We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
"College graduates should not have to live out their 20s in their childhood bedrooms, staring up at fading Obama posters and wondering when they can move out and get going with life. Everyone who feels stuck in the Obama economy is right to focus on the here and now. And I hope you understand this too, if you’re feeling left out or passed by: You have not failed, your leaders have failed you.
None of us have to settle for the best this administration offers – a dull, adventureless journey from one entitlement to the next, a government-planned life, a country where everything is free but us. Listen to the way we’re spoken to already, as if everyone is stuck in some class or station in life, victims of circumstances beyond our control, with government there to help us cope with our fate. It’s the exact opposite of everything I learned growing up in Wisconsin, or at college in Ohio. When I was waiting tables, washing dishes, or mowing lawns for money, I never thought of myself as stuck in some station in life. I was on my own path, my own journey, an American journey where I could think for myself, decide for myself, define happiness for myself.
That’s what we do in this country. That’s the American Dream. That’s freedom, and I’ll take it any day over the supervision and sanctimony of the central planners."
You have a nation filled with people who are worried about money, and worried about their kids' futures. Thus the frequently-observed temptation for pols and the MSM to distract the voters. Is this election about race and gender?
Their race card is as big as America now. It is America. There is no longer an America for them, just a collection of race cards that they shuffle and deal and shuffle again, playing solitaire with themselves until the economy goes down. In their America it is always 1963 in Birmingham. It will always be Birmingham, 1963, even for those who have never been to Birmingham and who did not even exist on this planet in 1963.
It all started off with stirring speeches, Greek columns, the thrill of something new. Now all that's left is a presidency adrift, surviving on slogans that already seem tired, grasping at a moment that has already passed, like a ship trying to sail on yesterday's wind.
President Obama was asked not long ago to reflect on any mistakes he might have made. He said, well, "I haven't communicated enough." He said his job is to "tell a story to the American people"- as if that's the whole problem here? He needs to talk more, and we need to be better listeners?
Arguably, a little bit of Toryism in the White House would be less profoundly devastating and destructive than the long reign of Tory blight was for the UK. America is bigger, brasher, less governable than Britain. In Britain the establishment can aspire, and sometimes succeed, to enfold the whole country in a dim and dismal environment of stale, smug consensus. This trick is much harder to pull off in the United States. One could make a cogent argument that the kind of Toryism that largely stifled modern Britain could be less damaging and more helpful over here.
The essential 21st Century conflict is between the rationers and the producers. This is not a class conflict, that is the fallacy that the left has fallen into for over a century. It is a conflict between a system of bureaucratic collectivism and a society of individuals. It is not a conflict between the rich and the poor, the majority of the rationers are either rich or close enough to it. Their charges may be poor, but the representatives of their victim groups invariably become rich. The rationer camp is funded by some of the wealthiest men and companies in America who agree with its premise that we need to ration everything from children to jobs to food to carbon emissions.
Well, not unexpectedly, I've postponed my tumor operation a few weeks. I'm tentatively scheduled for Sept 24th. Between getting much less for my stocks than I'd hoped for and losing my web job until October, I simply don't have the money yet.
But it's cool. As I mentioned in the last update, the tumor hasn't grown any worse, so there's no need to panic. I'm currently designing a web site $600, so I'll get there. For those of you just tuning in, the back story is here. Contributions to the Save Our Doc fund are more than welcome. To those of you who have already pitched in, my sincerest thanks.
One thing I've noticed that seems to be common amongst cancer docs is that they tend to be a fairly upbeat group. My doctor in Miami is a riot. At one point he adopted his 'tough guy' voice and growled, "Just rub a little dirt on it — you'll be fine!" The doctor in Mexico was the one who, after looking at the scans, said "Good news. You have a cancer, not the cancer." Whether or not hospitals specifically seek out cancer docs with an upbeat personality is anybody's guess, but it sure has helped on this end. Whenever I start feeling down and picturing the worst, something one of the docs has said inevitably comes to mind and cheers me up.
