Monday, March 30. 2009
We know that you have been too busy to post much lately. Despite that disappointment, we want to note and celebrate the numerous wonderful career and personal things going on in your life this year.
Everything's coming up daffodils. You are indeed one blessed and fortunate Dylanologist.
While it may be overly simplistic to divide people into the producers (of profits) and the non-producers, there is still something to it. And there is something to it psychologically too, because the non-producers often carry a small secret uncomfortable feeling about being more directly dependent on the effort and profit of others to produce the $ to cover their paychecks.
The creation of wealth is a kind of magic from which everyone benefits. I am sick of the CEO-bashing and business-bashing and bashing of commerce. The Left acts according to the foolish and economically moronic illusion that wealth (and poverty) are static, and operate on a zero-sum basis. That's what "Gimme yours" comes from.
When I think of producers and wealth-producers, I do not think of Ayn Rand's heroic industrialists, nor do I think of Wall Street deal-makers, bond salesmen, or money-managers. Those are a tiny number. No, I think of people like the alligator farmer they had on Dirty Jobs on the Discovery Channel. I think of people like Sippican, who creates value out of a chunk of wood. I think of the high school drop-out who buys a gas station, adds a mini-mart, and ends up owning three of them and employing 40 people. I think of my gunsmith and his two younger apprentices who will probably buy the business from him someday. I think of a guy who buys an old building and fixes it up. I think of the gal who trained my hunting dogs. I think of my carpenter, who keeps my house from falling down. I think of the dairy farmer who uses some of our land for his yearlings. I think of our groom, a legal Mexican immigrant who built a grooming business and now has 12 grooms working for him - and now two blacksmiths too: he says he's too busy running things to do our grooming anymore. I think of Synthstuff with his general store. I think of the NYC bridge-painting contractor I met on a hunting trip who started out as a union apprentice. All independent, proud creators of value and wealth - out of thin air, sweat, hard work, and knowledge.
Those are the folks who pay all of the taxes, create the jobs, and make the donations. That is the beating commercial heart of America where anybody who wants to can still build a business and make money if that is what they want to do. Everything else depends on that and those folks, from government to churches to museums to opera houses to universities and every other non-profit, to bridges and airports and conservation and medical research. We should all be grateful to them for what they do instead of joining the silly few who look down their noses on commerce - while feeding off its magic.
The Left has been talking a lot these days about income equality. I have no idea why. Even putting aside the fact that the Left's only plan to reduce inequality is to reduce the incomes of the prosperous, I see no virtue in income equality.
Furthermore, I see many serious problems with the concept, just two of which are disincentivization of risk-taking and of the assumption of responsibilities.
Fred Bauer discusses Yglesias on redistribution of "the wealth" (h/t, Riehl). One quote from Yglesias:
What if we had a 95 percent marginal tax rate on income over $10 million? What dire consequences would flow from this?
Besides the minor details of the loss of freedom and the confiscation of citizens' property (and the fact that people would quit buying those $200 million Powerball tix), what could possibly be wrong with it?
Ed. note: Many of the topics on wealth and poverty are discussed in Cassandra's fine post.
 Slate says that Emily Yoffe is the author of What the Dog Did: Tales From a Formerly Reluctant Dog Owner. Her essay in Slate is What is narcissistic personality disorder, and why does everyone seem to have it?
Not a bad essay for (and presumably by) a non-professional. Fact is, the whole subject is so complex that I haven't even tried to write about it: there would be so many "but"s and "if"s and "except"s in it that it would be dull reading. One quote from Yoffe's piece:
This is the cultural moment of the narcissist. In a New Yorker cartoon, Roz Chast suggests a line of narcissist greeting cards ("Wow! Your Birthday's Really Close to Mine!"). John Edwards outed himself as one when forced to confess an adulterous affair. (Given his comical vanity, the deceitful way he used his marriage for his advancement, and his self-elevation as an embodiment of the common man while living in a house the size of an arena, it sounds like a pretty good diagnosis.) New York Times critic Alessandra Stanley wrote of journalists who Twitter, "it's beginning to look more like yet another gateway drug to full-blown media narcissism." And what other malady could explain the simultaneous phenomena of Blago and the Octomom?
These days, "narcissist" gets tossed around as an all-purpose insult, a description of self-aggrandizing, obnoxious behavior.
The link for the essay is above.
