On My Mind

Sea Stories

2012-01-27T10:43:00.000-08:00

At the request of a couple of friends, I'm going to start including a few "sea stories" in my posts. It's important that you understand what these are, they are "sea stories." Some of them are true, some are ledgends told over beers late at night when reason and sanity have been discarded. Of the ones that are true, some are personal experience, and many are not. They are told for fun and to capture the "essence" of the men who served in diesel submarines. They were a very special breed of men.

I don't know how good I'll be at writing them, how often I will do it, or for how long I will keep it up. That will, in part, depend on your comments. Let me know what you think. I'm going to call it the "Subron 8" series, because I liked the squadron insignia, wich included a dolphin and an eight ball. The first story follows.

Subron 8: The Skipper's Car

2012-01-27T10:40:00.000-08:00

We had just secured the special sea detail and I was stowing my foul weather gear, heading for the crew’s mess to get a snack before going on watch. Pughead joined me and, as we were drawing coffee, asked me if I remembered the docking incident a couple months earlier, when our bow clipped a car parked dockside.

“Oh hell yeah,” I laughed, “we really creamed that sucker.”

“Well, you know whose car it was?” he asked me.

I told him I didn’t and he started laughing, “It was the skipper’s car, man.”

----

Docking at New London Submarine Base can be tricky, depending on the state of the water. The base is on the New London River and the piers are at right angle to the current, which runs stronger at low tide than at high tide. When you turn and start moving into the pier you need to get with the program, because the current is moving you sideways. If you are on the upstream side of the pier you can ram the pier if you don’t come in fast enough, and if you’re on the downstream side the current is taking you away from the pier. New London doesn’t have any tugs, so the maneuver requires that you make the turn, approach at pretty high speed, and then back the motors hard at the last minute to stop alongside the pier.

It’s not as hard as it sounds, but it’s not for the faint of heart either and standing on the forward deck during that maneuver is something of a treat. I was coming up for my crow pretty soon, and being an Electrician would no longer be on the deck gang, and I was going to miss it.

On the day in question we were approaching on the downstream side of the pier and, since we’d been at sea for several weeks, there was a pretty good crowd of families and such there to greet us. We’re eyeing the distance between ship and pier and the closing rate and are pretty happy because we’re coming in close and fast; at this rate we might not have to use the capstan to winch in to the pier at all. And then a certain sense of unease begins to set in; the sea wall, is getting really close, we are still moving at a hell of a clip, and we haven't felt the screws stop in preparation for backing.

I look up at the bridge to see if they are awake up there. No, actually, it appears they are not; they’re waving to the people on shore. Hello? I’m not sure whether to shit or yell “fire.” I start waving my arms and pointing to the oncoming sea wall, and feeling like some kind of idiot. Three other guys join me and finally the geniuses on the bridge notice that all is not well.

As soon as I see that the OOD is screaming into the 7MC I turn back to watch the oncoming sea wall, and decide that maybe I don’t want to watch that. But it’s hard to take your eyes away from it, as the bow of the boat looks bigger and bigger and those cars and people look smaller and smaller. We feel the screws stop and then go back, really fast. I’m not sure the EM’s actually let them come to a complete stop before reversing them, and they really pour the coal to them. The boat is shaking like a drunk having the dt’s and it’s slowing, finally, but…

Diablo hadn’t had the GUPPY mods and we still have the peaked, overhanging bow, and all eyes are on the “bullnose” as it zeros in on a car parked on the seawall. A woman is standing beside the car, her eyes big as dinner plates as she watches the oncoming disaster, and nobody on shore or on the boat moves a muscle. I don’t think anyone so much as blinks an eye. Me, I’m not even breathing.

We’re down to about the speed at which a man walks when the bullnose hits the car right between the headlights. The boat continues forward about ten more feet before a lower part of the bow hits the seawall and the brings us to a nice gentle stop. Later investigation reveals no significant damage to the ship, but that car... Well, in a contest between 1,800 tons of submarine and a couple tons of car, the car does not fare well.

Now it’s our turn to play dumb ass because we are all frozen in place staring at the crushed car and are forgetting to get the lines over, and the guys with the high foreheads up on the bridge are screaming at us to get moving and tie the damned ship up. Oh yes, that. I, personally, don’t think they have any room to be quite so indignant, but whatever.

----

So I asked Pughead who had been conning the ship when we hit the skipper’s car, and how much trouble he was in.

“You don’t remember?” he asked, I shook my head. “Well,” he went on, “That’s the interesting part. The Captain had the con.”

“You’re shitting me. The skipper hit his own car?”

“Yep, and it gets even better. He turned a claim in to his auto insurance company. ‘One car hit by submarine.’ Claimed it on his, you know, not collision but his ‘act of god’ insurance.”

“Did they pay it?”

“Well, they were going to, but then they found out that he had the con and said that meant that meant (are you ready for this?) that he was driving the submarine. So they said that the accident was his fault, and charged him a deductible under his collision insurance.”

We’re laughing our asses off and he says, “But it gets better yet.”

“Oh yeah, how can it get better?”

“He’s trying to get the Navy to pay the deductible.”

Killing Hostage Takers

2012-01-27T07:46:00.000-08:00

The media keeps repeating that the SEALs had an option for “detaining” the hostage takers, but I have absolutely no problem with the SEALs killing the hostage takers in the process of rescuing their captives. In fact I’m inclined to think that killing them should be the default. Sort of let them know that, “If you really want to surrender, we’ll let you, but you better make that desire very clear and do it very fast.”

What I have a problem with is the President of The United States standing at a podium afterward and smugly talking about how we have “brought them to justice.” That is not how our constitution defines “justice.” In this country, justice is not delivered through the muzzle of a gun.

That mission was not about delivering justice. That mission was about rescuing people who were being held hostage, and if killing was needed to accomplish that, then so be it. If that meant that the bad guys did not get justice, then that’s life. Sometimes bad guys don’t get justice, sometimes they just get killed in the process of committing a bad act.

So it’s fine for Obama to be pleased with the rescue, and even with how it was done, but a constitutional scholar should know better than to refer to extrajudicial execution as “justice.”

State Of The Union, 2012

2012-01-26T09:17:00.000-08:00

It took me a couple of days to put my thoughts together on this because, for one thing, I kept finding myself becoming a bit overheated. I try not to write here when I’m agitated, so I had to step back from time to time and regain my objectivity. Yes, I actually did say that. If you think what I write here is, um, a bit heated at times, you should see what I decide not to post.

I fell asleep several times during the actual event, so I had to rely on a transcript, which you can use to follow along. He actually did make some pretty good points, and I will not skip over those when I get to them. I don't bash Obama for the fun of bashing him. I voted for him and I want to see that vote made good. He just keeps doing things that are in direct contradiction to the motivation for my vote.

