Stock Car Follies

Stock car racing has its clowns and follies, too.

After the first pit stop last night in Kentucky, during which almost everyone got only two tires, Kyle Petty and company went into a couple of dissertations that, even for them, was more than a bit weird. First they focused on Danica Patrick, who had restarted 11th and was running 16th. Kyle opined that the reason was that she had taken four tires and he thought that it "takes longer for those four tires to come in."

I was thinking that was a remarkable example of blowing smoke up our dresses when they next went to Jimmie Johnson, who had gained four positions after the restart. The reason they gave for that gain? You got it: he was one of the ones who had gotten four tires.

These two pieces of commentary came in immediate succession, and were delivered with complete confidence and aplomb. They did not explain why four new tires would cost Danica five positions while gaining four positions for Jimmie, nor did they seem to find anything in the least contradictory or odd about their positions.

They also did not explain, of course, why Danica, after her four tires "came in" continued advancing to the rear, running as low as 29th before finishing in 21st place after several cars ahead of her crashed.

They also spoke at great length about the failure of an air gun during a Jeff Gordon pit stop, and about how crews treat air guns like the crown jewels and such. Two are former drivers and one of them is the greatest crew chief in the history of any form of auto racing (he was described by his associate in the prerace as “America’s Crew Chief”) and none of them asked why no replacement air gun was ready to go when the air gun failed. The crew looked like a bunch of chickens with their heads cut off, and it took them almost a full minute to get a replacement air gun ready to go. WTF?

I've seen air guns fail and the guy behind the wall pull it back and toss a replacement in a couple of seconds, and I've never been anything other than a fan. But an observant fan. These announcers were apparently not even watching what they were being paid to announce, because they didn't even notice the total confusion that the pit crew exhibited when the air gun failed, how totally unprepared they were for that event, and that they had no backup air gun ready to go.

These clowns are so clueless regarding the topic they are discussing that maybe they should run for Congress, or perhaps the White House.

Rough Driving

About six times in the Indycar race today one car hit another and caused a wreck. In each case the offending driver was penalized for "making contact," which I thought was rather amusing. The same thing happens about three dozen times during a stock car race, causing the targeted car to wreck about half of the time, and it is written off as "nobody's fault, just hard racing," or "just one of them there racin' deals." The offended driver usually returns the favor in a subsequent race, often with interest. Indycar drivers just whine to the media after the race.

A.J. Foyt, on the other hand, says that "There are a bunch of goddam idiots out there" when his driver is wrecked. The announcers later paraphrased him as saying "gosh darn," but the damage was already done.

Real World Politics

Mr. Obama announced yesterday that he wants Congress to give him $500 million with which to train moderate rebels in Syria. Wow. How much training can be done for $500 million? More to the point, how many weapons can be purchased for $500 million? Why do I think the second question is much more pertinent than the first?

Meanwhile, while we are arming training Syrian rebels, Mr. Kerry is telling Russia to disarm the rebels in Ukraine. And not only must Mr. Putin disarm those rebels, assuming that he has the ability to do so, which is highly unlikely, but he must do so “within hours” of Kerry telling him to do so.

Mr. and Mrs. Clinton are flying around the country touting her new book and telling people that they understand the working class because they worked hard for their money and are themselves members of the working class. They make a speech to that effect just after their private jet lands and just before they retire to the penthouse suite for champagne and pheasant under glass for dinner.

And finally, Mr. Obama is making a tour of the Midwest where he “spent a day in the life of a young Minnesota accountant struggling to make ends meet.” He had lunch with her and then went to a park for a “town hall” type meeting where “350 invited participants” had gathered. I’m sure her typical day includes meetings in the park with 350 Obama loyalists.

This trip had the stated purpose of “reconnecting Obama with Democrats ahead of midterm elections,” which seems a bit odd considering that he isn’t running for office in that midterm election.

These people are just utterly detached from reality.

Adventure

My wife locked her purse in her car yesterday, a feat which she accomplished by dropping her car keys into the night deposit box of the San Diego Library. As much fun as it might be to do so, we will not explore any theories as to why she did that. Her first thought was to call me at home; a plan which was thwarted by the fact that her cell phone was in the locked car with her purse.

A San Diego Police officer was nearby and, manfully resisting his tendency to laugh his ass off, promptly offered assistance. She decided that having him call me might not be the best idea. “Mr. Heffner, this is the police, I’m calling about your wife.” I’ve already had several strokes and one heart attack, and… Anyway, he allowed her to call me on his cell phone.

