Varsity Hot Dogs Rule

NASCAR is racing this week at Martinsville, where there is more talk about the hot dogs than about racing. Martinsville Speedway is, for some reason, famous for its hot dogs. I’ve been there, and of course I ate one. Okay, more than one.

They are monstrous things, and I don’t want to talk about what color they are. Actually, I can’t talk about their color because it is indescribable, but the word “neon” would be part of that description. Unless you tell them to leave it off they put chili on it, and if you do that they look at you weird, sort of like they suspect you of being a Yankee. Not that I would do that, since every good race track hot dog deserves chili.

It is claimed that Martinsville sells the best hot dog in NASCAR land, but that claim is wrong. That honor belongs to the Varsity Drive-In in Atlanta. Yes, of course it has chili on it. You think there are a whole bunch of Yankees in Atlanta or something?

The Varsity is right next to the Georgia Tech campus in downtown Atlanta, and it sells something like five tons of hot dogs every day. They have an express line, and if you get in it you better have your mind made up when you reach the order point. The order taker is a huge guy wearing a torn tee shirt, and if you hesitate he will bellow insults at you, wanting to know what the hell you were doing while standing in line if it was not deciding what you wanted, and asking you if you are feeble minded and wanting to know why you are holding up all of those nice people behind you.

I was hospitalized after an industrial accident, multiple fractures of both legs, and when my friends were taking me home from the hospital I told them I wanted to stop at the Varsity on the way home for hot dogs. They were embarrassed that they had not thought of that idea themselves.

A Memorable Chopped

I’ve been sort of binge watching Chopped, and am beginning to think it should be renamed “Pity Party,” since the contestants seem to be talking more about themselves than about the food they are preparing. “I grew up homeless. My mother died last month. I’m a single mom. I wasted my life with drugs and alcohol.” Boohoo. It’s sort of like they think they can win by tugging on the judges’ heart strings, but it doesn’t seem to be all that effective. The biggest whiner doesn’t win very often.

The one time it did seems to get to the judges was when one of the two finalists was a young woman with a French accent. She wanted the winner’s money so that she could go to France to visit her grandmother, who was very elderly and in failing health. She wanted to see the lady, who had raised her as a young child, one more time before she passed away.

The other finalist was a young man who was the chef for a Christian organization. He was competing to create publicity for his employer, because he thought they were a fine ministry and that people should know about them

Both were truly likeable people, and the decision was close. The young woman was chopped and as she was turning to leave the winner said, “Wait.” There was a pause and then he said, “I will buy you the ticket.” He went on to say that he had no need for the money and that he would use whatever amount was needed to allow her to go visit her grandmother in France.

There was not a dry eye in the house. Including my house. It was a very pleasant moment.

The Path of Least Resistance

In speaking about closing Guantanamo, President Obama said a couple of days ago that he should have closed it in his first year in office, which I think is rather a statement of the obvious. He went on to say that the reason he didn’t was that “we had a bipartisan agreement that it should be closed,” and that, “I thought that we had enough consensus there that we could do it in a more deliberate fashion.”

He wasn’t through yet, adding that then “the politics of it got tough,” and going on to say that, “the path of least resistance was just to leave it open, even though it's not who we are as a country.”

That sort of sums up his presidency. The laughable delusion of “bipartisanship” and "political consensus," accompanied by that when things “got tough” he followed “the path of least resistance.” Pathetic.

The Big Dance

I do not know who those guys were in the Aztec uniforms last night. They scored 76 points and shot 47%, no less than 41% on 3-pointers. They had 13 offensive rebounds, 10 of them in the first half.

On the other hand, their opponent scored 64 points and shot 45%. What?

They play Duke on Sunday and, strange as it may sound, they need to step up their defense.

A couple of Comments

Ashley Judd still has a smile that could stop a speeding freight train. She's the only Kentucky fan at whom I would not throw rotten fruit. If she ran for President I would vote for her, which would be utterly stupid; but I would do it anyway. In fact, I rather hope she does.

A critic made the comment that "Arizona and Hawaii do not save daylight." News flash: neither do any of the other 48 states. They just change their clocks twice a year. The amount of daylight is unaffected.

Oh, yes; 33 years today since my last drink/drunk.

Accusers Who Can't Read

Oh, this is hilarious. Accusers of Hillary Clinton are saying that this email thing is a violation of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and that her violation of it is particularly heinous because she herself voted for the bill. The passage in the legislation which they claim she violated reads,

Whoever knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence the investigation or proper administration of any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States or any case filed under title 11, or in relation to or contemplation of any such matter or case, shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.

They obviously don’t see the flaw in their reasoning, but do you? Right. Of course you do, because your IQ is higher than room temperature. She didn’t “alter, destroy, mutilate, conceal, cover up, falsify, or make a false entry” in any record because she made entries in her own server rather than in the official servers. She did not make entries in any official record, false or otherwise.

Mrs. Clinton is not accused of corrupting or entering false data into any public record; the accusation is that se simply didn’t use the public record at all. That may or may not be a problem; I don’t know and, frankly, I don’t really care. There are issues far more important about which we should be concerned.

Sarbanes-Oxley, in any case, is a piece of legislation passed in 2002 which set standards for public accounting firms, and dealt primarily with accounting standards, so it had nothing whatever to do with the government or with correspondence procedures for anyone, government or otherwise.

I'm no fan of Hillary Clinton, but this is not only a tempest in a teapot; it’s not even a real tempest, and the teapot seems to be missing.

Some Things Cannot Be Unseen

Molly decided she wanted to groom her tail this afternoon, but first she had to catch it, which involved circling in diminishing circles of increasing speed until I was beginning to think she might disappear up her own rectum. Having finally caught it, she was undecided between licking it and biting it, so she did both, which creathed another frenzy of tail chasing and, finally, a high speed exit from the living room. My impression was that she was fleeing from her own tail, but I may have gotten that part wrong.

A Simple Journey

I may have seen an example of why the US Postal Service is losing money. I was sent a package and a link by which I could track that package on USPS. The tracking notations tell me that the package was “Accepted by the Postal Service” at San Diego CA 92199 on March 11 at 8:38pm. That location is in Poway, a contiguous suburb of San Diego.

The package’s next step was to be “Accepted at USPS Origin Sort Facility,” also at zip code 92199, at 4:04am the next day, March 12.

It was then “Arrived at USPS Origin Facility” in Moreno Valley CA 92553 at 5:19am that same day, March 12. That’s pretty fast, actually, since that zip code is in Riverside, about 100 miles north of San Diego. They processed the package and moved it 100 miles in the wrong direction in barely more than an hour.

That’s after taking more than seven hours to process it within one single zip code.

The latest notation is that the package was “Arrived at USPS Origin Facility” in San Diego CA 92199 on March 13 at 10:48am. Does that look familiar? Well it should; that’s where it was two days earlier at 8:38am before it was trucked some 200 miles round trip.

Not that it’s of any significance, but northbound, the trip took barely more than an hour. The same trip southbound required more than seventeen hours. No way of knowing how much of that time was processing, but why did the package need to go to Riverside at all?

The tracking information now says, “Expected Delivery Day: Saturday, March 14, 2015,” but cautions that the exact delivery day is not guaranteed. I paid extra for overnight delivery, but the shipper has agreed to refund that charge for obvious reasons.

Not Just Irony

The fact that the stock market is dropping "because the economy is improving" is not merely ironic. The rationale is that with "the economy improving" the Fed is likely to increase interest rates, which is why investors are selling off stocks.

Think about that for a moment, and think what that means in terms of what the stock market has become. It is no longer a vehicle for investment in business prosperity, because signs of business prosperity are a negative influence on the stock market's value. The stock market today is a casino; a vehicle for gambling on the value of the dollar. It is an off track betting parlor, fostered by the nation's government despite the government's passion for outlawing interstate gambling and punishing those who engage in it.

For years the improving economy was enjoyed only by those whose investment portfolios were enhanced by asset inflation, and the middle class was left out. Now the investment portfolios and joining the middle class in getting screwed.

What's In A Name?

I don’t listen to Obama’s speeches any more, but I enjoyed watching him walk across the Edmund Pettus bridge. It was a moment of important historic symbolism.

Some idiot was shocked and dismayed when he found out that Edmund Pettus was a general for the Army of the South during the Civil War and a leader of the Ku Klux Klan. I don’t know what other kind of person he thought bridges were being named after in Alabama in 1940.
At any rate, he began circulating a petition to have the bridge renamed. I certainly hope that petition fails.

For one thing, in renaming that bridge we would be renaming a very significant historic event, and that should not happen. Think about references to “the battle of Smithfield, formerly known as Gettysburg.” Forget it. Those marchers crossed the Edmund Pettus bridge, not a bridge of some other name.

We should, actually, appreciate having the man’s name on that bridge and should draw some measure of hope from it. Here was a man who advocated hatred and division and instead of being remembered for that, his name is connected throughout history with a seminal event in progress toward racial equality.

The people who marched across that bridge turned the name Edmund Pettus from a remembrance of what is wrong with our social fabric to a symbol of what is right. We should not erase that.

