Monday, September 27. 2010
The Stolen Valor Act, which some judges say abridges free speech, will end up before the Supreme Court. Here's the latest case of "free speech". The Denver Post reporter who previously, in her words, "was duped" by the false claims, reports:
Kevin Grimsinger came forward this summer as a special forces veteran who had lost parts of his legs in Operation Enduring Freedom. I wrote about him in July when he led the movement in Colorado to qualify veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder for medical marijuana.
As it turns out, the double-amputee didn't serve in Afghanistan and wasn't injured by a land mine, as he claimed. Records show his military service ended a decade before he said he was hurt fighting in Kandahar in 2001.
He was, in fact, paralyzed as a civilian in a crash on a mountain road in Southern California where, as he now tells it, he was trying to kill himself....
For his aunt in Northglenn — the first to speak out about his history — it's a classic case of stolen valor.
"It's not right that he's living his life pretending to be some kind of war hero," said Linda DeBruyn, whose husband and son are war veterans....
Slingers, as the 42-year-old likes to call himself, moved to Denver some time around 2003. He since has misrepresented himself to the Denver Mayor's office, which appointed him to a special commission. He pulled one over on state lawmakers when testifying earlier this year. And he hoodwinked medical-marijuana advocates who were all too eager to wheel him forward as a valorous poster guy.
He has misled about 200 people participating in a veterans outreach program he runs at Budding Health, a pot dispensary in Denver. Most folks there and at VFW Post 1 — where Grimsinger was a quartermaster — know him as the guy whose legs were blown off in Afghanistan.
"Holy crap. Holy crap," VFW commander Izzy Abbass said when learning Grimsinger's history. "This just detracts from what everybody else endured and suffered."
Hey, judges, no harm done, huh. Influencing legislation, being appointed to a government commission, misleading veterans in need of help, no big thing. How about impersonating judges? Would that count?
 At American Thinker, Hoven's The Government Tapeworm:
Government is an organism that tries to maximize its energy intake. It is, in effect, like all other organisms.
Read it. It's about the Romer-Laffer Curve, and how greedy governments can enslave you - almost to the point that you give up, but not quite. A successful work camp never works its inmates to death...unless they are too old or sick to be productive to the State.
Photo is a human tapeworm. They can be up to 35' long, and lay millions of eggs daily. They can be an effective aid to slow and manageable weight loss.
 The College Board keeps selling college:
“For reasons that are not entirely clear, more people are questioning whether it’s necessary to go to college.”
If she had been paying any attention, she would know that the reasons are very clear. Many of the young people drawn into college are academically weak and disengaged; they learn little or nothing in their college years; they accumulate loads of debt; they end up working in jobs that almost any high-school student could easily learn to do. Furthermore, as we increase the percentage of people in the labor force who have college credentials, that ratchets up credential inflation, making it harder for those who don’t have college credentials to find good employment.
Via Insty:
People who choose to work with their hands are looked down upon by the chattering classes. It used to be that getting into college was hard. Now it’s just expensive. Getting into a post-college profession was even harder. People were impressed if someone went to college. And even more so if they went on to become a lawyer or doctor.
Walter Russell Mead's 6 Tips About What Really Matters in College
Many British University Grads Working in Call Centers
For-profit education under assault by the government. New rules that do not apply to the old-fashioned schools.
From Re-thinking Education at Rebel:
Everything testifies to the great benefit of charter schools, private schools and home schooling, so why do we continue to provide education in such an antiquated method? Again, it doesn’t serve the teacher’s union to break the kids out into smaller and smaller schools and classes where information can not be controlled and might even become contradictory to earlier “government” teachings. What government employee would benefit from a revolution in education delivery? None.
Sunday, September 26. 2010
Larry Ellison seeks to change the America's Cup rules, so it's not just for billionaires.
You know - I hope he pulls this off. It's his prerogative to change the design rules and site for racing - I hope he does it. When you consider the amount of money these one design hi-tech maxi-racers burn through, it sounds like he's on the right track.
State-of-the-art one design smaller boats with strict rules sounds good to me. Then it is all about wind, weather and tactics and not the biggest and deepest pocket.
Saturday, September 25. 2010
 I guess we don't have to worry about that baloney. I was hoping a good one would hit up here, so I could have an excuse for a day or two off work to catch up on my chores. We know how to deal with bad weather.
