2009-11-07T15:59:00.002-05:00

Former President George W. Bush and his wife, Laura, secretly visited the hospital at Fort Hood, Texas, last night to comfort the wounded from the cowardly terrorist attack and their families, according to Fox News. They asked the base commander that there be no press coverage of their visit.

To me, this was a very classy act. They were there to do what they could to console the victims. They weren't there for a photo op to make themselves look good.

The Bushes have a ranch about thirty miles from Fort Hood, so it was a little easier for them to get there than for President Obama, who will be there Tuesday for the memorial service. Still, this wasn't something that they were duty-bound to do. They did it because they care about the members of our armed forces, just as they did when President Bush was in office. This is why he was so popular with most service members then, and I dare say that he remains so now. The Bushes are good people, who put up with a lot of calumny about them for eight years. And although I didn't agree with everything he did, I miss him.

A Muslim? I'm Shocked, Shocked!

2009-11-06T06:02:00.004-05:00

Admit it: The first thing you thought to yourself when you heard about the atrocity at Fort Hood yesterday was, "Is it a Muslim terrorist attack?" The FBI quickly pooh-poohed that notion, saying, "No, no terrorism here, move along." But on Fox News, Shepard Smith was coy, refusing to name the murderer even after all of the other networks and the AP had already released the name. They got it wrong, of course; they named him as Major Malik Nadal Hasan, said that he had been killed, and rumored him as a convert to Islam. His actual name was Major Nidal Malik Hasan, he's a native-born American Muslim of Palestinian descent, an Army-educated psychiatrist and it turns out that he is still very much alive. As in most chaotic breaking news situations, the initial reporting was inaccurate.

Most of the news outlets are puzzled about why he might have committed such a heinous act, shooting 43 people and killing 13 of them (so far). All you need to do is look at the pictures of him in a local 7-11 yesterday morning and all is made clear. He looks like he just walked in from Peshawar. That is not the normal garb for an American military man. It IS the normal garb for a devout Muslim. Somebody dressed like that very well might have no problem murdering soldiers that he viewed as oppressing his co-religionists in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Of course, most of the media doesn't want to use that particular M-word, because it is politically incorrect to do so. The message they've been giving us since 9-11 is that Muslims are no different then we are and that it's just a coincidence that every time you turn around and hear about another terrorist plot being foiled or some immigrant doing an "honor killing" on his daughter or wife for becoming "too Westernized," it's a devout Muslim who is involved.

It's time to say something that is politically incorrect but true: If immigrants from ANY society do not accept the basic tenets of our society, that is, individual liberty and religious freedom, then THEY DO NOT BELONG HERE! And from everything we've seen in the news, both from here and in the U.K., France, Germany and other places in Europe, devout Islam is incompatible with Western civilization.

The Europeans are in a lot more trouble than we are, because they've allowed a lot more immigration from Muslim countries (often in their former empires) than we have. Now, many of those Muslims are law-abiding citizens, but it's apparent that the ones who are not are very, very dangerous people. The Europeans fought Crusades for several hundred years to keep the Muslims from conquering Europe. Now, in the space of the past few decades, those same Muslims are well on the way to accomplishing that ancient goal by peaceful immigration.

More importantly, any Muslim in our military or in any position where he can harm our society has to be considered suspect at this point. It's like having a python for a pet: 99% of pythons are perfectly good pets, if you like that sort of animal, but the 1% of the time when the python gets loose and strangles the baby that makes you think that you'd be better off if nobody kept pythons as pets and you just left the pythons back wherever it was that they came from. Our country could get along just fine without pet pythons or Muslim immigrants equally well.

An Interesting Election Day

2009-11-04T10:50:00.005-05:00

Especially considering that there weren't any races locally affecting me. Republican-endorsed Conservative Doug Hoffman lost to Democrat Bill Owens in NY-23, by a margin of a few thousand votes, fewer than were cast for Dede Scozzafava, who was still on the ballot, although I'd guess that those six or seven thousand votes were mostly mail-in absentee ballots. That just shows the flaw in absentee voting: If things change on the ground at the last minute, your vote can be wasted, which is why I always show up at the polls in person on election day. The good news is that the RINO Scozzafava wasn't elected, and next year, perhaps the Republicans of the district can choose a candidate more to their liking than Scozzafava was.

The news elsewhere was good, however. Barack Obama's magic is gone. He personally campaigned for Democrat gubernatorial candidates Creigh Deeds in swing state Virginia and incumbent Jon Corzine in blue state New Jersey. Deeds was crushed by Republican Bob McDonnell in Virginia, and even the Democrat political machine in the Garden State could not save Gov. Corzine, who was defeated by Republican Chris Christie by a decisive margin.

Now, it is said that all politics is local, and of course local issues like high property taxes and poltical corruption in New Jersey came into play. However, given Obama's heavy personal involvement in the two big races, the defeats show that his support is not enough to get Democrats over the finish line, even in heavily Democrat states like New Jersey, if the people are angry about the economy, unemployment, extreme government spending by Congress, and Democrat schemes to ram through expensive agendas like health care reform and cap-and-tax global warming that will make our economic problems worse, not better.

My guess is that the Obama-Pelosi-Reid health care and cap-and-tax plans are dead in the water, because we are only a few months away from the 2010 congressional primaries. Any congresscritter from either party who votes for them is likely to see a strong challenge in the primaries in any district that is not mostly populated with far-left liberals. Those Blue Dog Democrats who were swept into power last year on Obama's coattails will be committing career suicide if they vote for those schemes, and they know it. This is why Obama and his minions were in such a hurry to ram things through. Now they're probably too late, which is a damn good thing.

Dogs and Cats, Living Together

2009-11-02T08:37:00.002-05:00

Unless you're a political junkie, you've probably never heard of Dede Scozzafava, Bill Owens or Doug Hoffman. You probably have no idea what part of the state New York's 23rd congressional district is in. But since NY-23 is one of a handful of special elections on Tuesday that will serve as a referendum on Barack Obama's presidency so far, it's a story to keep an eye on. It's a traditionally Republican congressional district, although one that went for Barack Obama in 2008.

President Obama tapped the district's Republican congressman, John McHugh, to serve as Secretary of the Army, which opened up the seat for the special election. The law in New York is that local party bosses get to select the candidates in special elections like this one; there's no primary system or anything like that. The Democrats chose a liberal, Bill Owens. The Republicans also chose a liberal, Dede Scozzafava, whose positions on most issues would be at odds with most people who call themselves Republicans.

One peculiarity of New York politics is that there are a lot of different parties that have candidates on the ballot; sometimes, candidates run as members of more than one party. In any case, the Conservative party chose a Tea Party activist named Doug Hoffman, a fiscal conservative with an accounting background. God only knows that they could use an accountant in Washington!

Well, numerous Republican luminaries, starting with Sarah Palin, endorsed Hoffman over Scozzafava, saying that she was too liberal. Other Republicans, like Newt Gingrich, said that party loyalty was more important than ideology and threw their support behind Scozzafava.

The end result was that Scozzafava ended up running a distant third in the polls, with Hoffman and Owen running neck-and-neck. And so, on Saturday, Scozzafava apparently did the honorable thing and suspended her campaign, seemingly so that the Republican/conservative vote wouldn't be split and throw the election to the Democrat. Because, you know, Republican contributors had given her campaign some $900,000 and it wouldn't be right to help out their political opponents, right?

