Wednesday, June 27, 2018

Overt Media Bias

The CBS affiliated local news ran a very strange piece last night about a woman and her daughter who incurred injuries while riding on a rented motorized scooter on a Mission Beach boardwalk. The piece painted the two as some sort of innocent victims of some horrible misfeasance because the company which rented them the scooter allowed them to “ride along the Mission Beach boardwalk last Friday” and caused them to have an accident in which “they collided with pedestrians.”

The pedestrians with whom the motorized scooter collided were not mentioned in the piece, other than as objects which got hit by the motorized scooter, and were not interviewed for the news item. News 8 did not consider them to be victims, and was not interested either in their fate or viewpoint of the incident.

The father/husband, who was not present, admitted that the two females “were sharing a scooter and not wearing a helmet,” both violations, but defended them by saying that, “They're not from here they don't know the history of this issue. They just did what everybody else is doing.”

I can’t tell you how many times my parents asked me when I was a kid that if everybody else was jumping off a ten story building would I do the same just because they were. When I was growing up children were not raised to become lemmings, but apparently today they are.

The victims, here, are the pedestrians who were hit by the idiots riding the scooter. The riders were not victims, as portrayed by News 8, they were idiots who were engaging in thoughtless and reckless behavior. The rental company was derelict in failing to provide proper safety notices, such as the need to wear helmets, but that was not really covered in the news piece.

News 8 is doing what the media considers to be it’s mission today, pushing a legislative agenda, in this case regulating these motorized scooters and/or banning them from boardwalks. The news item begins, in fact, by placing the event merely as prelude to the demand for legislation, stating that, “A man whose child and ex-wife were seriously injured in a scooter crash over the weekend on Monday called for a boardwalk ban.”

The man, ex-wife and daughter all live in Arizona, by the way, so News 8 wants to assist people from out of state to come here and tell us how to run our city.
I don’t think so.

Monday, June 25, 2018

Is NASCAR Dying?

I think probably it is. I don't know how many people were watching Sunday's race at Sonoma on television, but the lack of people in the stands was simply stunning. In years past when I have watched that race, the stands were filled and there were crowds of people watching on the hillsides. Yesterday there was not one person on any hillside and the stands were, perhaps, 10% filled. Can't blame the weather; it was 72 degrees and not a cloud in sight.

Saturday, June 23, 2018

Good Thinking

Just a few years ago a gas line owned and operated by PG&E blew up, destroying several dozen homes and killing eight people. The pipeline was not particularly old and was of steel construction, but was found to be improperly manufactured and PG&E was found criminally responsible.

This year SDG&E applied to the California Public Utilities for permission to replace 400 miles of gas pipeline which is seventy years old and is of cast iron construction. The plan calls for the new pipeline to be 30" in diameter, greatly increasing the capacity of the 16" diameter original. The CPUC denied the application, saying that the new pipeline "is not necessary."

Question. Who will be held responsible if the 70-year-old cast iron pipeline fails and causes damage, injury or death? The title of this post is, in case you didn't pick up on it, snark.

Thursday, June 14, 2018

Well, That Was Brutal

Only four players under par in round one today, and only by a single stroke. That course is tough on a good day, and when the wind is up... Yikes. Lefty hit 14 of 15 fairways and still wound up +7, which totally beggars the imagination.

Another post which is not important and, probably, not particularly interesting.

Wednesday, June 13, 2018

Serendipity

I was at the grocery store and went to the coffee aisle, heading directly to where the Peet's was and glommed a package of Major Dickason's Blend whole beans just as I realized the person stocking the shelf was not wearing a grocery store uniform. She was wearing a Peet's Coffee uniform and she highly approved of my choice.

I realize this is not a highly important post. Just one of life's nice little moments.

Monday, June 11, 2018

Insanity Prevails

Outrage is hitting new heights on the Richter scale over immigrant children being separated from their parents at the southern US border. The implication is that this first started happening just a few months ago at the express order of the Trump administration.

The problem with this narrative is that US law requires that all people attempting to enter the US without entry documentation be stopped from doing so, and that they be detained until their request for asylum can be adjudicated by a court. That has been the law for many years. Further, since 2012, during the Obama administration, it has been illegal to detain children in adult detention facilities.

So all of this towering outrage is about something that has been going on for no less than six years. Not only that, but all of the screaming is to demand that the Trump administration stop doing what it is doing, that is to say complying with laws passed by Congress, and no one is demanding that Congress change the laws.

