Paul Krugman Is An Idiot, #7,453

Paul Krugman writes today of “The New Liberal Consensus”  which, it turns out, is not actually a consensus at all. That’s not surprising, really, since if you put five liberals in a room you will usually have about fifteen opinions on any given subject.

Krugman is writing about the difference between old fashioned taxicabs, in which drivers receive wages, health insurance, paid vacation, sick leave, retirement benefits, unemployment insurance and have half of their Social Security and Medicare paid for them, and the new Uber thing, where drivers even have to furnish the car they are driving and provide liability and hazard insurance for the damned thing.

Krugman points out that “wages are much less rigidly determined by supply and demand than previously thought,”  which begs a couple of questions. First is that if economists are so good with their mathematical formulas and economic “models” why did they think that wages were “rigidly determined by supply and demand”  and are only now finding out that they are not?

The second, and more important, question which it begs is that wages not being “rigidly determined by supply and demand”  seems like a bad thing for workers, or at least like a major factor affecting the working class, and he tosses it off with no discussion of its cause, effect or what should be done about it. Rather than discussing the impact of economic issues on workers, which you might expect from the liberal populist which he claims to be, he’d rather be talking about what liberals should be doing for their political advantage.

And even on that he can’t adopt an actual liberal position, because he suggests that liberals should “promote the use of new technology without prejudicing the interests of workers,”  which is a typical Clinton “third way,” middle-of-the-road approach to not actually taking a position on the issue at all, and that they should, “not let themselves get painted as enemies of innovation,”  which is, of course, to support the Uber model and screw the workers, which is precisely what Republicans are doing.

Semper Fi

I have always had a fondness for Marines. Yes, I always fucked with them when they were aboard my boat, but they always took it good naturedly and dealt it back in the same manner. We are both Navy. I admire them tremendously as well. They have a long history which is important to them, and of which they are justifiably proud.

World War II in the Pacific was won by submarines and the Marines. Well, okay, a few aircraft carriers helped, and the Army Air Corps dropped a couple of big bombs, but the Marines took the islands and submarines sank most of the ships.

CBS was talking with some Marines who were at the shooting in Chattanooga. One of them was speaking of a friend who had helped several of his men to safety before being killed by the shooter. He said, in a very matter-of-fact tone, “He took care of his Marines,”  and I found my eyes watering. Must have been some pollen in the air.

That’s what a non-commissioned officer and the Marine Corps is all about. Semper Fi is the Marine Coprs motto, short for Semper Fidelis which means "Always Faithful."

“He took care of his Marines.”  I hope they put that on his marker at Arlington; there is no finer epitaph.

Update, 10:30am: On a lighter note, the submarine service, as far as I know, does not have a motto, unless it would be something along the lines of, "Oh shit, don't open that valve you idiot"  which, for proper effect, should be screamed at the top of one's lungs.

The Cosby Saga

Bill Cosby is still in the news, which is actually rather surprising. Have you seen one of his recent appearances? I watched one online, and was wondering two things the whole time. Why are clubs paying him to come to their venues and do this? And why are people coming to the clubs and paying money to watch him do it? I was amazed to find out that he is merely 78 years old. He looks and sounds 90 or older, and is about as funny as a bad case of diarrhea.

In the recently-released deposition he admits to buying drugs which he intended for use prior to having sex with various women. His opponents claim that to be an admission that he was “drugging girls and raping them.” His supporters say that many celebrities were using those drugs during consensual sex in those days, and so he admitted nothing.

I’m tend to side with the women who claim he raped them, but one thing I know for sure is that he admitted to repeatedly and callously cheating on his wife of (now) more than fifty years, and that puts him in a class with Tiger Woods; a person whose failure to make the cut in major tournaments I consider to be a cause for celebration. Actually, he’s worse than Tiger, because Tiger didn’t go around lecturing us on how to be a good father and family man while he was cheating on his wife.

Oh Really?

The headline reads "How To Fry Eggs,"  which I would have thought was an absurd topic before I met my wife, but we won't get into that. I normally don't read things that are on the order of "How To Pee Standing Up"  (I already know not to face into the wind), but for some reason decided to see what the Food Network felt constituted teaching me how to fry eggs.

The first step in frying eggs, according to the Food Network, is to "start with a hot nonstick skillet on medium heat."  I don't know what the second step is because, given that the first involves a thermodynamic impossibility, I don't much care what they consider to be the subsequent steps.

Things That Mystify Me

Greece is in debt to the tune of $335 billion, a debt with terms which it cannot meet, and Europe's solution is to increase that debt by almost a third, lending Greece an additional $95 billion on even worse terms.

The Greek government calls for a public vote on the offer, which turns out to be not only no but "oh hell no,"  so the Greek government then continues negotiating and accepts an even worse deal without a public vote.

Exciting Stuff

I have an idea of what it takes to hit a small target at long range. At one time I could hit a beer can three out of ten times with a rifle at 1000 yards. You can’t even see a beer can at 1000 yards? Yes, I was using a scope.

But to fling a vehicle to within a few miles of a target
2.66 billion miles away on a journey lasting nine and a half years taking a route that used the deflection of two planets… And now we have pictures of that target, pictures as detailed as those of our own moon.

This is an object that is so far away from the Sun that since it was discovered 85 years ago it has not yet completed a single orbit. Not only did the discoverer not see Pluto complete its first observed orbit, it will be twelve generations before his descendants do.

And now we have these pictures. Wow.

Inane Question of the Year

Sebastien Bourdais won the Indycar race in Milwaukee last Sunday in a manner that dwarfs the description of “convincing.”  He was in a different zip code most of the day and, at one point, had the entire field a lap down such that he was able to make his final pit stop for tires and fuel by himself without losing the lead.

After the race an NBCSN person asked him, “Did you have a first place car?”  He looked at her and paused, sort of like he was trying to figure out if there was some hidden meaning in the question; perhaps hoping that there was. English, after all, is not his first language. He seemed, finally, to decide that she had actually asked precisely the question that it appeared that she had asked, and answered, “Apparently I did.”

Yes, dear, he did. He won. Next question.

"It is a very good life."

One of the contestants on a back episode of Chopped was asked by the judges to tell them about herself. She had only recently come to this country from Bankok, where her family still lives. She was a young person and her English was charmingly broken. "I realize how lucky I am to be in this country,"  she said. "I am working very hard and having fun. It is a very good life."  I was quite happy to see her win the competition.

I wonder how many of her generation who are native to this country would include in their definition of "a very good life"  the fact that they are "working very hard." Some would, certainly, but...

Small Change

I’m not going to argue the cause of the War Between the States, and will accept for the purpose of this discussion that it was fought by southern racists for the sole purpose of preserving slavery. The Confederate battle flag, then, is an offensive symbol of a war fought 150 years ago to preserve slavery, and must not be displayed. But, eradicating that flag is insufficient. We also must rename schools which bear the name of persons who were on the wrong side. Military installations named after generals who fought for the losing army must be renamed. All traces of the losing side of that war must be erased from today’s society.

We used to call things like that “stepping over a dollar to pick up a dime.”

We are not discussing the rate of imprisonment of black men which is happening as we speak. We are not discussing the current rate of unemployment in the black population. We are not discussing the phenomenon of being arrested for “driving while black.”  We are not discussing, in any form, racism as it exists in our society today. It does exist, & is getting worse instead of better.

No, we are intent on eradicating symbols that remind us of racism as it existed 150 years ago, as if that was somehow going to solve anything.

We were talking about unemployment in Ferguson, MO and in Baltimore, at least it was being mentioned, but we dropped it in favor of this nonsense about the flag and then the renaming of schools and military installations.

For some reason, I keep being surprised by the public’s ability to focus on trivia while ignoring the real problems which face this nation.

What Should Be Banned?

From an AP story about a man who was killed when he placed fireworks on top of his head and lit the fuse,

Devon Staples, 22, and his friends had been drinking and setting off fireworks Saturday night in a backyard in Staples' eastern Maine hometown, Calais, when the accident happened with a reloadable fireworks mortar tube, police have said.

It’s hardly surprising to learn that drinking had been involved, but I’m not sure that “accident”  is the applicable term here. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say “when the Darwin event occurred,”  or “when Staples inadvertently committed suicide.”

In other news, not one but two NFL players, from different teams and in separate cities, had “accidents”  with fireworks that resulted in the amputation of a finger.

There will, of course, be calls to ban fireworks, and the mother of the New England man is already doing so. Banning stupidity is impractical, as it would render most of the population unable to function.

Seriously?

I caught the last few minutes of "America's Got Talent" last night, probably the most horribly misnamed program in the history of television unless they are engaging in deliberate snark, and seriously wish that there was some way that I could unsee that.

The "talent"  was some guy who broke 120 raw eggs into four pitchers and then drank them. How that disgusting display is considered entertainment at all escapes me completely, but what totally blows my mind is that three of the four judges liked it enough to vote "yes"  for sending it onward to the next round of the tournament.

PGA News Correction

If you were confused by CBS Evening News saying last night that Rory MeIlroy will miss the US Open due to his injury allow me to reassure you that, no, there are not two US Open tournaments this year. It is the British Open that McIlroy will miss.