Sunday, March 29. 2009
What's the main predictor of income gaps in America? Single parenthood.
Excellent overview of the American working person and his income at Villainous. One quote re the non-static nature of low income in the US:
A University of Michigan study shows that only 5 percent of those in the bottom fifth of the income distribution in 1975 remained there in 1991. What happened to them? They moved up to the top three-fifths of the income distribution -- middle class or higher. Moreover, three out of 10 of the lowest income earners in 1975 moved all the way into the top fifth of income earners by 1991.
Thus there is no "poverty class" in the US. We are mobile, and poverty is temporary. Another quote, re Obama's taxes:
...the most astonishing sentence in the op-ed (in The Economist) is this one: “His plan would not raise any taxes on couples making less than $250,000 a year, nor on any single person with income under $200,000.” It amounts to a declaration of war on two-income families, a marriage penalty of punitive proportions.
If those two single persons with income just under $200,000 get married, Mr. Obama is going to hammer them with a huge tax increase. If the second earner, who in many cases is the woman, is going to have to give 54% of what she earns to the government, she might as well stay home with the children.
Read the whole thing. Link above.
Reposted from October, 2006
 It's time to think about what fun, expensive, and unnecessary gear we might be wanting to play with this spring.
Here's our first post on Fishing Bamboo.
And here's a post about Hoagy Carmichael Jr., who is apparently a great fisherman of the Grand Cascapedia, and who is responsible for the renaissance of the split-bamboo fly rod, at Never Yet Melted.
The photo of Amber is to highlight a fine site for fly fishermen, Bamboo Fly Rod. net. Nope, that site is defunct, but we hope Amber isn't. This site has good info on casting with, and the care of, bamboo rods.
Leland is just one of many makers.
Saturday, March 28. 2009
 How will you celebrate Earth Hour tonight? Had I a Hummer, I'd take it out for ice cream.
Even though there is no warming, everybody seems to want to do the meaningless but conspicuous token virtue thing. Watt's Up. Moonbattery wants to celebrate Tom Edison via Human Achievement Hour.
If anybody really believed this stuff, they would cancel their electric instead of wagging their finger at me.
 We'll quit putting out bird seed as soon as our diminishing supply runs out: the bugs are coming out despite our sub-30 degree nights (the earth is cooling, you know - climate change), so the birds can go off welfare for a while. What's been around ye olde feeder today?, you ask.
Cowbirds, Redwing Blackbirds, Mourning Doves (tons), White throated Sparrows (lazy ones - should have migrated north by now), Song Sparrow, Chipping Sparrow, Blue Jay, Purple Grackle, Cardinal, Goldfinch, Red Bellied Woodpecker, House Finch, BC Chickadee, Tufted Titmouse, WB Nuthatch. All in their splendid breeding plumage.
Plus some Chipmunks and, of course, Grey Squirrels working the system.
Photo: A male Goldfinch, before fully changing into his Spring plumage.
Wednesday, March 25. 2009
We have often opined here that the real purpose of a liberal arts education is life enrichment rather than to enhance one's future in commerce.
As usual, my views are hopelessly old-fashioned. Tim Black at Spiked discusses the subject in The Modern University: You Get What You Pay For. It's the UK, but it applies in the US too. One quote:
Underpinning the fees debate – indeed the thing that makes the fees debate possible – is this contemporary degraded idea of university education. Gone is the ivory tower; in its place stands the glass-fronted hub of much-mooted, never-seen economic growth. The establishment of the UK Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills is itself testament to the shiny new role laid out for the twenty-first century university. In his first speech as secretary of state for the department in 2007, John Denham stated: ‘To compete and prosper in this world, to respond to the needs of leading global and national businesses, we must enable many thousands more people to study and graduate each year. To become a world leader in skills, as Lord Leitch recommended, we must aim for at least 40 per cent of adults to have higher level qualifications by 2020.’ (6)
How Chaucer helps a nation compete in international business is beyond me, but I would not want to live in a world without him. Tim Black, like me, wonders what this is all about. Another quote from his piece:
The transformation of higher education into a glorified, paid-for training service has, likewise, turned what might once have been aspirant scholars into very demanding customers. Students today come not so much to learn, as to consume the ‘educational product’ on which they have just splashed several thousand pounds. In the proud words of the 2003 government white paper, The Future of Higher Education, students are at university for the ‘acquisition of skills’ (8). Their future earning potential depends on it. In this sense, the NUS’s alternative to tuition fees – a loan to be paid back dependent on earnings – seems like the demand of little more than a consumer watchdog.