But yesterday, Scozzafava shattered any illusion of honor, and threw her support behind the Democrat! This was the biggest case of someone being a turncoat in New York since Benedict Arnold tried to betray West Point to the British. Scozzafava couldn't have been a bigger RINO (Republican In Name Only) if she'd had a horn growing out of her forehead!

She proved by her dishonorable action that people like Sarah Palin, Fred Thompson, etc., were exactly right about what kind of congressperson she would have been: Another liberal useful idiot that would go along with Obama's schemes to turn the country into a socialist paradise. Well, Dede, don't the the door hit ya where the Good Lord split ya on the way out. Good riddance to you!

And not to be gratuitously insulting, but I saw a picture of her on the sidebar of another blog, just over a picture of Hillary Clinton, who looked absolutely svelte by comparison. I think there's a new Cankle Queen in town!

The good news is that Doug Hoffman should get most of the Republican vote and hopefully will win NY-23 handily on Tuesday. Then the voters in that district will get the responsible representation that they deserve.

NFL Futility In the State of Misery

2009-10-12T10:05:00.005-04:00

I was looking at the football standings this morning, and thinking how badly our Florida teams are playing this year. The Tampa Bay Bucs are 0-5, the Miami Dolphins are 1-3 (pending tonight's game), and the Jacksonville Jaguars are 2-3. 3-11 is a pretty bad aggregate record. But there is a state that is doing worse: Missouri, or Misery as they sometimes call it.

The Kansas City Chiefs and the St. Louis Rams are both 0-5 after yesterday's losses. Combine that with Nebraska beating Missouri in college football on Thursday night and the St. Louis Cardinals being ignominiously swept in three games by the Los Angeles Dodgers in the National League Division Series, and it was a pretty bad weekend in the Show Me State.

I read somewhere that Rush Limbaugh wants to try to purchase the St. Louis Rams. I guess that's because last year's winless team, the Detroit Lions (who have won a game this year) were unavailable. I think that Rush could bring the Republicans back to a winning record before he could make the Rams winners.

Columbus Day

2009-10-12T08:44:00.003-04:00

Today is Columbus Day, when we celebrate the European discovery of the New World in 1492. It is the most politically incorrect holiday on our calendar (yes, even more than Christmas!). I have to wonder how many more years it will be a holiday.

Christopher Columbus and his Spaniards, after all, showed a callous disregard for the natives, enslaving and torturing many of them in the search for gold, silver and other riches in the Americas. That narrative was pretty much disregarded when I was in elementary school and America was 80-90% white, but as the nation grows increasingly more multi-ethnic and our leaders dwell more on our historical faults rather than our national manifest destiny, Columbus has become symbolic of America's original sin, at least in the eyes of those on the political left.

The Italians would be unhappy if Columbus Day were to be dropped from the holiday list, but hey, how many of them are there? It's not like they're likely to become suicide bombers and start blowing stuff up, like certain other groups would if they were miffed.

Times change, and reality changes with the times. If Pluto can be dropped from planetary status, then Columbus Day could be demoted from legal holiday status to an ethnic festival like St. Patrick's Day. I figure it will happen about the same time as the Washington Redskins and the Cleveland Indians are forced to change their team names.

What would be likely to replace Columbus Day in the legal holiday pantheon? Well, like the Nobel Peace Prize, there's only The One logical choice: August 4th, in honor of Barack Obama.

Now, some might say, "Wait a minute! George Washington and Abe Lincoln have to share a holiday, and Barack Obama gets his own? What's up with that? And isn't he technically included in 'Presidents Day' anyway?"

Well, yes, but they were only presidents; Barack Obama is also our new Messiah! Consider this new holiday one to be awarded not for anything he's done, but for "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples." It's not like that would be unprecedented.

Perfect Picture

2009-10-09T09:55:00.002-04:00

I couldn't resist...

You've Got To Be Kidding Me!

2009-10-09T07:35:00.003-04:00

Apparently not. The Nobel Peace Prize, already awarded to reprobates like Jimmy Carter and Yassir Arafat, has hit a new low. The eggheads in Oslo have awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama, for "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples." Note that the deadline for the award nomination was February 1st, meaning that the fledgling president had been in office for a grand total of 11 days.

Don't you remember all of the totally awesome stuff he did in those 11 days? He brought peace to the Middle East and established a Palestinian state that now lives in harmony with Israel, he ended the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he got North Korea and Iran to end their nuclear programs, he persuaded China to end their occupation of Tibet and allow the Dalai Lama to return home, he convinced the Russians to pull out of Georgia and stop menacing their neighbors, and he got every nation in the world to give up all of their nuclear weapons and promise to use nuclear energy for only peaceful purposes from now on. Gosh, he did so much in those 11 days that he was the only possible choice for the...

Wait a minute! You mean to tell me that he didn't do ANY of those things? You mean to tell me that even almost nine months into his term, he still hasn't done any of those things? You mean those wacky Svensk fellows just gave him the award because of his complete and total awesomeness, not because of anything he actually DID?

You mean to tell me that they gave an empty award to an empty suit of a president for his empty accomplishments over 11 days? Yup, that's exactly what they did. How appropriate. But I guess that $1.4 million will spend the same either way, deserved or not.

If there was any justice in the world, Stevie Wonder would be at the award ceremony to sing "You Haven't Done Nothing."

Don't You Feel Better Now?

2009-10-02T08:49:00.004-04:00

I saw this story in the news:

David Letterman Reveals Extortion Plot and Confesses to Sex With Staffers

And all I could think was "Thank God we had this paragon of virtue to defend us from immoral people like Sarah Palin's slutty daughter!"

But as Whoopi Goldberg would probably say, "It's not sexual harassment-sexual harassment!" Right? Notice that it was sex with female staffers, plural; women whose careers Letterman had considerable power to help or harm. So this wasn't a single incident of a boss boinking a subordinate, but an ongoing pattern of behavior. In your office or mine, the guy would be fired for cause.

I already thought Letterman was a schmuck. This just confirms it even more. But as Glenn Reynolds noted at Instapundit, the timing is excellent for Letterman; compared to Roman Polanski, he doesn't look like so much of a heel.

A Blast From The Past

2009-09-25T06:49:00.003-04:00

A few people have already seen this, but for those who haven't, a little bit of back story.

This picture was taken in the summer of 1984 along the Yakima River in eastern Washington. There's a story behind it, known as Raiders of the Lost Rifles:

We (the 109th MI BN, 9th ID, Fort Lewis, WA) were doing a field training exercise at the Yakima Firing Center. The Ranger unit on Fort Lewis was doing a night waterborne insertion into the area of operations on the the Yakima River. Unfortunately, one of their rubber rafts turned over in the swift current, and a couple of M-16 semiautomatic rifles and a tactical radio ended up in the drink. This resulted in every able body in the area being sent to search along the banks of the river for the lost rifles. I don't know if they found the lost rifles and radio or not; I just know that we didn't find them. But it was a nice day for a walk along the river, even if the mosquitoes were heavy at times (note the unrolled sleeves). And so the Raiders of the Lost Rifles trudged along the Yakima River, looking at every glint in the water, although the radio was undoubtedly olive drab and the rifles were matte black.

