I Turned Myself In!

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 HoneckerObama! 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'sObama'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'sObama'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 HoneckerObama 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 GermanAmerican Way!

Say "hi" to President HoneckerObama for me and have a nice day.

Clyde

An American Erich Honecker?

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 HoneckerObama 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'sObama's health care plan, right or wrong! It's the East GermanAmerican 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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

Where's Steve Martin when we need him?

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

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

Comedian/Senator Upstaged

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

Picking a Losing Fight?

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

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

Thoughts on Sarah Palin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vacation's Over

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

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

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

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

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

Topical? You make the call.

In Threes?

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

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

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

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

RIP, Ed, Farrah and Michael.

Watching Iran

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

A Stressful Week

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thought For the Day

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

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

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

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

The interviewer asks, "Why?"

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

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

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

One More Thought On Dinosaur Rockers

I guess the best reply they could make would be:

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

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

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

Dinosaurs Still Roam the Earth

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

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

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

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

Just A Thought

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

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

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

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

Obama Picks Sotomayor

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

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

Can You Dig It?

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

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

Contrast: East vs. West

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

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

Every Letter Tells A Story

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

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

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"

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?

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

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...

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

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

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...

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?"

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!

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?

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'

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.

Don't Worry, Comrades! Central Planning Is Watching Out For You!

Did you see that apparently President Obama wants Chevrolet to kill the Volt program?! Holy crap! I want an electric car so that I don't have to use gasoline purchased from countries that hate us. And Obama wants to kill the GM program that could produce one domestically? Stupid! Yeah, don't give me a domestic option and make me buy one from Toyota or Volkswagen or Hyundai when they bring one to the market.

Not to mention that they will be directed to cut the number of trucks and SUVs they produce and make more small cars instead, solely for political reasons, according to what I just saw on Fox News. Yes, Obama and Crew are going to be issuing production orders for GM and Chrysler. How idiotic is that? As one column I read earlier today said, these are the people who can't even do the switch to digital TV properly and now we're going to put them in charge of central planning for the U.S. domestic auto industry? Joy. They'll give us a car with four left doors.

Wanna see what's in your future, comrades?



And it will only cost you 25,000 rubles dollars and the Party will deliver it to you in two years. Sorry, comrades, there's a waiting list. Unless you're someone like Nancy Pelosi or Barney Frank or Chris Dodd, of course. They'll be getting their Lada limousines immediately instead of the Trabant, though. Waiting, like paying taxes, is for the little people.

The Agreeable Mirror

When I was a kid, we went to a carnival where there was a funhouse. Inside, there were warped mirrors that distorted the viewer's image, turning an average person into a fat dwarf or a skinny beanpole, as well as twisting the facial features into a caricature. Last year, during the presidential primary season, we encountered something that was exactly the opposite. When candidate Barack Obama appeared on the scene, many people observed that his lack of a substantial resume made him a blank slate upon which people could project their hopes and dreams.

However, after some contemplation, I think it would be more accurate to say that candidate Obama was the reverse of those funhouse mirrors: When people looked into the Obama mirror, not only did it make them look taller, take off those extra ten pounds they were carrying around, smooth out their wrinkles and clear up their acne, but it also made them cooler, because when they looked in the mirror, they didn't just see themselves. They saw themselves with The One, arm in arm, hanging out with the cool black friend that they never had. They were ready to do their part to expiate the sins of white racism in America. 'Hope' and 'Change' sounded good, so it didn't really matter what exactly they meant. Right?

It is a fact of human nature that we tend to like people who agree with us about things more than we do those people who don't agree with us. In fact, in English, the word "disagreeable" is a synonym for "unpleasant." We know, of course, that we are intelligent and wise and have all of the correct positions on every issue, while those who disagree with us are not and do not. This is why their very presence is disagreeable to us.

So if we are told that a person is seven different kinds of wonderful, but with not much in the way of specifics, then if we have to fill in the blanks using only that information, we would have to think that he must agree with us on most matters of substance. We are good, so if he is good, too, then he must think like we do. This is what happened to the people who looked in Obama's agreeable mirror: "He's such a wonderful guy! I know all his campaign talks about is generic 'hope' and 'change', but I'm sure he agrees with me about everything!"

