Thursday, March 4. 2010
The Endeavor, off Newport in 2004
Our recent post on this year's America's Cup race in Valencia got me to reviewing the history of J-Class boats, often known as "J-boats." An excellent summary here, which takes note of the surviving Js.
I've seen 'em up close, but never sailed one. Open for an invitation, though. I do know how to trim a jib but that monster foresail is one big Genoa, not a jib.
Hi there. Are you a Lefty? Do you tend to get all wee-wee'd up when you hear Sarah Palin talk?
If so, then this video is not for you.
The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false face for the urge to rule it.
H.L. Mencken
 Many cheerful facts about aging
Obsolete: The US Mail
Why recycling glass is silly and useless
Reporters used to be tough guys. This one sounds like a big baby - plus he doesn't have a clue
US now #1 in natural gas production. Hey - it's organic!
Not predicted by models: Sea ice thickens
Prediction of the intertubes, c. 1995
Lowry: Clever rhetoric from the O:
It's all rhetorically clever as far as it goes. But the problem here has never been the salesmanship, but the bill itself, which is an anchor around anyone trying to sell it.
The problem with one-party government: Led by New York, big-government blue states sink deeper into corruption.
Why can't we sell our own bone marrow?
Mankiw:
Americans, as well as citizens of many other advanced nations, now spend about twice as many years in retirement as they did a generation or two ago. During that time, they expect the government to provide them with income support and healthcare. Is it any wonder that we face serious fiscal problems?
Why does this Tea Party thing drive Libs crazy?
Wednesday, March 3. 2010
A Pudd'n Guy who knows his math. An easy investment in a lifetime of free air travel.
BTW, it would save us all some linking time and trouble if y'all would just check Vanderleun's American Digest daily, or twice, or thrice daily, same as you do Maggie's.
 Just stumbled on this 2001 book by Ted Dalrymple: Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass.
I think I'll track down a copy. It's the first book I have heard of from a Psychiatrist taking a look at the topic, and Dalrymple has spent much of his career in tattoo land.
I assume he is talking about Brit families of multi-generational poverty and dysfunction rather than the temporarily poor (eg the unemployed, new immigrants, grad students, people down on their luck, etc) or the electively poor (eg hippies, small farmers and farm help, spendthrifts, Maine fishing and hunting guides, aspiring artists and actors, etc) who together make up much of the American poverty stats.
Addendum: By coincidence I see from Insty that Dalrymple has a new book:
IN THE MAIL: From Theodore Dalrymple, The New Vichy Syndrome: Why European Intellectuals Surrender to Barbarism.
Can he say that nowadays? Oh, I forgot. He's in the USA now, isn't he?
Photo: Ted Dalrymple, aka Anthony Daniels MD, retired Psychiatrist
It's an 11,500 year-old temple in southeastern Turkey. h/t to a good piece at Protein.
 - The Mediterranean population of the Bluefin Tuna - "Tonno" - the King of Fish, is headed for extinction due to overfishing. Their vulnerability is that they all congregate in one place for breeding, and helos direct the netting. EU politics will permit that extinction to occur. A damn shame. Of course, the regular Atlantic population is headed for the same fate.
- And Bottlenose Dolphins aren't really fish, but the Japanese in Taji kill 23,000 of them each year. This is not stewardship.
- Another fish tale: An Entirely Synthetic Fish: How Rainbow Trout Beguiled America and Overran the World.
Apparatchiks who pretend to be revolutionaries — that’s an awful lot of the press these days.
Prof. Reynolds, here.
It's time we did a plug for a wholesome site, The Borderline Sociopathic Blog for Boys. Photo is not from it, but sorta could be:
 Post-industrial ghost towns. Why won't these folks move for jobs, like most people do? Texas has tons of work.
Krauthammer on Congress.
Sowell: Alice in Healthcare
Related, The WSJ's Abuse of Power begins:
A string of electoral defeats and the great unpopularity of ObamaCare can't stop Democrats from their self-appointed rendezvous with liberal destiny—ramming a bill through Congress on a narrow partisan vote. What we are about to witness is an extraordinary abuse of traditional Senate rules to pass a bill merely because they think it's good for the rest of us, and because they fear their chance to build a European welfare state may never come again.