Globalistical warmening fails again. Funny how negative results never make headlines or get attention. Even important negative findings in science have trouble getting published in scientific journals. There must be a fallacy term for that, but I'm not sure what it is. If a good hurricane hit land this year, the Al Gore folks would be all over it.
What am I smoking? A Griffin corona. Nice. No, actually, it's not a corona. It's bigger than that. Tasty, whatever the Griffin is that I bought from my local upscale cigar store Indian.
 My NYC pal, who happens to be a "private wealth" money manager, and I had an interesting a conversation this week.
I commented to him that it seemed to me that, the more money people had, the more they worried about money. (I also told him about some doubtless BS study that said that peoples' general life happiness doesn't improve much after an income of $75,000. - assuming the life they constructed is not totally dysfunctional.)
He told me that he had thought about this too, and that his observation about my point was that wealthier people did tend to worry more about their money the more money they have - up to the point of $17 million in the bank.
At 17 million, he said, for some psychological reason, prosperous people generally stop worrying unless they are highly neurotic - or if they try to live as if they had $100 million.
He also said, however, that "Everybody is neurotic about money. The hard part of my job is the Psychiatry, because it's not rocket science to determine a good bond price and it's not rocket science to preserve capital."
Friday, September 24. 2010
Thanks to all who have taken the time to respond to my questions this week.
 My final question is just for fun.
You have just won a one-week trip, all expenses paid (except gratuities), with however many passengers the airplane can hold (or fewer), on a round trip flight on a G-650 to anywhere - but only to one destination to which the airplane can fly non-stop - and an airport on which it can land.
What's your destination?
Are all Americans entitled to equal protections under the law? Of course, except if relying upon the current leadership of US Department of Justice. Reluctantly, only after misrepresentations were made to Congress by officials of the US Department of Justice, the chief of the DOJ’s Voting Rights Section – with over three decades service in the DOJ -- claimed whistleblower protections to spill the beans to Congress the US Commission on Civil Rights.
In his testimony, Christopher Coates, recounting his direct experiences, summed up “the hostility in the Civil Right Division (CRD) and Voting Section toward the equal enforcement of some of the federal voting laws.”:
What I am pointing out is that I believe that some minorities are just as likely to resort to lawlessness in the voting area as are some whites….In our increasingly multiethnic society, that [ignoring minorities’ breaking of electoral laws] is a clear recipe to undermine the public’s confidence in the legitimacy of our electoral process….We do not have the discretion to decide not to enforce the law based upon the race of the perpetrators or the race of the victims of the wrongdoing. Those discretionary decisions cannot constitutionally be based upon race.
Another Voting Rights Section attorney who resigned to blow the same whistle comments, “My profession has not seen a hero like Coates since the giants of the civil rights movement convinced the courts to eradicate legal racial discrimination. Coates has dedicated a lifetime to following in their footsteps, to ensuring free access to the ballot.”
I just checked Google news. No MSM coverage yet. I just checked another major aggregator of news wires. No coverage yet. Surely there will be, some. That is not enough.
It is up to the voters in November to see that there’s a Congress which conducts proper oversight of the Obama Justice Department, to ensure equal justice for all.
I have to admit, I'm a little upset.
A witch ruined my Maggie's post.
Well, okay, part-time witch and newly-elected Delaware Republican candidate Christine O'Donnell ruined my Maggie's post. It really hurt.
A few days before the Delaware election, I was reading various articles in both the MSM and MSB and, in regards to the Tea Party spirit, was planning on writing an interesting piece on "who gets it" and who doesn't.
From the Left:
David Brooks: Tea partiers are narcissistic, egomaniacal, self-righteous people who distort the truth!
I think it's safe to say that ol' Dave doesn't get it.
Jacob Weisberg: The Tea Party movement has two defining traits: status anxiety and anarchism
Or ol' Jacob.
Continue reading "ProCon: Personally, I blame Christine O'Donnell"
Thursday, September 23. 2010
Readers have been generous with their comments on my questions this week, and it's all been helpful and sometimes inspiring. (This question series is only for this one week.)
