Sunday, January 17. 2010
While the rest of the country has been freezing, it has been near 70F and sunny in San Diego. But, all good things must end: it’s supposed to pour this week, possibly the most in several decades, our Chargers’ winning streak just came to an end and the NY Jets will proceed to the final four playoff for the SuperBowl slot, and worst of all my mother-in-law arrives tomorrow for 3 weeks.
I’d burn her broom but then she couldn’t leave. Started me thinking of Ernie Doe’s 1961 hit “Mother-in-Law.”
Below the fold is another Ernie Doe fav “Here Come The Girls”. NSFW
Continue reading "Sad Day In Sun Diego"
Our employees in DC indeed seem disconnected from the majority of the folks they represent. From Noonan's Slug the Obama Story 'Disconnect':
In a time when the people of Massachusetts have real concerns about their ability to make a living, stuff like the Schumer letter is just more evidence of a party's disconnect.
Politics is about policy. It's not about who's emotional and who cries or makes you cry. It's not about big political parties and the victories they need in order to rule. It's not about going on some ideological toot, which is what the health-care bill is, hoping the people will someday see and appreciate your higher wisdom.
In a way, Mr. Obama's disconnection is a sign of the times... If the president wants to lead toward something better, he should try listening. If you can't connect through the words you speak, at least you can do it through your ability to hear.
Why the liberal Cape Cod Times endorses Scott Brown, at Powerline, and why a small newspaper's opinion matters. (Nothing to do with Coakley's inconceivable flub that Curt Schilling is a Yankee fan.)
I think the O's frantic last-minute visit to MA today will help Brown, but we understand that the purpose is not to persuade, but to get out the unenthusiastic Dem vote.
Related: America needs one brave Dem
Related: Coakley counting on union muscle to win. No doubt. Did you ever hear of "union brains" applied to an election?
Related: Hundreds turn out to greet Brown in Kennedy territory - Hyannis.
Related from Auster, who refuses to get his hopes up (me neither, but I lie to myself all the time):
The special Massachusetts election will be over on the night of January 19. Meaning that, if Brown wins, the signature measure of Obama's stunningly radical presidency will have been effectively killed exactly one year after Obama's inauguration. But, nope, I'm not investing any hopes in the prospect of Brown's winning. No sirree Bob.
Related from Steyn (the whole thing is hilarious):
America's preparing to celebrate the first anniversary of Good King Barack the Hopeychanger's reign by electing a Republican?
In Massachusetts?
In what the tin-eared plonkers of the Democrat machine still insist on calling "Ted Kennedy's seat"?
 Our dear pal Sippican is moving from the MA seashore to central Maine on the mighty Androscoggin River.
If there is good grouse country nearby, I will be a visitor.
Rumford, to be specific (pop 6000). Whether he has a reason or not I have no idea. Rumford is an interesting old lumber mill town, with turn of the century mill company housing developments which would be of interest to any student of the history of town planning.
Photo is the Sipp family's new house. I like it. It's not a house - it's a home.
But does it get broadband?
Giotto's Wedding Feast at Cana, a 1304 fresco in Padua.
John 2:1-11
2:1 On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there.
2:2 Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding.
2:3 When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, "They have no wine."
2:4 And Jesus said to her, "Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come."
2:5 His mother said to the servants, "Do whatever he tells you."
2:6 Now standing there were six stone water jars for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons.
2:7 Jesus said to them, "Fill the jars with water." And they filled them up to the brim.
2:8 He said to them, "Now draw some out, and take it to the chief steward." So they took it.
2:9 When the steward tasted the water that had become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the steward called the bridegroom
2:10 and said to him, "Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now."
2:11 Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.
Saturday, January 16. 2010
Something America needs more of: good shoeshine stands. This one is in Grand Central Station, NY - a train station which hosts several shoeshine stands of various styles. Those guys do a better job than you could ever do yourself, and a good, solid, comfortable pair of shoes is like a good old friend. Gotta care for them.
I am told that high quality leather shoes, well-cared for and never worn two days in a row (the 2 lbs. of foot sweat per day is a problem for leather's endurance), should last 40 years or more. I own about three pairs of 20+ year-old dress shoes which are just entering their prime years.