Wilkinson gets it:
A lot of people are saying government is broken. They’re mainly saying it because the Democratic health care bill isn’t going to pass in a form that gives most Democrats what they wanted. The argument, in its general form, goes like this: There is this huge problem! My team’s favored solution to the problem is politically infeasible. So, politics is broken! When you put it like that, it’s evidently a pretty silly argument.
To get a better grip on the debate behind the debate I think you need to understand that big entitlement politics is about enacting policy that generates a kind of lock-in effect for a new power-shifting political equilibrium. Savvy political operators know that big entitlements, once established, create their own political demand. That’s why, for example, it was so important for the left to kill Social Security reform.
"create their own demand." Exactly right. From one seed, another mighty weed to strangle our garden.
Frank Rich: Obsessed and deranged. And Paul Krugman: Always pissed off. These two cranks have a problem with gratitude. We may be cranks too, but we have gratitude - and try for a bit of humor.
Tea Party violence
Inst. of Physics slams CRU
Weekly Standard: Media Failure: Global Warming Edition
Tuesday, March 2. 2010
 A charming female figure affects men like a drug.
A dinner partner asked me "Are men naturally monogamous?" on Saturday. What a silly question. "Of course they aren't."
Men are obviously programmed to want to have a good time spreading their DNA around willy nilly, as it were, but, at the same time, normal men are capable of forming these strange things we call "relationships," of forming sturdy and deep attachments, of developing strong character restraints, and of living by moral codes and committments to others.
We often refer to those latter things as core aspects of "manliness" in our culture: loyalty, honor, dependability, reliability, responsibility, self-control, providing support and family defence and all that. Otherwise, a guy is just a teenager. The combination of the former and the latter is part of the male challenge. (Females have their own set of life dilemmas.)
Still, these "naturally" questions I get always raise the basic problem: How does one discuss "natural" for a naturally culture-building and society-building animal like man? The discussion always becomes circular.
Freud was not the first person to address the topic, but he did his best.
Did you pack your own bag?
Yes, you always pack your bag. You'll be tempted to say that your new man-servant Abdul Arafat packed it in his tent, and then welded it shut so you couldn't peek. Resist this compulsion unless you crave proctological attention followed by long rides on Greyhound buses for life.
Are you innocent?
Yes. Everybody in this prison is always innocent. Just ask them.
Lots of other important FAQs at Vanderleun
Mitt Romney. But does he have sex appeal? Does he tingle? Is he cool?
 Tar and Chip is a good way to do, or re-do, a driveway. It's more attractive than asphalt, cheaper, and affords better traction.
It can also be applied on top of an asphalt driveway to improve the appearance. It's basically stone chips or small gravel, of whatever color you chose, rolled into hot tar. Over time, careless snow-plowing will wear away the gravel. Not quickly, though. It lasts for years.
This guy loves his tar and chip.
Do we have any readers who are tar and chip fans?
Marriage, and Conflict or Divorce? A ?Lenten confessional piece, with good links.
Who ever said anybody was really a "great catch"? We're all just flawed people.
 Happy Birthday, Dr. Seuss.
I needed this quick refresher on Hobbes' moral and political philosophy
Our tax dollars at work: The FDA Takes on Cheerios
Hawaii elevates race, big-time. Aren't WASPs a tribe too?
Mohawks Only. Canadian Indians go for ethnic cleansing
To conservatives: Shut up. You are hurting the kids.
A new lame campaign to deal with evil talk radio
Black ministers for WalMart
Chicago Boyz:
There exists no alternative energy source, no combination of alternative energy sources, and no system of combinations of alternative energy sources that can fully replace a single, coal fired electric plant built with 1930s era technology.
We do not always vote this way, but I think this is true:
America is, quite simply, a center-right country. Many have cited polling data showing that self-described conservatives outnumber liberals 2 to 1. But that's not nearly so telling as the fact that self-identified conservatives have outnumbered liberals in every year since 1968; when combined with self-proclaimed moderates, the country is enduringly 65% to 75% moderates and conservatives.
Monday, March 1. 2010
- The new, improved Science. Prof. Phil Jones:
...he claimed it was not 'standard practice' to release data and computer models so other scientists could check and challenge research.
- You can now forget everything they said about hurricanes. Never mind.