Here's my question for today:
Men are often viewed as the lustful ones with sinful hearts if not actions, while tradition has often held women to be more contained, demure, and lacking in ordinary lust. While men often tell me about their almost-drooling at babes while walking down the street - even happily married men - I rarely hear that from women. (Obviously there is a huge range in sex drive and sexual interest and imagination between individuals.)
So are women just quieter about reacting to hunks they see, or are men really more lascivious? In other words, are women just as prone to purely physical attraction as men, or do they really need a "relationship" to become interested? Or, to put it another way, are women as likely to make daily life as much of a pornographic experience as men do, on average?
NYM posted this pic of Virginia's Thornton Hill Hounds, eager to get out of the trailer and to work. He notes that these are mostly Penn Marydels. Not house pets.
More cool stuff about dogs - How dogs became domesticated. h/t Classical Values. Dumb soundtrack and no real audio, from a Russian fox farm -
Wednesday, September 22. 2010
As the anti-Democrat tide gets stronger, many Democrat office holders have been clinging to their offices ashore by resorting to the race-card - that those who differ from them must be racists.
In mid-August, when no one else was paying attention to this contest, I wrote about the congressional race in California's 47th district in Orange County. A seemingly entrenched Democrat, Loretta Sanchez, has the advantage of a preponderant Hispanic and Democrat constituency. Her challenger, Van Tran, has waged an uphill battle to within striking distance, Sanchez 45/Tran 43 in one poll. The consensus of experienced poll-watchers has moved the race from solidly Democrat to weak Democrat, and the tide keeps turning.
I wrote in mid-August that "The race has not, yet, overtly become an ethnic battle – and shouldn’t" but in desperation Loretta Sanchez has now pulled the race card.
Loretta Sanchez went on Spanish-language Univision TV to tell Latinos "Those Vietnamese and GOP are trying to take away our seat from us."
No, Loretta, the seat does not belong to any ethnic group or race. The seat belongs to Americans who want representation in their and the country's interests.
Van Tran's campaign emphasizes those interests:
1. Stop the wasteful spending.
2. Cut taxes so that small businesses can create jobs.
3. Reduce excessive regulations on small business.
4. Stand up to the special interests in Washington.
Here's Van Tran's website. Please contribute, send a message against the race-card, and send Loretta Sanchez out with the tide. Van Tran is proud to be an immigrant who treasures America.
H/T Breitbart TV
 Some form of cutlivation of the Eastern (or American) Oyster has been going on for 150 years on Cape Cod, especially in Wellfleet. At first, this just consisted of importing wild oysters from elsewhere in their Atlantic or Gulf coast range, and giving them a while to absorb that special Wellfleet flavor.
There is no way that one small harbor could support the nationwide demand for naturally-produced Wellfleet Oysters.
As we sat on the deck watched the oystermen at work on their cages at low tide, we wondered where they buy the baby oysters.
I found out how the whole system works (link has great photos). The laboratory-bred spat from the hatcheries are bought by nurseries, then they are sold to the watermen who do the "grow-out" of the seed oysters. It is quite remarkable. No wonder they aren't cheap.
Photo on top: large scale commercial oyster grow-out in the southern US
Photo on bottom: oystermen tending their oyster cages in Wellfleet at low tide. Production is limited by town regulations, so there is no industrial-scale production and all are beach-bottom cultured instead of being grown on rafts, slowing their growth but making them tastier.
How much sex is a person "supposed" to want? I don't think anybody can answer that question.
Short video: Is sex addiction a disease?
One of my (many) problems with Psychiatry's DSM is one of making "diseases" out of things I might either view as symptoms, or simply as behaviors which deviate from some shrinks' view of "normal."
When it comes to movie stars and the like (as the link mentions), it's another matter. Many of them seem to live like kids in a candy shop, relatively insulated from consequences. When handsome men or lovely beauties are throwing themselves at you all day long, what's a person to do? Especially after a few drinks, a few lines of coke, etc.
Psychiatry is able to justify viewing substance addictions as diseases because, for many people, continuous substance abuse can lead to an alteration of the reward pathways in the brain, resulting in a drive which is challenging to resist.
With sex, however, those reward pathways are already built in to the system as one of the strongest animal instincts we have to grapple with in life.
As usual, I must leave this post at mid-thought, but I will pose the question to our readers:
Is "Sex Addiction" a disease? Or is the idea a "diseasification" of decadent people with lousy self-control and poor capacity for delayed gratification?