 Scott Brown for Senator! Wasn't the O in CT a month ago to raise money for Dodd? Worked out well. Obama to Massachusetts to deliver the coup the grace?
Related: Martha Coakley says Devout Catholics 'Probably shouldn't work in the emergency room'. What a moron. How about Moslems?
Eureka! I am a Conservative (and I never realized it). Don't feel badly - it happened to many of us over the years.
Climate change! More China provinces plan power rationing -report
Heather: Chicago’s Real Crime Story - Why decades of community organizing haven’t stemmed the city’s youth violence
Not Ideas About The Thing But The Thing Itself
At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.
The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow...
It would have been outside.
It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier-mache...
The sun was coming from the outside.
That scrawny cry--It was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,
Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.
It takes a minimum of three legs to build a stool, and a minimum of three logs to build a good fire.
A BD daughter recently learned this basic Boy Scout fact after failing to start holiday fires. It requires a tent of wood to hold in enough heat to produce and ignite the heated gasses which create the rapid oxidation we call a flame. The flame is the burning gasses. The complex and mysterious chemistry of ignition is the key to flame.
The gasses, of course, are hydrocarbons. Wood is nothing but unripened oil or pre-coal. I explained to her (she does not seem to have a chemistry brain yet) that slow oxidation is called "rotting," slightly quicker oxygenation is called "smoldering," quick oxidation is called "fire," and extremely quick oxidation is called "explosion."
Medium controlled oxidation is called "life," and why we exhale CO2 (hydrocarbons + oxygen = mostly CO2 + H20 + heat/energy), and why we are above room temperature most of the time. It's an exothermic chemical reaction. We animals are masterfully designed to control and harness these chemistries in our bodies.
Friday, January 15. 2010
The people of Haiti are difficult to help now, but they have always been difficult to help.
If you want to do something now, we recommend World Vision.
Part of an extraordinary long quote from A Woman in Berlin in a piece at Never Yet Melted:
...I long ago lost my childhood piety, so that God and the Beyond have become mere symbols and abstractions. Should I believe in progress? Yes, to biggger and better bombs. The happiness of the greater number? Yes, for Petka and his ilk. An idyll in a quiet corner? Sure, for people who comb the fringes of their rugs. Possessions, contentment?
I have to keep from laughing, homeless urban nomad that I am. Love? Lies trampled on the ground. And were it ever to rise again I would always be anxious, could never find true refuge, would never again dare hope for permanence.
Perhaps art, toiling away in the service of form? Yes, for those who have the calling, but I don’t. I’m just an ordinary laborer, I have to be satisfied with that. All I can do is touch my small circle and be a good friend. What’s left is just to wait for the end. Still the dark and amazing adventure of life is beckoning. I’ll stick around, out of curiosity and because I enjoy breathing and stretching my healthy limbs.
Many conservative commentators have been applauding Google’s newfound resistance to China’s internet controls, and hoping that the Obama administration takes heed. Although Google’s speaking out is to be welcomed, at least for again highlighting the issue, Google and its US hi-tech compatriots, like CISCO and Yahoo, have been hip-deep in furthering domestic repression in despotic countries across the globe, including China.
In this case, the Obama administration actually has cause to blame Bush. I wrote many columns in 2005-6 about this freedom repression complicity by US hi-tech leaders (see below the fold, at Read More, for a link list I just compiled for another researcher) with the looking-away by the Bush administration which was more interested in foreign trade than foreign freedoms.
But, there’s still more to the story. China’s house internet provider, Baidu, has eaten Google’s lunch in China and is expanding globally. Baidu’s stock has widely outperformed Google’s. Google’s new verbal resistance is more a competitive move to highlight to other governments Baidu’s role in repressing free searches on its search engine, and to increase Google’s prospects in China by getting permission from China to offer more freedom of searches than Baidu. There may be some loosening, but that skeptically remains to be seen, as China has more than one way to skin Internet freedom and will.
Google and other US companies are duplicitous in their dealings with despotic regimes, hiding their furtherance of repression behind free trade and freedom rhetoric that is hollow.
Updates: The Wall Street Journal has a useful overview of Google in China. Congressman Chris Smith, a liberal Republican from New Jersey, has long led the fight for human rights and internet freedom, including his Global Online Freedom Act. As reported in the links below, Google like other US hi-tech companies opposed it. Now, Google is in favor. Also, see China's cyberspace policy.