This is how each of the various constituencies of the Democrat party could think that President Obama was in full agreement with them about all of their personal pet issues. This is how Independents and even some liberal Republicans who couldn't stomach voting for John McCain could rationalize that President Obama would probably govern as a moderate, because that is what they personally would do were they in his shoes. They looked into the agreeable mirror and said, "Well, how much different could his views be from mine, if he's so agreeable?"

Obama was able to do this because he had served for less than one term as a U.S. Senator, and had spent much of it running for President. Senators often have trouble getting a presidential nomination because they have a long legislative record, votes for and against various issues, and they are known quantities. Obama, however, had not been around long enough to do so, and therefore was that 'blank slate' that the pundits talked about. He could be anything that you wanted him to be, at least until January 20th, when he had to start governing and actually making decisions.

And it was at that point that many people who had looked in the agreeable mirror months earlier suddenly realized that they no longer recognized the other fellow staring back at them. "This is not the Barack Obama I knew!" they cried, as he spent trillions of dollars bailing out Wall Street. Who could have guessed that all of the talk about bipartisanship and reaching across the aisle to Republicans was all just smoke and, well, mirrors? Who would have thought that he would appoint hard-left ideologues and govern from the left rather than from the center?

Well, just about anyone who didn't depend on the mainstream media for their information. Anyone who listened to talk radio or watched Fox News had a much better idea of who Barack Obama was: The Democrat with the most liberal voting record in the Senate, such as it was; a man imbued with liberal values by his family; and a man with many friends and associates who espoused very radical left-wing views. We can always hope that the leopard will change his spots, but it's not particularly likely.

Neglectful

Yes, I've been neglecting you, dear readers. I must apologize. Between a nice vacation with family a couple of weeks ago and a couple of weeks of general indolence, it has not been a productive month here at Recycled Sip. This doesn't mean that I haven't been contemplating things to write about, it just means that I haven't taken the time to put pixels to screen.

I had a nice lengthy piece to write about how people who voted for him are beginning to realize that President Obama isn't who they thought he was, but really, you can read the same thing all over the internet. I may post it anyway, eventually, perhaps over the weekend. The problem is that I do some of my best thinking at work, where I don't have access to a computer keyboard. By the time I get home, I tend to lose focus.

I just watched country singer John Rich on the Glen Beck show, singing his new song "Shutting Detroit Down." It has a very powerful message. I happened to hear it the other night on the local Americana/bluegrass/country radio program that I listen to on the way to work on Sunday nights. And yes, normally I'm asleep right now, but the inconsiderate yahoo across the street was blat-blat-blatting his noisy ATV around 4:30 and woke me up. The only silver lining if Obama wrecks the economy and drives the cost of gasoline back up over $4.00 a gallon would be that the yahoos might not be able to afford to play with their noisy, obnoxious toys.

RTFB!

Hey, remember that stimulus bill that Congress rammed through in the dead of night, without taking the time to read it? Well, it turns out that that same bill specifically authorized those controversial bonuses to AIG executives. And now Congress is on its high horse, calling the AIG CEO on the carpet this morning, and pontificating about how they are so outraged by the bonuses and threatening to implement a special 100% tax on those bonuses to get the money back, even though that would almost certainly be unconstitutional.

Well, in tech support there's a phrase commonly used when someone asks a stupid question because they haven't read the documentation: RTFM: Read The F'ing Manual. And the corollary for Congress is quite simple: RTFB: Read The F'ing Bill! If our elected "public servants" (ha!) had taken the time to actually read the bill, they might have realized that this little ticking public relations time bomb was in it. This raises the question: What other stink bombs are waiting to detonate? Well, however many it may be, it couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch. The very same crooked congress-critters that are screeching the loudest are the exact same ones who were responsible for oversight of our financial system and who also received large campaign contributions from those same companies they voted to bail out later. Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) was the largest recipient of campaign contributions from AIG, netting over $100,000 from them. So if you hear someone like Dodd bleating about his outrage, it's okay to yell at the television and tell him to STFU, using the full phrase in all its F-word glory. Trust me, I already have.