It has not always been this way. In his 1853 treatise The Idea of a University, JH Newman defined it as ‘a place [for] teaching universal knowledge’ (9). Such notions of the integrity of university education were not nineteenth-century oddities. They were informed by a deep, anti-utilitarian sense of the intrinsic value of culture and knowledge, something perhaps best expressed by Newman’s contemporary, Matthew Arnold, as the ability to ‘turn a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits’. The university enshrined such freedom. It demarcated a place outside the demands and interests of commerce and business. The value of education bore no relation to monetary value; indeed its ‘uselessness’ was its virtue. Such humanistic ideas of the university accompanied the expansion of higher education provision in the 1960s. In the 1963 Robbins Report on giving more social classes the opportunity to attend university, the committee wrote ‘[the] search for truth is an essential function of the institutions of higher education, and the process of education is itself most vital when it partakes in the nature of discovery’ (10).
Bring me up to date, please. What is college for these days? Life enrichment? Creating an informed citizenry? Nurturing of scholars? Work certification? Job training?
Tuesday, March 24. 2009
For some today, and for just about everybody in the past, medical insurance was something everybody bought, just like life insurance or disability insurance, to cover extraordinary expenses. It is called Major Medical, and it is still readily available.
Over the past 20-30 years, governments, businesses, and union contracts began expanding their coverage by reducing deductibles and covering more routine things. Medicare, of course, was the model for that. During the same time, costly medical technology and new drugs were developed in a near-miraculous way, mostly in the US.
With those changes, folks began wanting "insurance" to cover their routine maintenance medical expenses instead of the things that would financially overwhelm them. When that shift was combined with the CYA style of medicine which results in $5000 work-ups for dizzy spells (fed by the ambulance-chasers), everybody expected everything.
That isn't sustainable, and will never happen. Medical technology has grown to an amazing extent, but those machines are expensive.
I have no idea what the folks in power are trying to plan for us, but I know it will be an entitlement disaster, filled with unintended consequences, that people would not be happy with. It will end up with politically-determined rationing.
Our family bought Major Medical insurance many years ago. It cannot be cancelled. It's more important than a cool car. Why everybody does not do that when they are young and healthy is beyond me, because it would seem like the logical and prudent thing to do. Over the years, we have increased the deductible so that it is quite affordable, and we keep a money market savings account specifically for medical bills to the amount of the deductible. As I recall, we began with a $2000 annual deductible, and now we finally have a dirt-cheap $20,000 2-year deductible on the original policy. It does not cover any routine or preventive medical care, which is as I think it should be. Nobody owes me medical care, in my view, any more than anybody owes me auto insurance.
We have kept this policy whether or not I or my husband had some form of insurance through work, because you never know how long you will want to keep a position - or when you will be let go.
Off-topic: Around 30% of Medicare expenditures occur in the last year of life. In other words, on failing and terminal people. Interestingly and unsurprisingly, when docs hold end-of-life conversations with these patients (as we should), the costs go way down.
If this new study is correct and replicated, I can only wonder why it took so long to notice such a simple thing.
I have always suspected that most mental illnesses are due to hard wiring, not chemistry. The fact that medicine can help says nothing about their causes: it makes no more sense than it would to call headaches a Tylenol deficiency disorder. Given the complexity of the brain, miswiring is a common phenomenon and gives people plenty to cope with - in addition to the ordinary travails of life.
The human brain is an ongoing experiment of nature.
While searching info about Kenyon (it was Paul Newman's alma mater, along with EL Doctorow, Robert Lowell, William Rehnquist - and Rutherford B. Hayes), I stumbled upon an op-ed written for the NYT by Kenyon's Director of Admissions: To All the Girls I've Rejected.
It's about how colleges are dealing with the disproportionate numbers of female applicants they have been seeing over recent years, and why they feel forced to raise their admissions standards for them. It's Gender Discrimination!