Thursday, June 07, 2018

Premature Victory Laps

I’m trying to figure out why California Democrats are celebrating. No, they didn’t get “locked out” of any of the open Republican US House districts, but neither did they lock out Republicans in any of the open Democratic US House districts. In every race where Republicans are running for reelection, the Republican won with sufficient margins to indicate pretty certain reelection, and in Republican districts with no incumbent candidate the Republican candidate appears not to be in any trouble.

Based on California, Democrats could take over the US House, statistically, but the vote counts certainly do not indicate that they are likely to.

Nor did Democrats lock Republicans out of the gubernatorial race. In fact, the race is much closer than was predicted, and portends a pretty sizeable Republican turnout in the general election. It also leaves Gavin Newsome well short of “shoo in” status for the mansion in Sacramento.

Republicans were locked out of the US Senate race, but so what. They were locked out in the last US Senate race as well, and will be in the next one too. This is, after all, California. In my opinion Democrats suffered a bit of a setback this time in that one of the Democratic candidates for the US Senate is a male. It would be intolerable to the Democratic Party if he won, but there is little chance of that, despite the fact that Dianne Feinstein is actually a Republican in all political principles that actually matter to the nation, because none of those principles matter to the Democratic Party.

I don’t know why Democrats want Trump and/or Republican control of Congress gone, anyway. The stock market is at an all time high. Home prices are higher than they were in 2007, but this time we are told that’s a good thing. Interest rates are rising, which is great for retirement accounts and savings. Employment is at a seven year low and still dropping. Wages are starting to show signs of increasing. Higher minimum wages are passing everywhere. The trade deficit is at a seven year low. Women’s power in politics, in the marketplace, and in the justice system is not just increasing, it is rising like an Elon Musk Falcon 9 rocket. Marijuana is being legalized in more and more states. We’ve won the war in Syria, and Afghanistan apparently doesn’t exist any more. We are making peace with North Korea.

What do we gain by changing government party? If it’s about Trump's bad language, I don’t care. I served in the Navy and rough language doesn’t bother me, and using the bathroom of choice is not something that I consider of vital national security importance.

Memories

CBS News did a retrospect last night on the "last train trip" of Robert Kennedy. It was a nice piece. I enjoyed the memories it evoked of RFK and of how the people of this nation thought of him, and I enjoyed hearing the voice of Harry Reasoner. Perhaps the highlight, for me, was that the train was powered by a GG-1; an electric locomotive with a very special history all of its own.

Wednesday, June 06, 2018

Amusing

Economists and business writers are all screaming about the impending economic disaster and utter stupidity of Trump's imposition of import tariffs, and fail to notice that the US international trade deficit just fell to a seven month low.

In case you don't know it, that creates an increase in the GDP.

Sunday, June 03, 2018

Repeated Drivel Abounds

Dean Baker has a couple of little mindless refrains that he chants repeatedly, one of which strikes me as petty, shallow and nitpicking, the other of which seems to reveal a very real lack of ability in critical thinking.

The first is his penchant for accusing journalists of “mind reading” when they report what various public figures of organizations think. He does so today, accusing the Washington Post of mind reading for its headline that, “Trump thinks he's saving trade. The rest of the world thinks he's blowing it up.”

He retorts with, “I will assert that the Post has no idea what Trump actually thinks,” which is to accuse them of living in a cave in Outer Mongolia, since Trump has stated repeatedly that he believes he is saving trade. I think Trump is nuts, but one does not have to agree with Trump to be willing to say that he believes what he says he believes, so I will counter Dean Baker by asserting that the Post is aware of what Trump is saying and has a very reasonable assumption for believing that it knows what Trump believes.

Baker could have asserted that the Post has no idea what “the rest of the world” believes, as that part of the Post's statement encompasses an overly broad, grandiose and unknowable scope of knowledge, but he did not have sufficient wit to make that reasonable accusation.

The second is, of course, his constant refrain in response to any talk of a labor shortage, which is that there are plenty of laborers out there who are, “working for your competitors,” so all you have to do is pay higher wages to hire them away from away from your competitors. He never admits that this “solution” solves nothing, merely moving the labor shortage from one employer to another.

This is the kind of drivel that economists thrive on these days.

Friday, June 01, 2018

Feline Anatomy

According to Darby Conley, author of the comic strip "Get Fuzzy," cats do not "throw up." (My wife might argue that point. What Molly does certainly looks to her like throwing up.) According to Darby, cats "practice selective digestion" and "gastro liberate" any unwanted "calorie free" food. Apparently they are related to owls in some abstruse manner.