I also notice they have a particular reticence to using scary words like "cancer" and "tumor". It's usually just "your condition" or "the problem". I happened to be watching an episode of 'House MD' a few weeks ago and Wilson, the resident oncologist, was talking to a patient and referred to "your condition", so I gather it's just part of the biz.
To finish up on an upbeat note, two of my friends are delighting in sending me 'gallows humor' cartoons to cheer me up. I posted one a few weeks ago; the 'Dead End' sign next to a graveyard. This one's pretty funny:
'Apocaloptimist' is a humorous term I recently heard that best describes how I've felt about the economy these last 4 years. The concept that it's all crashing down, but not to worry because we'll all be fine, in the end. I'm not sure that it's all going to come crashing down, but we're still not out of the recession/depression and there is a long road ahead before things improve to the point where we can feel confident about the future. Regardless of where we are, a quick review of history does point to one clear fact, and this is simply that mankind has a remarkable capability to adapt, make due, and eventually engage progress of a tangible nature.
We're still progressing today, just much more slowly.
But in the depths of a recession, true pessimists step forward. These are people who cannot see anything good, and refuse to take a simple step of reviewing history and seeing that bad times never last 'forever'. Absolutes can come back to haunt you, if used improperly. "We can never..." is the kind of phrase that inspires someone, somewhere to think, "Well, maybe we can...", and then they actually go out and do whatever it is we could never do.
Most human activity leads to peaks and those peaks are usually followed by valleys. Getting into the right frame of mind is how you get out of the valley and move to the next peak. Statements such as this, however, do nothing to help:
“No more fundamental innovations are likely to be introduced to change the structure of [today’s] society .... Like every previous civilization, we have reached a technological plateau.” — Jean Gimpel, technology historian, professor, and author.
Malthus was wrong, and 215 years later his views have still not provided any meaningful insights on how the world operates.
Armstrong’s America - Small-town boy on moon. A quote from the quiet and modest Armstrong:
"I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer, born under the second law of thermodynamics, steeped in steam tables, in love with free-body diagrams, transformed by Laplace and propelled by compressible flow."
To his credit, he has not written a self-mythologizing autobiography. Doesn't need to, because he has accomplished lots of real things in the real world. That is not easy to do.
What race is Obama? More importantly, what race is Derek Jeter? Even more importantly, aren't American Indians actually Asian?
How to Beat President Obama -The man who runs the American Crossroads Super PAC on targeting 'the persuadables' with precise messages on welfare, ObamaCare and the economy.
A rich inheritance, a big law settlement, tenure, a movie deal, a state sinecure — these enablers of elite liberal thought are all predicated on the less-liberal productive classes creating wealth to share. Behind every liberal philanthropist fortune is a huge capitalist score.
I suppose it's slightly ironic that, twelve hours before I might possibly drown from a hurricane, I'm posting an article on fire. Such are the whims and vagaries of outrageous fortune.
Yesterday, I said something in an email that only a Floridian would say:
The good news is that it's supposed to still be a tropical storm when it gets here, or a weak Category 1 hurricane. Hopefully.
Only in Florida would someone say it'll hopefully be a Category 1 hurricane.
When I posted on Isaac last Wednesday, it was barreling directly for us. Over the next few days, it moved slightly to the west, as far as Key West, then it turned slightly northward which drew it back our direction. So it looks like we'll get clobbered pretty good.
The good news is that it's picked up a real head of steam over the last few days and is now scheduled to hit us tonight, rather than tomorrow morning as originally forecast. More speed = less time over the water = less time to pick up energy.
For what it's worth, this is the fifth hurricane I've gone through in the six years I've been here. Four in the first two months, now Isaac. We also got lashed a good one a few years ago with Tropical Storm Fey.
As for the video, I don't think you'll learn anything particularly new ("governments are stupid"?), but it's nice to see the subject neatly laid out. As you know, along with earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and unscheduled solar eclipses, the recent spate of large wildfires has also been attributed to global warming.