Nine Rules

Huffington Post has an article on “9 Simple Rules” for sleeping featuring a pictures of a cat, which we all know to be world class sleepers. I know, I know, but it isn’t written by Arianna. It’s written by one Lindsay Holmes, whose qualifications are not given, and it does not say whether or not she lives with any cats.

Rule 1: Take a shower or bath. I’ve never seen a cat take a shower, of course, but cats very often bathe vigorously before curling up and going to sleep. I have, however, had my cat jump into my lap, curl up, and promptly give the appearance of being a dead cat with no preliminaries at all so we’ll give her, at best, a “maybe” on this one.

Rule 2: Wear actual pajamas. Oh, I don’t think so. Ever try to put silk pajamas on a cat? Don’t. Maybe she thinks that cats sleep so much that their fur coat can be considered pajamas and that they are “leisure class” beings who eat, hang out, and watch TV in their pajamas, but… No on this one.

Rule 3: Turn your bed into a haven. Well, clearly not. A cat will sleep anywhere, including on top of your toaster oven and, if you give it a chance to do so, inside your microwave. Neither of those could be considered a “haven,” although one could claim that the cat turned them into havens by sleeping there. That’s stretching it, though, so no.

Rule 4: Create realistic limits. Give me a break. Cats have no realistic limits about anything, and certainly not about sleeping. Total no on this one.

Rule 5: Set sleep alarm. Well, maybe. My cat will give every appearance of being comatose and suddenly her head will pop up like a jack-in-the-box. She will give me a blank stare, stand up and stretch with her back arched, and stroll into the kitchen for a snack. There better be a snack available at that point, or I will get yelled at. Some sort of alarm went off, although it may not have been a sleep alarm per se. We’ll have to give this one some more thought.

Rule 6: Don’t go to bed hungry. I think I’ll give her this one. My cat has only one mode when she’s hungry, and that consists of harassing me to correct the condition from which she is suffering at that time.

Rule 7: Write everything down. On the face of it, no, but if my cat finds where I dropped a potato chip, she will go back there every time she comes in that room for the next several weeks to see if I dropped another potato chip. She may have written down where that chip was. That does not, however, have anything to do with her sleeping, so we’ll stay with the no.

Rule 8: Tap into your inner child. Well, okay, cats are very, very good at tapping into their inner children. Cats are inextricably bound to their inner children. That’s why the internet is full of cat videos. This one is a no brainier.

Rule 9: No phones. I’m not sure how to score this one. Certainly cats don’t sleep with phones, but then they don’t care much for them when awake either. My cat tends to freak out and flee the room whenever the phone rings, so sleeping with a phone would definitely be counterproductive. Cats and phones just don’t belong in the same conversation, so we’ll just score this one a swing and a miss.

If you’re waiting for a conclusion, sorry, I have none. A conclusion would imply that all of this has some degree of significance, and it’s pretty obvious that it does not.

The Cosby Thing

I have no real opinion about his morals. Facts are required to form such an opinion, and all I have are accusations. There are a sufficient number of them to lend some credibility to the issue and to create a faint distaste, but...

However, I watched a Bill Cosby special on television recently, and I have no idea why any venue is still presenting him as entertainment. He is inarticulate, misogynistic and utterly boring. I have watched a special on sewage treatment that was funnier.

Lip Service Again

President Obama is trumpeting a “progressive agenda for the middle class” which consists of taxing the rich, raising the minimum wage, and providing free community college education. Other than the last, which has some tangible potential but is small and only a temporary fix, the agenda is his usual empty rhetoric.

There’s nothing wrong with taxing the rich but it should not be part of an "agenda for the middle class," since it does nothing to improve the their status. It does not raise their wages, provide them with better jobs, improve their access to truly affordable health care, or improve the conditions under which they work and live. In any case, Obama is talking about one or two percentage points of increase, and a truly progressive tax policy would raise the upper tax rates by twenty points or more.

Leadership should not be talking about minimum wage. Leadership should be demanding that no one in this great nation who is supporting himself, let alone a family, should ever work for minimum wage, regardless of what that minimum wage is. To insist that minimum wage should be sufficient to constitute a living wage is to have given up on restoring the middle class, to have surrendered the whole concept of general prosperity. We are not a minimum wage nation, and we should not be accepting, which we are beginning to do, that minimum wage is our standard of living.

In third world countries people live on minimum wage. In this nation we do not. We live better than that. We probably have to live differently than we do to assure a sustainable planet, but that’s a different issue. The point is that “minimum” is not in our vocabulary.

Free community college is a worthy concept provided that the community college is providing training in trades which constitute preparation for productive career jobs, not four year degrees that cater to the modern life goal of accumulation of wealth. There are job openings right now for welders, millwrights, pipefitters and other “skilled trades,” and providing access to training for those jobs is applaudable.

But more needs to be done to create more such jobs in the future, because the market for those jobs is temporary, caused by retirement of baby boomers and not by market growth. There is growth, but it is not sufficient to keep up with the population, and we cannot settle for the status quo. Once the current job openings are filled employment growth stalls again unless we have done something to create economic growth that is based on real production instead of being merely the manipulation of numbers in financial institutions.

We need, specifically to re-empower the working class so that paid sick leave, vacation and employer-provided health care are not issues mandated by government, but are benefits negotiated by workers because the workers have to power to do so as they once did.

We need to bring back production which has been offshored, so that this nation makes what it needs and wants, and so that the prosperity generated by our consumption is for the benefit of our own people and not squandered abroad.

Instead we get more lip service from our leaders, and we don’t need lip service and platitudes. We need real solutions offered by leaders who have vision and courage. Anybody?

Suing Over $7.91

A Washington state Attorney General filed suit against a florist for refusing to provide flowers to a same sex wedding, based on the state’s law prohibiting discrimination against “protected classes” (minorities). On first read I found the item unremarkable, but then I read “the rest of the story.”

It turns out the wedding involved a long time customer, Robert Ingersoll, who the florist knew very well was gay because he had been buying flowers for his partner at the florist for more than a decade. When he asked the florist to provide flowers for his wedding, she told him, apparently with regret, that her religion did not permit her to participate in same sex marriage. He responded by “giving her a hug,” and then suing her, “claiming $7.91 in out-of-pocket expenses, or the cost of driving to find a new florist.”

My first reaction is that Ingersoll seems to place great value on his freedom to practice his own beliefs, but he apparently does not think that the florist should have the freedom to comply with her own religious beliefs. This odd position is one which is, I think, altogether too common in today’s society. One certainly does not sue purely for damages when those damages are $7.91.

There appear to be two lawsuits ongoing, although the article is not real clear on that. There seems to be one by the couple for “economic damages to be determined at a later date,” which will probably be whatever “punitive damage” windfall the lawyers can persuade a jury to award, and another by the state for violation of the civil code against discrimination, in which the florist is accused of discriminating against a customer she served for more than ten years.

The law is, as was once famously said however, “an ass” and frequently does put law enforcement into positions where they do have to engage in such practice, so Attorneys General filing cases which on their face seem to deny an individual’s freedom for the sake of society’s greater good is not a big deal. If Ingersoll had not been a long time customer of the florist, I would have no bone to pick with the Attorney General.

He is quoted as saying by example that, “If an African American couple walked into a restaurant…” But that does not reflect what happened here, because the florist never refused to serve Robert Ingersoll because he was gay. She had been selling flowers to him, and presumably to other gay people, for many years. It was specifically the gay marriage that was her issue.

Since she did not refuse to serve gay people, as a juror I would disagree with her position, would tend to argue that selling flowers for a wedding does not constitute “participating in” that wedding. I would strongly suspect that she is a zealot proselytizing against the institution of gay marriage, but I’m not sure I would find her guilty of breaking any law.

The likely outcome, regardless of the rights or wrongs involved, is that the florist will be ruined, the couple will be enriched and the Attorney General will be reelected, all of which is what these trials are really about anyway.

Subron 8: Comms Etiquette

I had not been in the forward torpedo room for a week or so, even though I normally tended to hang out there when I was off duty. The torpedomen kept a high stakes pinochle game going much of the time, and I was one of the few other crew members who was a player of sufficient caliber to join it. My presence there was not universally celebrated.

The torpedomen did not much appreciate me taking their money, which I tended to do, but that generated nothing more than a certain amount of banter. Ill feelings were prevented by buying rounds of drinks periodically.

Somewhat more serious was that tubes forward is separated from my duty area by five compartments and no fewer than six watertight doors, all of which are only three feet tall. What with me being well over six feet tall, those doors presented a certain impediment to me arriving at my duty station in anything like a rapid manner when I was sent for, which sometimes annoyed my division officer. He would make snide remarks like having had to send for a sandwich so as to avoid starving to death while waiting for me to arrive.

The next time he sent for me I brought a sandwich with me, which he did not think was as funny as I thought it was. It created a small problem for the Chief Electrician, because he had trouble concealing that he thought it was funny as hell, but all of that is a different story.

Even more serious was that when any kind of alarm sounded all of those doors would be shut and locked down. And they would be shut very fast; so fast that they sort of made one prolonged bang. I would go flying through as many of them as I could before they were shut, but there was no way I was ever going to make it to my station in maneuvering room, especially since other people, some of them officers, were also using the doors.