Photo: Kenyon College
Monday, March 23. 2009
Fascinating story. From Kimball re AIG bonuses and the CDSs:
...Epstein explains, for more than a decade some 400 traders in a London-based subsidiary of AIG have managed $1.6 trillion in derivative contracts for the company. It’s an interesting story:
In 1998, this tiny group got into the newly-created credit default swap business when JP Morgan Chase came to it with a proposition to transform debt on its books into security packages that could be sold off its books. To make these bank debt packages salable to other institutions, they needed credible insurance against default to get Triple-A rating. So the AIG financial product group, seeing no risk of default, sold it in the form of credit default swaps. Soon afterwards, with the support of Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers (now President’s Obama’s economic advisor), the Commodity Futures Modernization Act was passed, which excluded credit default swaps from being considered a “security” under the jurisdiction of the SEC or any other government agency. This act allowed these swaps to be deployed on a massive scale to convert all kinds of debt, including even subprime mortgages and car loans, into triple A securities and turned AIG’s arm, now headed by Joseph J. Cassano, an aggressive Brooklyn-born alumni of Drexel’s back office operations, into a multi-billion dollar profit center for the insurance behemoth. Even though the unit’s 400 or so traders constituted less than one-third of one percent of AIG’s loyal employees, it produced close to twenty percent of its total operating profits. While Cassano kept the list of his counterparties in the credit default swaps a closely held secret, he bragged at a conference in 2007 that they included a global swath of “investment banks, pension funds, endowments, foundations, insurance companies, hedge funds, money managers, high-net-worth individuals, municipalities and sovereigns and supranationals.” By 2006, his group was raking in nearly $4 billion in profits, and, as is the tradition in the derivative game, he and his traders got a rich cut of the loot, which on average amounted to roughly $1.1 million a trader.
So far, so good, right? No complaints then. These guys were coining money and a lot of people got rich, spent their money, and made a lot of people happy.
But into every life a little rain must fall. Epstein continues:
With the collapse in 2008 of the debt AIG was insuring, came such massive losses that Cassano resigned, and AIG, unable to post collateral, faced bankruptcy. At this point in September 2008, the US government rescued AIG, pouring in $173 billion of tax payers’ money. Even so, there remained a $1.6 trillion in potential liabilities that could be triggered by thousands of the credit default swap contracts, many of which would not expire until 2012. To prevent hundreds of billions of losses, these custom-designed contracts had to be continually watched, and, if necessary hedged, by traders who understood each one’s particular vulnerability.
So what would you do if you were Obama, Maxine Waters, or some other moralistic scold? Deplore the bonuses? Easy to do, but at what cost?
All those complex contracts: who was going to deal with them?
To perform this critical task, the remaining 370 or so remaining traders in the group wanted the same sort of guaranteed compensation in the form of retention bonuses as had in their two year contracts. The situation for AIG, and the US government that now owned 80 percent of it, was not unlike the one in Mario Puzo’s Godfather in which an offer is made that cannot be refused. In this case, even without a bloody horse head under the blankets, AIG and its federal overseers could not risk falling into a $1.6 trillion black hole by turning down the demands of the traders in the financial product group. It was not that these traders had such unique skills in managing derivative contracts that they could not be replaced by other people but that they knew the business’ crucial secrets, including the identities of he counterparties to the credit default swaps and the vulnerabilities in their positions. The implicit threat: they could use the secrets to which they were privy to trade against AIG’s positions as it attempted to unload its $1.6 trillion dollar portfolio.
Maybe, all things considered, AIG did the right thing, the prudent thing, the fiscally responsible thing?
Under these circumstances, rather than risking immense losses from having their secret book compromised, AIG paid to keep its traders from defecting. Their compensation, when approved by the Fed and Treasury, would amount to about $500,000 a trader a year ( less than half what they had been getting in 2008.) The staff at the NY Fed, while Timothy Geithner was still its head, in fact helped negotiate the terms for these retention bonuses. When Geithner moved on to become Treasury Secretary in January 2009, he presumably understood how financially dangerous it could be to do otherwise, since he intervened with the Senate Banking Committee Chairman in February to get a provision dropped from a bill that would have prevented AIG (and other recipients of federal money) from paying such huge bonuses. In fairness to Geithner, the alternative to making these pay-offs might have proven a thousand times more costly to AIG, and its defacto owner, the US Government.
Moralistic outrage can be a delicious emotion. But it is worth making sure that you have the right target before going to town with it.
So this London group sold the insurance (CDS) based on a low-risk prediction, predicted wrong, and left us looking at such vast and disruptive counterparty risk that something had to be done. The bankruptcy of AIG was not a reasonable or responsible option. Apparently making CDSs "non-securities" made the whole mess possible, but I understand why the Clinton admin did that at the time: they did not anticipate that it would make it possible to put lipstick on pigs, and that one could run out of lipstick.