Now, why was I wearing flowers in my helmet? Well, the wildflowers were in bloom along the river. Part of tactical camouflage is taking pains to blend into the background of your local environment. Note that these were the old steel pot helmets, whose liners were removable, allowing the helmet to double as a wash basin. The Kevlar helmets that came later had a built-in liner, which precluded other uses for the helmet other than protecting one's noggin.

Anyway, a few weeks ago, I was talking about this picture with a friend of mine and went and dug up the negatives from the set of pictures that this one came from. They were old 110 film, so when I took the negative to Wal-Mart for a print, they had to send it out to a lab rather than doing it on site. I was pleased with how well the picture came out, considering that the negative was 25 years old and hadn't always been under complete climate control (that week without power after Hurricane Wilma back in 2005, for instance). I sent the original to my Mom back in 1984, so this was the first time I had seen the picture in 25 years.

Knucksie Tales

2009-09-17T08:44:00.004-04:00

Knucksie the cat was originally my stepdaughter Anjelica's kitten, which she got up in Orlando in late 1991. She named the cat Baby, but that didn't really seem an appropriate name for such a rambunctious kitten. I christened her Knucklehead, Knucksie for short, since it was more polite than Shithead.

Knucksie was always darting out the front door whenever it opened. She was the only cat who was allowed to go outside, primarily because it was impossible to keep her inside. She would go to the door and cry to be let out, then would go out and play for a while and return to the windowsill, where she would paw at the glass until let back into the house. She was a very polite cat; she would meow a "thank you" when I'd let her back in.

I would have preferred to have her stay inside, because I know that bad things can happen to a cat who goes outside: Cars, vicious dogs, mean kids. But for many years, she lived a charmed life. There was one day when she was out on the windowsill and a vicious dog came running up to her. You never heard such a commotion! I quickly ran out and chased the dog off and Knucksie, who had run around the side of the house, came back and sprinted into the house.

It wasn't uncommon for her to vanish for a day or two, then come home. One day she had disappeared and I went outside and found out that somehow she had ended up on the roof. When I came back from my New York trip last year, I looked around the inside of the house and couldn't find her. Then I looked in the spare bedroom which I use for storage, and where I had kept my luggage. There was Knucksie, hungry and a bit dehydrated after three days in the room. She meowed angrily at me for accidentally closing her in there, although it was partially her own fault for sneaking in there.

Knucksie was a great hunter in her younger days, keeping the yard clear of vermin and wildlife. Her victims included a rabbit, a squirrel, a mole, a snake, a few birds and several anole lizards. The mockingbirds in the tree outside knew her for the predator that she was, shrieking "Cat! Cat!" whenever they saw her outside. Sometimes they would divebomb her as well, but she was not impressed. She knew that if they got within paw range, they were meat.

She also was the one who found the baby opossum. I came home from work one morning and she was stalking in front of the trash cans next to the garage and growling. I looked behind one and spotting a tiny opossum which had gotten separated from its mother. We ended up calling the local wildlife rehabilitation facility and taking the opossum in to them to take care of.

Despite her ferocity with other animals, she was very gentle with people. She quickly learned the "no claws" rule and pretty much obeyed it. She acquired a habit for a while of jumping up on my computer chair and worming her way into the seat next to me so she could watch what I was doing.

A few months ago, her luck ran out. She had gone running out the door when I left for work, which wasn't uncommon. Usually, she would be waiting in the grass in the morning, ready to go inside. That morning, she wasn't around. She came home a couple of hours later, and I noticed that she was dragging her right hind leg. It turned out that she had a broken femur. I took her in to the veterinarian and they put a splint on her leg. She was too old and skinny for them to operate on her, so they had to just splint it and hope the bone would heal on its own. Fortunately, it did, although she was in the splint for eight weeks. She dragged it around behind her, and the weight was enough that it threw off her balance. Her outside cat days were over.

Finally, though, the splint came off for good, and she spent her last couple of months mostly hanging out in my bedroom as she readjusted to walking on the healed leg. She did make it outside one last time, though. I had the window open a few days ago, and she came running out and jumped up on the windowsill, then jumped outside.

"Oh, no you don't!" I yelled, running to the door, grabbing the wayward Knucksie and bringing her back inside. "You're an inside cat from now on," I told her.

And that was that.

I feel a little better now that I've had a chance to tell you a bit about her. She was a very good cat. I don't think I've ever had a better one.

Another Knucksie Picture

2009-09-16T11:57:00.001-04:00

This one's a little better:

She was such a good cat! >sniff<

A Sad Day

2009-09-16T08:12:00.003-04:00

This is Knucksie:

She passed away peacefully this morning at the age of about 18. She was a good friend, and one of the best cats I've ever had, always gentle and wanting to snuggle and be petted. I will miss her for a long, long time.

In The News

2009-09-16T03:14:00.003-04:00

I spotted this headline:

Jimmy Carter: Wilson comments 'based on racism'

to which I had the following retort:

Clyde: Carter comments 'based on being a jackass.'

I mean, really, who's the bigger jackass (to use the presidential term), Kanye West or Jimmy Carter? They're both world-class jackasses, as has been known for a long time, so I'll have to declare the contest a tie.

I wish that Carter would hurry up and die already, so I can get my federal Day of 'Mourning'. I won't go to Plains and piss on his grave when he dies, but only because I don't like standing in long lines.

To the Nines

2009-09-09T08:59:00.001-04:00

We're coming up on another one of those dates and times, this time the one with all of the nines. Very shortly, it will be 09/09/09 09:09:09.

Enjoy it... to the nines.

Up Late For Shuttle Launch

2009-08-28T23:50:00.002-04:00

I took a nap this afternoon, intending to get up at 7:00 p.m. to watch the Dodgers-Reds game. Instead, I turned off the alarm and slept in. When I woke up, it was 11:30. I flipped on the Royals-Mariner game, found out that my fantasy team starter Brian Bannister had already given up five runs and decided to check on the status of the shuttle launch scheduled for 11:59 p.m.

The NASA channel showed everything a go as they counted down. I looked outside and the sky is completely clear, so I'll be able to watch it go up from my front yard. Night launches are very impressive, even from a couple of hundred miles away. You know something is intensely bright when you can see it halfway across the state!

Five minutes to go...

Thought For the Day

2009-08-28T07:52:00.000-04:00

Only an irritated oyster creates a pearl.

Oh, Danny Boy...

2009-08-27T07:16:00.003-04:00

I was looking at the most recent projected track for Tropical Storm Danny and noted two things: That it's supposed to become a hurricane by early Saturday off the North Carolina coast, and that Boston is still within the cone of uncertainty as the storm makes its way north on Saturday afternoon and evening.

Sometime during that period will be the funeral mass for the late Senator Ted Kennedy. Danny probably won't hit Boston, but it's not beyond the realm of possibility.

Now, having been through hurricanes myself, I wouldn't wish them on anyone. However, I just have to ask: Would it be a sign of Divine disapproval for someone's funeral to get hit by a hurricane?

Stop The Canonization, I Want To Get Off

2009-08-26T07:36:00.004-04:00

As you will no doubt have heard, Senator Edward M. "Ted" Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) died last night of brain cancer. Not surprisingly, it's wall-to-wall Ted Kennedy on both CNN and MSNBC (or as I call it, MSDNC). Fortunately, Fox News is covering other topics besides Kennedy's death. The only question about CNN and MSDNC (and probably the networks as well, especially CBS and NBC) is whether they will ask the Pope to canonize Teddy or whether they'll just declare his sainthood themselves on their own.