I could not, however, bring her the spare car key because she carries that with her in her purse in case she locks the car keys in the car, which she has done once before. She doesn’t want to have to wait for me to bring the spare key to her if she does that again, so she carries the spare key in her purse. Good plan, except that it doesn’t cover you if you lock your purse in the car and drop your keys… Never mind.

She could not call AAA because not only was her cell phone in the locked car, but so was her AAA card, in her purse with the spare key, so she had me call AAA in her behalf. I could not, of course, call her back to tell her I had done so, but we know each other well enough that such a call was not really needed.

Meanwhile, the reason that the police officer was there was that an alarm was going off in the library. Apparently someone had been left behind and locked inside when the library closed and, in the process of leaving after the library was closed and locked, had set off an alarm. A library manager had been called and was on the way to shut off the alarm and the officer was standing by until he/she got there.

When that happened my wife was able to get in the library and retrieve her car keys, so she called me and asked me to call AAA and cancel the rescue. The rescue was quicker than my call and so she and the tow truck driver waved at each other as she was leaving the scene when he arrived.

Living with my wife is many things, all good of course, but it is seldom dull.

Regime Change Again

This time of a thug who we put in charge. Obama is saying that we may commit to air strikes in Iraq, but not until Nuri al Maliki changes his ways and forms a “more inclusive” government or steps down.

Where have we heard this before? It’s a refrain which has been sung by the executive branch of this nation for several generations, going back in the Middle East to 1953 when we overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran.

Usually when we overthrow the leadership of a country we learn our lesson and move on to other countries for our regime change mania, but Obama has unlearned that lesson for us and is committing to a second regime change in the same nation after barely more than a decade regardless of how badly the first one turned out.

Not only that, but having been dissuaded from his “red line” rhetoric regarding Syria last year, Obama sees this as a chance to renew the opportunity for regime change in Syria by going in through the back door. He has pronounced that if he commits to air strikes in support of Iraq against the dreaded ISIS forces then those strikes would not be restricted to Iraq but would include strikes against those forces in Syria.

Sort of like bombing Cambodia during the war in Vietnam, you know, but we all know where air strikes against ISIS in Syria would lead. In Libya we morphed from a limited protection of Benghazi to “we will not stop until Ghadaffi is gone” (and most of Libya is rubble) in a matter of hours after
the first bomb fell.

ISIS has done us a favor. Two for the price of one. What a deal.

Unemployment Is Not Always Cyclical

If you are going to write a dissertation on an economic theory it probably does not enhance your credibility as an economist to start your dissertation with a sentence such as, “One of the things you can always bet on with surety is that the conservatives will always try to convince the public that a cyclical event is, in fact, a ‘structural’ event.” A thoughtful and unbiased reader might suspect from that opening, as several commenters did, that the writer has an agenda, which very much turns out to be the case.

His topic has to do with the failure to recover from our low level of employment which he attributes to “cyclical factors” and inadequate government stimulus.

In a nutshell, notwithstanding all of his charts, graphs and statistics, the offshoring of manufacturing and information technology jobs was not by any means a “cyclical event.” It changed the employment picture in this nation in a profoundly structural manner, and until we recognize that and change the way we seek recovery to accommodate that we will not see any meaningful recovery for the working class.

We are still seeking to restore our economy by restoring consumer spending because “consumer spending is 70% of our GDP,” and that is a fundamental problem. Consumer spending is consumption, not production, and the reason it is an element of our Gross Domestic Product is that it has been assumed that consumer spending is a valid measure of this nation’s production of consumer goods. That was valid at one time, but the offshoring of production jobs changed that to a profound degree, and it is no longer even close to being true.

When it was true an increase in consumer spending caused an increase in the production of consumer goods and an increase in the jobs producing those goods. That no longer happens. What happens now is that an increase in consumer spending mostly causes an increase in imports and a concomitant increase in our balance of trade deficit. Thus, an increase in consumer spending actually harms our economy more than it helps.

To restore the economy for the working class we have to do one of two things; either restore the production jobs so that consumer goods production once again is equal to consumer spending, or develop a new economic model that does not use consumer spending as the basis for our economy.

Economists and politicians know this, and they are lying to us by not admitting it because both alternatives are hard and complicated. They have no idea how to bring those jobs back, and they have no idea how to create a model that replaces them. Hyping an increase in consumer spending is the easy answer, but not only is it the wrong answer, it is not an answer at all. It is a lie, and our leaders know it is a lie. They will continue to tell that lie until we force them to tell the truth.