Ruins

My brother Karl was down here last week, and he brought quite of few pictures on his laptop computer, since he had bought one of those electronic picture frames for my father and was going to copy all of the pictures to the memory card that goes in the frame. Among the pictures were some from several years ago when Karl visited Athens, including some taking in front of the Acropolis. It reminded me of my visit to Rome back in the 1980s, and walking through the ruins of the Forum and other ancient Roman sites like Pompeii.

At the time, I wondered what it would be like to visit America's cities in a thousand years or so and see what the ruins of our civilization might look like. I also wondered how humbling it must feel to live in the long shadows of ancestors who were far more powerful than their descendants. Greece and Italy are fairly unimportant countries in the modern scheme of things, compared to the empires that their forefathers held across the Mediterranean Sea and beyond; they're the equivalent of small children playing dress-up who appear to be swallowed up in adult-sized clothes.

Well, we no longer have to wait a millennium to find out. There's a photo essay at Time magazine's web site by French photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, titled Detroit's Beautiful, Horrible Decline. It's a saddening portrait of forgotten places in a once-great city that is slowly crumbling into ruins. There are probably pockets of rot like this in just about every major city in America, but they're far more pervasive in the Motor City.

The photographers write:

"Ruins are the visible symbols and landmarks of our societies and their changes...the volatile result of the change of eras and the fall of empires. This fragility leads us to watch them one very last time: to be dismayed, or to admire, it makes us wonder about the permanence of things."

To paraphrase Shelley, "My name is Henry Ford, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair..."

Lonelier Than the Maytag Repairman

[Phones ringing]

"Treasury, Timothy Geithner, please hold."

"Treasury, Timothy Geithner, please hold."

"Treasury, Timothy Geithner, please hold."

"Treasury, Timothy Geithner, please hold."

"Treasury, Timothy Geithner, please hold."

"Treasury, Timothy Geithner, please hold."

"Treasury, Timothy Geithner, please hold."

"Treasury, Timothy Geithner, please hold."

"Hello, this is Timothy Geithner, thank you for holding, how may I help you? Oh, hello, Congressman. You need someone from Treasury for a Banking Committee hearing? I'm sorry, Congressman, but right now, I'm the only one here and someone has to answer the phone. But I'll send someone over just as soon as we get someone through the vetting process. Thanks, Congressman, goodbye."

"Hello, this is Timothy Geithner, thank you for holding, how may I help you? Oh, good morning, Mr. President. Yes, I'm working on that list of appointees, but we keep having problems with, um, people not being fully forthcoming on all of their taxes... Uh, yes, sir, that does seem to be going around, doesn't it? No, sir, none of these jobs are as easy as we thought they were. I'll keep at it, sir. Maybe I can get a deputy secretary or two in the next week or so. It's not like the economy's really doing anything right now, so it doesn't matter too much, right? Thank you, sir, goodbye."

"Hello, this is Timothy Geithner, thank you for holding, how may I help you? Oh, good morning, Senator... The banking bailout plan? Well, sir, that's something that one of my deputy treasury secretaries would be working on, if I could ever get one confirmed. We had two drop out just the other day.

"I don't understand it, Senator: We have this exciting new administration, all of this hope and change, and all of the brightest and best seem to be taking one look at the problems we're facing and deciding that they'd rather stay in the private sector... Yes, Senator, very discouraging. Thank you, Senator, goodbye."

"Hello, this is Timothy Geithner, thank you for holding, how may I help you? New York Times? Oh, things are going great here at Treasury, just great! Couldn't be better!"

[Puts phone aside, fakes another voice]

Fake voice: "Mr. Geithner, we have the President on the other line."

"Oh, sorry, I'm going to have to go now, but we'll get back to you real soon. 'Bye!"

Happy Birthday, Barbie!

It was 50 years ago today that the Barbie doll made its debut at the New York Toy Show. The favorite doll of many little girls for the past half century is also a favorite of collectors. BBC News has an article about a woman in Germany who has over 6,000 of the dolls, basically filling her entire house with them. Needless to say, her 17-year-old daughter isn't as enthused as her mother is:

As Bettina enthuses, there is a passive indifference from her 17-year old-daughter, Melissa.

Like most young girls, she liked Barbie once. And like most young girls, she grew out of it.

But given the scale of her mum's collection, she is beyond being embarrassed and discreetly heads to her room with a friend.