To gain my station, then, I would have to call the Captain and ask for permission to open a single watertight door. Having gone through it, I would call him again, report the door secured and ask permission to open the next door. I then had to repeat this process as many times as needed to reach my station in maneuvering room. If I spent my spare time in the crew’s area in after battery I might have to do it once, at most, but coming from tubes forward I sometimes had to do it four or five times, and to say that it annoyed the Captain would be a considerable understatement.

The Captain, however, was a very understanding guy, and he could never bring himself to tell me that I was not permitted to play pinochle with the torpedomen in tubes forward in my free time. He finally reached the point where he would tell me, “Go to maneuvering and call me back to tell me that all of the watertight doors are secured.” My division officer dropped a few hints about where I should spend my free time, but I was real good at being very dense when I wanted to be, and his hints sailed right over my head.

So anyway, I decided to see if the torpedomen had a pinochle game going, so I went to a communications device called the “growler” to call up and find out. Using the growler is pretty simple; pick up the handset, set the dial to the compartment you want to talk to, then turn the crank to make it ring at the other end. First, however you listen to be sure no one is on the circuit, because if someone is, then turning the crank causes a loud and horrendously annoying buzzing in their ear. This was, unfortunately, a step which I had omitted.

I belatedly stuck the headset to my ear and heard a voice say, “Who did that?” Sadly, I recognized the voice. It was, without question, the Captain himself.

“You mean you don’t know?” I asked. There was a brief pause, and then the Captain replied, “No.”

“Ain’t I lucky.” I responded and quickly hung up.

About half an hour later, having found out that a game was starting, I was passing through the control room on my way to tubes forward. Speaking to someone, officer or enlisted, as you pass them is considered good form but is optional with the exception of the Captain; you do not pass him without acknowledgement. Under the circumstances I was tempted to break protocol, but told him good morning and he returned it, and then he spoke my last name. He said nothing further, so I stopped and looked at him. He was sort of half smiling. “You’re not that lucky,” he said,

I waited a moment to see if he was going to say anything else, which he did not, mumbled a hasty “Aye sir” and got the hell out of the control room as fast as I could.

I found out later that he was only guessing.

Well, This Sucks

Our weather has turned cold, with highs only around 68, and people are having to wear long sleeves. Not long pants, though; nothing will get San Diegans to wear anything other than short pants and flip flops.

That does not include me, however; blue jeans and western boots regardless of weather. I do not own any short pants or flip flops.

Tortured Logic

Jared Turner, of Fox Sports, indulges his fantasies of Danica Patrick stardom by giving us “3 reasons Danica can nab career win No. 1 in the Daytona 500.” His reasons are, to say the least, a sterling example of tortured logic.

Reason number one, he says, is, “her past Daytona success.” The facts rather contradict his starry-eyed thinking, because Danica has run the Daytona 500 three times, finishing 40th, 8th and 38th, for an average finish of 27th. That does not actually suggest high odds on her winning the race this year.

Reason number two is, according to him, that “Daytona loves Cinderellas.” He goes on to cite the number of times that rookies and underfunded teams have won at Daytona, but Danica has run the race three times and is therefor not a rookie, and her team, sponsored by GoDaddy and backed by Hendrick Motorsports, is one of the best funded and technically advanced teams in NASCAR. She hardly qualifies as a “Cinderella.”

The third reason he gives is that restrictor plates make the race an absolute crap shoot with all cars being equal, and means that any car in the race might win. That would mean that her chances are one in 43 of winning, which is hardly the best odds she will have all year. They are, in fact, the same odds she will have in the entire season.

Since this Danica fan wrote this piece of hyperbole, Danica crashed in practice, destroying her car completely, and will be going to a backup car for today’s qualifying race. Awesome.

Well, They Whiffed On That One

CBS Evening News did a segment last night on the report from Kaspersky, and to say that it was a swing and a miss would be a horrendous understatement. They missed the point of that report so badly that one would have to say that they swung the bat before the ball even left the pitcher’s hand, and would have to add that they did the classic spin themselves around and fall down at the plate. I think the pitcher balked and fell down laughing.

CBS went on at great length about the millions of dollars that were stolen, how balances were changed on accounts, and how the “hackers” would have ATMs spit out money at certain times and have people standing by to grab the $20 bills as they came flying out of the slot. Seriously.

Do you know how many man-hours would be involved in stealing the $1 billion that CBS claimed by changing individual balances, transferring amounts from those individual accounts and, for God’s sake, having bike messengers standing at ATMs collecting $20 bills? That would be a very lengthy ongoing enterprise, and they did that for all that time without getting caught? Nobody noticed the dudes hanging around the ATMs waiting for them to start spitting out money?

They actually said that “the hackers would program ATMs to spit out money at certain times, and then have someone there to collect the money.” Really. If they had claimed that they programed the ATM in a manner that would allow an accomplice to enter a code and withdraw unlimited funds, I might believe that, but to have it “spit out money” at a fixed time without assurance that it would, in fact, be collected is absurd, and ATMs do not hold all that much money in any case. Stealing money from ATMs is strictly small time stuff.

Now you can read an article in Reuters, another one in PC World and yet another one in Times of India, all of which are about the Kaspersky report and none of which mention monetary theft at all. What they do say is that Kaspersky discovered spyware in the hard drives of millions of computers which was undoubtedly placed there by NSA for the purpose of spying on behalf of the US government. The monetary theft, if it even happened at all, was a trivial sideline. The actual story was the ability of the NSA to plant spyware in the hard drive operating software of so many computers.

CBS forgot to mention that. They never mentioned NSA or the US government at all, but rather came up with this buffoonery about a $1 billion theft consisting of ATMs spitting out $20 bills. “Bonnie and Clyde would have been so proud,” Scott Pelley closed. Yeah, and Harpo Marx would have been embarrassed by Scott Pelley.

Update, (PS) 9:55am: The content of the piece struck me as bogus even as I was watching it last evening, but then when I went online and read the more objective articles today and realized the degree to which CBS was engaging in puffery and propaganda, I had to laugh out loud. And they are actually critical of Brian Williams.

"Neoliberalism is our Frankenstein"

Patrick Smith writes a delightful takedown of today’s neoliberalism which, make no mistake, is the religion of modern Democrats including Barack Obama. He missed an opportunity to draw a parallel to between it and the equally odious and idiotic neoconservatism, leaving a gap which I will endeavor to fill here.

He relates the issue specifically to the crises in Ukraine and Greece, but don’t doubt for a moment that it is not at the center of this nation’s inability to meaningfully recover from the economic crash of 2008; the reason that Wall Street and corporations have actually gained from that crash while the working class has been left on the tailings dump of an elitist economic policy.

Smith points out that neoliberals draw their logic from the English liberal economists Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, which puts them even further from current reality than neoconservatives. Neocons draw from Ayn Rand, who was at least an American and lived in the twentieth century. (She was also a notorious drunk and “woman of loose morals,” but that’s a different issue.) Neolibs are drawing from Englishmen who lived in the 17th and 18th century, and whose thinking was about as relevant to today’s economic conditions as Richard Lionheart’s might be.

He goes on to note that neoliberals sort of “cherry pick” from the writings of people such as Adam Smith, quoting his words only when they bolster their case for the kind of chaos they wish to create. Sort of like fundamentalists do with the bible when condemning certain lives of which they disapprove.

Which is actually a rather apt comparison, since Smith goes on to point out that neoliberalism, “denotes not thought but belief, ideological conviction,” a point which I have noticed often in discussion. They do not tolerate other points of view and take the position that their minds are made up so they therefor do not want to be confused by any facts. Today’s neoliberal finds it very difficult to describe that for which he stands and spends most of any discussion ranting about the evils of the “other side.”

It’s hard to argue against his conclusion that neoliberalism “is the ideology of radical deregulation, radical corporatization, radical privatization … maximal profit without regard to consequences, and the radical devaluation of any serious consciousness of the communities in which all individuals are suspended.”

You might want to argue the first point, citing Dodd-Frank, until you examine the reality of that bill and give thought to what happens if, as Congress certainly intended, it is not adequately enforced. Where are the provisions that assure that it will be enforced, and where are the penalties for institutions which are found to be in breach? What happens if Congress fails to act as specified? The answers to all of that lie in the bills that were passed following the Savings and Loan crisis of the 1980s.

The relentlessness of privatization can be illustrated by Obama’s trip to California to “enlist the help of major IT corporations in securing the safety of the nation’s communication systems.” Need I say more?

The King Is Dead

The “liberals” at Salon and Huffinton Post are aghast at the announcement that Jon Steward is leaving the Daily Show, a show that they seem to forget is on the Comedy Channel. They are raving about the way that he “revolutionized the manner in which news is delivered,” and worrying about who will replace him. Replace him on the Comedy Channel.

Many are distraught because they claim that the public will no longer have a reliable source of “real news” with Jon Stewart gone, again I remind you, gone from the Comedy Channel. How seriously should we take people who rely on the Comedy Channel as their main source of news? Given that most of them are desperate for Elizabeth Warren to make a run for president, I would say the answer to that is, "not very seriously." And their concern seems to me to be misplaced in more ways than merely with respect to the venue of the show.