Freedom of Speech

Yes, I supported discontinuing the display of the Confederate battle flag on government property. Banning its display generally, on private property or at public venues, however, constitutes impingement of freedom of speech. And no, I do not display that flag.

Greg Grandin says, in his piece at Tom Dispatch, that, “the Confederate flag represents ‘hate, not heritage,’”
but I would submit that it represents whatever the person displaying it intends for it to represent. We cannot know what is in the mind of another. He attributes that consensus to “liberal and mainstream commentators,”
so what he is saying is that it is perceived in that particular fashion by that particular group, which is a tiny fraction of the general population, and one which holds its own set of prejudices and preconceptions.

So, in reality we do not know what a person is expressing by displaying this symbol, but even if he is expressing some form of hatred, where is it a given that the expression of hated is impermissible? We may not like it, and I don’t, but what happened to the American tradition of, “I despise everything that you say, sir, but I will fight to the death to defend your right to say it?”

There seems to be an emerging belief that we have some sort of right not to be offended. What is particularly odd about that is that it is liberals who are fighting to deny the freedom of expression involved in the display of this flag, and they are at the same time declaiming that we should embrace a greater degree of diversity.

14th Deadly Sin

I mostly enjoy books by James Patterson, including the “Women’s Murder Club”  series, but I have to say the the current one, “14th deadly Sin,”  is a bit sullied by one of its major premises. A young boy is falsely arrested and dies in custody, and one of the “Murder Club”  members quits the DA’s office to file a lawsuit in the boy’s behalf because, as the author puts it, the boy “suffered wrongful death and his family deserved justice that could only be delivered in the form of a multimillion-dollar settlement with the SFPD and the City.”

The concept that massive amounts of money constitutes justice is a premise that is fundamentally repugnant to me, and I am not looking forward to reading about how our “noble”  ex-ADA plans to pursue such an endeavor.
I will probably skip those chapters and focus on how Lindsay Boxer plans to apprehend the mass murderers.

Masterpiece of Understatement

The headline reads, "Skilled workers relish chance to restore USS Constitution."  I would think so, yes. I would give several years of my life to be able to be one of the restorers on this great ship. The Boston Globe article describes in the words of the craftsmen themselves what it is like to work on a piece of living history. Fine reading.

Flagging Interest

A large portion of the media discussion about the upcoming Coke Zero 400 at Daytona is not about who will contend for the win, or rules changes, or team efforts, it’s about whether of not any confederate flags will be allowed. (They will be, but are discouraged.)

There is no actual discussion about whether or not African-American people are welcome at NASCAR races. (Actually, they’re sort of not, which is why there are no statements about the flags being offensive to “all of the black people at our races,”  because, well, I think you get the point.) There is certainly no discussion of how many African-American drivers there are in NASCAR. (One, but only in a junior circuit.) So we are not going to talk about racism in NASCAR in terms of people of color, but we are certainly going to talk about racism in NASCAR in terms of a fucking flag. Good for us.

Do Not Celebrate The Fourth!

Do not celebarte the founding of our nation this upcoming weekend. Do not go to the beach or to a public park. Don't go to any ballgames. Do not hold your family gathering at any sort of public venue.

Stay home, by yourself, and watch the television so that the news can tell you where the terrorists are and how many hundreds thousands of innocent people they have gunned down in the streets. Congratulate yourselves that you listened to the warnings issued by the Department of Homeland Stupidity and knew that these horrific attacks from the "thousands of self-radicalized homegrown terrorists"  was coming.

Oh, really?

The pastor who said that he would set himself on fire if gay marriage ever became law now says that he was "speaking figuratively."  I would say that he was actually spouting bullshit, and doing so in both utterances.

Freakout!

The negative reactions to yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling have been interesting. They would be really amusing if they weren’t so repulsive.

The minority Supreme Court opinions were bizarre. Roberts said the decision was “an assault on democracy.”  Thomas claimed in his opinion that “slaves didn’t lose their dignity because the government allowed them to be enslaved.”  Scalia said he would “put my head in a bag,”  and that “Freedom of Intimacy is abridged rather than expanded by marriage.”  To prove the latter point he said that we should “Ask any hippe.” He didn’t suggest where we should find one in 2015.

A local television station had the following leader promoting its upcoming evening news. “New dilemma for religious leaders as they try to balance their religious beliefs with this new law.”  It isn’t, of course, a “new law,”  and apparently they are unfamiliar with the principle of separation of church and state, and think that the Supreme Court ruling is going to force the Roman Catholic Church to perform marriage ceremonies in its churches for gay couples.

Quick note: that is not what the ruling will do.

This is an independent station whose evening news I don’t usually watch, but I tuned in to see if it would be as weird as the leader suggested. It was. They had a lengthy interview with the pastor of some unnamed but obviously fundamentalist church who explained to us that the Bible defined marriage, and that it was more than two thousand years older than the constitution.

Actually, it’s not, but this is a guy who undoubtedly thinks that man and dinosaurs roomed the Earth together just a few hundred years ago and that God created fossils for the express purpose of faking us out, so there’ no real point in arguing with him.

This is the same station who had weather reporter John Coleman, who was a complete fruitcake and a notorious climate change denier. His retirement did not provide sufficient impetus to persuade me to watch the station.

Burying the Lede

The NY Times, in discussing the Obama Administration defense position leading to today’s Supreme Court decision on Obamacare, tells us that the administration said that “the balance of the law demonstrated that Congress could not have intended to limit the subsidies.”  The administration also argued, “Accepting the plaintiffs’ position would affect more than six million people and create havoc in the insurance markets.”

The Times goes on to say that the administration finished with, “the phrase, noticed by almost no one until long after the law was enacted, was a curious way to encourage states to establish exchanges.”

I think they saved their best argument for last, because that phrase strikes me as an utterly bizarre vehicle for encouraging states to form exchanges. Congress can be, and often is, pretty idiotic, but when you want to force someone to do something, you don’t carefully conceal the threat for failing to do it.

I think their second argument is pretty weak. Civil rights legislation affected a lot more than six million people, created some years of havoc in multiple venues, and was pretty worthwhile legislation. But their first argument was a winner, too. When considering one piece of anything, one has to look at it in the context of the whole.

I am, as you know, no fan of Obamacare, but I think the Supreme Court got this one right.

Trailblaizer? Not!

A couple of days ago, Daniel McFadin wrote an article, published online at NBC Sports, claiming that Danica Patrick qualifies for the NASCAR Hall of Fame. He did not assert that she will do so before her career is finished, but that she qualifies right now. You know what is coming, right? Of course you do.

Except, for the most part and other than to say it is absurd to claim Hall-of-Fame status for any driver who has never won a NASCAR race, I’m not going to bother. The one point that does need to be addressed is a claim by Steven Cole Smith at motorsport.com that she is a “trailblazer” equal to Wendell Scott.

Wendell Scott was the first person of color to win a NASCAR race, so right off the bat any claim to equality with Wendell Scott is shot down in flames because winning a NASCAR race is something that Danica Patrick has never even come close to doing. On that basis alone I can call bullshit to Smith’s idiotic claim.

Another small point is that Scott was the first man of color to even drive in a NASCAR race. Danica, on the other hand, is a long way from being the first woman to drive in NASCAR. Women, in fact, have been driving in NASCAR races ever since the first one was held, right there on Daytona Beach. Janet Guthrie was competing in NASCAR in 1976, earning rookie honors in that year, and enjoying better results than Danica has accomplished in any year of her entire career.

But the real insult is to apply the word “trailblazer” to both Wendell Scott and Danica Patrick. Wendell Scott came into NASCAR using only his own resources and at a time when athletes of his color were not only unpopular, but were banned outright in many racing venues. Danica Patrick came with truckloads of other people’s money and at a time when the public was fully accepting of, and even enthusiastic about female athletes.

Wendell Scott was a trailblazer. Danica Patrick is merely an opportunist.

Um, Probably Not

NOAA shows a forecast high of 77° for today. At 7:30am, however, they show the current temperature already at 75° and, looking out my window, I see that the marine layer is burning off very quickly. I cannot say what the high today will be, but I'll bet it won't be 77°.

Dean Baker Is An Idiot

I think all economists are idiots, actually. They think that economics and business are the same thing, and that having studied some arcane formulas which purport to predict the rise and fall of economic conditions under certain civil circumstance while sitting in an ivory tower, that they then know how to manage an actual brick and mortar business in the real world.

Baker writes a piece today discussing the claims by employers that they are having difficulty filling some jobs due to a lack of qualified applicants. He claims, as he always does, that all they have to do is raise the offered wage and they will get more applicants than they can handle, and that regardless of the skills required, there is a complete adequacy of any skill set available.

He admits that those skilled workers might not be currently unemployed, but might be presently working for other employers. He says that is not a problem, however, because all the company in question needs to do is raise the offered wages high enough to hire the workers away from their present employer and the problem is solved.

I see two small problems with that; perhaps not all that small. The first being that his plan has not solved the problem at all; it has merely moved it from one employer to another. Now the company from whom the employees were pirated is faced with the need to find qualified employees, so the problem still exists in the same nature, and to precisely the same degree. It merely exists for a different employer.