Tuesday, September 21. 2010
 I mean literally sleeping together - spouses sleeping in the same bed - not the other meaning. If any readers can help me find out the history of this habit, please let me know.
I do know that the wealthy and the nobility traditionally have had separate private suites and that beds and bedrooms are expensive, so I wonder whether bed-sharing began as a matter of lack of wealth more than anything else. Seems to me that separate suites could potentially be more romantic and more independent-adult.
It's a socio-anthropological question.
If anybody has time or interest to research the history of the topic for me, I'd appreciate it.
Monday, September 20. 2010
Mrs. BD found this good deal from our friends at Club ABC: 8 days in Prague and Budapest. They do a very good job making world travel possible for the non-weathy and for those who are willing to fly economy and maybe endure a stopover.
I've always been more of a Mediterranean and UK traveller, but the Holy Roman Empire is growing on me. It's probably just a phase.
You can make online reservations for music and opera tickets way in advance. She wants to see Janacek's Kat'a Kabanova at the Prague Opera (where Mozart first conducted Don Giovanni).
I have never been to Hungary. Mrs. BD wants to see Hungarian folk music and dance troupes, and try some of the historic coffee houses. Here's a nice Budapest restaurant. Looks just like I would expect:
Thank God that the commies are gone from Czecho and Hungary. Maybe Cuba will be next.
Amusingly, they do have a Hammer and Sickle Times tours in Budapest. Join us, Comrades and ex-Liberals:
Go back to the good old times to experience how life was when Big Brother ruled our every move, we drove Trabants, drank spirits at work, lived in block flats, stood in banana lines, had two passports, coupon books, no TV on Mondays and no freedom of speech! Written and raved about every year in major newspapers around the world, don't miss out on this bygone era.
They also have this more cheerful tour: Historical Revolution Walk. This one is about the good guys.
 I plan to pose a number of questions to our readers this week because I have some talks to give on Saturday and would love some fresh ideas.
I hope our brainy and learned readers will rise to the occasion.
First, why are so many American middle-class and poor people (especially women) fat or overweight, while wealthier and better-educated women tend to be svelte?
Got a theory? Is it really class-related, or is that coincidence? Or is it a matter of fashion, wherein some social groups are just more accepting of fat? Some guys do prefer fat girls.
First off, Wendy and I would like to offer our sincere thanks for the positive comments the original ProCon post received. You can certainly sense that people are itching for a change.
These ProCon posts will be a small series until the election. Future posts will deal with various aspects and related articles, but today I wanted to cover some of the points raised in the comments. There being 27,000 words on the site, most of the raised issues were covered there, but rather than just tossing out links to answer the commenters, I thought I'd expound on them here. Rather than quote anyone, I'll just generalize.
1. "There isn't enough time between now and November to be effective."
That's just plain ol' wrong. Anyone who believes that has no idea how truly flaky American voters are and how many of them still don't know for sure who they're voting for when they wake up on Election Day. That flyer you hand them at the grocery store that morning might make all the difference.
Yes, it's embarrassing to admit the average American voter is so fickle, often picking a candidate for the flimsiest of reasons, but that matters not. We don't care any more about 'embarrassing' than the fact that it's 'tacky' to go after people's wallets, rather than intelligently discussing the issues as we did during the last two elections. And I needn't remind you what happened using that respectful little tactic.
This is war, and convention be damned.
2. "Web sites don't do any good."
No argument there. The 'home base' we want you to set up isn't for blogging and collecting readers and, in fact, the subject is never raised. You certainly can blog on it if you want, but it's two main functions are to act as a backdrop for the inspiring, hopefully-vote-changing 'motivational' posts and as a base of operations for your own endeavors, be it organizing a neighborhood Tea Party or collecting carpool riders for a Tea Party in the big city. It also gives you a sense of involvement and is demonstrative proof that you're actually doing something — as referred to fawning over your fave blogger's latest words.
Continue reading "ProCon: The Commentariat Speaks"
Sunday, September 19. 2010
 The prix fixe 3 course lunches at Jean Georges, on Columbus Circle (1 Central Park West). $26/person. We ate in the "informal" section before going to the Freud-CS Lewis play down the street yesterday.