To be honest, I was not a big fan of the man. His politics aside, there was always the shadow of Chappaquiddick and his questionable behavior on that night. You have to do a hell of a lot of good to balance the scales after leaving a woman to drown. Some might think he balanced the scales; I don't.

I'll say this: He probably wasn't as big a scoundrel as I thought he was. But he damn sure isn't as big a saint as the TV talking heads would have us believe.

So Easy...

2009-08-25T09:08:00.008-04:00

I know that criticizing Rep. Maxine Waters (D-California) is like shooting fish in a barrel. She's a perfect example of the fact that it doesn't take intelligence to succeed in politics. So what has this fine paragon of Congress done now?

She has referred to those who oppose Obama's health care scheme as "Neanderthals."

It just goes to show that opposing ObamaCare is so easy a caveman can do it. And so can those of us who are more evolved than that.

And scaring the hell out of the American people with insane spending and trying to take over their health care and their lives? It's so easy a Democrat can do it.

Who's Counting?

2009-08-25T08:14:00.001-04:00

So I'm in the break room last night, eating a nuked slice of pizza and reading the paper, when I see an article about Miss Venezuela winning the Miss Universe pageant. Then it mentions that she received the crown from the previous Miss Universe, who also was from Venezuela. And I had to ask: "Who's counting the ballots? Hugo Chavez?"

Just askin'...

Aw, Nuts!

2009-08-24T08:12:00.002-04:00

I've written in the past about the explosion in varieties of gourmet chocolate on the candy aisle, with a mad rush to see who can come up with the chocolate bar with the highest percentage of cacao. I think there are some out there now that have just a splash of milk and a pinch of sugar thrown in with the cacao, making semi-sweet baking chocolate taste like Hershey's chocolate syrup by comparison. I guess it would take a stiff upper lip to enjoy that kind of chocolate.

Paralleling this has been an explosion of varieties of packaged nuts. It used to be that there were peanuts, mixed nuts, almonds and macadamia nuts. Now there are more varieties, and they are flavored with a great number of different things. I recently tried some of the Sahale Snacks nut blends, including Soledad Almonds (with apple, flax seeds, date, balsamic vinegar and red pepper) and Valdosta Pecans (with sweet cranberries, black pepper and orange zest). I also liked the Sing Buri cashews, with pineapple and Chinese pepper. Now Planters has gotten into the act, with their Planters Black Label jars. I bought a couple of them: Belgian Milk Chocolate (almonds and cashews) and Santa Fe Roasted Chipotle seasoned blend, which again is almonds and cashews with spicy seasoning. They taste a lot like Lay's barbecue chips with a bit more of a bite.

Even Blue Diamond almonds has gotten into the extreme flavors act, with Wasabi flavoring among others.

It's not just nuts, though. I saw some "extreme" flavored Pringles chips as well, although I ended up buying a multipack of the Pringles Restaurant Cravers, with Mozzarella Sticks & Marinara, Onion Blossom and Mexican Layered Dip flavors instead.

If I ate all of those at once, with the flavored nut blends, my tongue might just explode!

Wisdom In A Bag Of Chocolates

2009-08-20T08:10:00.002-04:00

I like the bags of Dove chocolates, which are wrapped in foil with a little message on the inside. On a whim, I bought a bag of the new peanut butter-filled Dove milk chocolates. The messages are a bit different from the other ones I've seen, many of which ran to things like "It's definitely a bubble bath day!" or "You know what? You look good in red." The new batch in the peanut butter variety's wrappers are a bit more philosophical. Here are some that I saw today:

Seize the day.
Listen to the wind.
Share a kind word.
Protect your solitude. Turn off your ringer.
It's okay to live without a "big picture" in mind.
Be an optimist.
Remind yourself that it's okay not to be perfect.
Express your gratitude to those you love.
Hug a friend today.
Chocolate is love shared between friends.

If everybody did those things, it would be a nicer world, wouldn't it?

And the peanut butter-filled Dove chocolates are just the kind to share with a friend. You might even get a hug, which would be good for a two-fer.

Tropical Playlist

2009-08-19T09:47:00.003-04:00

While at work last night, I was listening to music on my iPod and I came to the realization that I could come up with a playlist for the named tropical storms so far during this Atlantic hurricane season, using songs on my iPod. Well, actually I had to cheat a little bit on the spelling of the first one.

Ana -- "Anna" by the Beatles
Bill -- "Big Bad Bill Is Sweet William Now" by Van Halen
Claudette -- "Claudette" by Roy Orbison

Now, what's the name of the "D" storm? (Answer: Danny.) Hmmm... I think the closest I'd have for that one would be "Denis" by Blondie, which was pronounced "Dah-nee" rather than "Dennis." Beyond that: Erika, Fred, Grace, Henri. Somehow, I think I'll be stumped from Erika on.

These Posters Made Me Laugh

2009-08-17T08:43:00.003-04:00

From The People's Cube:

Posters: Do Not Spread Fishy Rumors or You'll Be Flagged

Sheer genius! Be sure to go to The People's Cube's home page for more satirical humor.

Another Thing Old People Remember

2009-08-16T11:29:00.002-04:00

Live Elvis, as opposed to Dead Elvis. Today is the 32nd anniversary of The King's passing, making it the biggest day of the year at Graceland. I wonder if the Michael Jackson fans will make annual pilgrimages to Neverland Ranch in the future on the anniversary of his death? I also wonder if the Jackson estate will be anywhere near as savvy as the Elvis Presley estate was in marketing their deceased star.

Another interesting story in yesterday's newspaper was about the upcoming consecration of the new Hindu temple in Fort Myers, which will serve the 1000 Hindu households in southwest Florida (Lee, Charlotte and Collier Counties). It will be dedicated to Ganesha, the elephant-headed deity that Hindus believe helps them overcome obstacles, according to the article, although Hindus will be able to worship all of their gods and goddesses there. I guess that it is not too surprising that Hindus would be attracted to Florida; its warm subtropical climate with rainy and dry seasons is probably closer to that of much of India than any other place in the United States. The article also noted that Hindus make up about 0.4% of the U.S. population, which would be around 1.2 million people.

Obama's Potemkin Town Hall

2009-08-14T22:31:00.004-04:00

Did you see President Obama's laughably scripted town hall meeting from Montana today, or even just the highlights? The crowd looked like extras from The Stepford Wives, deliriously cheering every word the President spoke. Where did they bus these people in from? It looked more like an Obama campaign rally than the sort of skeptical town hall meeting that members of Congress are seeing across the country. All it was missing was the styrofoam Greek columns.

I mean, really, when the guy who asked one of the two hard questions that Obama got mentions that he's an NRA member and believes in the Constitution and only three or four people applaud, in a crowd of over a thousand, you have to just laugh. This was MONTANA, for heaven's sake, one of the states with the highest rates of gun ownership in the country, and almost nobody applauds a mention of the NRA?! You would have gotten more applause than that in some place like Vermont! It was a clear tip-off that this was not a random, representative crowd of Montanans.