Well, all teenagers are embarrassed by their parents, but I'd say that Melissa has more reason to be than many.

Growing up in a household that only had boys, we didn't have Barbie dolls. We had G.I. Joes, back in the day when G.I. Joe was the same height as a Barbie doll, before they shrank them down. The military action figures (NOT dolls!) didn't have flowing locks like Barbie; their hair was plastic, or else some kind of short fuzz. And of course, they had cool stuff like guns and grenades. We also had the Major Matt Mason ("Mattel's Man In Space!") action figures. This was back in the late 1960s, of course, when every kid wanted to be an astronaut.

So are Barbie dolls bad for fostering an unreasonable body image to young girls or are they good for allowing Barbie to have 108 different careers and showing those same young girls that many different career paths are open to them besides homemaker? (We won't go into Barbie's mid-life crisis back in 2004 when she threw poor Ken over for the Australian pool boy.)

My Tuesday Rant

I sent this to a friend yesterday in order to vent. I felt a tiny bit better afterward, but only a tiny bit:

Well, Monday was one hell of an expensive day for me. In the time between putting in the order on Friday night to move all of my retirement funds to the G fund, and the time it became effective Monday, my funds dropped another $3,000, pushing my losses to around 30% of what I had in January 2008. Needless to say, I'm not happy at all. I'm kicking myself for not doing this back in November. I'd still have a lot more of my hard-earned money than I do now.

Right now, I see the economy (and the stock market, which is shorthand for the economy as a whole) looking a lot like one of those rollercoasters that went from the ground all the way to the top, way up high, and now it's plunging down, down, down. We've got our hands up, the air's rushing past us, we're all screaming, and now we can see that the rollercoaster isn't going to stop at ground level, but it's plunging into a dark hole in the ground. How far down does it go? Hell if I know, I just want to get off this goddamn thing. But we're strapped in tight, and now we're screaming in the darkness...

My mistake was being much too optimistic about the economy being able to come back any time soon. I should have realized how the market was going to react to someone who it perceives (correctly) as being anti-business. Obama and crew talk about soaking the rich, but it's middle-class people like me whose retirement funds are melting away like snow in July. In Obama's America, everyone will be equal: Those who have retirement accounts will be no better off than those who don't.

And frankly, I'm not sure it's worth it to save money any more, because with the coming inflation, money saved will be worth less than it was. Might as well live like a grasshopper and spend every dime, then ask the government to bail us out when we run out of money. That seems to be the way things work in America these days. If you're an ant, saving for tomorrow and paying your bills responsibly, you're a sucker. I've got to figure out something to invest in as a hedge against inflation. Maybe guns and ammo. I'm not a firearms enthusiast like some of the guys at work, but maybe it's time to become one... :-(

"He Won The Bet"

That's what will probably end up on the tombstone of the late Sergey Tuganov (Yes, that's really his name! I'm not making that up!) who collapsed and died after a 12-hour marathon threesome, during which he consumed an entire bottle of Viagra. The maximum safe dosage is 100 mg, according to the doctor on the Fox News Channel, which is either one or two pills.

It seems that the 28-year-old man had a $4300 bet with the two women about whether he could keep them satisfied non-stop for the entire twelve hours. Tuganov won the bet, but had a heart attack and died minutes later; it was the ultimate Pyrrhic phallic victory.

I'm sure that well over 90% of the world's men would like to go out that way, although certainly at a more advanced age. Live fast, die young, leave a good-looking corpse? No, I want to look like Keith Richards and exit the stage as a centenarian.

That all begs the question: How the hell are they going to get the casket closed?

UPDATE: The comments at Fark.com (where Tuganov is referred to as "a modern day John Henry", among other things) are priceless.

I was particularly amused by this one, by a commenter named Tortilla Burger:

Today we salute you, Mr. Sex Mad Viagra Orgy Man.
(Mr. Sex Mad Viagra Orgy Man)
Some men are finished in two minutes and promptly fall asleep afterwards.
But you guzzled a bottle of Viagra and kept it going for 12 straight hours.
(Two women at the same time!)
There's no better way to leave this Earth than after a half-day threeway sexathon.
(Damn my hips are tired)
Perhaps you'd have lived if you gave up after the first 6 hours, but sometimes a man's got to stand by his principles.
(Other things are standing too)
So crack open an ice-cold Bud Light, O Beast With Three Backs. Let's face it, there's nothing you could do to top this anyway.
(Mr. Sex Mad Viagra Orgy Man)

Worst Idea of the Week

They had to go a long way to beat out President Obama's bloated multi-trillion dollar spending orgy budget, but the adult film company Vivid managed to come up with a worse idea: They offered "Octomom" Nadya Suleman up to $1 million to star in one of their adult movies.