I have had lots of good food lately, but this is as good as it gets. Menu isn't all seafood, but plenty of it. I had the Tuna Tartare on avocado with radish and some kind of incredible tangy sauce, the broiled Cod with tomato-herb sauce, and the famous tiny molten chocolate cake. All perfect. Here are some reviews. Forgot my camera, but found the pic of his Bluefin Tartare on the web.
After the play, we took a little stroll through Central Park, which looks immaculate and is full of cheerful people. Despite Bloomberg's obnoxious nannyism, NYC is doing something right these days.
Don't pass it up on your next visit to NYC. Trust your Editor Bird Dog on this. If you try it and disagree, I'll pay for the lunch.
Saturday, September 18. 2010
BD's tab dump this morning addressed poverty in America. Who are the poor? What is in their lives, he wondered. Tiger provides this:
...by simple, homey measures of comfort and convenience, the lowest rung on the income ladder lives better lives today than the average middle-class Americans of the last generation.
Poverty is not materially poor in the US. Sometimes I think it is just spiritually poor. What's a "good life"? Is it having a microwave? Not to me - nothing to do with a good life. I lack one, and do not want one. Not trying to be Marcus Aurelius or Thoreau here. I was under the poverty line for seven years - "working poor" - and I had a great simple life in poverty-stricken, jobless, but scenic western MA. Now I am making money in New York, and my life sucks more in many ways. I do meet more delightful females but, for one thing, I have less time for the fall hunting season. I do love the City, however, and feel invigorated every time my feel hit the sidewalk in the morning and I see the hustle and bustle and all the beautiful, slinky HOPAs and MILFs headed to work in their cool New Yorky outfits.
Plus I love the endless demands and rigors of my job, which test and stretch my brains and character every day and often all night too. I am trying to figure out what I really want in life besides beer, money, pals, dogs, guns, and fun sex. I realize now that I do not know, but that as a Yankee I know I do not want it to be easy. I want to work at least as hard and long as my old man did and does, and I know I need more God in my life.
I will not burden our readers with my inner confusions (but it is why I have been semi-AWOL here since my August boating adventures. I explained that to our Editor a while ago, and he was kind, understanding, encouraging, and teasing as he always is).
We showed our dear friends around the Outer Cape (aka Lower Cape) last weekend, and I hope they got a sense of why it is enchanting to some of us. (They had a chance to look up some dead ancestors too.) We walked quite a bit, tooks lots of snaps, consumed quite a bit of seafood, ran into some interesting and friendly folks.
Re nomenclature, Wiki correctly notes:
The terms "Upper" and "Lower" as applied to the Cape have nothing to do with north and south. Instead, they derive from maritime convention at the time when the principal means of transportation involved watercraft, and the prevailing westerly winds meant that a boat with sails traveling northeast in Cape Cod Bay would have the wind at its back and thus be going downwind, while a craft sailing southwest would be going against the wind, or upwind. Similarly, on nearby Martha's Vineyard, "Up Island" still is the western section and "Down Island" is to the east, and in Maine, "Down East" is similarly defined by the winds and currents.
Over time, the reasons for the traditional nomenclature became unfamiliar and their meaning obscure. Late in the 1900s, new arrivals began calling towns from Eastham to Provincetown the "Outer Cape", yet another geographic descriptor which is still in use, as is the "Inner Cape."
Anyway, as I was saying, we love it because it is simple, a little bit wild and woolly, small-"d" democratic, and without pretension, fashion, or name-droppability. Even the wealth up there on the Outer Cape quietly adheres to the Yankee Code (and when they do not, they catch hell).
Lots of pics with commentary below the fold -
Continue reading "The Outer (Lower) Cape: Eastham to P'town"
Friday, September 17. 2010
White House wants to change the alarm to "climate disruption."
When people keep changing the name of something, you have to wonder What's up? Like, maybe there is no global warming now. But there is still weather of all sorts to get all excited about - especially in New England where the climate is "disrupted" constantly: See this charming 1876 speech by Mr. Samuel Clemems.
As for me, I hate boring weather. I enjoy disruptive weather.
BTW, I think Holdren is insane.
Well, I've been busy. 27,000 words, 55 pages and counting.