Economists are prone to thinking that relocating a problem is the same as solving it. “If it’s no longer my problem, then it isn’t a problem at all.”  Baker once solved Europe’s shortage of hotel workers by arranging for parking lot attendants and taxi drivers to take those jobs. He didn’t stop to think that he had merely created a problem for parking lot and taxicab company owners.

The other problem with Baker’s solution here is something called a “wage/price spiral.”  Everyone is busily pirating employees from everyone else, meaning that wages are rising higher and causing prices to do the same, which leads to inflation. We’ve been there before, and it wasn’t pretty.

Dean Baker is, of course, an economist and therefor thinks that inflation is a good thing because he lives in that ivory tower and does not have to deal with the real world effects of it. He thinks that it has all sorts of beneficial effects, like “diminishing debt,”  reducing effective interest rates and minimizing the impact of the federal deficit on GDP.

He doesn’t realize that it makes milk, eggs and heating your home cost more, and doesn’t seem to care that the reduction to effectiveness of interest applies to savings as well as debt. He also thinks that wages rise at the same pace as inflation. Haha, dream on.

In fact, the reason that we have employer-provided health care benefits is that a wage/price spiral was damaging the economy so badly that the government froze wages in an effort to put a stop to it. Unable to offer higher wages to hire workers away from other employers, which is what Baker is suggesting here, and which they had been doing until the government stopped them, companies began offering “fringe benefits”  instead of wages to pirate workers from other employers.

Reporting on Mass Shootings

I have no real evidence for this, but I have a suspicion that we might have fewer mass shootings if the media spent less time talking about the shooters. Yes, the event is news and needs to be reported, but do we need to know what the shooter’s childhood was like? Do we need to read about his inner thoughts and the manner in which he planned the deed?

It seems evident that many of them were suffering from a sense of isolation, and felt that no one was paying attention to them. What better way to make people pay attention than to emulate the guy who made the headlines; the guy who everyone was talking about?
“I may be dead, but at least they’ll pay attention.”

Perhaps they should report the event, and tell us bout those who lost their lives, but say little or nothing about the shooter; maybe not even report his name. What would we lose in that process that would be worth knowing? What might society gain?

Missing The Point

A couple of examples, today, of the rifle range malaprop practice of firing at your neighboring station’s target.

Paul Krugman has a piece today in which he refers to one benefit of Obamacare being that it provides “major gains in coverage at relatively low cost.”  It does nothing of the sort, of course, and as an economist he should be very well aware of and outraged by that. It provides people with access to high-cost coverage by having the government pick up part of the tab.

We should, instead, be providing everyone in this nation with actual “relatively low cost”  coverage by regulating the health care provider industry, just as we regulate all other industries which provide services which consumers buy from necessity and not from choice. Deregulating energy distribution was a disaster, and leaving the provision of health care unregulated is precisely the same kind of disaster.

Second amendment fanatics are reenergized after the latest mass shooting, and are crying out that the founders stated the need for a “well organized militia”  so that citizens could fight against a tyrannical government. I am always amused at how vigorously people claim to defend a document while knowing so little about it, because these same morons defend a “strong national defense” with equal devotion.

The founders actually spoke of the need for a “well organized militia”  because in the same document, our own sacred constitution, they forbade the government from maintaining a standing army. Article I, Section 8 authorizes Congress “To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years.”

So the “well organized militia”  was not intended to fight against our own government, which the founders never in their worst nightmares imagined would ever become tyrannical, but rather to rise up and fight against possible invaders. And the enormous military establishment which second amendment fanatics almost universally support with the same fervor that they devote to their guns, is a gross violation of our governing document.

And we wonder why democracy doesn’t seem to be working very well.

Three score and twelve

My ambition to "live hard, die young and leave a good looking corpse" has foundered. I am no longer capable of pulling off any one of the three parts of that. I will now have to settle for living well and confusing confounding my enemies, which is a better goal anyway.

Gutting Obamacare

We are waiting to see if the Supreme Court will or will not “gut Obamacare”  by disallowing the payment of government subsidies for health insurance. Let’s think, for a moment, about the admission that preventing the government from paying subsidies for health insurance would “gut Obamacare.”

This was, going in, a process advertised as “health care reform”  which turned into “health insurance reform.”  But was it even that? Was it actually, as supporters claim, “landmark legislation”  and the “greatest piece of legislation in five generations?”  Did it, as claimed, rank in significance alongside legislation like Social Security and the original Medicare bill?

Health care costs more than three times as much per capita in this nation as it does in any other developed country. Obamacare says that not only will we not make any major efforts to reduce that cost, we will deliberately maintain that high cost and, instead, the government will pick up part of the cost for those who cannot afford it.

What nation does that? What nation not only maintains the high costs of a necessary service, but goes to the extent of providing government subsidies in order to maintain that high cost, and celebrates having done so? What voter base calls the imposition of subsidies which support high cost “landmark legislation”  and applauds and reelects the author?

Real reform and “making insurance affordable”  would involve allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices; it would allow the reimportation of medications from foreign countries; it would recognize legitimate medical degrees from other nations; it would modify drug patent laws; it would require cost-based pricing by medical providers… The list goes on at length, and what started out as “health care reform”  touches on none of these things.

Obamacare should be gutted. Not because I am a Republican, but because it is not “landmark legislation,” but is a sufficient “band aid”  to reduce the demand for real reform. It leads the uninformed to think that it is “a first step in the right direction.”  It is nothing of the sort. It is insanity and stupidity which should be discarded so that conditions remain bad enough that the citizens continue to demand real reform.

Well, Duh

Every week we get half a dozen headlines like, "Carl Edwards hoping to win the Quicken Loans 400," which is the race in Michigan today. I have no idea why any of the 43 drivers would drive in the race if they were not hoping to win the damned thing. Some of those hopes are realistic and some are not, and the driver's chances of actually winning the race may be worthy of discussion, but please spare me the headline about a race car driver hoping to win a race.

Chomsky on Obama et al

Noam Chomsky is no more an admirer of Obama than am I. In an interview published today he says that Obama is “an opportunist”  and that Hillary Clinton is “much the same, only more militant.”  He goes on to say that he has not been disappointed in Obama, because he didn’t expect anything. “His portrayed idealism could not be taken seriously,”  he says and, “The policies he was proudest of I thought were awful.”

I particularly like the part where he says that Obama has "essentially rescinded the principle that was established in the Magna Carta 800 years ago”  with his policy of assasination by drone. You are no longer innocent until proven guilty by a jury of your peers, you are dead if Obama decides you are dead.

He’s even more critical of Kennedy, and all of this is because, unlike today’s Democrats, he’s an actual Liberal. Read the whole interview, and you’ll get an understanding of what today’s generation has missed by not experiencing the Depression. We think times are bad today. How little we know.

CBS News is Confused

CBS Evening News is confused by the administration’s Iraq strategy. In reporting the addition of 450 troops to western Anbar, reporter David Martin said that, “because the base is so close to the front lines, most of the troops will be there simply to protect the base from attack.”  He finished his report by stating that, “Like all the other Americans in Iraq, they will be barred from frontline combat against ISIS.”

He did not say how these troops are going to protect the base from attack without engaging in frontline combat. Wave their arms and scream curses in the background, perhaps?

Or, since they are “barred from frontline combat,” perhaps they are supposed to join the Iraqi Army in running for their lives, which is not very dignified, and which renders their stated mission of protecting the base from attack a bit spurious.

Incoherence Abounds

Apparently Obama did speak of international affairs at the recent G-7 international economic summit, but his remarks regarding economic matters, if he made any, are not receiving much in the way of press coverage.
I have already touched on his discussion of domestic policy, and today the media is focused on his remarks regarding military action in Ukraine and the Middle East.

In Ukraine, he claims that Putin’s resistance to the absorption of that nation, which borders directly on Russia, into the military alliance of NATO constitutes expansionism and an attempt to “reconstitute the glory of the Soviet Union.”  It was, of course, not expansionist for us to attempt to incorporate Ukraine into NATO.

As to Iraq and Syria, his discourse becomes even more unmoored from reality. He admits that we “have no complete strategy”  against the Islamic State, but that doesn’t prevent him for actively pursuing our incomplete strategy with increasing levels of activity. The “Obama Doctrine”  seems to be that if you don’t know what you are doing, you should definitely do more of it.

Pursuant to that, he is building a new US base in Anbar Province, which is mostly occupied by the Islamic State and is therefor an ideal place to put a US base, and is sending 400 more US troops to train Iraqi soldiers. He is doing this despite his admission in the same speech that we presently “have more training capacity than we have recruits.”  Obviously, in light of that, we need to increase our training capacity. (?)

His admission regarding training capacity has been confirmed by an anonymous (of course) “defense official,”  who said that our training base at Asad air base has not received a single recruit in as much as six weeks. That might have to do with the fact that the base is in Anbar Province and is entirely surrounded by Islamic State forces. We have some 300 Marines there, who are very much at risk, although they can certainly be airlifted out if need be.