Come on, President Obama. Don't insult our intelligence! Don't piss on our legs and tell us it's raining.

"Evil-mongers"?

2009-08-14T08:08:00.002-04:00

That's what Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nevada) has called protesters against Obama's health care reform scheme. Wonderful. The same sort of people who made fun of President Bush calling Muslim terrorists "evildoers" (because they didn't really believe in the concept of "evil") are now calling Americans exercising their First Amendment right to free speech "evil-mongers." So, let me get this straight, Senator: People who fly airplanes into buildings, behead "infidels" and stone rape victims to death, "NOT EVIL"; people who go to town hall meetings and speak their mind against Obama's plans: "EVIL."

I'm glad you've clarified your point of view for all of us, Senator Reid. And I hope that your constituents in the Silver State decide to give you a gold watch and send you home the next time you're up for re-election. You're an embarassment to the Senate, sir.

R.I.P., Les Paul

2009-08-13T20:45:00.004-04:00

A little experiment: Pick out any popular music from the last fifty years or so and listen to it. Then say thank you to Les Paul, the guitar virtuoso and inventor who died today at the age of 94. If there were electric guitars in that music you listened to, well, Les Paul invented the electric guitar. And even if you picked a genre that doesn't include electric guitars, it almost certainly was recorded using multi-track technology. Again, a Les Paul invention. Whether you like rock, jazz, country, hip-hop or any of the hundreds of genres of music, they all use multi-track recording, and your life has been enriched through music that Les Paul's inventions improved.

So thank you, Les Paul, for all that you did for popular music. And may you rest in peace.

Currently Reading...

2009-08-10T09:48:00.002-04:00

I've gotten bogged down in Atlas Shrugged during the 50+ page speech that John Galt gives over the commandeered radio frequencies. The sad truth is that nobody's going to listen to you go on for fifty pages worth of a speech, even in an 1100-page novel. I figure that's at least three hours if read aloud, and most people would have said, "Okay, we get it, we get it! How about the Cliff Notes version, buddy?"

Anyway, I'm taking a break from it right now and reading a "new" book by J.R.R. Tolkien. He's surprisingly prolific for a man who has been dead since 1973. Actually, his son Christopher edited the manuscript, as he did with the rest of his father's posthumous published works. The book is The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, a retelling of the old Norse sagas translated into English verse. I've been reading the introductory material for the last couple of days, off and on. I'll have to hurry up and get to the meat of the book, the eight-line stanzas, since I only have it for two weeks.

A New Obamicon

2009-08-09T11:36:00.002-04:00

What the hell, why not?

Yeah, that's the late, unlamented Erich Honecker. Let's beat the meme like a dead horse...

I Turned Myself In!

2009-08-07T08:11:00.004-04:00

Here is the text of the e-mail I sent to the snitch e-mail address, flag@whitehouse.gov:

Comrades! I want to thank you for this wonderful opportunity to turn in those thought criminals and wreckers who want to sabotage the wonderful plans of our Dear Leader, President ~~Honecker~~Obama! Long may they languish in their prison cells in the gulag!

First, I wish to denounce Winston Smith, 1984 Orwell Road, New London, Connecticut. Comrade Smith is an irredeemable thought criminal who does not have sufficient zeal in his support for DemSoc. I overheard him say that President ~~Honecker's~~Obama's health care plan will ration care for senior citizens on Medicare, and deny them treatments because they are "not cost effective." Send him to Room 101 where he belongs!

Second, I wish to denounce John Galt, 1 Objectivist Way, Galt's Gulch, Colorado. He's guilty of being a selfish, greedy capitalist and exploiting the working class. His girlfriend, Dagny Taggart, of the same address, is equally guilty. They both said that it's not their responsibility to be taxed in order to provide health care for illegal immigrants and other layabouts too lazy to earn their own health care. Not only should they be sent to the gulag, but their taxes should be raised much higher so that they can pay their fair share of the health care bill! Nobody should be allowed to "shrug" off their debt to society!

Finally, I must also turn myself in, because I have had my own doubts about whether President ~~Honecker's~~Obama's health care plan can be implemented without bankrupting the country. Wow, that sounds "fishy" to me! So tell me which prison camp I'm supposed to report to. I understand that President ~~Honecker~~Obama will make sure that the trains are running on time.

And as someone who served in the Army in West Berlin in the late 1980s, this all seems very familiar to me, except that it was on the OTHER side of the Berlin Wall that people were snitching on each other to the Stasi. I never thought I'd see it in America. "Hope and change," right, comrades? It's the ~~East German~~American Way!

Say "hi" to President ~~Honecker~~Obama for me and have a nice day.

Clyde

An American Erich Honecker?

2009-08-07T07:17:00.010-04:00

You know, it's getting to the point that I'm not sure this is America any more. We have a presidential administration that gives out an e-mail address, flag@whitehouse.gov, which people can use to report fellow citizens who are giving out "misinformation" about the Obama health care plan, or just anything that sounds "fishy." Twenty years ago, when I left West Berlin, Erich Honecker was still the President [Correction: His title was "Chairman of the Council of State of the German Democratic Republic" -- the de facto head of state.] of East Germany, where the government kept files on its citizens and people informed on each other to the much-feared Stasi (short for the Staatsicherheitsdienst, or State Security Service) to curry favor with the communist government. I never thought I'd see that sort of thing happening here in America, but it's just a small jump from having people inform the government about their neighbors' politically unreliable views to throwing those dissidents into gulags. Today, courtesy of the "hope" and "change" that 53% of the American electorate chose last November, we now have a president who is the American equivalent of Erich Honecker.

Now, if I was a less socially responsible person, I might spam that e-mail address, flag@whitehouse.gov, with every kind of objectionable material I could find. I might have spam for penis enlargement and breast enlargement sent to them, I might have porn or things like "2 girls, 1 cup" or "goat.sex" sent to them, or just put it on a web page where the spambots could crawl all over it.

But I think instead, I'll help them out. I'll send an e-mail to President ~~Honecker~~Obama at that e-mail address, flag@whitehouse.gov, and turn in some thought criminals like Winston Smith or John Galt or Dagny Taggart. Maybe I'll just turn myself in, too. After all, we must support President ~~Honecker's~~Obama's health care plan, right or wrong! It's the ~~East German~~American Way! And when He gives a speech, don't be the first one to stop applauding; they always send that guy to the gulag first.

A Definition

2009-08-04T07:44:00.003-04:00

It's seems like I've seen this somewhere, but I'm not sure where, and therefore unsure who to credit for it:

"When people you don't know lose their jobs, it's an economic downturn. When friends or family members lose their jobs, it's a recession. When you lose your job, it's a depression."

I've moved up to the "recession" level as of today. My good friend Barbara up in North Carolina officially is moving up to "depression." Today is her last day on the job. Her employer notified her two weeks ago that they could no longer afford to keep her. They were decent about it, giving her two weeks' notice, which is rather unusual. It wasn't that she hadn't been doing a good job; it was nothing personal, just the lousy economy. Of course, that doesn't really make her feel much better. It just means that she'll get a glowing letter of recommendation (and I hope it looks like Three Mile Island or a 100-year-old's birthday cake).

I'm confident that someone as intelligent, resourceful and personable as she is will land on her feet. As I told her, "Tough times don't last, tough people do." I'm not one to spout a lot of Pollyanna platitudes (I'm a curmudgeon, after all!) but I really do believe that she will come out of this unfortunate situation alright.