What makes this video exceptional — coming from a left-wing, AGW-loving organization like NPR — is that the expert actually says the following in real, live English words for all to hear:
Even without climate change in the mix, this is probably not coming back as the forests and woodlands that they were before.
That's right, even without global warming, the expert still acknowledges that shortsighted government agencies might have played some small, tiny part in this travesty.
Why should we? Fruit is just fattening sugar-water - a dessert - and you can get all the vitamins you need from a daily or occasional multivit. Men seem to prefer, given the choice, meat and roots. Life is short: eat what you enjoy but avoid the carbs if you don't like your weight.
My brain chemicals forced me to link that essay. Seems to me that when we make good decisions, we like free will, but, when we make lousy decisions, we do not. Anyway, it is not binary. People are complicated and flawed.
With autumn just around the corner up here, it's time to stock up on pre-fossil fuel. A carbon-emitting friend sent me his pic of his growing woodpile.
It's also a good time to call your chimney sweep, because he will begin to get busy after Labor Day.
It's a very complicated state of affairs, but the economy still stinks for almost everybody without a government job. However, it does not alter my longstanding thesis that a liberal arts education is not meant to be a job credential, and never was. It was designed as life-enrichment, advanced mental discipline, and delayed-adulthood for the clergy, for serious scholars, and for the prosperous elites.
Most of the kids today are being challenged to build something for themselves. That's a good thing for everybody, but it works better if the government gets out of the way.
Strassel: The Silent Second-Term Agenda - Despite the Democrats' shellacking in 2010, the president moved left. Re-election in November will reinforce his view that he was correct to do so.
It begins:
President Obama has a reputation for talking, but not necessarily for saying much. He has achieved new levels of vagueness this election season. Beyond repeating that he's in favor of making the "rich" pay for more government "investment," he hasn't offered a single new idea for a second term. This is deliberate.
The core of the Obama strategy is to make Americans worry that whatever Mitt Romney does, it will be worse.
When we last left the exciting Fukushima/earthquake/tsunami story, it had been determined that the Fukushima nuclear power plant suffered almost no ill effects from the largest earthquake in Japan's history and the fifth-largest ever recorded. They had built the reactors deep in solid rock and they withstood the upheaval just fine.
Then the tsunami came along, knocked out the backup generators, and the whole thing went into the toilet.
Then the Japanese government freaked out and shut down all of their nuclear power plants due to 'safety concerns'. The first one finally went back on line a few weeks ago, a year and a half later.
Now, a little panic and overreaction from a government is hardly anything new. We see it here all the time. Some 11-year-old moron puts out an eye with a bottle rocket and immediately all fireworks are banned throughout the county. About the only thing they have in some places these days are sparklers and snakes. Happens all the time.
But then Germany got into the act, likewise shutting down all of its nuke plants over safety concerns, all of which raises one of the greatest questions of all time:
There are tsunamis in Germany?
Earthquakes, sure, but, as Fukushima testified, nuke plants can be built to withstand earthquakes just fine. So what the German high command was really saying to its citizenry was, "We're afraid we're going to get hit by a tsunami any minute now." That, all by itself, might have earned Germany the coveted title, Fool of the Decade.
But it gets even worse than that.
When they built Fukushima, they constructed a sea wall that would withstand the highest tsunami in Japanese recorded history, back in the 30's. These people obviously aren't fools, and they well knew that (1) the reactors would probably withstand a major quake just fine, but (2) a tsunami breaching the sea wall would do them in. So they obviously put a lot of research into it.
Turns out, that wasn't a tsunami after all that swept into northeastern Japan last March, killing nearly 20,000 people and launching a major nuclear and environmental crisis.
That was two tsunamis that merged far out at sea and rolled swiftly toward shore, more than 135 feet high. That means the speeding wall of water was almost as tall as the Statue of Liberty, torch to toes.
They've been studying data from a trio of satellites that fortuitously happened to be passing over that part of the Pacific Ocean on Friday, March 11, Japan time. And they have now confirmed what until now had only been hypothesized:
That separate massive water movements, ignited by undersea earthquakes miles beneath the ocean surface, can grow and actually merge their massive energy and water volumes to roll across scores of miles of ocean undiminished by distance. They are, it now appears, shaped and steered by the unseen contours -- the ridges and mountain ranges -- of the ocean bottom beneath.