That doesn’t mean that it makes any sense to leave them in such an exposed position, especially when they are serving no useful purpose. If they are attacked too rapidly for air evacuation, their blood will be on Obama’s hands.

Be that as it may, given that we have one training base in Anbar which is surrounded by the Islamic State and is not receiving recruits, why are we building and manning another training base in Anbar? A corollary to the Obama Doctrine seems to be “If what you are doing is not working, do more of it.”

Imperial Presidency

Why Obama is talking about domestic policy at a press conference which is part of an international economic summit meeting sort of escapes me, and it particularly surprises me that he would be discussing the one economic area in which the other six nations are so clearly superior to us. But there he was, discussing a decision made by his executive branch pursuant to health care legislation and telling us, no less, that it was such an exercise in excellence that the Supreme Court should not even have agreed to hear a challenge to it.

He’s not limiting himself to telling the highest court in the land how it should rule. That would not sufficiently demonstrate his concept of the power of the presidency. He says that a challenge to a decision made by his executive branch, “Frankly, probably should not even have been taken up,"  by a coequal branch of government which is charged in the constitution with the specific responsibility of serving as a “check and balance”  on the other two branches.

Obama is giving us a new definition of the “imperial presidency.”  Bush said that if a person threatened us he could imprison them without trial; Obama says he can simply order that person executed. He does not need permission from Congress before engaging in acts of war upon other sovereign nations, and now he is saying that decisions made by his executive branch should not be questioned by the Supreme Court.

Triple Crown

I am not a horse racing fan; know nothing about it. But I care about the making of history, and I think that horses are lovely creatures, so watched the Belmont Stakes yesterday. I'm glad I did.

As they were in the second turn, entering the backstretch, I said out loud, "Oh my. No one is going to beat that horse."  Even I could see that he was not working as hard as any of the other horses. He was biding his time. They came into the frontstretch and I thought, "This is where he hits high gear."  And... Well, you saw it.

Why Do We Need Drivers?

Many years ago Dale Earnhardt was asked, “How do you plan to win today’s race?”  He looked at the interviewer much as he might look at a bug which had just crawled out from under a rock and replied, “I plan to drive real fast.”  If you don’t know how much that typifies the Iron Man, I feel sorry for you.

The reporter, as I recall, mumbled something like, "Oh, okay, thanks,"  and wandered off to interview elsewhere.

Today a driver’s answer would probably be more along the lines of, “Well, we’ll put a quarter pound of air in the right rear tire on lap 187, around lap 300 we’ll use a half turn of wedge, and…”  Because today it’s not about how fast the driver can drive, it’s about what the mechanic can make the car do. A "quarter pound of air,"  forsooth.

Whenever they interview the second place finisher he never blames himself for not winning. He always says something along the lines of, “Well, the car got tight the last few laps and we didn’t have anything for him.” What’s this “we”  shit? I only saw one guy inside that race car. Back to Dale Earnhardt, the Iron Man; I never heard him blame his car for not winning a race. “I pedaled as hard as I could, but I couldn’t run him down.”

If second place is always the car’s fault, why do we need drivers? Let’s just put those Google self-driving mechanisms in the cars and let the mechanics and computers have at it. Sorry, they aren’t called mechanics any more, they’re called “crew chiefs.”  Mechanics don’t make that much money.

Why do we have drivers championships, for that matter? Jimmie Johnson should not get the Sprint Cup trophy; Chad Knaus should get it because every time Jimmie does not win the race it’s because Chad didn’t make the car go fast enough. Or turn well enough. Or something. Stands to reason, then, that when Jimmie does win it’s because Chad did make the car go really fast.

Drivers complain that rules changes “make the cars too hard to drive.”  Seriously. Race cars are supposed to be easy to drive? Reminds me of another old time driver,
A. J. Foyt, who once famously said, “Hell, if we’re going to race taxi cabs, then lets get a bunch of taxi cab drivers out here to drive the damned things.”

Dale Earnhardt didn’t think race cars needed to be easy to drive. I watched him go sideways at Talledega one time, coming out of turn four at 200 mph, and I do mean sideways. He recovered and kept going, just lost a couple of positions, and his radio remained silent until car owner Richard Childress asked him if he was okay. “I’m okay,”  he replied, “Car’s a little loose.”  And that was all he had to say about the issue.

They don’t make race car drivers like they used to.

The Worm Turns

Kevin Acee is a local sportswriter who has been defending the Chargers management against charges by the fans of incompetence and ennui due to consistent failure to make the playoffs. He claimed, for instance, that Norv Turner was an outstanding head coach and that A.J. Smith was the best general manager in the league.

Now he is turning against them for reasons which are not entirely clear. Last week he was castigating the team for not agreeing to renew Eric Weddle’s $6 million/year contract a full year before it expired because Weddle is, he said, entitled to “a sense of financial security going forward.”  Seriously?

Weddle has already been paid $34 million, and if he hasn’t been able to turn that into “a sense of financial security”  that certainly is not the fault of the San Diego Chargers. I’m not sure what kind of money the Union-Tribune is paying Kevin Acee that he does not instinctively understand that, and does not recognize that if Eric Weddle cannot find financial security in having been paid $34 million then he is not going to find it in any amount the Chargers are going to be willing to cough up.

Now he is accusing the Chargers of disloyalty to San Diego because he thinks they have “quit”  on the effort to build a new stadium and keep the team in this city. They have, admittedly, not had much to say regarding the committee’s proposal to spend $1.4 billion for a new stadium in Mission Valley, which may simply be because they don’t want to expose themselves as idiots and drive their stockholders away.

I guess that, based on the headline, I’m calling Kevin Acee a worm which, coming from me, would actually be a compliment, but I suppose we do have to remember that Acee’s attitude changed when the Union-Tribune was purchased by and merged with the Los Angeles Times. There may be a reason why he suddenly became less averse to the team moving to our northern neighbor.

Terror Again

CBS Evening News had a segment last night in which a young man “radicalized by ISIS”  on the Internet quite literally brought a knife to a gunfight, with entirely predictable results, and they headlined it as a “terror plot.”  If we are going to be, as a nation, terrorized by a guy with a knife, then we have come to a very silly place in our history.

Torture Regime

I have been engaged in “strength training” for some time now, and it has become clear that this damned personal trainer is trying to kill me. I think my wife is in on it because she uses the same trainer and she’s all, “Oh, she’s so nice…”  No she’s not; she’s a fucking tyrant.

I don’t know if she hates all men in general, or if it’s just me, but if I disappear check that gym on Alvarado Canyon Road for dead bodies. I’ll bet there’s a bunch of them stashed in there. I think it’s a misandranous plot and she gets a bounty from the National Organization for Women. Yes, my wife is a member.

Who's In Charge?

Eric Weddle is beginning the final year of his contract, a year during which he will earn receive $8 million. He “feels highly disrespected”  that the Chargers have not contacted him about extending that contract, and has retaliated by not attending voluntary team workouts.

The general manager finally responded by announcing that the team would not only not extend the contract before this season, but that they would not discuss the contract after the season either. I think Tom Telesco is sending a message that he is not going to let the employees run the store.

Missed Opportunity

I received a letter from a company sort of loosely masquerading as the credit union which holds our home mortgage, which offered to refinance my loan at “the lowest rates in recent history.”  Out of curiosity, I called the number on the letter.

I was told that the company was “managing a government program designed to help low income people reduce their mortgage payments”  and was offering rates as low as 2.75% at this time. She needed, she said, to ask me a few questions to “qualify”  me for the program. We are not low income, and are not burdened by an underwater mortgage or a high payment, but I agreed to answer her questions within reason.

My answers, if she was actually operating a “government program to lower payments for struggling homeowners,”  should have caused her to call me dirty names for wasting her time and hang up on me. After finding out that we have about a 25% loan-to-value balance in our home and getting the amount of our current payment, she asked if making that payment was a struggle for us. I said it was not, and was wondering to myself how she was going to suggest that her “government program”  might have anything to offer me.

Instead of telling me to take a long walk on a short pier, she went into an enthusiastic sales pitch about their “fabulous rates”  and wanted to make an appointment to come to our home to sit down with me and my wife to discuss all of the “wonderful options”  which they could offer us.

Either the government is more idiotic than I think it is, which would be quite a stretch, or that woman was lying her ass off. I did not, of course, make the appointment.

But I’m pretty sure I didn’t need to tell you that.

Cooking Mistakes

I read an article yesterday about “seventeen mistakes you are making when you cook” and found, of course, that I was making none of them. I also found that I was avoiding some of those mistakes for all of the wrong reasons, but reasons don't affect the taste of dinner.

The first one was that you should not thaw a frozen steak before cooking it, and I’m okay in that one, but not because I cook steaks in the frozen state. Some foods can be frozen successfully and some cannot, and steak is in the latter category. If you freeze a steak it will have the texture of old boiled cannibal no matter how you cook it, so you might as well not waste time thawing it. Damn thing will be inedible in any case.

The second one suggests that you are not adequately draining your tofu before cooking it and I either pass that test or flunk it completely depending on your definition. I am not draining my tofu at all because I’m not buying any tofu. I will not allow tofu within 100 yards of my kitchen.