As best I can determine Stewart drew a nightly audience of 2 million people, which amounts to about 0.6% of the population. So these writers are not concerned about where “the public” will go for “reliable news,” they are concerned about where less than one percent of the public will go. Of every 157 people in this country, 1 person watches Jon Stewart.

The one time they never listened to Jon Stewart was when he told them, repeatedly, “I am a comedian, not a newsman.”

The Illusion of "Solving Inequality"

Even Republicans are now agreeing that “inequality” needs to be dealt with and they are, like the Democrats, proposing to deal with it by “taxing the rich,” that is by taking small amounts of money away from the richest Americans. That means that instead of owning 99.9% of America’s wealth, the “1%” will then own only 99.8% of America’s wealth, the working class will still be working two jobs to be only marginally able to pay their bills, and politicians can run on a platform of having solved the inequality problem.

Unfortunately, the American voters are delighted with this totally illusory solution. As someone said in a comment on another blog, “The level of acceptance of propaganda as truth in the US has now become staggering in its effect.”

Much is being made of sundry individuals in the 1% saying that they don’t mind paying a little bit more tax, using that as support for the plan of “taxing the rich” to solve the inequality problem. Of course the 1% supports this solution and is happy to pay a slightly higher tax, so long as the basic policies which created inequality and are still contributing to it are left in place. Their willingness to pay a higher tax should be a "red flag" as to just how bogus this solution actually is, something along the lines of Br'er Rabbit begging not to be thrown into the briar patch.

Inequality is not the real issue; it is the result of unfair economic and social policies, and is a symptom of those policies in action, and the progressivism in the tax rate is among the smallest of those issues. Solving inequality is going to require changing those policies in major ways, starting with the biggest ones, which are replacing the well paying jobs which were shipped offshore in the name of “globalization” and “free trade,” and allowing the forces of collective bargaining to regain equal power with business.

Taking small amounts of money from the rich may help the poor if it is redistributed in social programs, which for the most part it will not be, but it will do nothing towards raising the living standards of the men and women who work for a living and draw paychecks based on hourly wages. That is what the discussion must be about, because it doesn’t matter how many jobs we generate if those jobs do not permit the workers to support their families with dignity and a provide quality way of life.

Nightly Freak Show

CBS Evening News has a piece last night with Holly Williams purportedly interviewing heroic Kurds who are fighting the terrorist ISIS in northern Iraq, or Syria. She seems to be a little confused about precisely where she is, which might be due to the helmet she is wearing for dramatic effect. The actual effect is more silly than dramatic, since she is the only person in the area wearing a helmet. The actual fighters are wearing cloth caps and, since everyone is walking around in the open and no one is looking the least bit on guard, one has to doubt her claims that she is “at the front lines” and that “a terrorist attack could happen at any second.”

Not to mention that she said early in the piece that “the ISIS forces are four miles that direction,” which hardly portends “an attack any second” and rather debunks the need for body armor and a helmet.

She then holds a Skype interview in which Scott Pelley discusses with her how incredibly harrowing it must be for her to be traveling to such dangerous places, to which she replies that it is indeed nerve wracking to be where one is in danger of being killed but that that’s what brave reporters do. Fortunately, I had not yet eaten my dinner so I didn’t throw it up.

Scott Pelley closed, as he is now closing all interviews with this posturing jackass, “More intrepid reporting from Holly Williams.” Intrepid reporting. Gack.

Meanwhile, Stars and Stripes reports that NBC anchor Brian Williams, now admits that he was being less than truthful when he claimed to have been aboard an Army helicopter that was shot down in Iraq during the 2003 invasion. People who were in that helicopter, it seems, do not recall seeing him there.

One of them, Lance Reynolds, challenges him on Facebook. “Sorry dude, I don't remember you being on my aircraft. I do remember you walking up about an hour after we had landed to ask me what had happened.” He has more to say.

Williams at first tried to palm it off as having been in the chopper that was immediately behind the one which was hit by ground fire and forced to land, but eventually had to admit that he was in a flight that was following about an hour behind the flight in question, and that he did not arrive until the wounded chopper was safely on the ground and the crew was out of it unharmed.

He claims it was a “mistake” in his reporting, and that he doesn't know how he could have "misremembered" the event. Seriously. He claims that.

Our “mainstream media” is a nightly freak show.

Economic Obfuscation

Dean Baker castigates the Washington Post for telling readers that under Obama’s proposed budget, “interest payments will be larger than spending on any program other than Social Security and Medicare.” He claims that they should have reported instead that, “the interest tab projected for 2025 is 3.0 percent of GDP,” because the Post’s statement does not “provide context” for the amount of interest the nation will be paying, while his statement does.

Apparently he has no idea of what the word “context” means, mainly “the terms in which an item or concept can be fully understood and assessed.”

Saying that the government is spending “more in interest payments than it is on any program other than Social Security or Medicare” strikes me as fairly informative. It suggests that the debt upon which that interest is being paid is rather large and, most importantly, it very clearly tells me that interest payments are interfering with the government’s ability to provide services to its people.

Saying that the “the interest tab is 3.0 percent of GDP” tells me, at most, that the payments are not significantly damaging the nation’s overall economy. Except that it is not the overall economy which is making the payments, it is the government, and Baker’s inane statement tells me nothing whatever about how the payments are affecting the government’s ability to function financially.

Dean Baker is an idiot. He is critical of the media and then offers a “better” statement which provides even less of what he was castigating them for not providing.

But this is the function of today’s economist; to obfuscate and conceal economic reality because if the public realized what was really going on they would react with torches and pitchforks and burn down Wall Street and Washington both.

The purpose of relating everything to “a percentage of GDP” even when it is not a function of the overall economy but is a matter of government spending is a deliberate ploy to make the amounts look smaller and less significant, and to make the public more tolerant of the appalling and profligate waste and theft which has become the primary purpose of today’s government.

Super Bowl

Both teams use a 4-3 defense, so it doesn't prove my point either way, but no defense will be successful when it sits back eight yards off the line of scrimmage and allows Tom Brady to complete 74% of his passes. The NFL should create the equivalent of throwing a towel onto the field and leaving the premises.

Exciting game? Not really. If the Patriots had played defense during the last two minutes of each half, and had Brady thrown one fewer interception, we would be talking about how boring the game was.

Why a 3-4 Defense Doesn't Work

The 3-4 defense does work very well if the defensive coordinator knows how to run it, but very few do, and as a result the 3-4 is very seldom particularly successful.

When the San Diego Chargers first switched to the 3-4 it was under defensive coordinator Wade Philips, who knows very well how to run that defense. He may be the best coach ever to run that particular scheme, and the Chargers were very successful with it for quite a while. Then he left, and none of his replacements have been able to provide the Chargers with a reliable defense using that pattern.

There was an article in the Detroit Free Press which posited that the Pro Bowl needed to change the way it selected outside linebackers because of teams which used the 4-3 defense, arguing that outside linebackers in the 4-3 did not make as many quarterback sacks as linebackers in the 3-4 and were therefor under-represented in the Pro Bowl. That was evidence, to me, that defensive coaches are not using the 3-4 properly.

Proper use of the 3-4 requires that all four linebackers play as linebackers. That means they are assigned as “head hunters,” assigned to cover a portion of the field with responsibility for defense against both run and pass. You do not merely treat the outside linebackers as nothing more than linemen who are standing up and use them as quarterback rushers. Doing that negates the advantage of the 3-4 in two ways.

First is that you no longer have four linebackers, you effectively have two linebackers and five down linemen and are actually using a 5-2 defense. You now have only 2-1/2 “head hunters” in the defensive backfield on each play because one outside linebacker is rushing the quarterback and the other one is a pass rusher who is wandering around back there wondering what the hell is going on.

You have also told the opponent where the pass rush in coming from. A major advantage of the 3-4 is that the opponent knows that a fourth player will be coming on the pass rush, but he doesn’t know where than fourth man will be coming from. It might be an outside linebacker, but it also might be an inside linebacker, or it might be a safety, or it might even be a cornerback. That makes blocking assignments very difficult for an offense. If he knows that the fourth man is going to be an outside linebacker, pass blocking becomes a hell of a lot easier.

Finally, a 3-4 defense has to be aggressive, has to attack the opponent. In the 4-3 defense you have four down linemen protecting three linebackers, preventing the offensive blockers from getting to and disabling the linebackers. In a 3-4 the linebackers are “naked.” You have only three linemen covering four linebackers, and blockers can easily get to and disable a slow moving or stationary linebacker. In a 3-4 defense the linebackers must be in motion the moment that the ball is snapped; if he remains static even for a second an offensive player can get to him and take him out. Too few defensive coaches realize that.

Announcers go crazy about the “last minute winning drives,” giving credit to quarterbacks and offensive players, but in most of the ones that I have watched, the real cause of that drive was a defense that could not finish off the opponent, and it was almost always a 3-4 defense that did not attack.

Omigod, The Concussions

There is an alarming article which points out that players in the NFL suffered 111 concussions this past season. While I would certainly prefer that no players suffered any concussions, the awesomeness of that horrendous number of concussions needs to be put into proportion.