Now, there is a market out there for porn flicks involving M.I.L.F.s, but most of them have had a few years to get their bodies back into shape. Anyone who saw the "belly" pics of the pregnant Suleman would realize that she undoubtedly hasn't had the opportunity to do so. If she was on her hands and knees, her belly would be dragging on the floor, which is not an appealing visual even to the kinkiest perv. The stretch marks on her stretch marks have stretch marks!

And if you think her belly is stretched out, well, that's probably not the only thing; after popping out 14 children, eight of them in the last litter, even a porn star-sized tool would rattle around in that thang like a clapper in a church bell. Please, Octomom, keep that last shred of dignity and spare our eyes.

Had Enough?

Me, too. I've been watching my Thrift Savings Plan (the federal version of a 401(k) plan) account dwindling over the past 14 months. It's down more than 25% from what it was in January 2008, and that's not including the money that I put into it since then. I've had enough. I was in the Lifecycle 2020 fund, which has a variety of investments of varying risk, set up for someone planning to retire around 2020, growing more risk-averse as time passes and retirement gets closer.

I had been thinking that Dow 7000 was going to be my floor, where I decided to get the hell out of the market, but as I watched the market continue to tank today, I realized that things aren't going to get better any time soon. With Obama and the drunk-on-power Democrats running things, the financial markets are only going to get worse. The left-wing soak-the-rich policies they are advocating are only going to make things worse, not better. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, and if there was, it would be an oncoming train.

So today, I took all of my remaining money out of that fund and put it all into the G fund, which is invested in low-interest government bonds and is the only fund guaranteed not to lose money. I also changed all of my future allocations to the G fund. I'm voting "no confidence" on Obama and his motley crew. I'm not going to even think about getting into any other fund until the Dow goes back over 9000. Sure, I'm not going to be able to make the money back when the market eventually starts going back up, but I won't lose any more money either if the market falls to 6000 or 5000 or God only knows how low. Screw it. I've lost enough, and it was money I worked damn hard for. My only regret is that I didn't do this on November 5th.

Wanna See Something REALLY Scary?

It was in a post I saw over the weekend at Gateway Pundit. Seems that President Obama is planning on getting the ball rolling this week on his cap-and-trade carbon plan to fight "global warming." It will, among other things, put punitive taxes on coal, which is used by many power plants to generate electricity. A Department of Energy study shows that the cost of coal for power generation could go up by between 161% and 413%. This would not only cause up to 4 million people to lose their jobs, increasing unemployment by 2.7%, but also would cause the electric bills of most Americans to skyrocket: They could double, triple, quadruple or even quintuple! Businesses would also be affected and would have to pass on the additional costs to their customers. Inflation would skyrocket as well. You think the economy is bad now? Watch what happens if this cap-and-trade plan is implemented. The economy took a major hit when gasoline went from $2.00 to $4.00 per gallon over a couple of years. What do you think will happen if electricity costs increase to something between two and five times their current rates, virtually overnight?

A lot of people are all in favor of "saving the planet," but how are they going to feel about it when their electric bill is almost as much as their mortgage or rent? Are they going to care about "saving the polar bears" when old folks on fixed incomes start dying because their power is cut off when they can't pay their bills, like that old codger in Michigan who froze to death a few weeks back? If Obama pushes this abomination through, I predict a run on tar, feathers and pitchforks among the citizenry.

Clyde Explains It All

It seems that two nuclear submarines have collided in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, one British, one French. The BBC story about the accident notes that "HMS Vanguard and Le Triomphant were badly damaged in the crash in heavy seas earlier this month."

This is what happens when you have people who drive on the wrong side of the ocean.

Presidents Day

Happy Presidents Day! (I'm assuming that there wasn't anything in the Democrats' stimulus bill changing the name of the holiday to Il Duce's Day.)