Continue reading "Google’s Duplicitous China Policy (Updates)"
 Maggie's Farm has the reputation of being a dog-friendly - if not dog-written - website.
How about dog-friendly hotels? There are tons of them, and I am not sure that everyone knows how easy they are to find.
I decided just to check those on the I-95 corridor.
There is a Pet Friendly Hotels site.
Photo is my favorite breed. Friendly? They will knock down strangers just to kiss and lick their faces.
If you get to thinkin' you're a person of some influence, try orderin' somebody else's dog around.
Anon, via Theo
Toon above via Theo
Anchoress: “Haiti is the broken bloody body of Christ”
Related, from Why is Haiti So Poor? (h/t, Marginal Rev):
Haiti, once called The Jewel of the Antilles, was the richest colony in the entire world. Economists estimate that in the 1750s Haiti provided as much as 50% of the Gross National Product of France. The French imported sugar, coffee, cocoa, tobacco, cotton, the dye indigo and other exotic products. In France they were refined, packaged and sold all over Europe. Incredible fortunes were made from this tiny colony on the island of Hispaniola.
How could Haiti have once been the source of such wealth and today be the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere? How could this land that was once so productive today be semi-barren? How did "The Jewel of the Antilles" become the Caribbean's hell-hole?
A Massachusetts Miracle looks possible. Not likely, but plenty possible. Related: Coakley does not have a good record as prosecutor.
Related: Dems Sucker Punch Mass Union Members
Fear Factor - The ideologues in Washington are scaring Americans.
Every group effort or organization has its obvious jerk. But maybe it's not so simple.
Climategate: How they hid the effect of the sun. Hid the sun? Related from Driscoll: It Was Only A Matter Of Time
Hey, Mr. Taliban: We aren't looking for a fair fight.
Thursday, January 14. 2010
Park Avenue, Midtown, tonight. Plenty of lights on in those bankers' offices.
 The history of cranes and tower cranes here.
h/t, Samizdata
I haven’t been enthusiastic about prior conservative free-market approaches as a solution to healthcare spending's pressure on the economy or individuals. Conservative proposals are, rather, a mitigator of overuse leading to overspending. Through “more skin in the game,” conservative proposals cause users to think twice about how much is really necessary.
The liberal approaches, by contrast, after the application of their best minds, are now proven to go in the opposite direction from cost reduction or improved healthcare. They lead to higher costs and just benefit a fraction of the uninsured, while vastly increasing the power of the government to impose its rationing generalizations upon individual needs – which vary -- while further insulating users from sensible involvement.
With HT to Instapundit, “The High Cost of No Price” from the American Enterprise Institute.
Economists have shown that if a good’s price is zero or decreasing, then the demand for this good will likely increase. In 2008, consumers were only directly responsible for 11.9 percent of total national healthcare expenditures, down from 43 percent in 1965, according to new data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. This means that someone other than consumers pays roughly 88 percent of all healthcare costs, giving consumers little incentive to mind costs and much incentive to over-consume.
From the NIMH:
The search over the past decade for genes behind mental illness has led to the realization that mental disorders are not discrete conditions with specific causes. Rather, they are the result of interactions between risk factors that affect development; psychiatric symptoms can arise from many causes and are more interrelated than current disease models allow. By 2020, this insight, which has been slow to take hold, will have transformed how doctors understand and treat psychiatric conditions.
Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.
Anon, from Theo's old farmer quotes. Ain't that the truth.
Like that word. Re the Met, at Classical:
I suppose if Christians want parity in respect, we should be recruiting our own brigades of ax-swingers and splodeydopes, but I did a little reading and apparently our founder's view on disrespecting our creed was some p***y-a** nonsense about "turning the other cheek" (like that's going to strike fear into the hearts of infidels). And as far as I can tell, none of our sects have any proviso for a bevy of pliant virgins on higher planes in the event of pious detonation. So Jihad For Jesus is going to be an uphill climb, to say the least. Meanwhile, I guess we'll have to settle for the smug moral superiority of suffering figurative slings and arrows in both cheeks.
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