There are 32 teams in the NFL, and each team plays sixteen games. For each game, 22 players are on the field for the game; not the same 22, but there will be 11 defensive players and 11 offensive players who will "man the battle" during the game. A football game is sixty minutes long, so a little simple math says that there are 11,264 man-hours of football played during the season. That means that a concussion happens every 101.5 man-hours or, since 22 man-hours are played per game, once every 4.6 games.

That means that there is a 21.7% chance that a concussion will occur during the upcoming Super Bowl, and for each player the risk is slightly under 1%.

Not wonderful, but hardly "Omigod, 111 concussions."

Never Forget?

I have watched this week, and been deeply moved by, the film clips of survivors of Auschwitz returning on the 70th anniversary of their liberation to visit that place of horror. What must that be like for them? Their faces don’t show much, and they show so little anger when they speak. There is a nobility in those aged faces that suggests they are beyond anger and have reached something stronger and more enduring. The pain can still be seen, though; nothing can erase that.

Never forget. What does that mean? To me it means that the people of a nation must be aware of and responsible for every action taken by its government, and by that standard we have already forgotten. We accept the thousands killed in wars fought based on lies; the Afghan wedding parties slaughtered by Hellfire missiles fired from drones; the innocent bystanders tortured in Guantanamo…

Immensely fewer innocents than the holocaust, but we are not speaking out against the killing of innocent people. Tell me how that ends.

Breaking: Inflationgate

Headline at Huffington Post reads "Employee seen taking balls into bathroom." They really need to hone their headline writing skills. I would certainly hope that the employee would not attempt to go into the bathroom and leave his balls behind. That would be painful. I guess one has to be a guy to jump to certain conclusions.

Seriously?

I haven't watched the Pro Bowl (or is it Probowl?) for years, but chanced upon it while flipping channels last night. Did they really make the uniforms for one side gray and white, and the uniforms for the other side black and white? Why would they do that? Is it a tacit admission of how boring the whole exercise in futility has become?

Pot Calls Kettle An Idiot

Economist Dean Baker praised economist Paul Krugman last Thursday for ridiculing billionaire Jeff Greene, who Baker said richly deserved to be ridiculed for saying that people “need to get used to lower living standards,” which isn't actually precisely what he said.

Once again proving that economists are stupid as a bag of hammers when it comes to anything other than playing with and manipulating numbers which have dollar signs in front of them.

What Greene actually said was, “America’s lifestyle expectations are far too high and need to be adjusted so we have less things and a smaller, better existence." (Which is hardly a "lower living standard.") He goes on to say that, "We need to reinvent our whole system of life.” (emphasis mine)

He makes a lot more sense than does either Krugman or Baker, both of whom cheerfully endorse an economy which consumes twice as much as it produces and which maintains an annual net trade deficit of staggering proportion as a result. Baker occasionally gives lip service to the evils of the trade deficit, but continues to support consumer consumption as the basis of our economy, which actually makes him even more unmoored from reality than is Krugman.

Greene is simply acknowledging that a population of 350 million people cannot live as lavishly as can one of 200 million, because resources and infrastructure simply do not permit. Baker, Krugman and everybody else in public life have buried their heads in the sand and refused to see this simple fact, assuming that resources, energy in particular, and infrastructure are limitless and can accommodate an endlessly growing society.

It is as plain as the print on the front page of our daily newspaper that such is not the case. Our economy is not working. It has not been working for decades; has been failing repeatedly, failing bigger each time and recovering more slowly and less thoroughly. We can’t fix it by simply doing more of what we have been doing or trying to do it on a bigger scale, and we can’t continue to pretend that what we are doing is working, as economists and politicians want to do. We have to come up with something different.

Raising Tax Inequality?

The San Diego newspaper (well, it looks like a newspaper until you read it), which bears the rather weird name of U-T San Diego, had a headline on the front page yesterday which read, “Obama plan raises tax inequality.” The article itself does suggest, in a meandering and indirect way, that some people like the plan because they think that taxing the rich is good, while others dislike the plan because they are rich and don’t want to pay more taxes.

The headline is, I suppose, making some sort of ignorant and misguided counter to talk of “income inequality,” and the writer of it is unaware that our income tax system is, and has been since its inception, a progressive income tax, based on the principle that taxes should be levied on each citizen based on ability to pay.

Over the years various corrupt politicians have made the tax less and less progressive, and Obama’s proposal is to take a timid and utterly inadequate step toward restoring the progressive nature of the tax. His plan should, indeed, be criticized; not for “raising tax inequality,” forsooth, but for doing far too little to restore the progressiveness of our income tax and for his monstrously idiotic plan to “make corporate taxes more competitive,” which is Obama-speak for reducing them.

The U-T San Diego should be used exclusively for starting fires in your fireplace or for lining garbage cans, bird cages, and cat litter boxes.

The Big Speech

I saw the event described as the, “Annual Monarchist Ritual To Acclaim U.S. Hypocrisy,” which I thought was slightly hyperbolic but not altogether inapt. It does bring to mind the seemingly hours-long process of presidential entry into the hall, with all and sundry fawning over his presence and frantically attempting to touch the royal robe.

Everyone who has mentioned it has loved Obama’s comment about “I have no more campaigns to run,” but I have not seen one remark about the open and utterly corrupt cynicism which is embodied in that comment. This is the first time I have ever heard a politician openly admit that winning campaigns is more important than governing “for the people,” which is precisely what he is saying. He has not advocated this sort of legislation before because winning campaigns was more important to him, and he is doing so now only because he has no more campaigns to prevent him from doing the right thing.

One also has to wonder why, if he “has no more campaigns to run,” he has been headlining at fundraisers on an almost weekly basis.

Inflation Gate

It's perfectly reasonable to despise the New England Patriots. It's perfectly reasonable to be disappointed, even modestly angry, when they win a playoff game.
It is utterly insane to accuse them of tampering with
the fucking footballs.

Comedy Devolves Into Farce

Sony pictures is hacked and the government almost immediately announces that they know, have proof in fact, that North Korea did it and that the purpose was to prevent the release of a movie mocking the North Korean leader. The train of thought appears to be that North Korea is a terrorist state and therefor emulates radical Islam by threatening death to parties mocking their leader.

The “proof” is offered by the same FBI which once proudly announced the arrest of a man for attempting to blow up the Mackinack Bridge in Michigan, only to find out that he had no explosives because the only thing he was actually doing was bootlegging cell phones.

Anyway, professional computer companies examine the FBI proof of North Korea’s guilt in the Sony hack and say that it is doubtful that it proves anything of the sort. They reveal that the initial demand had nothing to do with the silly movie at all, but was an attempt to extort money and they suggest that they suspect a disgruntled former employee.

The government responds by standing its ground and claiming that some of its proof is too secret to release. The secret proof is more thorough, they say, than that which is being debunked by computer professionals, but we will have to trust them because disclosing it cannot be done for national security reasons. Just to prove how serious we are about this, though we are issuing sanctions against North Korea for hacking us.

That did not put the issue to rest because apparently we don't actually trust them all that much. The computer companies continue to say that they just don’t think the hack looks like North Korea, raising some pretty good points to support their contentions.

So here comes the FBI, who just won’t give up on this, saying that we know it was North Korea who hacked Sony because we hacked them first. We had, it seems, installed spyware in North Korea’s computers and were actually watching them hack Sony, and we know they did it because we were watching them do it.

Well, no, that would raise the question of why did we not stop them, so the FBI admits that our spyware did not see the actual hack of Sony but did see other things which lead to proof that the Sony hack came from the same computers. Unfortunately for the FBI, that’s not how spyware works, but we won’t go into that here.

Just the supposed fact that we hacked them first is ironic enough. How can we be quite so outraged at them hacking us if we did it to them first? The image of James Comey standing at the podium in high dudgeon over North Korea’s invasion of our computer networks and saying that he knows they did it because we invaded their networks first is simply beyond belief.

Germany, England and other allies have not yet raised the question that, if we have planted spyware in one government’s computer system, have we done the same in the computer systems of their nations as well? That question will arise, and when it does, things are going to get very, very awkward.

"Yes" Means What?

Governor Jerry Brown signed into law on Sunday a bill known as the “yes means yes” bill that the legislature claims will significantly reduce rapes on the campuses of our state. Because if you have a social problem, you definitely heed a new law.

The law requires "an affirmative, unambiguous and conscious decision" by each party to engage in sexual activity, which is about the silliest thing I’ve ever heard. Imagine, if you can, two college students, both of them intoxicated, trying to arrive at an “affirmative, unambiguous and conscious mutual decision" about anything.

Respect for others, men for women, or for that matter respect regardless of gender, is disappearing from our culture, so we pass laws trying to cure that illness. It won’t work any more than an ice-water bath will work to cure pneumonia. The fever is not what kills a pneumonia patient, it is but a symptom, and passing a law that requires that he has to get a woman to audibly say “yes” does not teach a man to respect women.

Nor does such a silly law protect the woman if she is herself intoxicated, since an intoxicated person is by definition unable to give an “unambiguous and conscious decision,” and why should women in college be any less free to imbibe alcohol than are men?