He pretty much lost me with his opening statement. In 2003 he was referring to Iraq as a “dumb war.” In his 2008 campaign he was calling it “the wrong war.” Now he is claiming that it has “made America safer and more respected around the world.” How he can imagine or pretend that it has done either of those two things is beyond my comprehension, and by beginning that little fable with a recitation of his trip to Andrews AFB to “welcome home some of the last troops” he tries to establish his connection with ending that war, which is a flat out lie. That war ended on precisely the schedule laid out by George W. Bush before he left office. In fact, Obama tried to negotiate an extension of our military presence in Iraq, and upon failing to do so claimed the withdrawal date as his own accomplishment.

On Economic Growth

He first talks about “when another generation of heroes returned home from combat, they built the strongest economy and middle class the world has ever known.” Ah, yes, the miraculous economic boom following World War 2 and, “if we did it then we can do it again.” Paul Krugman sings that song, too. Of course back then returning combat veterans comprised about 14% of the population, while today they comprise about one tenth of one percent.

The larger difference is that back then we didn’t have any competition, because we had just spent four years bombing it into rubble. This time we have rather stupidly bombed Iraq and Afghanistan into rubble, and they were not our competitors. Our competitors we left fully intact, making consumer goods and high tech goodies while we focused on making instruments of war with which to bomb Iraq and Afghanistan into rubble. So sadly, no, we certainly can do a lot better than we’re doing but we can’t do the 1950’s and 60’s again. I’m not sure that bombing India, China and South Korea into rubble is a good idea.

I’m leaving out the “great country” and “keeping promises” cheerleading, which will shorten the discussion quite a lot, but I will take a quick look at how effective he is at bullshitting by telling the truth, that is spreading manure by stating facts which are entirely accurate.

“In the last 22 months, businesses have created more than 3 million jobs. Last year, they created the most jobs since 2005. American manufacturers are hiring again, creating jobs for the first time since the late 1990s.”

Opponents are claiming that his statement is untrue because a) there weren’t that many jobs created and b) he’s claiming credit for jobs he didn’t create. The first is crap, there were 3.16 million jobs created in the private sector in that time period, so he’s actually understating the facts. The second is idiotic: he does not claim, even by implication, that he or his policies created those jobs. It is a nice clean statement of fact and, even as he made the statement, I had not doubt as to its truthfulness.

It is, however, manure because the work force is also growing, and because of that and the low number of new jobs the portion of people in the work force who are actually employed is essentially unchanged since the worst of the latest recession, with participation having increased by only 0.3% since that time. That means that if you are of working age your chance of getting a job are no better now than they were in 2008.

“Together, we’ve agreed to cut the deficit by more than $2 trillion.”

Well, yes, but that’s in ten years, not one. With a current deficit of $1.4 trillion, that means we’ve reduced the deficit by a whopping 15% so far. So in the next ten years the increase in the debt will be $12 trillion instead of $14 trillion. Are you properly impressed?

“And we’ve put in place new rules to hold Wall Street accountable, so a crisis like that never happens again.”

Except that the people who wrote the legislation and economic experts who review the effectiveness of it disagree wildly on just how much it prevents future crisis, and the banks that were “too big to fail” then are even bigger now than they were then.

He embarks on an almost orgasmic paean about the auto industry, excitedly says that “the entire industry added nearly 160,000 jobs,” and winds up with a triumphant, “the American auto industry is back.”

Well, adding 160,000 jobs in a couple of years is not to be sneered at, for sure, but it’s somewhat less than overwhelming given that we need to add 200,000 jobs per month in this country merely to keep up with population growth. And saying that the industry “is back” at this point is sort of like saying that the 49ers have won the game when they score a touchdown in the first quarter. The auto industry may be "back," and I hope it is, but it’s a little early to be beating victory drums.

Then he gets to the part about restoring American manufacturing and, as I feared would be the case, the first thing he brings up is taxes. After saying that companies “get tax cuts for moving jobs and profits overseas,” the next thing that he says is, “companies that choose to stay in America get hit with one of the highest tax rates in the world.”

Where have I heard that before? Oh yes, of course, from about 600 Republicans for the last dozen years or so. Did we really elect a Democratic president to spout Republican slogans at us? Yes, I believe we did, because he goes on, “if you’re an American manufacturer, you should get a bigger tax cut. If you’re a high-tech manufacturer, we should double the tax deduction you get for making products here.” Tax cuts for businesses! What a novel idea. It’s amazing that some Republican hasn’t already proposed that. Oh, wait…

He doesn’t give any real details on his “bipartisan trade agreements,” and it’s probably in the best interests of his reelection chances that he doesn’t. He describes them as creating “millions of new customers for American goods,” but he leaves out the “trade” part where they create millions of American customers for foreign goods, and thereby millions of foreign jobs making those goods. I don’t know if you remember Ross Perot and his “giant sucking sound” in the NAFTA debate.

The we have the quintessential “Americana moment” with the blushing laid off single mom in the audience, the community college, the magnanimous corporation opening a plant in a destitute village, the tuition getting paid, the wonderful job with laser technology due to “partnerships.” Applause all around. Close up camera shot of the single mom looking embarrassed and pleased. Happiness abounds.

It would have been, I think, a little more patriotic had he chosen an example using an American corporation rather than Siemens, which is a huge German company. That’s splitting hairs, perhaps, and it’s not all bad having foreign money paying American wages. Still, it would be a little better, I think, if he’d used an example where American labor was generating American profits and income tax revenue, rather than German profits.

And the idea of community colleges pairing with industry to train workers is a little on the trite side. Actually, it’s a lot on the trite side, since it’s been around since before Obama was born. I remember Jimmy Carter using it, and it never turns out to have any significant impact. We can always cite anecdotes of lack of worker skills, but the unemployment problem is not about lack of “skills and education.” We need something that addresses the central issues, not just tinkering around the edges with tired old cliches.

On Education

His section on education is about a fifteen minute continuous cliché, trying to pose education as a solution to the economic conditions that we presently face which is, at best, presenting a long term solution to a short term problem and at worst just sheer nonsense. Manufacturing jobs do not require a college education, and it’s questionable that they even require graduation from high school. He presents the same old generalities that he and his predecessors have presented a thousand times: give states more money for more teachers, require kids to stay in school, somehow create better teachers (magic!), tuition tax credits (tax cuts!), lower interest on student loans, lower tuition…

He does a few of what I call his “specialty statements,” which are saying things that sound really good but, when broken down and examined carefully, make absolutely no sense. “States also need to do their part, by making higher education a higher priority in their budgets.” Really? Higher than what? California, for instance, is cutting their programs for food assistance, and all but eliminating their in-home health care programs for the elderly, so what else should we cut in order to fund universities?

What he’s really saying, of course, is that education is so important that the federal government is going to do a lot of talking and mandating but is not paying for any of it and that it is up to the states to foot the bill.

“So let me put colleges and universities on notice:” he says, “If you can’t stop tuition from going up, the funding you get from taxpayers will go down.” What does that mean and how, precisely, does that help young people obtain college educations? I suppose that he is in some manner demonstrating how “tough” he can be, but I don’t see how he is helping anyone with that kind of statement. Why is everyone cheering as he threatens to cut funding to higher education?