Interesting

When certain parties wanted to split this nation into two parts we fought a long and bloody war to prevent that from happening. Now it is becoming increasingly popular to suggest that we, not the Iraqis, but we split Iraq into three parts. Do we even think for the briefest moment about what we are saying and/or doing?

Ironic

I just finished watching a rerun of an old Law and Order, in which McCoy prosecutes a woman for a murder committed during a 1968 protest of the war in Vietnam, with much discussion of "an immoral war," and charges that "the real criminals are in Washington." She finally agrees to a plea deal of manslaughter for 8-1/2 to 20 years. In the closing scene McCoy muses, “She’ll be in jail until 2003. I think the 60’s will be over by then.”

That was, of course, the year that we invaded Iraq.

It's About The Points

There’s a show on television named “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” which, like politics, is a comedy show. Its slogan is “Everything’s made up and the points don’t matter,” which can be modified to suit politics; “Everything’s made up and only the talking points matter.” Which brings us to Iraq.

CBS Evening News is freaking out regarding the situation in Iraq now, apparently having realized that they aren’t going to sway public opinion in favor of declaring war over Syria, describing ISIS as the new “al Queda army” and its leader as the “new Osama bin Laden.”

They emotionally told us last night that ISIS is “retaking territory where thousands of Americans died,” and then had some former CIA clown on to tell us that the group posed the danger that “with a safe haven in western Iraq” they would have “a base of operations where they could attack the United States homeland” and that “we should be very worried about that.”

He didn’t say what form he thought those attacks would take, I don’t think rocket propelled grenades (RPG’s) will reach that far, but it was as almost if he was speaking directly to Obama, who has this mantra about “denying them space in which to plan their attacks” regarding the war in Afghanistan.

Obama supporters, who have been giving Obama credit for “ending the war in Iraq” in 2011, are sort of hoist on their own petard at this point because his opponents are now saying that the disintegration of Iraq is his fault for pulling out the troops in 2011. They’re both full of cow dung, of course, because the decision to withdraw all troops in 2011 was not made by Obama; it was made by George W. Bush and formalized in an agreement between him and Nuri al Maliki in 2008.

All Obama did was allow that agreement to be carried out because he had no choice. In fact he tried valiantly to abrogate the agreement, and negotiated vigorously with al Maliki for more than two years to extend our military presence in Iraq and failed. He was, of course, roundly criticized for that failure while being praised by supporters for “ending the war,” because facts are irrelevant when it comes to politics.

Twitter is for Twits

Twitter is going to be the force that changes the world, we keep being told. It will be the driver of revolutions which will topple governments, and it will turn small causes into world shaking events.

What was the outcome of #BringBackOurGirls? That "hashtag" was going to rescue the girls kidnapped in Nigeria, and result in the destruction of Boko Haram. It turned out to be, as Twitter causes always do, to be as effective as a rock thrown in a millpond; making a big splash, diminishing to a few ripples, and then leaving the millpond as still as before the rock was thrown. The girls are still missing, Boko Haram is still as much in business as it ever was, and in Nigeria nothing has changed in the slightest.

A new "hashtag" has replaced it on top of the follower count, celebrating the defeat of Eric Cantor, as if that trivial event was in any way going to alter the cesspool that is politics in Washington.

Busted. As In Broken.

As an example of how badly broken our all-volunteer military is, to illustrate just how thoroughly that principle is failing this nation, consider this,

Bowe Bergdahl, the soldier who deserted in Afghanistan, was discharged from the Coast Guard a mere 26 days after completing boot camp. The Army was aware of that, but gave him a waiver and signed him up in a combat role. They were gearing up for Obama's 30,000 man "surge" of troops in Afghanistan at the time.

Our active frontline military level is 1.43 million, 2.28 million including the reserves. According to the above, we are so badly stretched that we did not have 2% of the active military, or 1% of the total, available to man that "surge" and the recruiting pool is so badly depleted that we had to use Coast Guard rejects.

The military has a term FUBAR, the clean version of which stands for "fouled up beyond all recognition" and means that something has become unrepairable. This is the "best military in the world" and we are filling it with Coast Guard rejects?