And don’t give me the “he should have known that she was drunk” nonsense. Not if he was drunk himself, and it is perfectly possible for a person to be sufficiently intoxicated to be incapable of informed consent and to show no outward sign of it whatever. It is not, in fact, even a particularly rare condition

I’m not sure how pervasive the problem actually is in any case. I’m not questioning its seriousness, but Twitter blows things out of proportion. For a while the world was afire with passion about the girls kidnapped by Boko Haram. They were never rescued and that crisis continued unabated, but it disappeared when the Ebola virus erupted and the world set out to cure that dread disease and succor people affected by it. Ebola is not cured and people are still suffering, but then Ray Rice slugged his girlfriend in front of an elevator camera and so now we are all about violence against women. Until the next sensational event occurs. Twitter rules to a degree that we pass laws based on its current trends.

Picking the Playoffs

Picking the Seahawks is pretty easy. Green Bay possibly could beat them in the 12th man stadium, but they won't.

I am, however, going to go against the odds and pick the Colts to win in New England. The Patriots only rushed for 14 yards last week, and the Colts defense is as good against the run as the Ravens. More to the point, the Colts will play pass defense, which the Ravens did not.

Now That Was Poise

Give up four turnovers, three of them entirely unforced, surrender 13 points of a 14 point lead, and then march down the field from your own three yard line for a touchdown. Follow that up by holding your opponent scoreless while scoring two more touchdowns. That was impressive.

Immediately after he scored a touchdown on a quarterback sneak, Cardale Jones was on the sideline slapping the shoulder pads of and congratulating each and every one of his offensive linemen. That was a very classy thing to do, and I decided right then that I would be quite happy if Ohio State won the game.

Win it they did, and it was a well deserved win. The announcers kept commenting that Oregon was in trouble with long third down situations because their game depended on deception, on making the opponent think they were going to do one thing while they actually did something else. Ohio State's game was one of execution and precision. Their plays were not complex, and they ran the same running play repeatedly. Oregon knew what was coming, but Ohio State executed the play with such precision and physicality that Oregon was simply unable to do anything to stop it. Shades of Vince Lombardi, and it was fun to watch.

Football Notes

I did not enjoy watching Denver lose yesterday, but I very much did enjoy watching the Colts play real live honest to God pass defense. The secondary got right in the grill of the Denver recievers and said to them, "I am not going to let you catch a pass. Be it one yard or twenty, if you are going to catch a pass, you are going to have to go through me." Which is why Manning completed only 9 of his first 22 passes, and finished the game with a paltry 200 yards passing on the day. Wrong team won, but it was a good game.

I also did not enjoy watching the Patriots win, especially given that they did so as a result of the Ravens' choice not to play pass defense at all. The secondary lined up eight yards off the line of scrimmage and stood there like house plants, allowing any pass of less than eight yards to be completed uncontested. Being stationary, they frequently were in no position to do anything more that shout curses at the receivers who galloped past them after the catch, turning eight yard passes into twenty yard gains.

This scheme was, of course, for the purpose of being sure that they did not "give up the big one," but they still managed to surrender a 51-yard touchdown pass that was not even thrown by Tom Brady. It was thrown by a pass receiver who they were deliberately not covering and was caught by another receiver who they were inadvertantly not covering. Awesome.

With 14 yards rushing and passing that was gifted by the Ravens, the Patriots' game was a travesty.

Carolina was simply beaten by a better team, which is hard to argue given that they entered the playoffs with a record of 7-8-1. I don't think we need to go into much detail on that one.

I didn't care who won in Green Bay. I wanted both teams to lose and knew that wasn't going to happen, so I rooted for whichever team was behind and enjoyed the hits on the quarterbacks that left them limping and hobbling around. Both quarterbacks walked off the field intact and one team won, so the game was a bit of a disappointment.

Feline Follies

I woke up last night from a dream which I only vaguely recall, having to do with battling for territory, only to realize that I was in reality fighting with the damn cat for possession of the bed. I was sort of perched on the edge, while Molly was holding the more desirable soft ground in the center.

Efforts to dislodge her were not as easy as one might think. She weighs only slightly over eight pounds, but was doing the feline thing of altering gravity and behaving much like a black hole of essentially infinite mass. There is a law of cat physics to the effect that a cat’s weight is inversely proportional to it’s state of alertness, and cats can reach infinitely low levels of alertness. Or they can rise from the dead like the gods that they think they are.

Not only can they alter mass, but they can transmogrify their bodies such that picking them up is much like trying to pick up a ninety pound mass of warm Jell-O. You pick up the front half, to which they offer no resistance whatever, and the back half remains on the bed, seemingly not connected to the front half but somehow managing to serve as a highly effective anchor for it.

We got things sorted out, but she was back to sleep before I was.

35 Degrees, Forsooth

One of the dogwalkers who pass my window every morning was wearing earmuffs this morning. Earmuffs. Even the dog looked cold. "Do my business in this? You have to be kidding. Do you know about newspapers in the house?" Some people are walking really fast, either to generate heat or to get it over with, while others look like their blood has congealed. A few regulars have not even showed up, so apparently they do know about newspapers in the house. Or are just telling their dogs to suck it up until it gets warmer - mid-afternoon perhaps..

San Diegans do not deal well with anything below 60 degrees.

They Are Who I thought They Were

The Chargers season ended, not with a bang, as the saying goes, but with a whimper; scoring a whopping seven points while losing to another non-playoff team. U-T San Diego writers are bleating endlessly about injuries, of course, but it should be pointed out that the Green Bay Packers won a Super Bowl with no fewer than eight of their starting players on injured reserve.

One might also ask why the Chargers have incurred all of those injuries. Could it have to do, perhaps, with players being in night clubs on Friday nights flinging champagne bottles drunkenly across the room? That does not, I believe do much for physical conditioning, and when have we seen the Chargers ever play a full 60 minutes of hard, physical football?

The Chargers, I believe have had for many years an attitude problem. They have too many players, not all of them, but too many who are more interested in being celebrities than they are in being professional football players, and that attitude is tolerated by the team’s management. Winning teams do not keep players who are in night clubs on Friday night when there is a Sunday game.

The Chargers are a team of celebrities, and as long as management tolerates that this is what you will get. They will continue to be pretty boys in pretty powder blue uniforms who cannot win the games that count.

Drivers License, Please

California has some 900 new laws going into effect later this week (first of the year), including one that permits illegal aliens to obtain drivers licenses so that they “can drive in this state legally.” Without commenting on the immigration issue, the illogicality of California laws sometimes staggers the imagination.

First of all, if one cannot be here legally, how can one drive here legally? I guess a certain amount of hair splitting can be done to make that meet a degree of logic, but it gets nuttier if you dig deeper into what this new drivers license is.

If you are a legal resident of California you have to provide an original birth certificate, a copy will not do, or a passport in order to obtain a drivers license. If you are illegal you merely have to show something with an address. That’s because the illegal’s license is stamped with a disclaimer saying that the license “cannot be used for identification.”

If it cannot be used for identification, how can it be used as a drivers license? How does a traffic officer know that you are not handing him a document which says that someone else is licensed to drive, since this cannot be used to identify that you are, in fact, you? He could look at the picture, but the license itself instructs him not to do that.

He can’t check the license against the registration to see if you are, maybe, driving a stolen car, because the license does not tell him who you are. It tells him only that, whoever you are, you are allowed to drive, presumably because you posses the license regardless of your actual identity.

Presumably, if you give the license to your cousin Dimitri, it would permit him to drive too, and the fact that he is six inches taller than you, outweighs you by ninety pounds and is not female while you are would not present a problem because cops are not permitted to use the card for identification.

The anomalies are not caused by California, of course, they are caused by the federal “RealID” program which California had to circumvent in order to issue licenses to illegals. Many states simply refused to comply with the federal program which creates a national identification card at state expense, but California was not one of them.

I don’t think we should have a national identification card, and I don’t think the states should have been forced to pay for it.

The Interview

Is this the silliest news furor ever in this nation, or what? A grade B, unfunny, sophomoric “comedy” slated for limited release in minor theaters, which winds up with the president of the United States complaining that the studio did not consult with him before they cancelled its release, and then says he is pleased that the release is being restored so that “the American people can make their own choices.”

So, one week Obama is engaging in statesmanship of the magnitude of restoring diplomacy with Cuba after decades of useless embargo, and the next week he is engaged with the release of a stupid movie aimed at a fifteen-year-old audience. Is this guy serious?

And now, evoking memories of Bush administration claims of WMDs in Iraq, CBS Evening News tells us that a professional computer security company, more than one actually, has refuted Obama’s assertion that North Korea is the certain culprit for the Sony hack, and suggests that it may have been done by a disgruntled former employee, reporting that the first hack was an attempt to extort money. Awesome.

No, I'm Not Gone

Two trips to the emergency room in the past two weeks, one for a back problem and the other gastrointestinal. Both times I went to my doctor's office and each time the doctor (differnt doctors) sent me to the er. Currently at home hoping that antibiotics will solve a bout of pneumonia, which did not work last time. Maybe it will this time. Anyway, just too fucking tired to spend time sitting at the computer.