It's all about the unintended and unexpected consequences of financial legislation. Even the smart Larry Summers was the biggest supporter of CDSs, and tons of supposedly savvy folks wanted to get into the CDS market for speculation, hedging, or arbitrage. Wiki has a good description of the CDS markets.
Sunday, March 22. 2009
From Bruce Kesler -
My respected blog-friend Scott Johnson of PowerLine writes “Why I am depressed.”
 “I feel utterly powerless to do anything about the fellow in the Oval Office who combines infantile leftism and adolescent grandiosity in roughly equal measures. It seems to me that every day he is responsible for assaults on the freedom and well being of the American people. I can't keep up and I can't stand to pay attention.
“His aim seems to be to reduce us to government dependents. His inattention to rehabilitation of the financial system in lieu of vastly expanding the size and scope of the government is a dead giveaway, as is his lack of concern over the vast destruction of wealth his policies are working (and will continue to work).
“Perhaps most depressing to me is the manifestation of his adolescent grandiosity in his stewardship of foreign policy and national security. He doesn't understand that the government of Iran is intent on acquiring nuclear weapons it can put to evil purposes. He thinks he can sweet-talk them out of achieving this objective.”
Scott Johnson also refers to Victor Davis Hanson’s “Thoughts About Depressed Americans.”
“Why are Americans hesitant, bewildered after the arrival of the Messiah?
“Not for the reason our President attests about high unemployment or shaky GDP or the lack of national health care. We simply are ashamed of our profligacy; we don’t trust those who should be trusted; we put up with the crass and honor the mediocre and ugly; and we fight and bicker over the distribution, never over a share in the creation.
Hope and change, indeed.”
Both Johnson and Hanson, in effect, point at frustration at both external events and at our own behaviors. They are correct. And, for me, they are incorrect. Depression comes from frustration with non-attainment of unrealistic objectives and inadequate actions to overcome.
I’m not depressed. Mostly because I’m a glass-half-full type, with the life experience that with difficulty and pain has seen and been shown that it is.
Depression implies a fixation upon the perceived negative forces at work, with a tendency toward paralysis of action to change them or our self. These are unconstructive and self-defeating attitudes and behaviors.
Avoidance of or ending depressed feelings and behavior comes from attitudinal resilience and from engaging in efficacious actions.
No doubt, we’re in a mess, both of our own making and by others, and many in our political and societal elite are making it worse, with potential dire consequences. Still, one must recognize the resilient strengths we have. Forty-eight percent did not vote for Obama, despite a perfect-storm in his favor, and current polling shows him losing support, and even his allied media are having to take some notice of his excesses and lackings. The US is emerging from this economic calamity relatively stronger than other countries. The positive trend-line in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere that was hard-earned under Bush has not been abandoned by Obama, though it may become weakened. Ordinary Americans are buckling down in their personal affairs and continuing to achieve for themselves, society, and our futures.
Scott Johnson, however, seems to recognize the negative feedback felt by being ignored and powerless to be efficacious. Those who’ve argued long and hard for greater sanity do not feel recognized with success or able to measurably change that. Are they heading to a new version of tuning out? I don’t think so. But, what is needed instead is even more diligence and exertion, particularly in new ways – sane ways -- of engaging themselves and others.
Many are working at that. Real change takes a while, in fits and starts, through trial and error, but relies ultimately upon faith in oneself, in one’s beliefs, in the decency and sanity of others, and thus in outcomes.
I’m not Pollyanna, but even prefer that to a depressed hole. So I’m not depressed, but energized. I know it works.
Saturday, March 21. 2009
Smith is a member of Montana's Flathead Nation. Like so many artists, as long as she steers clear of politics she makes nifty pictures to look at. Here are some of her works.
(I think I first became aware of her work in Jamake Highwater's The Sweet Grass Lives On; 50 Contemporary North American Indian Artists. Highwater himself has an interesting story. Born Jake Marks, he was a choreographer, critic and writer who worked in San Francisco and NYC and who, like Ward Churchill, wore a ponytail and passed himself off as an Indian. A fraud. In some areas of society, of course, being a member of an "oppressed group" lends mucho cachet and sex appeal. His Indian art book was pretty good, though. Lots of pictures.)