Another suggestion was that you’re putting too much milk in your scrambled eggs; that you should add only a little bit of milk. I sort of flunked that one because I don’t add any milk when I scramble eggs. Adding milk to scrambled eggs is barbaric.

The last suggestion which I’m going to address was that canned tomatoes work better than fresh ones when making Marinara. I pass that test; not because I knew they work better, but because I’ve always been too lazy to use fresh ones. Peeling tomatoes is a pain in the ass. Now I can make sauce with a glow of righteousness.

They did not point out, though, that those canned tomatoes need to be simmered for a fair length of time, at least 40 minutes or so, to get the canned taste out of them.

California Early Summer

I think it was Mark Twain who said that the coldest winter he had ever experienced was June in San Francisco. We're not that bad, but NOAA is pressed to come up with different ways to say the same thing. "Decreasing clouds"  gives way to "some sun"  which changes to "some clearing"  and is followed by "partly cloudy."

It all means the same thing. If you are three miles inland you will get two hours of sun in midafternoon, but it you live at the coast you will not see the sun until July. People come here from Arizona and sit on the beach in shorts and sweatshirts, wrapped in big beach towels, looking stunned and rather pissed off.

Paul Krugman is an Idiot #6,376

Paul Krugman likes to remind us about how often he is right when he says things. If it were anyone else it would be called unseemly bragging, but coming from a liberal economist it is merely reminding us. Anyway, yesterday he reminded us that he was right in saying the interest rates were not going to rise, and that, “The longer high unemployment drags on, the greater the odds that crazy people will win big in the midterm elections — dooming us to economic policy failure on a truly grand scale.”

Because high unemployment is not, itself, an economic policy failure. And what have the “crazy people”  done in terms of economic policy that is significantly different than what the Democrats did when they were in the majority?

Today he ponders on “Inequality and Urbanism,”  or what happens when rich people move into poor neighborhoods. He uses an example of when “a bank branch takes over the space formerly occupied by a beloved neighborhood shop.”  Everyone is “maximizing returns,”  he says, except, of course, the shop owner who is out of business, but Paul Krugman is a Princeton man so we have to give him some room to forget the little guy.

He opines that “the disappearance of that shop may lead to a decline in foot traffic,”  but that on a more positive note “an influx of well-paid yuppies can help support the essential infrastructure of hipster coffee shops, ethnic restaurants, and dry cleaners,"  all of which are populated by people who pop into and out of them by teleportation, apparently, since the foot traffic declined when the “beloved neighborhood shop”  left.

He sort of waffles on whether any of this is good or bad, but he considers “hipster coffee shops, ethnic restaurants, and dry cleaners”  to be “essential infrastructure.”  Why do we keep listening to this idiot?

Memorial Day

"They go to war, these young men, not to die for their country but to place themselves, their precious lives, between their home and the forces which would destroy it."   Kenneth Roberts in "A Rabble In Arms."

Talking Points

So “the Benghazi affair”  raises its silly head again; an issue that could be of some modestly serious import but is not because it is a discussion about the relative validity of various “talking points.”  No one raises the more basic truth that the existence of “talking points”  is a problem in and of itself, regardless of whether they were valid or not.

Talking points are what people use to get their stories straight when they are not intending to reveal what they actually know. Susan Rice, it seems, had been given the wrong set of talking points, which is to say she told the wrong story, which would not have happened if she had been revealing her own knowledge. As Judge Judy says, “If you tell the truth, you don’t need a good memory.”

The whole Benghazi “defense”  is about members of the administration getting together to agree upon what they were going to say, and people who are being honest don’t do that. Somehow that point keeps getting left out of the discussion.

Unicorns!

CSAG has saved the future prosperity of the great city of San Diego by assuring that the Chargers will play their games here for the next thirty years in a new $1.1 billion stadium that will be built without the imposition of any new taxes on the citizens of our city because it will be paid for by unicorns and mermaids. Most cities have to rely only on unicorns, be we have the advantage of being right on the Pacific Ocean, so we have mermaids too.

Actually, the Citizens Stadium Advisory Group plan (pdf) includes more than a dozen putatively realistic funding sources, one or two of which might actually fly, in which case the stadium would be about 10% funded in the real world that you and I live in. CSAG’s funding includes:

$200 million from the NFL, which has not been approached on the subject and has not agreed to provide any money for any stadium in any city. They have said that they “will study CSAG’s proposal carefully.”

$300 million from the Chargers, who said twelve years ago that they might provide $200 million toward a new stadium, but who have not been approached recently as to paying any part of a new stadium. They also have said that they “will study CSAG’s proposal carefully.”  The Charger contribution is not really $300 million, though, as we will see later.

$121 million from the “City Stadium Fund”  which sounds like an existing pile of money but is nothing of the sort. In fine print it says “$70 million per year for 30 years,”  which is actually $210 million and is the amount of the general obligation bonds which the city will sell to provide $121 million toward construction of the stadium. The other $89 million is, of course, interest on the bonds, but the whole $210 million is money out of the taxpayers’ pockets. For some reason, that $210 million will come out of the pockets of taxpayers without any new taxes being imposed, which is a pretty neat trick.

$121 million from the “County Stadium Fund,”  which means that CSAG is an ecumenical taxpayer abuser, willing to screw county taxpayers as well as city ones.

$60 million from “personal seat license”  (PSL) sales. They actually plan to sell $120 million of these PSLs, 50% of which will be returned to the Chargers to reimburse them for what they contributed to the construction, which why it was pointed out that the Chargers’ contribution is not $300 million, but is actually $240 million. This is a complicated plan; try to keep up.

Selling $120 million in PSLs is going to be a neat trick in a market which cannot reliably fill a 40,000 seat stadium, which holds the league record in television blackouts and is in the only city ever to have a Monday Night game blacked out locally. Some of the PSLs will be bought by voyeurs who will be attending games to watch the mermaids who bought the other PSLs.

$216.2 million in rent from the Chargers, San Diego State and bowl games. If that goes to pay for the construction, what is going to be used to cover the operating cost? Nonetheless, probably one source of funding that is legitimate.

$225 million from the sale of part of the Mission Valley site to developers, at $3 million per acre. That might happen. And I might win the Boston Marathon too, but I don’t think that San Diego should be selling any bonds against that eventuality.

$110.7 million from ticket and parking surcharges. No tax increases, but going to games is going to cost quite a bit more. This does have the advantage of placing the burden on those who benefit from the Chargers, and not on the general taxpayers.

$50 million form “Additional funding sources stadium is expected to generate.”  This is otherwise, and more accurately, stated as “We don’t know what that might be but we needed another $50 million in the plan.”

Don’t get me wrong, I am a fan of the Chargers and I want them to stay in town. But if the population is resisting the idea of building a $500 million stadium I just cannot believe that the solution is to come up with a $1.1 billion alternative. Someone has just flat lost their collective mind, here.

Paul Krugman is an Idiot #6,375

Paul Krugman produced a column yesterday regarding manufacturing employment and its relationship the trade deficit which is so filled with muddy and downright delusional thinking that it’s hard not to conclude that he hasn’t had a stroke or brain aneurysm and simply become brain dead.

He begins by giving the opinion that people who believe that “US manufacturing has disappeared because it has all moved to China and Mexico”  are “largely wrong.”  He goes on to say that “pointing to measures of industrial production is not the bet way to make this point,”  and argues that a better way to examine the above claim is to “ask how much of the decline in manufacturing employment would have been avoided if we weren’t running big trade deficits.”

Since it was the export of manufacturing jobs to cheaper labor overseas which largely caused the trade deficit, because consumers are buying foreign goods instead of domestic ones, that’s sort of saying that we should ask how quickly the chicken would have died if I had not hit it in the neck with my axe.

He then says that the negative contribution of 3% to GDP in manufacturing is a “major obstacle in efforts to achieve full employment,”  as if we were actually making any efforts to achieve full employment, because it is “a drag on the overall demand for US goods and services.”  Really? Aside from a deficit in manufactured goods being unrelated to services, domestic or otherwise, and therefor unlikely to be a drag on them, as to domestic goods he’s saying that the unavailability of domestic goods reduces demand for domestic goods.

Hello? We’re not buying American computers because America doesn’t make computers. America has no manufacturing jobs making computers. They are all in China. And so we import computers, adding to the trade deficit, because the computer manufacturing jobs were all sent to China. Those jobs were not sent to China because there was a trade deficit, they were sent there because it allowed companies to build computers more cheaply. And I don't mean less expensively, I mean more cheaply.

He then makes the point that the trade deficit of 3% does not account for a decline in manufacturing jobs, which is “15 points,”  but he’s not even comparing apples and oranges, he’s comparing apples and freight trains. The 3% decline is a percentage of the nation’s total dollar economy, while the “15 points,”  is the share of manpower employment; manufacturing employment accounted for 25% of the workforce in 1970, and it accounts for 10% today. The workforce is vastly larger today that it was 45 years ago, so it’s pretty hard to come up with any really meaningful numbers, but Krugman’s numbers certainly don’t do it, and the manufacturing workforce certainly has shrunk.