Update, friday: It didn't; I'ii be back when I'm home again.

Doing It Right

There are many reasons why San Diego is a great place to live and I cannot think, offhand, of much in the way of anything that would be a valid reason not to live here. We could , of course, use a better football team, but... Anyway, once in a while something happens that reminds me that this town does live up to its slogan, which is "America's Finest City."

Protesters closed northbound I-5 this morning, voicing their opposition to recent events in Ferguson. It caused massive backups, of course, and the CHP finally managed to disband the protest but there were no arrests and no one even got a ticket. San Diego law enforcement understands the constitutional right of the people to peacefully assemble.

Wierd Ways

Let’s hear it for the Aztecs basketball team, who scored 104 points. Of course, it took them two games to score those points, but they won both games due to their traditionally awesome defense. One of the announcers commented that the Aztecs were shooting 27% from the field, and the other one said, “Yeah, and what’s weird is that they’re doing that and winning.” The shooting will come in due time, but the Aztecs always make us fans nervous in the early part of the season.

What was really weird is the impression of the San Diego U-T sportswriters that the Chargers have an offense that is close to being perfect; missing, perhaps, only a cigar. Kevin Acee describes how Malcom Floyd slowed momentarily while blocking for running back Matthew Ryan and then realized that him missing the block was all that prevented Ryan from scoring a touchdown. Acee uses that as an example of how close the offense is to being perfection.

My first thought was, “Yeah,and if the dog hadn’t stopped running he’d have caught the rabbit,” and my second was that close only counts in horseshoes amd hand grenades. The Chargers only scored six earned points in the game he described.

If Acee wasn’t so absorbed in drinking Koolaid, he would realize that the example he cites reveals just how badly flawed the Chargers offense is on two levels.

First is that Floyd’s “slowing down to see what the cornerback would do” is a defensive posture not an offensive one. An offense does not wait to see what the other team is doing and then react to it, an offense makes the other team react to what it is doing. It attacks. No wonder the offense is not scoring points or converting third downs.

The more severe problems is that Floyd’s assignment was to escort the running back downfield, following a specified route, and Floyd did not do that. If you are thinking about what you should be doing, you are not doing it. You should be doing your assignments because you know what to do, not because you are thinking about what would "be a cool thing to do." That is the Chargers' problem in a nutshell, and it is not a small thing. It is a major thing.

You have an assignment. Don't think about it. Don't wait to see what the opponent will do. Carry out your assignment. especially when your assignment is blocking ror a ball carrier. It doesn't matter what the cornerback is going to do, it matters what Ryan Matthews is going to do, and you know what Ryan Matthews is going to do. Floyd blew his assignment because he was thinking instead of carrying out his assignment, which is called a lack of discipline and is the crux of the problem.

The Chargers are insufficiently aggressive on both sides of the ball, and they are undisciplined. Either they do not know their assignments or they choose not to carry them out. In both cases, that is not close to being a championship team; that is a very long way from being a championship team.

Football Roundup

LSU was shut out by the Razorbacks, which is a good team but not that good. The Tigers, I suspect, were reflecting the letdown of having been betrayed by their coach the preceding week. I’m not surprised the team played poorly; Les Miles is lucky that they even took the field.

On a happier note, both Eli Manning and the New Orleans Criminals lost yesterday, and each suffered that defeat in their own house. Even sweeter was that the Giants loss was contributed to by no fewer than five Eli Manning interceptions.

The Chargers are celebrating a halt to their losing streak, but I’m not sure that beating a 0-9 team by seven points, and unearned points at that, is really something to celebrate. Most seem to admit that the offense was pretty shoddy, with its only touchdown coming on the heels of a Raiders fumble on its own 20-yard line.

Everyone is excited about the return of Ryan Matthews and thrilled that he ran for 70 yards, but I’m looking at some league stats that make that somewhat less than overwhelmingly impressive. Jonas Gray of New England ran for 199 yards, and he did it against the Colts, not against a team that has lost 15 consecutive games. Thirteen players ran for more yards than Matthews did yesterday, one of them a quarterback, and ten players with ten or more carries had a higher yards-per-carry average. All of them were running against far better defenses than the hapless Raiders.

Too many writers are crowing about the “awesome” performance of the defense, but I’d say they are failing to account that the defense was playing against an offense that has not won a game in more than a year. In nine previous losses Raiders have averaged 72 yards rushing, and they ran for 71 yards yesterday. They averaged 205 yards passing in those games and passed for 162 yesterday. What’s “awesome” about any of that? Yes, the defense looked decent, but they were up against a rookie quarterback and an 0-9 team. They should have looked better.

Yes, technically the Chargers are “back in the playoffs hunt,” but…

Extremism Is Okay If...

We have this weird attitude about extremists. We must, it seems, kill extremists if they are of the Muslim variety, but tolerate them if they are Christian extremists because Christian extremists have rights while Muslim extremist’s don’t. If they are Republican extremists we call the nasty names, but if they are Democratic extremists we adore them and urge them to run for president.

There is a growing current among the “I’ll vote for anyone as long as she’s a Democrat” crowd to persuade Elizabeth Warren to run for president because she is, according to them, some sort of liberal icon who will save the country from the evils of corporatism. They are thrilled by her position that Wall Street should be drowned in a bathtub, which in reality is an extreme position which makes no more sense than does the Republican mantra that government should receive the same fate.

Warren is an economic populist and certainly has all the right lyrics for the economic aria, but she doesn’t know the words or music for any other song in the songbook. She is an economics professor with a couple of relatively minor government appointed positions under her belt, and one unfinished term as Senator. There is no foreign policy experience, no government administration experience, no military experience, no constitutional or legal experience... No public service other than one Senate campaign.

The few times she has been asked about these issues she has essentially done nothing more than change the subject, with the exception of being a 100% supporter of "Israel's right to defend itself." She is a one trick pony and, while it is a really good trick, she has shown us absolutely nothing else that she can do.

The Democratic Party’s moving Warren into a newly created and essentially undefined “leadership position,” a mere two years after she first entered the Senate, is a desperate and farcical attempt by the party to regain its liberal base by showing them that it is moving back to the left. The only ones who are going to believe that it is actually doing so are those few who have managed to hang onto their belief in the “hope and change” myth of 2008.

Redefining Democracy

The Obama loyalist branch of the Democratic Party is in despair and all but ready to raise the flag inverted because the Republicans won last week. I'm not sure what they think democracy is. Somehow they only think democracy is working if their side wins.

If only one side is allowed to win, how do you even pretend that you have a democracy? These people do not really want a democracy. They want their views to prevail without other views being given an opportunity, because any views other than their own are "evil, crazy" or "stupid" and are unworthy of being given a fair hearing. The word for "I want democracy, but only when my side wins," is "hypocrisy."

Fine Lines

Congress will soon be debating, at Obama's request, a new Authorization For The Use Of Military Force (the ubiquitous AUMF) against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, also known as ISIL. We might have better success at fighting it, or even deciding whether or not to fight it, if we knew what the hell we are calling it, but... Whatever.

Robert Golan-Vilella tells us in The National Interest just how wierd the thinks this debate is, saying that the "entire debate is about a hypothetical AUMF that the White House does not think it needs for a war that started over three months ago."

Daniel Larison agrees with him and adds that the war itself is very wierd in that, "By the government’s own admission, ISIS doesn’t pose a direct threat to the United States, it had no plans to attack the U.S., and couldn’t carry out those plans if it had any," and reinforces the oddity of the AUMF debate by adding, "but the president claimed to have the authority to order attacks against them anyway."

I would add to that debate that the whole concept of an AUMF is ridiculous. Congress should either declare war or not. If war then unlimited military force should be used, if not then our military in its entirety should sit peacefully in its barracks. This game of an "authorization" to kick the can of decision to the president is cowardly and unconstitutional.

Don't Thank Me For My Service

It was not some noble effort, and I did not do it for you. I did my duty. I repaid the debt I owed to those who served before me; those who made it possible for me to serve. I served because it was not possible for me to do otherwise.

Les Miles is an Idiot

The LSU Tigers had held Alabama to drives of 9 yards, 6 yards, 18 yards,
2 yards and 8 yards in the second half; 43 yards total in five possessions, with just one first down and a takeaway. They did that by putting eight guys in the box and attacking like wild dogs.

So LSU kicks a field goal to take the lead with less than a minute left in the game and the grass eating moron puts three guys on the defensive line of scrimmage, linebackers five yards off the line, and corners and safeties ten yards deep. The entirely predictable result is that the Tide goes 55 yards in nine plays with three first downs, 12 more yards and two more first downs than they had managed previously in the entire half, and ties the game.

To make things worse, the herbivorous dimwit then uses the same feckless defense in overtime and gives Alabama the win. Fortunately, my wife was out of town and none of the neighbors called the police. The cat was in a back bedroom and decided to remain there.

On a brighter note both Eli Manning and the New Orleans Criminals lost. Even sweeter is that the Criminals lost in the Super Dome and as a result of a Drew Brees fumble.