On Immigration

He got particularly dishonest in immigration, and it was the first time that I caught him in an actual lie. After saying that he “put more boots on the border than ever before,” he then makes the totally untrue statement, “That’s why there are fewer illegal crossings than when I took office.”

No, the main reason is that our economy crashed as he was taking office and there are fewer jobs to be had in this country, and so fewer people are crossing illegally in pursuit of those jobs.

After castigating Congress for not tackling immigration reform, he than says, “let’s at least agree to stop expelling responsible young people who want to staff our labs, start new businesses, and defend this country.” This from the head of an administration which is arresting and deporting undocumented workers at a rate far exceeding any previous administration.

Understandably, he did not dwell on this topic very long.

On Energy

The first thing he did in his discussion on energy was “open more than 75 percent of our potential offshore oil and gas resources.” Are you kidding me? Just twenty months after Deepwater Horizon, and in the face of disastrous evidence of a dangerously warming planet, he authorizes an enormous amount of new offshore drilling.

He then touts our natural gas reserves, another environmental disaster in the making, and makes shale gas and its extraction sound like one of the best things to happen since the initial discovery of oil. He will require drillers on public lands to “disclose the chemicals" they use, but does not say that there will be limitations on those chemicals, so the only difference is that now you will know what is poisoning you instead of having to wonder. Drillers on private lands, which is much of the country is most of them, are not affected by the requirement and can continue to poison us with unknown chemicals.

He waxes at some length about “clean energy” and “executive orders,” but we are left mostly uninformed as to what the hell he’s talking about. The Navy is going to buy enough clean energy to power a quarter million homes. Does that clean energy come in buckets? In barrels? Do they ship it in tankers? Or is it boxed so that it can be shipped by truck? Over what period of time are they going to make this purchase, and what are they going to do with it?

“I’m directing my Administration to allow the development of clean energy on enough public land to power three million homes.” Um, what?

On Infrastructure

Okay, Hoover Dam, Golden Gate Bridge, forefathers, all that good stuff, and then this from total lala land,

“Take the money we’re no longer spending at war, use half of it to pay down our debt, and use the rest to do some nation-building right here at home.”

Dude, the money we are “spending at war” is all borrowed money. We can’t “use half of it to pay down the debt” for heaven’s sake, because you cannot pay down debt with borrowed money. Good God, does he think we are totally stupid? Well, that was a dumb question, because of course he does.

“Now is a really good time to build,” apparently because there are lots of unemployed construction workers. That would be a good reason if the purpose of building was to provide jobs. Building is desperately needed and I’m not arguing with his statement, I just have an issue with his reason.

I think he could have spent more time in this topic than he did. I believe the American Society of Civil Engineers would agree with me.

On Financial Reform

Financial reform starts with, oh no, here comes “mortgage relief.” You know what, I can’t “save $3000 a year by refinancing my home at historically low rates” because I already have that low rate which I got it when I bought the house many years ago and I never refinanced with the fancy “get rich quick” schemes that mortgage companies have been offering me all these years.

But my car is worth less than it was when I bought it. In fact, it is worth less than I owe on it. Why is Obama not offering to “forgive” my car loan? Come on man, I didn’t know the car’s value would go down. I didn’t understand things like that I would have to pay, you know, interest on that loan. I thought that if the car broke down I could stop making payments. Why isn’t he offering to cancel my car loan? I thought that in this country if I did something stupid that the government would bail me out of the situation I got myself into. (That was snark. The only debt we have is our home loan.)

Here’s one of his “specialty statements," “It’s time to apply the same rules from top to bottom: No bailouts, no handouts, and no copouts. An America built to last insists on responsibility from everybody.” Did you follow the thread that brought us here?

First an admission that, “…mortgages had been sold to people who couldn’t afford or understand them.” Then we have, “…the chance to save about $3,000 a year on their mortgage, by refinancing at historically low interest rates.” That’s on the mortgage that they couldn’t afford and/or couldn’t understand, but which they undertook anyway, and that is a policy of “no bailouts, no handouts, and no copouts.” Right.

He does a really clever thing with spilled oil and spilled milk and his feelings about regulations. That’s “eliminating burdensome regulations that hamstring businesses,” which is another popular Republican theme from a Democratic president. Yes, he manages to work in a reference to “crying over spilled milk.” He mentions the “Gulf two years ago,” but does not connect that to his earlier declaration of opening up “more than 75 percent of our potential offshore oil and gas resources.” Of course he doesn’t.

We then reached another moment when I actually sat up and listened as he expounded at some length about financial regulation and investigation of financial wrong doing. Some of it requires Congressional action, which we all know won’t happen, but I respect and appreciate that he called for specific action by Congress. The part of it which had to do with executive action sounded good, but it is so disparate from his past action and his unbroken record of “looking forward not back” that I am more than a little bit skeptical. I like it, but I'll believe it when I see it.

On Taxes

On taxes, Obama is almost 100% Republican, starting by saying that the “most immediate priority is stopping a tax hike.” Never before Obama have I seen a Democrat refer to the expiration of a tax cut as a “tax hike.” Republicans have been doing it for years as an underhanded method of popularizing renewals of their tax cuts, but since Democrats are not generally associated with tax cuts they have never really needed to engage in this particular form of deception. Obama is all tax cuts all the time, and he is dead set to renew his pet tax cut right now, and so we have this rhetoric of “stopping a tax hike.”

He then goes into a very lengthy and heartfelt dissertation about “$1 trillion per year on tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% of Americans.” It’s hard for me to describe how much this frustrates me, not because of the subject itself, but because it is so freaking trivial and distracting. No, it is not “class warfare,” and yes, the wealthy should absolutely pay more taxes than they do, but to keep harping on this subject is something on the order of the Captain of the Titanic complaining about the arrangement of the freaking deck chairs.

If the amount is correct, and I rather question that it is, then correction of the problem would eliminate less than 8% of our deficit, even assuming that the deficit is our largest problem in the first place, which it is not. If we restored the economy it would eliminate about half of our deficit, and if we got health care costs, not health insurance, but health care costs, under control we would have a federal budget surplus. The trivial amount of tax which is not paid by the rich is not worth the time we spend discussing it, and it is time that we do not spend discussing things that really do matter.

Getting the economy back on track matters, and we are not going to do that by making the rich pay a little bit more of their income in the form of taxes. Getting the cost of health care under control matters, and the tax rate paid by the rich has nothing whatever to do with that. Neither does health insurance, which doesn’t generate health care costs, it pays those costs. Health care costs are generated by drug companies, hospitals, medical labs, and associations of doctors. We don’t even talk about those things at all, we barely talk about real means of restoring the economy, and instead we blow a lot of hot air about whether rich people pay enough taxes.

On Congress

He launches an attack on Congress; slamming their insider trading in the stock market, legislating favorably for companies whose stock they own, campaign contribution bundling, lobbying and the filibuster.