Oddly, manufacturing accounted for 30% of jobs in 1955, but he doesn’t use that number. He chooses a time 15 years later and 5% lower. One has to wonder why.

He admits that the “3 points out of 15”  is an exaggeration, actually who knows what it is, because “not every dollar of manufactured exports corresponds to a dollar of manufacturing value-added,”  except that we’re not talking about “value-added”  here, we’re talking about labor, and one cannot conflate dollars with relative employment share in national employment.

“For the most part,”  he concludes, “in other words, declining manufacturing employment isn’t due to trade.”  And this is the crux and reason for the whole pile of babble and nonsense, because Paul Krugman is a supporter of Barack Obama’s push for the Trans Pacific Partnership “free trade” agreement. “But even if we’d had a highly protectionist world,”  he says, “…we’d still have seen most of the great decline in industrial jobs.”

Still Selling Bridges

We apparently pulled off a commando raid in cooperation with the Syrian Army and killed an Islamic State oil minister this week. On George Stephanopoulos this morning various pundits, including Dianne Feinstein, opined that the raid was a complete success which signals that we are winning the war against the Islamic State, ISIS, ISIL, Daesh or whatever name it is being addressed by these days.

Meanwhile, the media is completely ignoring that the Islamic State completed its rout of Iraqi forces in Anbar Province this week and took full control of and occupied Ramadi, a major city in that province which is only seventy miles from fun-packed, downtown metropolitan Baghdad. So we kill an oil minister while they capture a major city, and somehow we are winning.

The Obama administration is hyperventilating about the construction by China of a military base outside of its national borders, specifically a small airfield in the China Sea which is being built on a manmade island. It says that the base is an example of China “using its ‘muscle’ to bully smaller nations,”  even though it is being built by China in the China Sea.

We argue that the base is “violating the harmony, the feng shui, of Southeast Asia, and it’s certainly violating China’s claim to be a good neighbor and a benign and non-threatening power.”  Our 750+ overseas bases do not violate our claims to be a good neighbor, or to be a “benign and non-threatening power,”  because we make no such claims; we claim nothing other than to be the “world’s sole superpower.”

And, of course, our plan to restore the “feng shui”  of Southeast Asia and to assure peace in the area is to patrol this heinous base with B1 bombers, because nothing creates a peaceful and harmonious atmosphere better than a few nuclear bombs hovering around.

Obama held a summit for the Gulf Cooperation Council (the “gulf” being the Persian Gulf) at Camp David, and virtually none of the heads of state showed up. There was much talk about Obama being “snubbed” until, after several days, the administration said that he was not snubbed at all; that the heads of state were not really supposed to attend and it was always planned that the summit would be held for deputies.

Right. When was the last time you saw a “summit meeting”  which consisted of the President of the United States and a bunch of deputy ministers being held at Camp David? It would not have been advertised as a “summit meeting”  unless heads of state were involved. If it was planned as a meeting of deputies, the Secretary of State would have presided, and it would not have been at Camp David.

Does Mr. Obama, perhaps, have a bridge in Brooklyn which he wants to sell us?

Two Tales of a Killing

I have been studying the Sy Hersch account of the Osama bin Laden raid, against the account provided by the Obama administration, and I have to say that the former is somewhat more believable. Critics of Hersch cite the lack of any named sources, but as to sources for the administration’s story we have only itself, so…

There has always been “holes” in the official story, even after the administration quit telling a miscellaneous set of wildly different stories and settled on a single one starring John Wayne and Chuck Norris. (Sorry.) The big hole, for me, was that after explosions and gunfire were reported in the close vicinity, a few blocks in fact, of the homes of several of Pakistan’s top generals no police or military showed up to investigate for more than 45 minutes.

Hersch explains that by saying that the police were told by the Pakistani government to stay away because the government knew it was the Americans and did not want to engage in a firefight with us. That makes more sense to me than the administration’s explanation that the Pakistanis were incompetent; an explanation which reportedly pissed off the Pakistani government. “We let you conduct a raid in our territory and then you throw us under the bus.”  Well, yes; throwing allies under the bus is what this nation does best.

It also astonished me that we though we could fly 100 miles across a heavily populated part of Pakistan without being detected, and apparently did so. The administration claims it was because we were using special “stealth Blackhawk”  helicopters, which had never been seen before and have never been seen since. They also didn’t mention the two Chinook helicopters, since they certainly could not claim that those beasts were configured to “fly quietly”  or be undetectable by radar.

Sy Hersch claims we pulled it off because Pakistan knew in advance and gave us permission, which sounds a lot more believable than inventing a whole new magical helicopter for the purpose.

Some of the government untruths don’t really bother me. The tale, for instance, about how bin Laden was discovered, that he was turned in by an informant rather than the fanciful story about following couriers and running fake vaccination programs, was told for the purpose of protecting the informant, and I see no harm in that. The fake vaccination program was an embellishment that did significant harm, in that it sowed suspicion on valid programs to the detriment of people who are in dire need of those programs. The administration should have thought more carefully about the consequences of that part of the tale, but in terms of being untruthful with the public I see no real problem.

I’m not even particularly troubled by the claim, false as it turns out, that bin Laden was supposed to be captured if possible when in reality that was a “kill mission”  from the start. Why is anyone upset by this? Assassination is the official policy of the United States, and has been since Obama took office. He makes no bones about it. Anyone who presents a perceived threat to this nation is killed. That is, according to Obama, “among the easiest decisions I make.”  Usually it is done by sending a Hellfire missile fired from a drone, but dead is dead.

I don’t like that policy, and don’t agree with it, but it is our national policy, set by the person we elected, and reelected, so why is anyone taking exception to it?

What I don’t like is the degree to which the story has been tailored simply to glorify the administration and the military, obscuring truth simply to make our elite class look good. Protecting those whose lives are at risk is fine with me. Lying to protect ego and reputation is a whole different matter.

Milestone

My father died 40 days before his 72nd birthday. I have now reached a point 36 days before my 72nd birthday, so I have now outlived my father. I know that is statistically insignificant, but...

Hyperbole Diminishes

After Danica Patrick was running 18th at Bristol and had ten cars running ahead of her crash, giving her a 9th place finish, the Danica fans went wild. She had turned the corner, they claimed, and would win one of her next few races, having finally proved that she can run with the best of the best in NASCAR racing. They were giddy with her success, and were breathlessly awaiting Talledega, where everyone either finishes on the lead lap or does not finish at all.

But first, she had to race at Richmond, where she finished 25th, two laps down to the leader. Then she did indeed finish on the lead lap at Tallegega, along with 32 other cars who did not wreck, but she finished in 21st place. This past weekend she finished in 27th place at Kansas, once again two laps down to the leader.

So, since her fans predicted her impending win and eligibility for the "championship chase," she has an average finish of slightly worse than 24th, and has driven four fewer laps than the leaders in three races, which is somewhat less than awesome.

Johanna Long, on the other hand, who actually is a race car driver, has driven in two races and finished in the top ten and on the lead lap in both of them, driving equipment with nothing on it but her car number, meaning that she has no sponsorship money. One has to wonder what she could do in the #10 GoDaddy car. Well, I don't have to wonder, I'm pretty sure I know.

Free Range Parenting

The fact that this term even exists is just sad. The fact that it is headlined in the news and is controversial, that people who practice it are being accused of child abuse, makes me wonder how we can survive as a nation.

We used to call kids who were raised by parents who were, at the time, known as "helicopter parents," who hovered over them constantly as being "tied to their mother's apron strings," and we wanted nothing to do with them. We went off in the woods with our buddies and did neat stuff like find Great Horned owls and raccoons to bring home and make pets out of.

Delusional Campaign

The New York Times brings us an article headlined, “Carly Fiorina Announces 2016 Presidential Bid, Citing Years Leading Hewlett…” The headline alone is enough to send anyone from California into either a rage or gales of hysterical laughter, depending on temperament, since her notoriety in this state is for having utterly ruined that once-beloved company.

One could cite her massive layoffs, or her purchase of Compaq computer company, or the infamous spying on the company’s board of directors. One could certainly find millions of former customers to document her company’s fall from one with the best tech support in the industry to being a company with no tech support at all.

None of which, of course, supports her contention that she “understand[s] executive decision-making, which is making a tough call in a tough time with high stakes,” since all of the high-stakes decisions which she made were disasterously wrong.

She makes some rather vague statements about her political experience, which is even more laughable, because she began her political career by working on John McCain’s campaign and has never run for public office and actually won the election. She spent $6.5 million of her own money running for the US Senate in California, won the primary against such political giants as Tom Campbell and Chuck Devore, and then lost to Barbara Boxer by ten points. Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of those two primary opponents, nobody else has either. She then tried to run for governor but failed to even make the primary.

In addition to her “executive experience” and political savvy, she runs now on being a woman who isn’t Hillary Clinton, and on blaming environmentalists for the California drought. We have, it seems, expended too much effort saving fish, and that’s why our snow pack has failed and our ground water is drying up.

It Sounds Good, But...