Twenty years ago she was making American Indian/Chagall-type mythic dream stuff. Ghosts and monks and coyotes and firebirds and petroglyphs. Here are two of her pastels:
Friday, March 20. 2009
Most Americans, unlike Europeans, are emotionally mature enought to be willing to see that government is not run by their betters, but by cowardly morons - often by cowardly moronic narcissists who could never handle a real, demanding job in which their added value could be measured.
The widespread recognition of that is one thing that distinguishes America from nations with monarchic, dictatorial, and dependency traditions.
Hope springs eternal from the human breast, though, doesn't it? Even from those who know better.
I have felt disgusted and embarassed by our federal government and the administration over the past few weeks. We posted earlier today that these people could not run a successful candy shop, much less the government. But they have not shown that they can even run their own lives honestly and effectively. That's why I want them as far as possible from my medical care, my investments, my business, and my pocketbook - and from everything else in my life. Please - do me no favors.
Three posts that captured some of my feelings today:
Obama's simple political strategy. Wizbang
The antique ideas from the Dems. So old, they are marketed as new. Am Thinker
Bonfire of the Trivialities. Krauthammer
Liberal views; Belgian Brains. Goldberg
If you can ease antitrust laws for newspapers, why not for anything else? This government is casual about the role of law in this country. Related: Pelosi says enforcement of immigration laws is un-American. That must mean that breaking the law is American.
 For those who live in the northern parts of the world, just a reminder: unless you live in an area with remarkably fertile soil, your lawns, perennials and some of your shrubs count on some fertilizer because none of them are truly natural (they are all genetically-engineered and hybridized), nor do they receive what nature would otherwise supply them for free (rotten leaf mold, flooding silt, bear, human, and Wooly Mammoth poop, etc).
My point is that it's easy to forget that the roots wake up and begin growing and seeking nourishment long before any buds appear.
Not only that, but it takes a while for your fertilizer to get down to the roots. Time and rain. March and early April is the time to give your precious plants a good head start up here in the north country.
And, yes, this is a metaphor too.
Thursday, March 19. 2009
 From today's Marketwatch:
"Responding to the anger about bonuses paid to AIG traders, the House approved a bill Thursday that would impose a punitive 90% tax on bonuses paid by American International Group Inc and other financial companies that receive federal help. The vote was 328-93. The bill would apply to bonuses of people making more than $250,000 a year, and would apply only to payments from companies getting more than $5 billion from the federal government."
From James Madison:
"Bills of attainder, ex post facto laws, and laws impairing the obligations of contracts, are contrary to the first principles of the social compact, and to every principle of sound legislation. ... The sober people of America are weary of the fluctuating policy which has directed the public councils. They have seen with regret and indignation that sudden changes and legislative interferences, in cases affecting personal rights, become jobs in the hands of enterprising and influential speculators, and snares to the more-industrious and less-informed part of the community."
Sober people are in short supply nowadays, ain't they?
 I've been to a lot of colleges. I've seen geeks, dorks, nerds. Committed frat-icide by keg. Met gobs of the artsy fartsy stripe, too. Seen plenty of pencil pushers in their dorm room chrysalis. But in all my travels, I've never been to a grimmer hive of humorlessness than Wellesley College. I'd rather have two teeth out than go to a party at Wellesley College. But they've finally come across with one good laugh. Check out the chart. That's the self-reported rate of virginity among the denizens of Swellesley, according to their own Counterpoint magazine.
When I picture the pile of mendacity this chart represents, and then season it with the images of the LUGS gettin' it on under the watchful eyes of their Sauron, Obama, and Che posters, the desolate furtive groping interspersed with the endless acts of contrition and permission necessary to disrobe a feminist toward the center of the chart, and the beautiful frosting of a vision of the bell curve ends getting together by accident during an all night trance party, I forgive Wellesley everything. You finally came across. You're checkbox comedians after all.
I've read that a Wellesley student once reported that she switched her iPod to Bach while waiting at crosswalks, because she didn't want anyone to know she was listening to the Spice Girls if she got hit by a bus when the light changed. I bet that girl's off the charts, baby.