All well and good, I despise Congress as much as anybody, but we can’t vote for Congress to replace the President, so he’s wasting his breath here. He needs to campaign against some Republican to be named later, not against Congress.

He tries to be fair by adding the, “The executive branch also needs to change. Too often, it's inefficient, outdated, and remote,” but it’s less than a home run because he left out “corrupt.” He asks Congress for authority to change the executive branch, which is a bit of a farce since he didn’t think he needed permission from Congress to start a war in Libya.

After pissing off John McCain and Eric Cantor almost continuously for more than an hour, he declaims that we need to “end the notion that the two parties must be locked in a perpetual campaign of mutual destruction.” I’m pretty sure that elegant piece of rhetoric did not come from the Dale Carnegie course on “How To Win Friends and Influence People.”

On Foreign Policy

I’ve never bought into the nonsense that Obama’s foreign policy was “apologist” or any of the similar criticism, but it has seemed to me that it lacked any clear overall pattern. His policy has appeared to be one of reacting to the conditions of the moment. After this speech I’m not sure that even he knows what his policy is, that he has an overall policy at all, or that he even knows what is going on in the world or even in his own Cabinet.

As to Al Queda, he tells us that what remains of them are “scrambling” and know that they can’t hide from us. Once again he is not on the same page as his Secretary of Defense, who tells us that there are still a lot of them, they are almost everywhere “out there,” and that they are still very dangerous. Panetta’s “so we need to spend lots of money on weapons” is unstated but clearly implied, as is Obama’s “I killed Bin Laden so you need to reelect me."

Obama has a tough job here, because he wants to claim credit for winning wars, but he also wants to keep the voters afraid of ongoing threats, so he has to walk a tightrope. If all the wars are won, voters might feel free to dump him and he won’t have the “I can keep you safe” lever to pull, but if he overdoes the threat he might convey the message that he hasn’t done a very good job of keeping us safe. So he goes all passive mode and says “wars have been won,” but throws the Iran nuclear threat in there at the end.

“Through the power of our diplomacy,” he says, “a world that was once divided about how to deal with Iran's nuclear program now stands as one.”

Well, sure, if you ignore China, Japan and India, all of whom are still buying oil from Iran and have clearly stated that they have every intention of continuing to do so, and Russia, which has said that it has reached its limit on sanctions and will not go along with any more. I sometimes wonder who is advising Obama, or if anyone is.

You also need to deny the evidence that Israel is going to throw a huge load of grits into the fan by launching an attack on Iran before the end of 2012.

Other than that, yes indeed, the world “stands as one.” That’s almost as delusional as taking half the money we no longer spend on war and using it to pay down the debt.

He says that “Our oldest alliances in Europe and Asia are stronger than ever.” Which sort of overlooks the minor detail that their economies are on the verge of collapse.

He claims that “Our iron-clad commitment -- and I mean iron-clad -- to Israel's security has meant the closest military cooperation between our two countries in history,” which is just weird. We had a joint military exercise scheduled recently, but cancelled it when Iran threatened to close Hormuz, but other than that, what “military cooperation” is he talking about?

“We've made it clear that America is a Pacific power,” he says. Yeah, by stationing 2500 Marines, ground troops, in Australia. Marines are pretty awesome troops, but I don’t think that 2500 of them constitutes a “Pacific power.” Yes, I know we have vast numbers of forces in the Pacific, but this is the only addition Obama has made that can be seen to justify his “we have made clear.”

He says that across the world “opinions of America are higher than they've been in years,” and that “as long as I'm president, I intend to keep it that way.” The first part is true and I won’t argue the second because I can’t read his mind. There is evidence, however, that he is not accomplishing that goal. Worldwide opinion of this nation went up when Obama was elected merely because we elected him or, more likely, because we got rid of George W. Bush. Since he has been in office, unfortunately, world opinion has been dropping again, because Obama has turned out to be just about as much of an imperialist as Bush was.

On Defense

His spending plan of “a new defense strategy that ensures we maintain the finest military in the world, while saving nearly half a trillion dollars in our budget” remains intact. The “saving half a trillion dollars” is infuriating.

First, that’s in ten years, not one, so it’s a very, very small fraction of what we spend on war material. And it is not a reduction in spending, it is a reduction in the rate of increase in spending, because the cut is not from the current budget, it’s from projected future budgets. If spending which was budgeted to grow at 4% is altered to grow at only 3% have you “reduced spending” by any amount at all? No, you are still increasing spending, you are just doing it a bit more slowly.

How much money do you “save” by increasing your spending more slowly? Well, that’s a philosophical question related to asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Then answer doesn’t matter. What matters is that the policy requires tax increases.

All in all, this was one of his most forgettable speeches.

Oh Good, Pirate Rescue

2012-01-25T14:40:00.000-08:00

So "commandos" (yes, we have progressed to using that James Bond term now) rescued some Americans from pirates. I don't think they used cutlasses, but I'll bet it was even more dramatic than that because it was the very same commandos who killed Bin Laden, and it was authorized by none other than the President himself.

So now, after hearing that "Obama killed Bin Laden" for a year or so, we are going to hear how "Obama rescued Americans from pirates." The man is simply awesome.

"The United States will not tolerate the abduction of our people and will spare no effort to secure the safety of our citizens and to bring their captors to justice," Obama said in a statement.

That actually means killing them, because that's what the "commandos" did. There were nine captors, and all nine of them were dead before the "commandos" left with the rescued American citizens. President Obama has his own definition of "justice" you know. "Bringing someone to justice" means killing them.

Romney's Taxes

2012-01-24T09:03:00.000-08:00

Romney released his income tax records and the left is outraged and indignant over the amount of taxes he paid; or, actually, didn't pay. Let's try this one more time, people,

Mitt Romney does not determine his own freaking tax rate.

He pays the taxes determined by Congress. If you are outraged by the tax rate he pays, take it out on the Congress that passed the laws creating that tax rate. Take it out on President Obama who extended the Bush tax cut for the rich for two years.

Military Priorities

2012-01-24T08:11:00.000-08:00

Well, the war crimes trial of the Iraq war, the Iraq “My Lai” investigation if you will, is finally done, and one noncom has been convicted of “dereliction of duty” and will serve three months. The rest of his platoon walks after killing a couple of dozen Iraqi civilians, including women and children, in Haditha in northern Iraq. Excuse me, I meant to say, after they created a couple dozen items of “collateral damage.”

Having never been in combat, I am not going to comment on the specific actions of men in combat, but the noncom in question did say one thing that rather jarred me. In an interview he said that, “As platoon leader my first responsibility is to see that none of my men is injured or killed.” That struck me as a truly remarkable statement.

This is the “finest fighting force in the world” is it? A fighting force whose “first responsibility” is the safety of the troops, rather than the mission? I have known quite a few Marines, I respect them deeply, and most of the ones I’ve known would respond to that with something like, “It that’s the case, son, then you’d best park your platoon on the sofa back home and let some real men do the fighting.”