- Everybody is mocking Al Gore's goofy NYT op-ed piece. I am beginning to feel sorry for the guy. This from Big Journalism's Former Veep Goes Girly-Man, Has Hissy Fit in Pages of New York Times:
This piece of pure, dribbling, drooling emoting is going to either make you collapse in a torrent of tears or retch into the nearest barf bag. The only human beings on the planet to whom this editorial would appeal are a bunch of 13-year-old girls without a single clue between them.
With hundreds of millions of dollars on the line, Al is going all out to save his “investment” in global warming hysteria. Here, he comes up with histrionics befitting the amount of personal loss he stands to suffer.
Prof. Lindzen, in his talk at Fermilab which we posted yesterday, refers to the Prosecutor's Fallacy (aka Defender's Fallacy), which refers to a strategy of counting on a jury's inability to understand statistics, and specifically conditional probability.
Conditional probability is about the amount of linkage in events.
The simpest case: Given a red, green and blue marble in a bag, what are the odds of drawing a blue one after drawing a red one?
See the sad case of Sally Clark, who fell victim to the fallacy.
 A re-post. We'll do the Western species later in the week -
It's getting near Opening Day around here, so here's an update on the Salmonidae. For our other pieces on fishing, enter "fishing" in our search space - you will catch some good stuff - along with some random entries.
Taxonomy: The family Salmonidae includes a number of cool-water fish subfamilies: trout, salmon, char, grayling, Lake Whitefish, and other less well-known fish. The Brook Trout and Lake Trout are technically members of the Char subfamily of the Salmonidae.
Heritage: The aggressive, young-trout-killing Brown Trout is a transplant from Eurasia. The fast-water Rainbow Trout is a transplant from the Pacific watershed. The splendid Brook Trout and the big Lake Trout are the common native game species of the Eastern US, and both are technically Char, not trout per se. At this point, the wonderful game "trout" have been transplanted world-wide, and some have established viable wild populations, as with the trout in Patagonia, where you can even catch New England's Brook Trout today.
Anadromy: Most Salmonidae have the capacity, or the preference, to be anadromous - to migrate to salt water until maturity - when they have the opportunity. The Arctic Char, of culinary and cold water fame (anti-freeze in the blood), is anadromous. So is the Steelhead - actually a migratory Rainbow. Salmon are, of course. Sea-going fish grow larger on the rich variety of big-water foods. Interestingly, many land-locked Salmonidae imitate anadromy by entering streams to spawn, and then return to their home fresh-water lakes or just stay put in the streams, if there is enough to eat.
The Great Lakes and other large lakes have their own Salmonidae species, such as Lake Whitefish, and Lake Trout which are not found in trout streams.
Hatchery fish: When you fish for trout in the East, you are, in all likelihood, catching hatchery fish, not wild, born-in-nature fish. Too many anglers, and not enough habitat, so we pretend we are catching wild fish. Catch-and-release gives your fellow angler a chance, and saves your state government, or your fishing club, money on their hatchery budgets. Still, some wild breeding populations do exist, and fly-fishing with barbless hooks gives every fish a sporting chance to avoid the crushing humiliation of the sportman's net. But I still wonder what would happen if we banned all fresh-water stream fishing for five years. What would we find in our streams? Nothing? Or big, mature breeding trout hunkering under stream banks and fallen logs? We will never know, but I suspect that many of our streams would not support wild trout populations.
Other details:
- Superb taxonomy website: ITIS
- Good Eastern trout summary, Pennsylvania Fishes
- An example of how eastern states manage their fresh-water recreational fisheries, from Connecticut
- An example of what fish hatcheries do, from New York State
Image: Brook Trout, by Denton
From VDH's excellent but scathing Obama Fatigue:
...just as liberals were turned off by Bush’s cowboyisms, so too conservatives are tired of Obama’s professorial, condescending sermons. After a year, the people are tired of all the “let me be perfectly clear” psycho-drama, the “make no mistake about” pseudo-tough man pose, the straw man “I reject the false choice that some would…,” and the narcissistic “I have ordered…..my team…to.” The boilerplate is now recognizable even to the Washington press corps. But as important, it dovetails with more disturbing propensities: there are the periodic signs of inanity like “Cinco de Cuatro” and “corpse-man;” the constant fudging on the truth of multibillion dollar new programs really “saving” money; and the surreal bowing to dictators and emperors, with the relish of turning our misdemeanors into felonies and our enemies’ felonies into benefactions.
Read the whole thing. I did not vote for the guy, but I "hoped" for better.
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