Drip, Drip, Drip

Obama’s initial response to criticism about not notifying Congress regarding the negotiations about the exchange for Bergdahl was that his health was endangered and it was necessary to move very rapidly. He went into considerable detail about how the soldier appeared in videos with weight loss and such, and that his concern as Commander in Chief required him to move swiftly to rescue one of the men who served under him.

Congress, however, remained angry and unconvinced, continuing to insist that they should have been informed before the exchange was finalized.

Then, after almost a week, the administration informed us that there was also a death threat involved in the process. CBS initially reported it as an issue of speed, saying that the Taliban threatened to kill Bergdahl if the exchange was not finalized immediately. Then we heard that it actually more directly had to do with the failure to inform Congress; that the Taliban had threatened to kill Bergdahl if the negotiations became public. The spokesman who released this information was not named.

The Obama administration has a way of releasing the details of an issue in bits and pieces over a significant period of time, often with conflicting facts. If the public is not buying the initial offering, they run a different flag up the flagpole and see if the public salutes that one. That makes it very difficult to believe anything the White House says.

Water Carrier

CBS Evening News has become so open about its pimping for the administration that it has turned into a comedy show. A few days ago it carried a piece about Obama’s decision to arm and train “moderate rebels” in Syria, followed immediately by a description of Assad routinely and repeatedly employing chlorine gas in attacks on Syrian civilians in violation of their agreement to surrender their chemical weapons. This was an agreement, CBS pointed out, which prevented Obama from bombing Assad’s forces into the Stone Age.

No other news agency has even accepted that the chlorine gas attacks have been proven even to have occurred at all, let alone that Assad perpetrated them, but CBS does not let such trivial details as proof get in their way.

Last night they were all over the Bergdahl story, saying that the reason that the transfer was made so rapidly and without notifying Congress was not only due to Bergdahl’s declining health, which was displayed by him stuttering, cradling one arm “as if it was injured,” and that he seemed to have lost weight. The picture with which they backed this up was, to say the least, unconvincing, and none of it was visible when they showed the film of his transfer.

On the film of his transfer they cited further evidence of his ill health in that when first seen in the pickup truck he was blinking repeatedly “as if suffering from vision loss.” Or, perhaps, as if he’d just had a blindfold removed. Try again.

Further hastening the negotiations, and justifying failure to notify Congress, they claimed, was that there were “death threats.” They did not clarify that, but we now learn that the Taliban threatened to kill Bergdahl if the negotiations became public. The administration only trotted that out after almost a week of having his health issues being the sole justification for haste and still getting heat from Congress, so...

They then tried to contradict his fellow soldiers who are now calling him a deserter, because Obama would never release terrorists in exchange for a guy who was a sloppy soldier and a deserter. They claim that those soldiers were interviewed at the time Bergdahl was captured and said then that he was “always on time, dressed in proper uniform and courteous.”

If you think that any grunt would describe a fellow grunt in those terms you have not only not served in the military, you have never had a family member who served, and you have probably never even spoken to a person in the military. There is nothing there about how well he performed his duties, and I can assure you that is the only thing we gave a shit about with respect to our fellows.

I guess I cared a little bit about whether or not my sidekick was on time, at least in terms of relieving me on watch, but I could care less if his uniform was clean, and courtesy was the last thing I expected from him. What I cared about was could he check battery specs? Could he keep a motor-generator set on line? Could he wire a motor starter?

The CBS report goes on to say that they did not suspect desertion at the time and could not speculate why he left the outpost, but decided that he “was simply ‘bored’ with the routine of standing guard.” Sure, because one always wanders off unarmed into enemy territory when one is bored.

Getting Old

I started reading an article about "Eleven things you should never put in a dishwasher," when I realized that I almost certainly knew what the eleven things are and, blush, that I don't have a functioning dishwasher.

GM "Investigation"

The General Motors "internal investigation" is unmitigated bullshit in its entirety. Garbage. Lies, confabulation and self justifying nonsense. The people who produced it, the smug ninny who announced it and the criminals who caused the problem and covered it up should all have concrete blocks tied around their ankles and be tossed into Lake Michigan.

The Unasked Question

In all of the discussion about the release of Bowe Bergdahl, one question has not been asked, and I’m rather wondering why it has not. Who were his superiors, and what were they doing before his presumed desertion?

When I was a petty officer, the Navy equivalent of sergeant, part of my responsibility was the well being of the men who served under my direction. If one of my men was having, for instance, wife problems or money problems, it was my responsibility to counsel him and to see to it that he received whatever help he needed to resolve those problems. If those problems were not noticed and dealt with then we would have had crew members functioning at less than maximum effectiveness.