I served in the Navy, which the arms-carrying branches usually considered as a rather cushy and sort of candy ass service. (They usually changed their minds when we cleared Hampton Roads and dived the boat, but…) Even us sailors knew, though, that the ship and its mission was why we were there. If our personal safety was our “first priority,” we would not have been on the freaking ship in the first place.

If this guy is typical of our modern military, then we have a major problem. Certainly “force protection” is a valid concern, I have no problem with that, but when personal safety is the “first priority” of the leadership of our fighting forces then we might as well not send them into combat. They are not going to win many battles against any kind of determined foe.

What Do You "Live For"?

2012-01-24T07:07:00.000-08:00

Many writers have noted that Joe Paterno "lived only for family and football" and that he even said that he would probably die as soon as he retired from football coaching. Which he did, of course. They say that like it was something wonderful; how dedicated he was to his job as a football coach.

Sorry, I don't think so. To me that shows a very deeply flawed person. Someone who is so deeply defined by profession and only by profession, for whom the horizons of life are that narrow, has something very wrong with them. They are ignoring most of the broad spectrum that is life.

Wishful Thinking?

2012-01-23T10:45:00.000-08:00

The Guardian presumably has a rather liberal reader base, but the title would probably be true for conservatives as well. In any case, you probably know just how accuratly predictive this poll turned out to be.

Practice What You Preach

2012-01-23T08:20:00.001-08:00

Here’s another thought for you in the disconnect between what the Left preaches and what it actually practices.

The liberal/progressive movement decries the influence that “evangelicals” hold over Republican politicians, with their stance on gay marriage, abortion and such, and yet they happily accept a president who is willing to have the rights of survivorship, power of attorney, inheritance and other spousal rights to be determined by the religious institution and definition of marriage, saying, “I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman.”

He says that his views on gay marriage are “evolving,” but that is merely a stall. He uses that to make “his base” believe that he might someday change his mind. Don’t hold your breath. In the meantime, the tie between religion and government, for this president, remains firmly in place; the religious definition of marriage is what the state should use to determine who a person should have the right to chose as the person to make decisions for them if they are unable to do so, the person to inherit their possessions, the person to fill the hole left by their death.

But it is the Republicans, not Democrats, who are influenced by religion.

There was a scene in “West Wing” where a group was discussing the open service of gays in the military and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs closed the discussion by pointing out that the arguments against it were the same ones that would have prevented him, an African American, from achieving the rank that he held. He didn’t call them idiots, but the word was clearly implied. He gave them a withering look and left the room.

Barack Obama looks at arguments which a generation ago would be used to prevent him from marrying freely and says those arguments were wrong, but when those same arguments are used today to prevent gay people from marrying freely he has no argument with them. That is the very definition of hypocrisy, and yet the liberal/progressive movement claims him as the nation’s salvation and claims that we absolutely must reelect him.

Super Bowl Rematch

2012-01-23T07:18:00.000-08:00

NFL football has deteriorated to an offense that consists of nothing but 4-yard forward passes. They run the ball once in a while and throw a downfield pass, a few of which accidentally result in big gains, but the game itself is the 4-yard forward pass because no team defends against it. It's actually easy to defend, merely jam the receiver at the line of scrimmage and don't let him run the route, but no one does it, and so that completion rate is about 80% and that is what all teams do.

This weekend's games were drawn out, low scoring affairs of marginally successful running and 4-yard passes. Both games were given as gifts to the other team by rookies who were not paying attention to what they were doing. A Ravens receiver catches the winning touchdown in the end zone and has it batted out of his hands because he is not paying attention to the defender nearby. A 49er's punt returner loses the ball because he was carrying the ball like an idiot, inviting the other team to strip it from him.

The way college teams play the game is infinitely more exciting, and they are more focused and more skillful than the idiots that the NFL puts on the field. Of course, college players are allowed to make contact in practice, so what happens in the game is familiar to them. NFL practice consists of touch football, so I don't know why we would expect much when they are actually hitting each other.

Phil Simms Is Just Stupid

2012-01-22T13:48:00.000-08:00

CBS is probably my least favorite network for watching NFL football, certainly so when Phil Simms is at the microphone. I think that idiot was hit on the head a few times too many in his football career.

For instance, he was swooning over the Raven's defense, which was a bit odd given that the Patriots never found it necessary to punt. Just after they ripped off two 10+ yard runs against the Ravens, Simms opined that, "The Ravens game plan is so well thought out and so well executed." Oh really? Perhaps so, if that game plan is to tire out the Patriots' place kicker.

At another point he said something about "you have to defense every play with that pinpoint accuracy and such good defense." I'm unsure what the hell that even means, but the pass in question was significantly off target, and there was no defender even close.

There is almost certainly no brain connected to his mouth.

Gingrich Smackdown

2012-01-21T08:21:00.000-08:00

The Republican Debate opened with a question to Newt Gingrich regarding his ex-wife’s claim that he had asked her for an open marriage, and I think this may be the first time in my life that I have ever been on Newt’s side or agreed with anything that he said. He replied to the question with,

“I think the destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country, harder to attract decent people to run for public office. And I am appalled that you would begin a presidential debate on a topic like that,” Gingrich told the CNN moderator.

He added, "I am frankly astounded that CNN would take trash like that and use it to open a presidential debate." And then continued,

“Every person in here knows personal pain. Every person in here has had someone close to them go through painful things. To take an ex-wife and make it two days before the primary a significant question for a presidential campaign is as close to despicable as anything I can imagine."

I do think the “go through painful things” was more than a bit disingenuous. Perhaps “been put through painful things” would be more accurate, with Newt as the putter, so he’s trying to slide past the issue that he was being accused of some pretty slimy behavior. Still, while I disagree with that particular phrase, the topic had nothing whatever to do with his fitness for the office being contested, was nothing more than scandal mongering, and I agree with the rest of what he had to say.

The moderator tried to bail out of his faux pas by claiming that, “As you noted, Mr. Speaker, this story did not come from our network. As you also know, it is a subject of conversation on the campaign. I'm not -- I get your point. I take your point.”

Give me a break. And he calls Newt “Mr. Speaker” which Newt has not been for 13 years. What’s with this “elected to office for life” that we seem to have adopted in this country lately? A person is entitled to the honorific only for so long as he/she holds that office. The exception would be judges who are appointed for life, but we only have one Speaker of the House.

Newt promptly engaged in smackdown number two, and I agreed with him for the second, and probably the last, time in my life.

"John, it was repeated by your network. You chose to start the debate with it. Don't try to blame somebody else. You and your staff chose to start this debate with it."

Whatever else Newt may or may not be, he knows how to kick ass.

He then went completely off the rails, and returned me to my comfortable position of regarding him as a complete asshole; finishing his smackdown of the media by saying that he is “tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans.”

Friday Food Blogging

2012-01-20T08:31:00.000-08:00

Got this one from the newspaper the other day, but modified it more than a little bit. It turned out pretty well, and passes the "wife test" even after a drive home that included a flat tire.