Hillary Clinton uttered a campaign line on Baltimore which is one of those things that sounds really good. "Without the mass incarceration that we currently practice, millions fewer people would be living in poverty,"  she said. "It's time to end the era of mass incarceration."

But does it really make any sense? Does It actually address the problem? Not really. A much better case can be made that poverty leads to incarceration than can be made for incarceration causing poverty. Changing sentencing guidelines is not going to do much to correct what ails Baltimore.

The people who were rioting were not prison inmates. They were not ex-cons. They were unemployed and underemployed and they were without hope.

What Baltimore needs is a better economy; a real improvement in the economy, in the form of more jobs. Baltimore needs employment that provides a future for the people who live there, and Clinton is tossing out sound bites about her campaign themes such as “mass incarceration.”  Not that I don’t agree with her premise, but are shorter prison sentences going to provide meaningful, remunerative employment for the people of Baltimore?

She reveals the typical political “thinking”  which is to simply toss around political sound bites. Asked to comment on the situation in Baltimore, she can do nothing more thoughtful than drag out one of her campaign slogans.

Trading Philip Rivers

Nick Canepa says that the Chargers draft "blew in cooler heads,"  whatever that means, and goes on to blather about the dodged bullet of the rumor that the Chargers might trade Rivers to Tennessee for a #2 draft pick which "would have been a mistake of enormous magnitude."  The "cooler heads"  bit presumably refers to the fact the Chargers drafted a running back, which everyone with an IQ higher than room temperature fully expected them to do.

Trading Rivers to Tennessee in order to draft a new quarterback is something that never even crossed the mind of the Chargers management. It was a rumor started by sports writers, probably Nick Canepa himself, so that sports writers would have something to talk about with respect to the upcoming draft. Chargers management never said anything about Philip Rivers until some sports writer asked them if they were going to trade him, at which point they not only said "No,"  they said, "Oh hell no."  That did not stop sports writers from speculating that Chargers management might be lying and that Philip Rivers might be traded to Tennessee in order for the Chargers to draft a new quarterback.

Which is pretty much the way political reporting is done these days, too. Rumors are not started because they have any basis in fact or logic, they are started so that reporters and political pundits will have something to talk about. Thus we have all this uproar about contributions to the Clinton Foundation, all of which has about as much meaning as the rumors of Philip Rivers shopping for real estate in Memphis.

Update, Friday night: oops, make that Nashville.

I Don't Get It

If you choose someone who you wish to inherit your worldly goods if you die without a will, someone who can act in your behalf if you are incapacitated, someone who can visit you if you are in an intensive care unit of a hospital, someone with whom you can maintain fully confidential communication, why should it matter to any government what gender that person is?

Now She Speaks...

Hillary Clinton says that we have to stop the "age of mass incarceration." Interesting. In several decades of public service she has never once shown any objection to the frequency with which we imprison our population, and has even spoken favorably of the "war on drugs" which is the primary cause of that "mass incarceration." Now, in the first week of her campaign for president she is suddenly appalled that we imprison a higher percentage of our population than does Russia.

If she is elected president, do you suppose that she will continue to sing this refrain? Yeah, me neither.

She's Better At Cooking

Stock car racing pundits were all agog that Danica finished ninth last week at Bristol, and were so hysterical over that feat that some were predicting that she will "be in the championship Chase" at the end of the year. Never mind that she did it by running 18th with thirty laps remaining in the race, having one car pass her and ten cars in front of her crash.

This week at Richmond she never ran better than 18th, played bumper cars all day, was repeatedly in danger of going a lap down before she actually did so, and finished 25th, two laps down to the leader. Oh well, her admirers had fun for one week.

Oops.

I won't go into details, because I'm sure you know that an American drone strike killed two people who were being held hostage by "extremists" who we decided to kill. We fired a Hellfire missile at a target without knowing precisely what was there. If you think that is a rare event I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I want to talk to you about.

We not only kill "suspected militants,"  we kill people that we don't even know we are killing. Makes you proud, doesn't it?

Football Tidbits

So, the Eagles have signed Tim Tebow for a one-year deal. The mind sort of boggles, but considering that he will be behind Sam Bradford and Mark Sanchez, and the head coach is Chip Kelly... Who knows?

I have always liked Philip Rivers, and now he shows us that he is a man of good taste, discernment and perspicacity. He says that he does not want to sign a long term contract with the Chargers because he doesn't want to live in Los Angeles if the team moves there.

Eric Weddle is feeling "hghly disrespected" because the Chargers do not place a high priority on resigning him. Yes, he is an outstanding free safety, but he is also 30 years old, which is getting a little long in the tooth for the defensive secondary. He is finishing up what was at the time the richest contract in history ever awarded to a defensive player, and the Chargers are not interested in coming anywhere near that amount again. He expressed his displeasure by skipping voluntary workouts this week, which I rather doubt was very helpful to his cause.

Big Cats Are Smart

If there is a mountain lion in the crawl space underneath your house, how do you get rid of it? Well, it turns out your best plan is to leave it the hell alone and it will leave during the night, because it doesn't want to be there just as much as you don't want it to be there.

Firefighters, animal control and the police department tried all day the persuade the beast out, with no success whatever. They used sticks, poles (which looked pretty much like sticks to me), and even air-powered cannons firing tennis balls. The mountain lion was unimpressed and stayed right where it was. They were wise enough that no one volunteered to go in and get it; there being no one willing to personally confront the visibly pissed off mountain lion.

They finally gave up and everybody went home. When they came back the next morning to try again, the mauntain lion was gone.

Blogging Ethics

There is a blogger I have been reading for some years who used to write interesting and thought provocative pieces. He has lately become somewhat enamored of his own intellect and has begun an annual fund drive, which I have been ignoring.

This fund drive was interesting, though, because in addition to becoming more and more pedantic, his pieces had also become more and more infrequent. His fund drive proposed that the more money that was donated the more frequently he would write and post pieces. He even set specific goals, with one amount of “donations” for three articles per week, another for four per week, etc. It was the first time I had seen such a thing and I had mixed feelings. It seemed a bit arrogant, and I wondered why he didn’t demand we pay him by the word.

On the other hand, there is a certain logic to, “the more money I’m making the more I will do.”  But for blogging? Most fund drives say that it is to “cover the cost of running the blog.”  In my case, don’t give me any money, because the Google blogging platform is free. Many of those who are “covering their costs”  are on the same platform I am, but…

Anyway, the guy’s fund drive garnered enough money for five posts per week, and he was thrilled; thanked his readers profusely. For the following year, however, not once did he produce five articles in any one week. He seldom produced as many as three and some weeks he posted nothing. I figured that his readers had probably learned the same lesson I had, and waited to see how his next fund drive would go.

Oddly, his next fund drive has also netted an amount sufficient to gain a promise of five articles per week. Not from me, of course. In weeks subsequent to the close of that drive there has been close to five posts per week, but half of them are reprints of articles he published as far back as 2008, which he re-posts along with the comments which were made by readers at that time.

So, the title of this piece was made in jest. There is no such thing.

Even More Inanity

I told you about the article that taught us how to divide a recipe in half. Now Huffington Post offers us an article on how to start a conversation with someone you just met for the first time at a party. "My tried and true method is to start with an intriguing fact or little-known story,"  the author tells us, and goes on to say that this is the basis for his "Webby Award-nominated book."  He does not point out that the book did not win the award, and I'm thinking that he probably made the nomination himself.

He lists some of the "nuggets of trivia gold"  which he says will "ensure better conversations, a cure for any awkward silence, and maybe a new best friend or two."  I have to ask, though, what kind of conversation is started by remarking to a stranger that, "There are more cell phones in the world than toothbrushes."  If I'm holding a cell phone when when someone says that to me I'm likely to think that he just accused me of having bad breath, and that certainly is not a conversation starter.

Definitely on par with "if the recipe calls for two cups, use one cup."

Saturday Tidbits

Paul Krugman addresses the Apple watch. "I have no special expertise here,"  he says, and goes on to say, "But what the heck; I might as well put my own thoughts out there."  Don't we all, Paul, don't we all.

Danica Patrick was on the show Chopped the other day. She was the winner, and by the time she won I wanted her to. She made three very attractive dishes, and she was charming and fun for the entire show. Nothing like the personality she presents in the stock car racing venue.

Words of Wisdom

John Kerry is continuing to be a real font of wisdom these days, and I cannot resist commenting on a couple more of his recent witty remarks. The unfortunate part is that I’m sure he did not intend them to be witty, but that is beside the point.

He justified our assistance to Saudi Arabia in bombing Yemen by saying that we were “not going to stand by while the region is destabilized.”  When one comes upon a raging bonfire and throws gasoline on it, one is not “standing by,”  so I think Mr. Kerry’s statement is entirely accurate, but not with the meaning that he intended.

He then assured Israel that the United States can walk and chew gum at the same time. (He said “do two things at the same time.”) The two things we could do simultaneously, it turned out, were to “push back against Iranian attempts to project its influence in the area”  and “reward Tehran for providing guarantees that it was not building nuclear weapons.”