Honeymoon Over?

2009-08-03T07:48:00.004-04:00

You might think so if you saw this poster, which was spotted by radio talk show host Tammy Bruce in Los Angeles:

Remember how right after the inauguration, all of the late night comics and standup comedians were saying, "Oh, we won't have anything to joke about. You can't make fun of Barack Obama."

Well, apparently, you can.

Best comment at NewsBusters, where there was a blog post about the poster, by a commenter named "ecarlwhite": "Why So Stimulus?" We have a winner!

In related news, at PajamasMedia, Jennifer Rubin had a great post asking How Does A Leftist Govern America?

In it, she quotes the results of a recent Rasmussen poll:

Seventy-six percent (76%) of U.S. voters now think President Obama is at least somewhat liberal. Forty-eight percent (48%) say he is very liberal, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. This marks the highest finding to date on the question and is a five-point increase in the number who say the president is very liberal from a month ago. … Seventeen percent (17%) of voters say the president is moderate, while only six percent (6%) believe he is conservative.

I'd say that the last 6% need to put the bong down, pronto. I think that among the rest, there are a lot of people who voted for Obama who may be saying to themselves, "If I knew then what I know now, I'd have voted differently." They didn't read the fine print on the shiny box of Obama-Os, they saw the big "HOPE!" and "CHANGE!" on the front of the box, and didn't look at the ingredient label on the side of the box, where it said, plain as day: "Warning: May Contain Socialism." The media was actively doing everything it could to hide that Obama wasn't who he claimed to be. He was not a moderate; he had the most liberal voting record in the Senate. Some of us knew that. Some of us were paying attention. Some of us are saying, "I told you so."

Stuff Older People Remember

2009-07-20T08:01:00.003-04:00

Today is the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. You might have heard something about that in the news recently. And over the weekend, former CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite died at the age of 92. Cronkite was one of the newsmen who covered that Apollo 11 mission, one of many historic events over his long career, which ended when he retired in 1981.

There is front page coverage of the Apollo anniversary in today's paper, along with an AP article titled "Most Weren't Born Yet," which notes that in 2008, the median age of Americans was 36.8, meaning that most Americans alive today weren't born when Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon. If you can remember the moon landing, or watching Walter Cronkite on the evening news, you are officially in the older half of the population.

So what else do older people remember that the young whippersnappers don't, besides the moon landing and Walter Cronkite? Black-and-white television. Eight-track tapes. Pong. Tang. Leisure suits. AMC Pacers and Gremlins. Hippies. Computer punch cards. Johnny Carson. Disco. Vietnam. Watergate. Chappaquiddick. Cars where seatbelts were optional equipment and airbags did not exist.

If you were there back in the 1960s and 1970s, you can probably add at least twenty more things. If you weren't, you're probably just thinking, "WTF?" Don't worry, though. Forty years down the road, you'll be nostalgic about your iPhone and your netbook computer, while the kids will be looking at them and thinking, "Man, how did they get by with those slow, clumsy devices?" Progress moves on.

A Bad Idea Goes Awry

2009-07-17T10:18:00.001-04:00

I saw this story in the news the other day:

Oldest woman to give birth dies, leaving twins

MADRID (AP) — She devoted years to caring for her mother, who died at age 101. Then Maria del Carmen Bousada embarked on a quest to become a mom herself. She lied to a California fertility clinic to skirt its age limit, and later pointed to her mother's longevity as a reason to expect she'd be around to care for her kids.
At age 66 she had twins, becoming the world's oldest new mom — and raising questions about maternity so late in life. Now she is dead at age 69, leaving behind boys not yet 3.
...
Another brother, Jose Luis Bousada, told the AP he was estranged from his siblings and read about his sister's death in the newspaper. Asked who might raise the children, he said he imagined arrangements had been made and "I suppose there will be no problem."
When she revealed last November she had stomach cancer, Bousada said she did not regret having children late in life and that her sons would be well-cared for no matter what happened to their mother.
Addressing her mortality and her children's tender age, she told Spanish television station Antena 3: "I hope God does not ... I want to hang on at least until they are 18."

As the last election should have taught us, "Hope is not a plan." Actuarially speaking, a 66-year-old American woman in 2005 had a life expectancy of 18.70 years, according to the ssa.gov site. But that "life expectancy" means that by that age, 50% of the age cohort will have already died, and 50% will still be around at age 84.70. That's like playing roulette and playing red or black.

I don't know what the difference in life expectancy would be for a Spanish woman aged 66 in 2006 vis a vis an American woman, but it's probably fairly similar (we're not talking Haiti or sub-Saharan Africa). But she came up black less than three years down the road, and the house raked in her chips.

As the article notes, there's a reason that Mother Nature shuts down women's fertility when it does. I'm sure that those babies will eventually be glad that they were born to a 66 year old woman rather than never being born at all, but still, it's a hard thing for babies to lose their mother like that. And it was really a selfish thing for her to do.

Watching the Michael Jackson Memorial Coverage

2009-07-07T13:31:00.001-04:00

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

2009-07-07T09:27:00.002-04:00

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?

2009-07-07T09:06:00.003-04:00

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

2009-07-06T08:58:00.002-04:00

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

2009-07-06T08:17:00.004-04:00

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?

2009-06-25T21:45:00.002-04:00

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

2009-06-22T08:45:00.002-04:00

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

2009-06-12T08:30:00.002-04:00

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

2009-06-08T07:46:00.003-04:00

"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

2009-06-04T08:08:00.003-04:00

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

2009-06-03T08:42:00.003-04:00

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

2009-06-01T07:57:00.003-04:00

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

2009-05-26T09:28:00.002-04:00

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?

2009-05-26T08:06:00.002-04:00

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!

Contrast: East vs. West

2009-05-23T07:12:00.003-04:00

I saw in the news this morning that beleaguered former South Korean president Roh Moo-hyun committed suicide early today by climbing a mountain near his home and leaping from the summit. He had been embroiled in a bribery scandal involving about $6 million, and had been interrogated about it by prosecutors at the end of April. It's kind of sad, because according to local accounts, he was "widely known for his relative integrity compared to other Korean presidents." His was an up-by-his-bootstraps story: He was from a town in the provinces, and since he was too poor to attend college, he worked regular jobs while studying law on his own, and he did so well enough to pass the tough Korean bar exam. He became a lawyer and then a political activist working for the downtrodden against the authoritarian government of the time, and worked his way up to president of the country. And then, this scandal, the shame and loss of face, the apologetic note and the leap off the mountain.

Contrast this with American politicians, most of them scions of wealthy families, born with a silver spoon in their mouths. When an American politician gets caught in a scandal, there is no feeling of shame. (While this is especially true of Democrats, it is true of some Republicans as well.) Rather than own up to their shortcomings and apologize, they deny, deny, deny. They don't take responsibility for their wrongdoing (see House Speaker Nancy Pelosi accusing the CIA of lying to her and refusing to provide any evidence, for instance). Instead, they attempt to deflect the blame on others, or they just stonewall and refuse to talk about their scandals.

While I'm not calling for anyone to climb a mountain and hurl herself off of it, I would like to see some personal accountability, some honesty and integrity, and most of all, some feeling of guilt and a promise to atone for what they have done wrong. Former president Roh took it to an extreme, but at least he was sorry for what he had done.