Slow Cooker Chicken
6 Chicken thighs, deboned and skinned
1 large Sweet Onion, sliced
4 Carrots, peeled and sliced
1 can, Petite diced Tomatoes
1 can, Chicken Broth
Frozen Peas
Olive oil
Garlic, crushed
Oregano
Thyme

Put the onion, carrots, tomatoes and broth in slow cooker and set on low.

Cut the chicken thighs into about four pieces each. Put about a quarter cup olive oil in a bowl and add the garlic, Oregano and Thyme to it. Mix that well. Dip the chicken pieces in the oil/herbs mixture, coating well, and put them in the slow cooker on top of what’s already in there.

Cook eight hours on low, being sure not to remove the lid. Add some frozen peas about thirty minutes or so before serving.

Right Thing, Wrong Reason

2012-01-19T08:39:00.000-08:00

I was delighted to read that President Obama had put a stop to the Keystone Pipeline yesterday. Initial evidence earlier this year was that he would approve it, but recently he has been bowing to public pressure and environmentalists and granted a delay, and now we have a final rejection. Then I read the details which gives his reason for the rejection.

"This announcement is not a judgment on the merits of the pipeline, but the arbitrary nature of a deadline that prevented the State Department from gathering the information necessary to approve the project and protect the American people," Obama said in a statement. "I'm disappointed that Republicans in Congress forced this decision, but it does not change my administration's commitment to American-made energy that creates jobs and reduces our dependence on oil."

I’ll take that last sentence first, with its “commitment to American-made energy” and to his desire to “reduce our dependence on oil," because it is just pure nonsense. The pipeline would be carrying Canadian-made energy which is oil; so the statement is, at best, totally unrelated to his rejection of the pipeline and is thrown in merely to distract the voters.

Then there’s the “arbitrary nature of a deadline that prevented the State Department from gathering the information necessary to approve the project and protect the American people," which is enough to make a sane person either have a coronary of fall out of his chair laughing. The project was proposed in 2005. This is 2012. Seven years is not sufficient time to “gather information” to make a decision?

He says specifically that the decision is not about “the merits of the pipeline” but is due to the Republicans, which is a clear statement that he is making a purely political decision for the purpose of making Republicans look bad and for no other reason. For the next eleven months that is the only reason our president is going to do anything, is to make the Republicans look bad and to get himself reelected.

After three years of “being above partisanship” and cooperating with Republican demands, suddenly, when the election season begins, he has become the steely eyed liberal who is beating up the other side and is going all out to be the die-hard liberal who will go to any length to defeat the evil designs which they have for this nation. And if you believe that I have a bridge in Brooklyn on which I can give you a really good deal.

And rejecting the pipeline damn well should be “about the merits” of it.

I think the dangers to the aquifer are a bit exaggerated; the Alaska Pipeline has operated for 34 years without incurring any of the kinds of spills that are promoted as threats to that water source, but any threat to the Ogallala Aquifer is unacceptable if it can be avoided. It’s also not unreasonable to assume that in today’s climate of corruption and greed the pipeline would not be built with the integrity that the Alaska pipeline was built.

The larger issue, though, is that the pipeline would be carrying oil extracted using possibly the most environmentally disastrous procedure ever devised by mankind, and we should not be involved in encouraging that process. Sure, if we don’t use that oil someone else will, but that boat don’t float with me. Just because evil is happening in the world and we can’t stop it doesn’t mean that we have to participate in it. Building that pipeline would mean participating in it, and we damn well should not do it.

The initial delay was, of course, simply an effort to put the issue off until after the 2012 elections, which I regarded as cowardly. It was pretty clear to me that he would approve the project after he had been reelected. Now he has realized that rejecting it benefits his reelection chances, especially since he can blame it on the Republicans.

Someone once said that doing the right thing for the wrong reason has no more merit in heaven than doing the wrong thing. Politics is not heaven, certainly, but motives count with me, and Obama gets spitballs from me for this gesture, not flowers.

My New Favorite Excuse

2012-01-19T07:21:00.001-08:00

Is the captain of the semi-sunken cruise liner off the Italian coast. He did not intentionally leave his sinking ship before the passengers had all departed safely, he "tripped and accidentally fell into a lifeboat." He actually made that claim. I guess that American sailors just don't fully understand Italian mariners.

The Fallacy of Polls

2012-01-18T11:39:00.000-08:00

Somebody did a poll of some group of people, and Think Progress described the poll by saying that it “asked an incisive question.” I’ll give you the questions in a moment, but first the definition of “incisive.”

Incisive adj. Penetrating, clear, and sharp

And the questions: they ask which is worse for the American economy, “inherent unfairness in the economic system that favors the wealthy,” or “over-regulation of the free market.”

First of all, please tell me which of those two questions is “penetrating” or “clear,” let alone “sharp.” They are, in fact, both conclusions rather than conditions, both are extraordinarily vague, and the first one is so biased as to render to poll all but self-answering. What idiot would ever pick any answer that did not include the word “unfairness.”

To anyone who can get outside of ideology and actually think with the slightest trace of logic and intellect, this poll and its “conclusion” that “most Americans agree with progressives” make the Washington Post, and ABC News who conducted the poll, and Greg Sargent who drew that simple-minded conclusion, look like complete idiots. I’m actually amazed that the result was as disparate as it was.

But this is the way that political discussion is done in our nation today.

Too Much Money

2012-01-18T09:34:00.000-08:00

I have been reading articles and posts all morning in which Mitt Romney is castigated for the amount of taxes, and the tax rate, that he pays on his income, and I fail to see the point of such criticism. Romney did not write the tax laws, did not participate in writing the tax laws, never lobbied for tax laws, and has never held a federal office of any kind. What is he supposed to do, cheat on his taxes to pay more than he owes?

Why do we persist in demonizing everyone except those who are creating the situations which we deplore? The rich “pay too little tax” because Congress passed laws declaring that they should do so. We should be angry at Congress, but we give them a pass and vent our spleen on the people who “have too much money.”

And therein, I believe, is the point. I don’t think we really give a damn what they pay in taxes, I think we are just pissed off that they have too much damned money.

On Firing Head Coaches

2012-01-18T09:19:00.000-08:00

The Baltimore Colts lose their quarterback, not only their starting quarterback, but their only quarterback and the quy who has been 100% of their offense for years. They lose him for the entire season, win two games and fire their head coach.

The Oakland Raiders lose their starting quarterback early in the year, then they lose their second string quarterback. They have to go out and sign up a quarterback who had retired earlier in the year. They also lose a running back who is potentially All-Pro. They win eight games for a .500 season and fire their head coach.

The San Diego Chargers have their All-Pro quarterback healthy all year. They have their first round draft pick running back healthy all year. They win eight games, only one of which is against a team with a winning record, for a .500 record on the season, and do not fire their head coach.

There is undoubtedly a planet on which that makes sense. It isn’t Earth.

Insanity Abounds

2012-01-17T09:28:00.000-08:00

Stock car racing has devolved into complete nonsense now, making even less sense in its regulatory processes than the US government.