Kill Shots

From Andy Borowitz at The New Yorker, "The San Diego Convention Center is hosting the first-ever convention of people who shot Osama bin Laden, with organizers expecting a turnout of between three thousand and four thousand." Go read the piece. It's a short read and will have you rolling on the floor.

And this from The Irish Times, "Colonel Patrick Ryder, a spokesman at US central command, said yesterday: 'I can confirm that coalition aircraft did conduct a series of air strikes yesterday evening [Friday]in Iraq against what was assessed to be a gathering of Isil [Isis]leaders near Mosul.'"

We have this maniacial passion for killing leaders, and have been doing so for more than six years now. Where has it gotten us? If someone had killed Dwight David Eisenhower in 1944 would we have abandonded our war effort, packed up our weapons and gone home, leaving Europe to the Germans? And yet, this is apparently what we think the Islamic terrorist and war forces are going to do if we just find the right "leader" to kill.

For more than six years we have been claiming as "victories" the death of this terrorist leader or that one, and yet the alarms keep coming and the places from which the threat emanates are proliferating. When are we going to figure out that this plan of "cutting off the head of the snake" is not only not working, but is actually making the problem worse? When are we going to figure out that we are creating vastly more enemies than we are killing?

Geaux Tigers!

Recycled Fear Mongering

The administration is circulating rumors that the Islamic State has used chemical weapons which they captured from the Syrian Army, giving no specifics as to when and where this happened, or specifically what chemical weapons were used.

This is somewhat at odds with statements made some time ago to establish certainty that the chemical attack in Syria was perpetrated by the Syrian Army and not the rebel forces because we knew for sure than no chemical weapons had ever been captured by rebels, followed by claims that our CW surrender program had collected 100% of the chemical weapons in the possession of the Syrian Army.

But what the hell, we all know that, as Raplh Waldo Emerson put it,
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers.”

The latest clarion call is a resurrection of “The Khorasan Group,” and another drone attack which we claim has killed the group’s “master bomb maker” even though we admit that no one has laid eyes on this paragon of the explosive arts, either dead or alive. We are shown a burning car and told that this master bomber “is believed to have been riding in it.”

The first time we bombed the Khorasan Group there were quite a lot of raised eyebrows, because no one other than the administration had ever heard of it. It was, supposedly, sufficiently large and mature to have developed munitions factories, command and control centers, and training facilities, all of which we bombed, but prior to the announcement of the destruction of its facilities no one even knew that it existed.

We were, however, told to be terrified of it, notwithstanding that we had destroyed its munitions factories, its command and control centers, and many of its training centers, because we were not certain at the time that we had killed its master bomb maker.

Now CBS News tells us that we killed a car which is believed to have contained this “master bomb maker,” who was developing bombs which could be concealed in shoes, underwear, printer cartridges and “even human bodies” and “smuggled onto airliners headed for the United States.”

There’s a certain lack of originality to this refrain. The shoes, underwear and printer cartridges go back to some rather amateurish plots emanating out of Yemen, of course. They are now coming from the "master bomb maker" of the Khorasan Group in Syria, who is apparently more of an explosives expert than a creative idea man.

The “human body” bomb comes from a television program “Covert Affairs” on the USA Network in which the bad guy had a bomb surgically implanted into a “soldier” who he allowed to be captured and taken to a CIA safe house, where the guy detonates the bomb and kills everyone in the house.

The bad guy was not an Islamic terrorist but was, as I recall, a Turkish arms dealer but, what the hell; if you see an idea that works for you, tailor it as needed and fit it into your narrative.

"I Told You So"

One comment sort of sums up the idiocy. “So they voted for a higher minimum wage and for a Republican. Hahahaha. What a bunch of idiots and morons.”

No, I think you have missed the point being made by voters. Those who voted in the manner which the commentor regards as stupid are liberals, and they threw out the legislator who claims to be a liberal and is not. They demonstrated that you cannot do nothing and remain in office, no matter who you blame the “nothing” on.

They voted for a higher minimum wage at the state level and threw out the legislator who did not vote for a higher minimum wage at the federal level. Not moronic al all, but entirely consistent.

The only thing Democrats have to show for eight years in Congress is Obamacare and, while it is by no means an altogether bad bill and has some excellent features, it most certainly is not a liberal or progressive piece of legislation. It simply gives more people access to the corporate and big business system of health care, and anyone who calls that liberal or progressive needs an education in the meaning of the terms.

Yes, I know, “financial regulation reform,” but don’t go there. If I throw up right now I will have to buy a new keyboard. We might as well discuss bankruptcy reform, something else in which Democrats were complicit.

For more than two years I have been maintaining that if the Democrats want to regain the House and retain the Senate they would need to have a better message than whining about “Republican obstructionism” and preaching about the evilness of the members of the “other side.” I have gotten responses along the lines of, “We will call them evil and stupid because they are evil and stupid,” and when I suggested that such a message would not attract new voters, “Screw them, we don’t want their stupid votes.” And so, here we are.

I am not necessarily happy with yesterday’s outcome, and I don’t want to say, “I told you so” but… Yes, I do want to say that. “I told you so.”

This is what happens when you have a two party system. The only way to throw out the guy you put in when he is not doing what you put him in to do is to put the other guy in. That’s a little convoluted, but when I elect someone to change things and he doesn’t change things I cannot simply keep reelecting him. Sure it would be nice to change him in the primary election and get a different person of our own persuasion, but those things are rigged, so effectively there is only one way to throw him out.

In CA-53 the primary choices were Susan Davis and some guy who runs a barber shop and whose total political experience was when he ran for class president in grade school. Yes, I voted for him, along with eight other people in my district, so of course Susan Davis is running against a Republican in the general election and my point is made.

Don’t think this election was any kind of victory for Republicans. It was a repudiation of the fecklessness of Democrats, and a message that we are not buying all of their half baked excuses.

What The Hell Was That?

I did foresee that the Chargers might not win against Miami, but never in my most nightmarish prognostication did I imagine that they would indulge themselves in a 37-0 meltdown. The game was not, as the saying goes, as close at the score made it look. Philip Rivers was pulled from the game late in the third quarter after completing 12 of 23, with 3 interceptions, one lost fumble and a 31.0 quarterback rating. We were told that he was suffering from an undefined “hand injury” and that “his return was questionable.”

Funny, no trainer was ever observed looking at his hand, and the hand injury is not mentioned in the news articles today, none of which actually surprises me. Said news articles are not even pointing any fingers regarding yesterday’s loss; are just asking what the hell happened. Good question.

Meanwhile, in stock car racing… Well, in NASCAR, which pretends to be stock car racing, Stewart Haas Racing decided to give Danica Patrick a chance to maybe win some races now that three of its four cars are no longer eligible for the championship.

One of its drivers, Kurt Bush, is leaving the team next year despite the fact that he has been doing better than anyone else on the team other than Kevin Harvick. He has been in the top ten almost every race and has come very close to winning several races, so SHR decided to swap crews and crew chiefs between him and Danica Patrick. Both cars are basically furnished by the Hendrick organization; same outfit that makes cars for Jeff Gordon, Jimmie Johnson et al.

So Kurt finished eighth yesterday, with the crew and crew chief that Danica used to have, while Danica finished 36th and nine laps down with the crew and crew chief that Kurt used to have. That probably should tell us something, but equally probably will tell SHR nothing as they will continue with their plan to drop Kurt and keep Danica.

Danica was not quite as bad as her finish would seem to indicate. Nearly, but not quite. She was only four laps down when she attempted to knock down the concrete retaining wall in turn four. The attempt was, of course, unsuccessful, and probably did not enhance the performance of her car.

Back to football. For those of you who have Philip Rivers on your Fantasy Football team, I hope you had the foresight to bench that puppy like I did, because he racked up a whopping 0.4 fantasy points yesterday. That’s only four tenths of a point better than a player who is dead.

And My Point Is Proven

From a comment on Friday's post The Inequality Chorus, "Staying off work for a day is one thing. Staying off for weeks or months and getting fired is another, and many don't want to risk it."

Indeed, we want our higher wages, but not if it involves hard work or risk. We want the government to secure those higher wages for us while we sit back and do nothing.

When steel workers wanted higher wages in 1965 my coworkers and I did not look to someone else. We walked out and barred the gate to shut down the plant. When they sent replacement workers we did not let them in. When they sent armed police we stood up to them. Risk? Indeed so. We risked our jobs, and we risked getting shot. We got higher wages because we made it plain that refusing us would hurt them.

"If you're by yourself, you're screwed. You could do that, make a statement and still do the work. but would that make the difference you want to happen?"

When I was driving a truck the company required drivers to pay our own fines if we were caught overweight at truck scales, despite the fact that we did not load our own trucks. The trucks were loaded by crews in the plant before we arrived to drive them, and all we did was chain down the load, tarp it when required, and leave. The first time I was caught with an overload on one axle I walked into the manager's office, handed him the ticket I had paid and told him, "When you repay me for this ticket I'll tell you where your truck is. If not, you'll eventually find it, but it won't be in one piece."

Yes, that made the difference I wanted to happen. I was far from screwed.
I got my money, they got a different truck driver, and I went to work for a better company. If you allow your employer to walk on you, you get little sympathy from me.