Some Days Are Better Than Others

2009-05-20T10:58:00.001-04:00

And the same is true of some weeks. This one's been bad. Nowhere to go but up.

Every Letter Tells A Story

2009-05-11T12:23:00.003-04:00

There are a million stories in the naked city, and every so often, we brush across the edges of one of them. Last night, I brushed across two. First, there was a letter in my mail from an inmate in a local jail, written to a Mrs. N. something-or-other, a different last name than his own. Scrawled across the address in large rough letters was "Return To Sender" and written in the same hand below the return address was the salutation, "You can kiss your own ass yourself." I wondered if that was written by Mrs. N. something-or-other, or by her husband. The hand wasn't feminine (indeed, the man writing from jail had much nicer handwriting), but that really doesn't tell us anything, does it?

Well, I thought that little mini-drama would be the highlight of the night, until I went back to pick up mail at another machine and one of the women standing there showed me something even more bizarre: A letter with a slice of cheese in it, with the return address being only a mysterious "Cheese Woman." The oils in the cheese had saturated the paper of the envelope, rendering it translucent and making plain the orange slice of American cheese within. All I could do was laugh and wonder, "What the hell?!"

Movie Review: Star Trek

2009-05-08T14:53:00.003-04:00

I don't go to the movies that often; most of the time, I'm content to wait until the film makes it to the pay cable movie channels. Every so often, there's a movie that I really want to see in the theater. Even then, I normally try to avoid going on the first day. Today, however, I made an exception and went to the 10:15 a.m. showing of Star Trek. All of the buzz that I had heard was positive, so I had fairly high expectations. They were not disappointed.

Star Trek is a non-stop thrill ride from the opening sequence until the end. It runs over two hours, but when it was over, I was already ready for the sequel. I'm not going to go into the plot, since I don't want to spoil it for anyone who is planning to see the movie, but it was well done and exciting. The casting was superb, and the performances were enough to bring a smile to the face of anyone who ever watched the original series on television. Chris Pine makes a rollicking James T. Kirk and Zachary Quinto was spot-on as Spock; indeed, he looks more like Spock than the venerable Leonard Nimoy, which is saying something.

If you are a Star Trek fan of any sort, you must see this movie. Even if you aren't, you still might find it enjoyable if you like any kind of science fiction at all. This one will be a huge summer blockbuster. Don't miss it.

The Internet Answers My Question

2009-05-06T09:58:00.002-04:00

Last night at work, I saw a flyer that turned out to be for premium electrical tape, which showed rolls in designer colors like green, red, orange, etc. At first glance, they looked like tires. It made me wonder about something: Why are all automobile tires black? After all, you can get your car in just about any color you want, but your tires will invariably be black. Why is that?

Well, I went to Ask.com and poked the question above into the search field, and was rewarded with the answer from ProperAutocare.com, which explained that ozone and ultraviolet light from sunlight attack the polymers in the tire:

To protect against ozone and UV damage, a stabilizer molecule called a “competitive absorber” is blended with the tire polymer. Competitive absorbers work by capturing and absorbing UV radiation and converting it to heat which is dissipated harmlessly. All tire manufacturers use the same competitive absorber, carbon black. This is why all tires are black...why tires are not available in designer colors.

How did we get along before the Internet came along to answer all of our trivial questions? The answer: Not as well as we do now.

Laura Doesn't Grok "Blasphemy"

2009-05-04T19:01:00.002-04:00

Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit points to a column by Laura Varon Brown on the Detroit Free-Press site, where she writes:

Parties were more fun when George W. Bush was president. You could debate, argue even, praise and condemn, throw darts and laurels and solve the world's problems over a bottle of wine.
No more. At least not in my circles. If you want to stop a conversation in its tracks, just question something President Barack Obama has said or done. It's not open to debate -- and I don't think that's healthy, for the country or the president.
It's especially unsettling for a free speech girl like me. The First Amendment is important -- but lately, it feels like my right of self-expression is being squashed.

Reading the whole column, it's apparent that like most of the media, she's an Obama supporter. She feels, however, that when he makes a mistake, it should be valid fodder for criticism. What she apparently doesn't understand is that for most of his supporters, Barack Obama isn't just the President of the United States, he is The Messiah. You can criticize a President, but you dare not criticize The Messiah. That's called "blasphemy," and it will get the same reaction among those on the Left in America as those Danish cartoons got from outraged Muslims around the world. The religious have always said that blasphemy doesn't fall under the rubric of free speech.

Sorry, Laura, you may not take the name of the Lord Barack Obama in vain. That was part of the deal you made when you guys voted him in. You're just gonna have to live with it until January 2013.

Now, for those of us on the other side who view him as an underfed incipient Mussolini who has yet to make the trains run on time, well, we can be iconoclasts. You can't, at least if you don't want your friends to stone you to death or burn you at the stake.

Who's Missing?

2009-04-29T08:06:00.002-04:00

The U.S. Postal Service is teaming up with cartoonist Matt Groening to issue a set of stamps with the main characters from The Simpsons. There will be stamps with Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie. I saw pictures of the stamps and thought, hey, wait a second! Someone important is missing! No Simpsons stamp set is really complete without a Mr. Burns stamp! But is there a Mr. Burns stamp? Nope.

I'm very disappointed.

Swine Flew

2009-04-28T21:08:00.002-04:00

Re: Former RINO Senator Specter (now D-PA) changing parties, one of the writers at NRO's The Corner said something to the effect of "I'd heard that he was changing parties, but I was disappointed to learn that he's still a Democrat."

The only thing more odious than a turncoat is a turncoat who tries to paint his actions as motivated by principle. I saw his speech today and was nauseated.

This Little Piggie...

2009-04-27T07:49:00.005-04:00

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past few days, you know that the latest scary thing to pop out of the news is the new swine flu bug from Mexico. It's scary because even though it's a swine flu virus, it is being passed from human to human. While none of the people infected in the United States have become seriously ill, around 100 people in Mexico (by the latest count I read) have died from respiratory ailments believed to possibly be related to the swine flu. The discrepancy is odd, and troubling.

It's possible that the people who have died in Mexico may have suffered from complications caused by air pollution. Mexico City is among the worst cities in the world as far as air quality goes. I'm not a scientist, and I don't even play one on TV, so I'm not going to speculate beyond that. But so far, we haven't seen any American fatalities yet.

Another troubling fact is that most of the victims so far have been in the prime of life, rather than the very young and the very old, who are normally the main victims of the flu. This follows the same sort of pattern which was seen in the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-20, which killed tens of millions right after World War I. That particular virus caused a cytokine storm, where the body's immune system overreacts and attacks the body itself. That's a very, very scary comparison.

The other thing that's scary is that by the time cities and nations become aware that the virus is present and people are sick, it's already too late to avert a pandemic if the disease is virulent enough, because people are infected and contagious before they start to exhibit symptoms. Our magnificent transportation system immediately turns from boon to bane, moving infected people from one city, country or continent to another with ease at the speed of sound. You're going to see more and more cases reported, in more and more places, at an ever-increasing pace. We're just at the beginning of this situation. Don't panic, but stay alert.