By most accounts Bergdahl was having and expressing serious doubts about the mission, about his place and role in the military unit, for quite some time prior to leaving his post. In any case, there is no way that he was behaving normally and contributing fully to the unit’s mission and then suddenly deserted to the enemy. Something had to be showing in his behavior. Why did his sergeant and/or the officer directly responsible for him not notice and address that issue before it turned into a problem? Where was the leadership within that military unit?

Push come to shove, I would tell my superior that I wanted a guy shipped out, and perhaps that's what someone should have said regarding Bergdahl. Why was that never done?

“No man is an island.” That is particularly true in an organization such as the military, and yet this man’s supposed desertion is being discussed as if it happened in a vacuum and was not something for which the military itself bears any responsibility. The military says it will investigate the conditions under which Bergdahl was captured. I think that investigation should include all levels of the leadership in Bergdahl’s unit.

Obfuscation and Evasion

Tom Dispatch, via Salon.com, attempts to debunk the theory that raising the minimum wage would have any deleterious effects. In response to the question asking if companies would not merely pass the higher wages on in the form of higher prices, the author replies,

Maybe, but they are unlikely to be significant. For example, if McDonald’s doubled the salaries of its employees to a semi-livable $14.50 an hour, not only would most of them go off public benefits, but so would the company — and yet a Big Mac would cost just 68 cents more. In general, only about 20% of the money you pay for a Big Mac goes to labor costs. At Wal-Mart, increasing wages to $12 per hour would cost the company only about one percent of its annual sales.

I have no idea what he means by “but so would the company” in terms of going off public benefits, but the bit about the Big Mac is interesting. He says it would “cost just 68 cents more,” presumably bolstering his “unlikely to be significant” argument about increased prices. I’m not sure in what universe a 20% increase would be considered insignificant.

As for Wal-Mart, he says it would reduce their annual sales volume, but he says nothing about what it would do to their prices, which is a bit odd given that he is responding to a question about businesses raising prices.

I am not opposed to raising the minimum wage but, unfortunately, this is the kind of discussion we get today. No one seems to be able to actually make their case without resorting to obfuscation, as with the price of the Big Mac, or evasion, as with the Wal-Mart sales.

Why not admit that it will raise prices and make the case for that being justifiable? Or, alternatively, make a case that it will raise prices only in areas where the price increases don’t matter? If your cause is valid, why not engage in honest discussion about it?

And The Crowd Goes Wild

The various objections to and defenses of Obama’s carbon cut, reducing carbon emissions from coal-fired electric plants by 2030, proves that our schools and colleges are no longer teaching the ability to use logic. Or that politics has rendered logic unpopular, which is somewhat more likely.

From Bloomberg, who unsurprisingly does not like the enforced reduction, we get that, “For one thing, the amount of the U.S. cuts would be replaced more than three times over by projected increases in China alone.”

Which would be meaningful only if China’s increase was made in response to our cuts and would be cancelled if we cancelled our cuts. Bloomberg is saying, in effect, that China is increasing only because we are making cuts, and would not increase if we did not make cuts. I know, that was so illogical that it was hard to follow. More simply put, China's increase has nothing whatever to do with out cutting carbon emissions.

Read the whole piece. There’s a “since we can’t cut carbon increase to zero, we shouldn’t try to reduce the rate of increase at all” content in there which is utterly insane.

Then Paul Krugman defends the carbon decrease by saying that doing so will cost a more 0.2% of GDP and that’s cheap. He’s pretty light hearted about it, but it’s kind of a short sighted and silly defense. The reduction affects the electric power generation very specifically, and as such affects only a portion of our economy. It doesn't affect the financial sector to any notable degree, and doesn’t markedly affect housing or transportation. The cost should be measured against the portion of the economy which is directly affected by it, and that cost is going to be a bit higher that 0.2%.

That’s not to say that I think it will be unaffordable or that I don’t think we should be willing to pay it. I think the carbon cut is a great idea and that we should be willing to pay what it costs to do so, but we should know what those costs are, not be bullshitted into thinking that there are none with the silly kind of crap that Paul Krugman is peddling.

It will, for one thing, reduce the coal industry a lot more than 0.2%; more like 80% which is the whole point of the measure. Tell the coal industry and the people who work in that industry that it won’t cost anything, Paul. It’s not free, it comes with a cost.