A couple of months ago I hooked up online with a very sharp lady named Wendy Calloway. We had both mentioned in blog comments what a dismal failure the right-wing blogs turned out to be after the '06 (historic Democratic sweep) and '08 (Obama) elections, so I contacted her and asked her if she'd like to dissect the entire mess, piece by piece, and reevaluate everything; what worked, what didn't, and what to do about the latter. Therein followed about a thousand emails, a bunch of phone calls, and a big 'master file' of the future web site that we passed back and forth.
As for the '06 and '08 elections:
We immediately came to a few conclusions:
— That the pundits are correct. From Ace of Spades to James Taranto, everyone agrees that it's the independents who win or lose elections. Occasionally, as in 2008, national fervor will sweep someone into office, but for normal, average elections it's the independents, centrists and moderate Democrats who make the real difference in the voting booth.
— That the blogs on both sides of the fence weren't very effective. Just ask Ned Lamont. It was simply more 'preaching to the choir' and obviously didn't make any difference with the aforementioned independents, centrists and moderate Dems. For every few we picked off, DailyKos and MyDD got theirs.
— Most money used in campaigns is ill-spent. Bluntly put, lawn signs haven't won an election yet. There, in the privacy of the voting booth, it's almost always something deeper than that. While we heartily endorse getting our candidates' names into the public eye, we leave that to the large organizations.
So we decided to focus on that "something deeper", which usually translates to matters of the heart (patriotism), the mind (common sense), and matters of the wallet, such as "Will I be able to pay the rent next month?"
The reference to Ned Lamont is quite apt. He was the Connecticut senatorial candidate that DailyKos, MyDD, et al, got behind. His election was supposed to be their 'crowning moment' as they showed the world what blogpower was all about.
The point the above quote makes is that he got crushed in the election. Fat lot of good all that blogpower did.
Continue reading "ProCon: Back to the (grass) roots"
Thursday, September 16. 2010
Came in over the transom with the video:
 The P51 was the most versatile fighter plane of WW2. It excelled at both ground level support of the troops and high altitude long range fighter cover for the heavy bombers. It was the equal of the best fighter planes in dog fights. It was also an accident of fate or timing rather than planning that it existed.
In late 1940 or early '41 Britain was desperately short of fighter planes of any sort and had sent some RAF people to the US to see what they could buy. Hoping for some P-40's they talked with Curtis Wright and found them booked up for the duration by the US govmt. They got a tip from Curtis Wright that North American Aviation had no contracts yet and was looking for business, and that Curtis Wright would licence North American to build P-40's if they worked out an agreement. When the RAF asked the North American small management crew if they would be interested their answer was Why do you wand to buy an expensive, high priced obsolete plane that would take well over a year to start any production when we have a new design worked out and can have a prototype ready for RAF test flights in 9 months if you can get us an engine for it from Allison. They were, they could and they did a deal and were very happy with the performance of the prototype, and placed a production order.
When this news worked its way through to the Army Air Force they decided to look into the possibilities and eventually ordered a production run that wound up as the A-36 low level fighter. The Allison V12 was the only non-radial combat aircraft engine built in the USA and, unlike the Rolls Royce Merlin engine and the German ME bf109, it did not have a supercharger which was essential for combat above 15,000 ft as well as top performance at lower altitudes. After the RAF had a few month's experience with the new plane, the RAF did the obvious thing and grafted a Rolls Royce Merlin engine from a Spitfire onto one of their "P-51's" (don't remember what the RAF called their version of the plane). At this time the RAF got the North American crew on board the update and they soon found out that Packard Motor Company in the US was building Rolls Royce engines for the PT Boats of the Navy. Packard was happy to add Merlin egines for NA to their production runs and the P-51 was officially launched.
One of the benefits of NA being small and nearly broke was that the design engineers had to do double duty as production engineers so they designed the plane for simple and fast as well as low cost production. At that time the conventional practice was to build the airframe and then have people crawl inside to string all the wires and cables together, and this more than doubled the assembly time and cost. NA designed the fuselage in two half shells and had the electrical, hydraulic and control cables, etc installed in each half prior to sewing the halves together. The P-51 cost about one third the cost of the P-38 and about half the cost of the P-47 or F6F Navy planes.
The video here: http://www.asb.tv/videos/view.php?v=1bf99434&br=500
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