Celestial Events

2009-04-22T07:50:00.002-04:00

This morning, while driving home from work, I observed the near-conjunction of Venus and the Moon in the eastern sky. The crescent moon was just to the northeast of Venus, which was intensely bright. Not something that you see every day. I tried to get a picture of it when I got home, but my little digital camera made the picture come out grainy. Not a keeper.

Today is Earth Day, which started on this date in 1970. Of course, for me, it's more important because it's also my birthday. Another year older, another year closer to getting AARPed. Don't worry, it will happen to you, too. Your day will come just as surely as mine will, but today is not that day.

Thought for the day: Don't look back, because the guy with the scythe may be gaining on you.

Wrong Place, Wrong Time

2009-04-10T09:16:00.004-04:00

As the details of the tragic crash continued to emerge, one thing became very clear: Nick Adenhart and his friends had the terrible misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. They weren't doing anything wrong, just driving through an intersection with the green light, and then a drunk driver blows through the red light at 50-60 mile per hour and broadsides their car.

How unlucky do you have to be to have something like that happen? Very, very unlucky. You have to be in the exact wrong place at the exact wrong time. I don't know how fast Courtney Stewart, the driver of the Mitsubishi that Adenhart was riding in, was going, but for an intersection like that, probably about 45 miles per hour. That's 66 feet per second. Had they gone through the intersection one second earlier, the minivan would have screamed through behind them. Had they gone through a second later, the minivan would have roared in front of them, causing nothing worse than panic braking and a blaring horn. Even a fraction of a section could have made a big difference, since it only takes about a third of a second for a car to make it across a lane of the road. But in this case, the minivan broadsided the passenger side of the car.

And so, for those who they left behind, the what ifs start: The postgame interviewer might wonder, "What would have happened if I'd asked him just one more question?" What if he'd taken a slightly longer or shorter shower after the game? What might have happened if any of the four friends had been delayed by even so much as a minute? What if the driver had been a little faster (or a little slower) coming off the last light? When the margin of life and death is fractions of a second, they all count. The tragedy is not knowing in advance when it would be a good time to keep a friend talking with you just a little longer before they head out.

I know what this is like. When my brother Karl and his girlfriend Monika were down here visiting three years ago, they got in a car wreck on US 41 the night before they were to fly back to New York. I'd been with them that afternoon, and I'd suggested that we could go to the dog track in Bonita Springs. They decided to go to the beach instead. Their injuries were comparatively minor given that the car was totaled (Karl had a broken collarbone and Monika had a broken foot), but they were still very traumatic to them. And I wondered for a long time afterward how things might have been different if I'd persisted a bit more with the dog track idea. I'm sure that there are a lot of people who knew Nick Adenhart and his friends who are wondering what they might have done differently that could have avoided their doomed night out.

When It's Your Time...

2009-04-09T12:49:00.002-04:00

Yesterday, I was watching the news and they showed footage from Italy, where a 98-year-old woman had been pulled alive from the earthquake-caused rubble of her home. She seemed to be in very good condition, considering the circumstances. Obviously it wasn't her time to go yet.

This morning, there was breaking news from California: 22-year-old Nick Adenhart, a rookie pitcher for the Los Angeles Angels, was one of three people killed early this morning in a hit-and-run crash in Fullerton. He pitched last night for the Angels and threw six shutout innings in the best start of his young career. And today, he's dead in a senseless tragedy. It shouldn't have been his time to go, but unfortunately, it was.

This sort of tragedy happens all the time, of course, all over the country. Most of the victims aren't high-profile professional athletes, though. The families of the lesser-known victims suffer just as much. The other two people who died in that crash aren't just footnotes, and their families and friends also are in shock and pain.

Whether it's a young pitcher in a car wreck or an actress dying from a skiing injury, it just seems horribly unfair when people die before their time. It makes us feel sad, even though we don't even know them. And it reminds us that nobody is guaranteed tomorrow. You're odds are pretty good, of course, but sometimes shit happens. So hug your family and friends and let you know how you feel about them. Carpe diem.

"Are You Ever Going To Forgive Us?"

2009-04-07T12:04:00.004-04:00

This has to be one of the most eerily timely commercials ever made:

It's "The Deficit Trials, 2017 A.D." which was directed by Ridley Scott and made for W. R. Grace in 1986. Watch it, and then realize that this was made 23 years ago to dramatize the future problems caused by a $2 trillion deficit. Nowadays, in Barack Obama's America, that's chump change. By 2017, we may have a deficit of ten times that much. Our kids may not even be able to afford rags.

Gee, Thanks, Kim Jong Il!

2009-04-06T10:02:00.004-04:00

You might have seen something in the news over the weekend about the rogue nation of North Korea launching a ballistic missile. The North Koreans claimed that they were just launching a communications satellite, but it was obvious to the rest of the world that they were testing a possible delivery system for nuclear weapons. This rocket launch took place as President Barack Obama was talking up the idea of a "nuclear-free world," a world in which every nuclear power in the world would voluntarily give up their weapons of mass destruction. The American response to the North Korean launch (and that of other nations concerned about the renegade Stalinist dictatorship) was to appeal to the United Nations to DO SOMETHING! Alas, the United Nations was unable to come to any agreement about making some kind of strongly worded statement to condemn the North Koreans' action.

So here's a big thank you to North Korean dictator-for-life Kim Jong Il. In one fell swoop, he showed that Obama's fantasy about a nuclear-free world is hopelessly naive as long as there are people like Kim Jong Il (or the Iranian mullahs, etc.) in it, and he also showed once again how utterly useless the United Nations is. In the real world, when the lion and the lamb lie down together, it only provides an easy meal for the lion. And in the real world, an America without a strong nuclear deterrent is a potential victim for something a thousand times worse than 9/11 was. As long as there are evil leaders in this world, we must maintain the capacity to rain catastrophic destruction on them should they or their minions attack us.

Isn't It Odd?

2009-04-01T11:12:00.002-04:00

I was watching the news coverage of the rioting going on in London ahead of the G20 meetings, and one thing struck me as being exceedingly strange: The crowd of anarchists, who are chanting slogans like "abolish money," seem to have a lot of very nice cameras, which they are holding over their heads to take pictures of the scene in front of them. I wonder what they would use to buy cameras (and other things) if they abolished money?

No Foolin'

2009-04-01T08:11:00.003-04:00

Well, it's April Fool's Day, when it's customary to come up with some sort of wacky blog redesign or a post that varies 180 degrees from what you actually believe, just to put people on. I could do some paean about Big Brother's visit to Airstrip One, and parrot the lines from the Ministry of Truth about how things are going so swimmingly here in Oceania. But you know, I'm just not feeling it.

So I'll give you an interesting link instead. I found this the other day rather serendipitously:

Map Your Name

It's a site that allows you to enter family or given names, and then shows you maps for the United States, Europe and Australia broken down by the frequency with which the name occurs in the population. My family name is most common in Delaware (!), followed by areas in the South. This is not surprising, since beginning in the 1700s, my ancestors moved from Virginia to North Carolina, then to Georgia, Alabama and Texas. It would not be surprising at all if some of the people in those states were my distant relatives. The British map showed that the highest frequency for my name was in Dorchester, followed by other areas along the south and southeast coast.

The European map is particularly cool, since it is broken down into much smaller regions than the U.S. map, which only goes down to the state level.