Well, it's been a couple of days since the Democrats in Congress passed their $787 billion stimulus bill, which none of them had actually read all of the way through. It would have been impossible for them to actually read it, since it was over 1100 pages long and only was completed late Thursday night; there wasn't sufficient time for ANYONE to actually read it. But no, they had to vote on it immediately, so that Nancy Pelosi could catch her plane to Italy for her vacation trip. The Founding Fathers must be spinning in their graves at such irresponsibility by Congress.

And Italy is a very, very appropriate destination for Pelosi, considering the path that our nation is on now. It is, after all, the original home of fascism, and as our government continues to bail out and buy out banks and businesses, it looks more and more fascistic all the time. If you haven't read Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism yet, now might be a good time to do so. Well, actually, it would have been better if everyone had read it before November 4th, but that's water under the bridge.

Despite the Democrats in Congress ramming the bill through so quickly, President Obama wasn't around to sign the bill; he'll sign it on Tuesday when he returns from his weekend trip to Chicago. This tells you exactly how urgent the bill was, if it could wait three days to be signed, after there was less than a day for Congress to go over the pork-stuffed monstrosity. It wasn't a stimulus package with some pork in it, it was a pork package with some stimulus in it. Most of the money being spent won't create jobs; it's going for every Democrat wish list program under the sun.

What's in the bill? We don't know yet. There are bound to be any number of nasty surprises in it for those who are not feeding at the Democrat trough, things that will funnel money to questionable and partisan purposes, things that will advance the growth of the power of the federal government over the lives of the American people. They, after all, are wiser than you: Why shouldn't they take more of your money and decide how it should be spent? You'd just waste it, after all, and spend it irresponsibly pursuing happiness. Congress and government bureacrats, however, will be fully accountable for how they spend your...

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Sorry, I just couldn't keep a straight face any longer. You have to laugh or else you'd cry.

We're all liberal fascists now. God Save the United States of America.

Happy 200th Birthday, Abraham Lincoln!

You're looking good, big guy!

You know, when I was a kid, this was a holiday...

Thoughts on Tuesday's Presidential Visit

I've been letting some thoughts percolate for a while regarding President Obama's visit to Fort Myers.

First of all, when the President comes to your town, it's a big deal, whether you voted for him or not. Roads will be closed, security will be tight, and the President won't see a whole lot of your town other than what he can see through the tinted windows of the Presidential Limousine. I doubt if President Obama spent more than ten minutes outside in Fort Myers in the entire time he was here, which was too bad. It was a beautiful day, but he was whisked from Air Force One to the limo, with a few minutes of meet-and-greet for local bigwigs, then he was off to the venue, where the limo went into an underground parking garage and inside the building. Afterwards, it was reversed.

One nice touch was that the motorcade went right down Martin Luther King Boulevard, which was Anderson Avenue up until several years ago when the main street running through the historically black neighborhood of Dunbar was renamed. When it became evident that the law enforcement presence was concentrated along that route, many people correctly divined that the President would be coming their way. There were probably a couple of thousand people along the road, cheering as the limo whizzed past them. It wasn't much, but it was deeply symbolic for many Dunbar residents. I'm sure that President Obama is the first president to ever go down that street, and those who saw him were thrilled about it.

For the President, of course, it becomes routine. He doesn't see any moving vehicles other than his own motorcade, because all nearby traffic is blocked off for security reasons. He doesn't see a red light, and won't for the entire four year term of his presidency. He is not just a VIP, he is the Most Important Person, as far as the Secret Service and local law enforcement are concerned.

It all comes with a downside, of course: The President's day is tightly scripted, and his time is not his own. He has some input into his schedule, of course, but many things are obligatory. Every word he speaks and every action he takes will be under the microscope. And wherever he goes, it is an EVENT, with prior coordination with the locals and scheduling down to the minute. He can't just say, "Hey, what's down that road? Let's go take a look." Security concerns won't allow it.

And no matter where he goes, he will have a Secret Service escort with him. That doesn't end when he leaves office, either; former presidents also have Secret Service details. For the rest of his life, the President will never be able to live a "normal" life; the loss of spontaneity is one of the costs of winning the highest office in the land.