Wednesday, March 18. 2009
You can die of hypothermia when the temperature is well above freezing, and you will die of hypothermia after a while in 77 degree water. Many interesting facts at Freezing Persons Recollect (h/t, Cons Grapevine). All outdoorsmen should know this stuff. One example:
...many hypothermia victims die each year in the process of being rescued. In "rewarming shock," the constricted capillaries reopen almost all at once, causing a sudden drop in blood pressure. The slightest movement can send a victim's heart muscle into wild spasms of ventricular fibrillation. In 1980, 16 shipwrecked Danish fishermen were hauled to safety after an hour and a half in the frigid North Sea. They then walked across the deck of the rescue ship, stepped below for a hot drink, and dropped dead, all 16 of them.
Photo: 1st Class stateroom, Queen Mary.
I remember, as a lad, passing the Queen Mary in mid-Atlantic on a clear day. Built in 1934, she was an old lady by that time. Yes, she did blow her 1-ton whistles. She sits in Long Beach, CA today.
They don't make em like they usta.
The website Lost Liners has it all. (h/t, Theo)
 In a 2006 interview, then- prospective candidate Barack Obama praised our troops in Iraq but when asked whether “Did [Congressman John] Murtha say that in the right way?” his charge that Haditha Marines committed “cold-blooded murder," Obama deferred to Murtha:
“You know, I don't have the exact quotes in front of me. What I know is here is a guy who served our country. I would never second guess John Murtha... I think he's somebody who knows of which he speaks.”
One after another, the Haditha Marines have been found not guilty. I’ve written many, many blog posts on the details of each case. I’ve yet to read anywhere, including the leftist blogs, any substantive criticism of the proceedings’ consideration of the facts.
Two cases remain open: Platoon leader SSgt Frank Wuterich and Battalion Commander LtCol Jeffrey Chessani. As in the other cases, the politically-propelled zealous prosecution has been handed a series of setbacks to their legal position. The latest is the appeals court upholding of the dismissal of charges against Chessani because of undue command influence. The entire judgment is here. A portion gets down to tacks:
“[W]e are convinced the Government failed to meet its burden of demonstrating, beyond a reasonable doubt, that these proceedings were untainted by the appearance of UCI. [Undue Command Influence] We are similarly convinced that an objective, disinterested observer, fully informed of all the facts and circumstances, would harbor significant doubt about the fairness of this proceeding.”
The prosecution can appeal further, up to the US Supreme Court. Otherwise, the prosecution can choose to restart the case from scratch, under new leadership. The same cause of dismissal, for SSgt Wuterich, is expected.
These Marines have suffered from a runaway frenzy in prosecution. It’s time it ended.
The father of one of the boys in my son’s Little League team is a similarly distinguished LtCol of many years service in the Marine Corps, preparing to assume a vital and very challenging command. Is the message we want to give him and his family that they may face similar ruinous consequences of simply doing their duty?
Unlike Obama, I won’t defer to Murtha but to the known honor and courage of my fellow Marines.
Tuesday, March 17. 2009
 The blackbirds are now up from the South and back at the feeder: voracious Purple Grackles, Cowbirds, and Red-wings. Also visiting today: Song Sparrow, Fox Sparrow, White thoated Sparrow, Mourning Doves in droves, Tree Sparrow, Carolina Wren, Tufted Titmouse, BC Chickadee, Goldfinch, Cardinal, Blue Jay, a few remaining SC Juncoes. Nothing exciting, but all comers are welcome.
With all of the snow and cold, it's been expensive keeping these critters on welfare this year. It's getting about time to cut out their free lunch anyway, although it was 29 degrees F. this morning.
Plus the dang fat squirrels eat half of the bird seed, thus resulting in healthier, more fertile squirrels producing more babies to eat even more of the bird seed next winter.
Photo: A male Cardinal. We have plenty of them here. They nest in the evergreens and brambles.
We like to put it out there into cyberspace, especially stuff that the MSM neglects, but also whatever seems interesting or diverting to us. We do not aim to cover everything, though. We all have day jobs, so whatever we do is all we can do.
( Our dirty little secret is that we use politics to attract readers to our non-political posts, like recipes, gardening tips, an early morning glance at each Sunday's Lectionary, and pretty girls on occasion.)
How many newspapers these days give you an early look at Sunday's Lectionary reading these days?
If you like us, please send us around with a recommendation to your friends. A steadily growing readership is our reward. Furthermore, we feel sad when we consider all the folks around the planet who might enjoy us, but still do not know of our existence.
Photo: Our fact-checker, on the job serving breakfast at Maggie's Farm HQ this St. Paddy's Day morning. But Corona on St. Patrick's Day?
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