Last year at Daytona and Talledega, the two superspeedways, drivers discovered that two-car tandems were vastly faster than either single cars or “packs” containing three or more cars, and the racing was…. Well, there was no racing as you and I understand racing. There was high speed certainly, but the two car tandems were just ridiculous.

So this year, NASCAR is trying to make sure that two cars cannot “hook up” for the same kind of extra speed. One might think that authorities would look at shape of the cars to do that, since the issue is an aerodynamic linkage between two cars that allows them to go faster, but no, NASCAR is reducing the parameters of the cooling systems of the cars in hopes that the pushing car will overheat and force the tandem to break up so that the driver of the rear car can cool his engine down.

What could possibly go wrong with that plan?

Well, actually several things can go wrong; one being that the pushing driver doesn’t decide soon enough to cool his engine and it overheats and blows up. That dumps lots of oil, water and engine pieces on the track, which cause a whole bunch of other cars to wreck. That would indicate that NASCAR’s plan did not turn out very well.

Another possible outcome revolves around the fact that, with the rear car overheating, the two cars must trade places, taking turns pushing and leading. The more prone the pusher is to overheating, the more often they must trade places, and the more chance there is that they will wreck themselves in the process. So NASCAR’s plan increases the likelihood of a wreck, which some might say is a good thing. I don’t.

Finally, NASCAR claims to be trying to restore the “big pack” racing, where up to twenty or more cars raced in a single “draft,” or aerodynamically linked parade of cars. Why, exactly, they think that a car will overheat while pushing a single car and not overheat as one of the trailing cars in this “big pack” eludes me. Taking twenty cars, instead of having ten of them prone to overheating in ten tandems, you will have nineteen of them prone to overheating in a single twenty-car draft.

I definitely think that Brian France should run for President.

Cruise Ship Question

2012-01-16T08:24:00.000-08:00

I have never seen a ship sink... Okay, mandatory pause here for a corny submarine joke. What is the difference between a submarine and a regular ship? Hint, it is not that a submarine can dive. Give up? Answer: it is that a submarine can surface.

Cynical old submariners will add, "usually." Any ship can dive once, it's called "sinking." The trick is coming back to the surface, and you can only do that if you a) are a submarine and b) have your shit together.

Anyway, that Italian cruise ship that hit the rocks and essentially sank was gashed and took on water on the port side, and yet pictures show her lying on her starboard side. The gash in her hull can be seen, well above the present waterline. WTF?

Sports Line Of The Week

2012-01-16T07:20:00.000-08:00

From Gary Kamiya at Salon, whose sports writing is usually completely yawn worthy and who in general knows as much about football as my cat does, comes this little jewel,

"The Giants were helped by the fact that the Green Bay receivers appeared to mistake the football for an incoming hand grenade."

He then goes into rapturous paens of ecstaty over Alex Smith. Yikes. He wants the Giants/49ers game to be played on San Francisco Bay rather than at Candlestick Park, because Alex Smith is the only one who can walk on water. That might create problems for the receivers, but we're talking about Alex Smith - he don't need no steenkin receivers.

Coming Around On Tebow

2012-01-15T09:28:00.000-08:00

After watching Tim Tebow the past few weeks, I have changed my attitude of him quite a lot; mostly as a person, but also as a football player. As a college player I was prejudiced against him because he played for Florida and the only SEC team I like less than Florida is… Well, actually, there is no SEC team I like less than Florida.

Like the rest of the world, I kind of forgot about him last year, and this year I found all of the hype a bit annoying. I thought, too, that his public affectations of religiosity were in poor taste and that they were self serving. I no longer think that, really, and I’m seeing a young man who is dedicated, enthusiastic and refreshingly ethical.

I think the media and a lot of bloggers are being a bit unfair to Tebow with this stuff about God and Tebow’s won/loss record. I have written on several occasions about the risks that are incurred in public displays of faith and why I believe one’s faith should be reserved to private venues, but I don't believe that Tebow has ever actually ascribed a victory to God's intervention. He frequently says "I want to thank my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ," but listen to him; he never says "for this win" or anything similar to that. In fact, he never says what he is thankful for, merely that he is thankful. Yes, I think his utterances lack a certain amount of taste, but this fashion of accusing him of claiming that God is on the side of the Denver Broncos is, I'm pretty sure, just not accurate.

Here's what he said last night after Denver’s loss to New England. Notice he says what he is thanking his teammates for, and what he is thanking Broncos fans for, but...

"But before we talk about that I want to thank my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and thank my teammates for the effort they put forth not only tonight, but our entire season and also I want to thank the Broncos fans for all their support this season. It definitely meant a lot."

That’s actually a pretty nice statement, isn’t it? Later in the interview he was asked, “How do you make sense of losing in the context of your faith?”

“Something I pray before games, during games, after games is regardless whether I win or I lose, whether the hero or the goat, it doesn't matter, I still honor the Lord and give Him the glory because He's deserving of it. Just like my faith shouldn't change, neither should that. That's how I try to approach it, and sometimes even in a loss you can honor Him more. For me, I just pray that my character, and who I am doesn't change even though you can be dejected, you can still feel hurt, you can still feel disappointed, but you can still honor the Lord with how you handle things.”

Does that sound like someone who is claiming that God is on his side? It doesn’t sound like that to me, and in fact, it sounds to me like a young man who is more concerned with being a person of good character than he is with winning football games. He sounds like someone who knows that how you play the game is more important than the outcome.

Maybe our politicians, of both parties, could learn something from him.

NFL Playoffs

2012-01-15T07:20:00.000-08:00

So far the home team has won every game, and I would be somewhat less than astonished if today did not continue that record. The Denver win last weekend was a surprise, and was rather a fun one.

This week the surprise was the 49ers, and San Francisco got away with a bad case of stupid. When you are playing a team that passed for 600+ yards each of its last two games, and averages 39 points per game, no matter how good your defense is, you do not tell your offense to sit on a six point lead. Still, it made for an exciting finish.

Is Tebowmania finally finished? But now Bradymania begins.

Rate The Candidates

2012-01-14T10:57:00.000-08:00

You can take a quiz to see which candidate has values which most nearly match yours. There is a scale on the left on which you set the relative importance of the issues, then answer the questions. You don't see the candidates until the end.

I got Ron Paul in 1st at 37% and 1 of 11 categories (Afghanistan war), and Obama 2nd at 24% and 0 of 11 categories. On about half the questions, though, I had to answer "none of the above." Let me know who you get.

MLK Monument

2012-01-14T09:48:00.000-08:00

Apparently public outcry over the quotation on the Martin Luther King monument reached critical level and resulted in a decision that it will be changed, but I think the whole damned thing should be dynamited and started over. The statue is a monstrosity. His pose, with arms crossed across his chest, is remarkably untypical of the man, and the expression on his face appears hostile and angry.

At the risk of sounding racist, I cannot understand why a Chinese artist was chosen for this work. Not just ethnically Chinese, but a person living in China, who speaks no English and who built the monument in China from Chinese materials. It should have been done by an African-American artist who had lived through the experience of the civil rights campaign.