An Ironic Twist

I saw in the L.A. Times that federal judges may force California to cut their prison population by up to 40%, leading to the release of up to 57,000 inmates. It seems that some of the inmates had filed suit, claiming that prison overcrowding was preventing them from getting proper health care and mental health treatment.

Now, if it was up to me, the first thing I would do would be to release every single non-violent drug offender. That would probably come pretty close to cutting the inmate population down to what the Feds want. Locking up non-violent drug offenders is, to put it mildly, stupid. People who have harmed no one but themselves are being branded as felons, and the taxpayers have to pay for the cost of their incarceration. It's a waste of money.

The ironic twist is that if California has to release 57,000 inmates, where will they then get their health care and mental health treatment? Considering that they will be ex-cons going into a tough job market, they'll have a hard time finding employment. Sure, it's all skittles and beer for the inmates remaining behind in their less-crowded cells, but the ex-cons suddenly on the street may find themselves even worse off than they were in prison.

Obama Coming Tuesday

I just saw on the White House press conference that President Obama will be coming to Fort Myers on Tuesday for some kind of town hall meeting to plug the stimulus package. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs noted that a year ago, the unemployment rate here was 7%, but that it is now up to 10%.

During the housing boom, this area had one of the lowest unemployment rates in the nation, because everyone was building houses. With the crash of the housing market a couple of years ago, the people who used to work in construction were thrown out of work. This area had been overbuilt for the population, but everyone thought that they were going to get rich from real estate, buying properties and turning around and flipping them for big profits. It worked during the housing bubble, but when the bubble burst, the speculators were ruined. And because they had built so many new houses that nobody could afford to buy, many of them stood empty. Even more were abandoned half-completed.

I hope that Obama's people do their homework and understand the sort of questions they are likely to field at the town hall meeting. While both Vice-President Biden and Governor Palin made appearances here during the campaign, this will be Obama's first visit to Fort Myers. The good news for him is that that he should get some nice weather, much nicer than Washington. The bad news is that he won't have much time here to enjoy it.

Page One... (Updated and Bumped)

Of the new Obama administration job application:

1. Have you paid your taxes?

2. ALL of them?

3. Are you SURE?

4. Has your spouse paid all of his/her taxes?

5. Has everyone else in your immediate family paid all of their taxes?

(If you answered 'YES' to all five questions, continue on to Page 2.)

Hopes Daschled

It wasn't a good day for President Obama yesterday, as two of his nominees bit the dust due to tax problems. Former Sen. Tom Daschle, who had been tapped to become Secretary of Health and Human Services, and Nancy Killefer, who was supposed to become the newly-created Chief Performance Officer, both withdrew their names from consideration after their tax problems came to light. This was after Timothy Geithner survived his tax scandal to become the new Secretary of the Treasury (which oversees the Internal Revenue Service). As many people have asked on the internet in recent days, "Don't ANY of these people pay their taxes?" Or is tax-paying just for "the little people" like you and me? All I can say is that if Leona Helmsley was still alive, she'd probably have been nominated for a cabinet post!

Pity poor President Obama! He announced upon taking office that he would have the most ethical administration in history, but alas, all he had to work with to create an ethical administration were Democrat politicians and apparatchiks. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Not that the Republicans are much better; if Diogenes were to come back to Earth seeking an honest man, he might as well just skip Washington.

Visualizing Michael Phelps' Next Commercial

When I saw this picture of Olympic gold medal-winning swimmer Michael Phelps:



All I could say was, "Dude! I hope that's a water-pipe, man!"

Now, some people worry that this faux pas could cause him to lose some commercial endorsements. However, as I see it, this broadens his appeal to a whole new audience: All of those people who were too stoned to watch him during the Olympics. I foresee something like this:

"Dude! It's Michael Phelps, man! When 4:20 rolls around at my house, I usually get chronically hungry. When I do, I like to break out a big bowl of Orville Redenbacher's Gourmet Popcorn. Then, I like to hit Burger King for a Whopper with cheese and some onion rings. Super size it, dude! Then I like to have a big bag of Doritos, original cheese flavor, and for dessert... Dude, you gotta try these Oreo Cakesters! They rock! So for now, hang loose, and I'll catch you on the flip flop..."