Until now such twin tidal waves had never been observed, just theorized as possible explanations for such devastation as the 1960 Chilean tsunami that traveled trans-Pacific to kill about 200 in Hawaii and Japan.
"It was a one-in-ten million chance that we were able to observe this double wave with satellites," said Y. Tony Song of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. "It was like looking for a ghost. A NASA-French Space Agency satellite altimeter happened to be in the right place at the right time to capture the double wave and verify its existence."
So, to sum up, not only did Germany shut down its entire nuclear power industry because they were afraid of getting hit by a tsunami, but it turns out the tsunami they based this on was such an unlikely event that, until now, it had only been hypothesized.
...the Democratic Party is fourscore behind abortion on demand, radical environmentalism and tax hikes. These issues, we are told, are quite popular, so the Democratic Party should not be shy about touting them. These issues are what define them as Democrats, right? Let the Republicans talk about all that boring stuff like the private sector, energy (from underneath the ground, no less!), debt reduction and reforming entitlement programs. Borrrrring!
When I was a kid, one of the most exciting things to do was to take a Sunfish out in a hurricane. Doubt I'd still have the nerve to do that now, but these fun-loving folks in Maine took a Hobie 16 out in Hurricane Earl 2 years ago. Boat reached a max speed of 22 knots before pitchpoling.
The question of the Bush Tax cuts 'causing' the deficits, and hence the 'need' to increase taxes on the 'wealthy' is one which Democrats spend many evenings discussing. Clearly, Bush was an insane tax-cutter without any good ideas and caused every problem mankind faces today, and frankly every problem we've faced for the last 40 years. He was just that bad.
However, a non-partisan look at the cuts indicates something quite different. On a standalone basis, taking out all other additional spending programs from the last 11 years, what we find is the tax cuts paid for themselves, and then some. In other words, the issue isn't the cuts. The issue is all the additional spending which took place after the cuts. To be completely honest, and completely fair, not all the spending was by Bush, either. In fact, most of it was voted on with bipartisan support. Very little could be said to be purely Bush-related, let alone Republican-related.
Honesty is a difficult thing in politics. Typically I don't look for anything more than a minimal degree of it, what I prefer is a level of consistency of thought. The Republicans have their own challenges regarding honesty and consistency, but the Democrats have really done a good job of cornering the market on dishonesty and hypocrisy.
George Leef is not convinced that many jobs which require a BA have any need for it. What is a BA anyway? He begins:
Why go to college? Go back fifty years, and the answer commonly given was, "To become a well-rounded person who has a grasp of our civilization's history, science, and art." Go back about twenty-five years and the answer commonly given was, "So you'll be able to get a good job." And now one authoritative source is telling us, "Because you'll be better off when the next recession hits."
Ah, there's nothing quite like living in the beautiful Florida Keys. The clear, blue Atlantic outside our door. The gentle ocean breeze wafting through the palm trees. The lovely wahines serving drinks at the local tiki bar.
Yes, you simply couldn't ask for a more peaceful, tranquil existence.
"I simply do not know where the money is... I do not know which accounts are unreconciled or whether the unreconciled accounts were, or were not, subject to the segregation rules." - Jon Corzine
If they want to re-create their homeland's moral hell-holes in Europe, why did they bother to leave home? Oh. The Welfare checks and the multicultural embrace.
Embrace 
Well, not unexpectedly, I've postponed my tumor operation a few weeks. I'm tentatively scheduled for Sept 24th. Between getting much less for my stocks than I'd hoped for and losing my web job until October, I simply don't have the money yet.
Animals Are as With It as Humans,
U.S. Open 2012: 
It's also a good time to call your chimney sweep, because he will begin to get busy after Labor Day.
When we last left the exciting Fukushima/earthquake/tsunami 
Tom Stoppard 