Aside from the fact that Iran has already provided that guarantee by signing the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which Israel has not done, the “reward”  to which Mr. Kerry refers is lifting sanctions that we have imposed on Iran for decades. So by that standard, one person could reward another by no longer beating him over the head with a brick. It takes a rather weird mentality to consider that a reward, but American foreign policy is certainly based on some rather weird forms of thinking.

Just a Tidbit

CBS Evening News said this evening that an upcoming progran would feature "presidential contender, Rand Paul."   I don't think so.  Presidential candidate; yes. Presidential contender; no.

Hello Kettle, This Is Pot

Self awareness is not an American national trait, and most certainly is not something commonly displayed by American leaders in foreign affairs. I often wonder what the people of other nations think when they hear, for instance, our president declare that Venezuela presents a “grave and immediate existential threat” to the US.

Or when they hear Secretary of State John Kerry advise us in a PBS interview that “Iran needs to recognize that the United States is not going to stand by while the region is destabilized or while people engage in overt warfare across lines, international boundaries, in other countries.” We do, however, expect that the rest of the world will stand by while we do all of that, as it has done for us for the past couple of decades.

And then there is Obama’s recent complaint that China “is using its sheer size and muscle to force countries into subordinate positions.” Fortunately, I was not drinking coffee when I read that, or I would have had to buy another new keyboard. His remark was made as part of a complaint that China is building bases on islands, that is to say, outside of their own national borders. How dare they?

Just because we have built over 700 such bases doesn’t mean that it’s okay for China to build five or six of them. In the China Sea. The irony of that location apparently escaped Obama completely. We have bases in the Indian Ocean, but…

La Jolla Money vs Nature

La Jolla Cove is a scenic treasure, downtown, with a nice park. People go there to shop in the trendy stores, eat trendy food in the trendy restaurants, cruise around for hours looking for a parking place… If they succeed in the latter, they sit in the park with bottles of Cabernet and Pinot Noir and watch the sun go down, unless the marine layer hides that event, which it usually does.

You may get the idea I’m not a big fan of La Jolla, which has partly to do with its average income which rivals the national debt.

La Jollans are presently outraged by an invasion of seals, which are defecating on the rocks at La Jolla Cove. They are doing so in great quantity, and it may not surprise you to know that seal shit stinks. Badly. La Jollans are not happy about the stink, and they want the city government to do something about it. This is serious stuff. Who wants to eat trendy dinners, watch a sunset or stare at the marine layer in an area that smells like an overflowing sewage treatment plant?

The La Jolla Cove Business Association, I believe it was, hired a company to pressure wash the poop off of the rocks, but that didn’t turn out to be very effective. In order for it to work they had to use detergent, but the Coastal Commission vetoed that due to the pollution it caused, and blasting it with plain sea water didn’t remove it. All it did was piss off the seals, which is illegal.

Then they proposed hiring an animal behaviorist to train the seals to do their business somewhere else. I thought that was a joke when I read of it, and was trying to envision the size of the litter box that would be required, but it turned out they were actually getting bids from supposedly legitimate companies. Very high bids, as it turned out, so that idea was dropped.

Then they simply sued the city to force it to do a cleanup, not specifying how the cleanup was supposed to be done or what measures were to be taken to prevent the mess from recurring. The judge apparently noted the flaws in their filings, and ruled that cleaning seal shit from rocks was not a municipal responsibility in any case.

So that’s where it stands. La Jolla Cove still stinks, proving that no matter how much money you have, nature still rules.

Sauce For The Goose?

I am sometimes a bit baffled by the things that the American public chooses to become outraged about.

(And my mother just spun in her grave because I ended that sentence with a preposition. But Mom was rather easily outraged over trivia much of her life, so I’m not going to worry about it.)

Most recently, without taking a position either pro or con on the issue, is the Indiana law thing. There was essentially no outcry when the courts decided that it was entirely permissible for a business to discriminate against its employees based on its religious beliefs. Even President Obama just shrugged his shoulders.

But when Indiana declared that it might be okay for a business to discriminate against its customers based on its religious beliefs, the grits hit the fan, President Obama is flinging grits with as much enthusiasm as anyone.

I realize that the principles involved are not precisely the same, but they are sufficiently similar to make me wonder why we care so much about customers and so little about employees. Customers, after all, can go elsewhere (voting with their feet) a lot more easily than employees can.

Daily Dosing

Molly is a sweet cat, and mostly pretty smart, but she hasn’t quite mastered this “fleeing for your life” thing yet. Usually, when my wife goes to administer her twice-daily medication, Molly is either hanging out in my lap or is curled up in one of her many resting places throughout the house. Sometimes, however, she sees the medication coming and decides that terror is the order of the day, but she doesn’t bring it off very well. She runs off about eight feet or so and then stops to see if her tactic worked; which, of course, it didn’t since she stopped in the middle of the dining room.

Yesterday she fled to the top of my desk. Um, news flash, Molly; we can see you there.

Once caught, or snuck up on as the case may be, her resistance to taking the two pills and the shot in the back of her neck is precisely zero. Well, “taking” the pills is not really the right word, since cats don’t “take” pills. At any rate, she does not need to be held down or anything, and giving the meds is a one-person task since she passively allows my wife to pry her mouth open and shove the pills down her throat, never threatening to use any of those teeth and claws.

Sort of makes one wonder why she decided to flee, no matter how ineffectively, but she’s a cat.

Clarifying The Deal

Democrats are idolizing Obama for working out a deal with Iran which prevents them from developing a nuclear weapon. That’s sort of like working out a deal with the US Air Force to prevent them from bombing Kansas City, because Iran has no more intention of building a nuclear weapon than does the USAF of bombing Kansas City.

Obama’s big problem has been to get Iran to quit denying that they have any remote desire to build a nuclear weapon and, instead, to agree not to build one. Sort of like our hoa getting me to agree not to paint my house purple with green trim.

Republicans hate the deal because they are afraid it will allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon which, they claim, would “start a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.” No one excels at being afraid more than Republicans, of course, but they are really reaching with this one. Israel already has nuclear weapons, quite a few of them, so if Iran is, as they claim, trying to develop a nuclear weapon, then there already is a nuclear arms race ongoing in the Middle East.

Republicans don’t care much for facts, though, so in their fantasy world Israel doesn’t have nuclear weapons and if Iran is successful at building nuclear weapons that it isn't trying to build, it would start something which is actually already happening. Keep reading that repeatedly until you understand it. It will sink in eventually.

Iran, on the other hand, is delirious because we are rewarding them for agreeing not to do something that they weren’t doing in the first place. Much as I would be if someone paid me $10,000 not to beat my wife.

Welcome to the twilight zone of American politics.

Paul Krugman Is An Idiot, Chapter 3,645

Paul Krugman uses a comparison today between Walmart, citing its “low wages, low morale, and very high turnover,” and Costco, which he points out “offers higher wages and better benefits,” to claim that employers can raise the pay scale of workers without any actual net cost because Costco “makes up the difference with better productivity and worker loyalty.” This is an example of why economists should never talk about business practices. They have truly idiotic ideas about what a business is and how it works.

Krugman does admit that “the two retailers serve different markets,” and that, “Costco’s merchandise is higher-end and its customers more affluent,” but he goes on to say that his comparison is valid despite that. That’s sort of like admitting that one vehicle is hauling 80,000 pounds of freight and the other merely contains two human passengers, but that my mileage comparison remains legitimate.

And it isn't just a difference in market and affluence of customer base. Costco sells vastly fewer items and markets them in an entirely different manner than Walmart. For the most part they do not even remove items from boxes, but merely cut the box open and stick it on the shelving in the store. That creates a difference in productivity which is not a result of being paid better, it’s a result of a structural difference in the way the stores do business, and it’s only one example out of many.

Not to mention that Costco is selling a significantly different type of item, there being only a nominal crossover in the nature of goods which they sell, and they are selling them in bulk, with a vastly larger unit purchase than Walmart enjoys. Krugman is saying, in effect, that apples and oranges are both fruit and should therefor taste the same. Idiot.

Distraction? What Distraction?

Like much of America, I am a regular reader of Dear Abby, and I usually agree with her responses although I consider some of them to be pretty weak and/or Pallyanna-ish. She descended to new depths of “weak tea syndrome” with her advice today to the woman who admits to being an alcoholic and complains about her husband’s criticism of her drinking despite what the writer considers to be his own eating and drinking problems.

She responds that “The more your husband draws attention to your alcohol problem, the less he is forced to confront his own addictions to food and tobacco, and it also serves as a distraction,” and suggests that a “mental health professional may be able to help you understand why you tolerate your husband's behavior.” (emphasis mine) Seriously. She actually said that.

How about, “The way to get your husband to stop criticizing you for your drinking is to stop drinking.” Or maybe, “The reason you husband is critical of you for having a drinking problem is because you have a drinking problem, and his eating and smoking is irrelevant to that issue.” It is not the husband who is using distraction, Abby dear, it is the alcoholic wife. Jeez.

Your problem, dear "Humiliated in Texas," and what is causing you to be humiliated is not your husband's eating and smoking, nor is it your husband's criticism of you; your problem is your drinking.