The Right To Fail

2012-01-14T09:06:00.000-08:00

I was reading an article about the continuing problem of bee colonies dying off, and one sentence kind of leaped out at me. It pointed out the dischord between the rhetoric of overtaxation, and the casual expectation that we place on government to spend money in our behalf. It was simply this, “Last year he had so many abnormal bee die-offs that he'll qualify for disaster relief from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.”

I used to have my own business installing machinery in steel plants. In the 1980’s the steel processing industry became so weak that plants pretty much quit installing new machinery, and my business failed. It simply never occurred to me that the government should make up for what I had lost. That concept, that the government should protect me from failure, is simply not in my mindset.

I wound up becoming a landscaper. After digging holes for a while and a dozen years in landscape management, I finished with six years as a website programmer. “If you can’t get a job doing what you do, get a job doing whatever you can get a job doing.” That I should expect the government to make up to me what I had lost simply never occurred to me.

Now we have “disaster relief” for beekeepers who lose too many bees.

I remember watching a piece on “farm relief” some years ago. It used to be that farms made money in good years and banked that money as a reserve against the bad years. Now they spend the money on new equipment and such in good years, and the government makes up their losses in bad years. One elderly farmer did not really approve of the new way of doing business. “They’ve taken away our right to fail,” he said.

I have to agree with him. My career doesn’t look like much, and not many people would consider me a success. But whatever success I have achieved, I did it when Americans still had the right to fail.

Superstition

2012-01-13T08:38:00.001-08:00

I am not superstitious. I walk under ladders, I pet black cats, I sneer at broken mirrors… I am not setting foot outside of my house today.

It has to do with my ship leaving port to go screw around off the north coast of Russia, which was the Soviet Union at the time. I don’t know what we were going to be doing; I was an electrician, and they didn’t tell me those things. They told me how fast to make the boat go, and when we were diving. The usually didn’t tell me when it was time to panic, as that was usually self evident.

We left New London on Friday the 13th of some month. I think it was February, and it was probably 1960 or so. We never reached the coast of Russia, because we hit several storms that beat the crap out of us and forced us to return for repairs. There was, at one point, some small question as whether or not we would even be able to make it back. To a man, we blamed it on the date of our departure.

What Kind of Control?

2012-01-13T08:00:00.000-08:00

Michael Hastings wrote a piece in Reuters a couple of days ago extolling the prowess of Obama in wresting control of the military away from… Well, it’s unclear who was controlling the military before Obama took control of it; generals/admirals, Congress, or the industrial half of the Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex. Whoever it was, Obama stood steely-eyed at a podium in the Pentagon to symbolize his assumption of command over the armed forces some three years after becoming Commander-in-Chief.

Tom Englehardt had a different view of the same event, viewing Obama’s use of the Pentagon podium as a metaphorical aircraft carrier and the moment as an implied assertion that with regard to the land wars in the Middle East we are declaring victory and going home.

I have a view that is in between, but somewhat closer to Tom Englehardt than Hastings. Obama has done a better job of controlling the military than Bush did, and by quite a lot, but to say that he has “taken control of it” is a bit of a stretch I think, and his “new” strategy is long on forehead and more than a little bit short on reality.

For one thing it is, as Englehardt points out, hauntingly reminiscent of Rumsfeld, and we all know how well that worked out. I may be a little older than Tom, and I grew up in the Air Force, and I recall echoes of Billy Mitchell all too well. “We don’t need the Army, we can win wars with aerial bombardment.” The military is always obsessed with its newest toys, and always believes that the new technology will replace combat. It never does.

If you want to avoid combat, stay out of wars.

All three of us agreed on one aspect of the moment, that it was politically inspired and was a key moment in a reelection campaign. As such it is, in the long run, probably no more meaningful than one of his cheerleading stump speeches at a “town hall” in the nation’s heartland, and the “change” contained within it is probably no more realistic than the change he advertised in 2008.

Premature Indeed

2012-01-13T07:00:00.000-08:00

Interesting case on People’s Court yesterday. A renter decided not to move into an apartment after paying the first month’s rent. The landlord said that if he could rent the place out right away he would return the non-renter’s money. He did so and put a check for the entire amount in the mail the same day that the new renter signed the lease. But the story did not have a happy ending, or it would not have ended in court.

The day the landlord mailed the check he received notice that he was being sued for the money, in the amount of the check which he had just mailed. The suit had been filed the very next day after the non-renter had asked for the money back and been told he would get it if the place was re-rented. The landlord promptly went to the bank and stopped payment on the check, and sent a letter to the non-renter saying that he had done so and that they would meet in court.

The judge asked the landlord why he stopped payment on the check.

The landlord, a gentleman in his eighties, answered the judge, “Judge, I returned that money because it was the moral thing to do. But this man turns out to be sue happy. He could have had his money several months ago, but if he wants to wait until a judge orders me to return his money I’m perfectly happy to let him wait until you to order me to return his money.”

The judge, laughing her head off, so ordered, but the plaintiff did not get the usual award of court costs due to the suit being deemed “premature.”

Insanity Abounds

2012-01-12T11:17:00.000-08:00

The liberal blogs are trying to convince me that the field of Republican candidates are incoherent idiots who will drive this country on a course of insanity if elected, but I’m not all that convinced that there is any real degree of sanity at the helm right now.

Leon Panetta was on Face The Nation this past weekend and said that with respect to their nuclear program we must, “try to convince Iran that if, you know, they want to do what's right, they need to join the international family of nations and act in a responsible way.” That’s an amazing statement considering that Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty while our client state, Israel, which possesses nuclear weapons, has steadfastly refused to sign on to that agreement. Further, Iran has opened their nuclear facilities to international inspection, while Israel has not.

He went on to say that sanctions are “working to put pressure on them, to make them understand that they cannot continue to do what they're doing.” If you think about that, it reveals a certain lack of logic. If sanctions were convincing them that they “cannot continue to do what they're doing” would they still be doing it?

And what is it that they are doing that we cannot tolerate? Well on that topic he gets really confusing. “Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No. But we know that they're trying to develop a nuclear capability. And that's what concerns us. And our red line to Iran is do not develop a nuclear weapon. That's a red line for us.”

So the “red line for us” is that we have to stop them from doing what we admit that they are not trying to do. And we have to reserve the option of using bombs for the purpose of stopping them from doing that which they are not trying to do. Probably by bombing the shit out of facilities which they don’t have.

Scott Pelley of CBS News, meanwhile condensed all of this discussion into a tiny little throwaway line at the end of a marginally related news item, saying that, “And on Sunday Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told CBS News that Iran was within one year of being able to build a nuclear weapon. Thank you, David."

Pitiful, Just Pitiful

2012-01-12T07:32:00.000-08:00

I quit watching MSNBC for obvious reasons; tried ABC (blecch), tried NBC and decided that I could not stomach Brian Williams, and finally settled on CBS but am having trouble with that one.

They did a piece last night, for instance, on the killing of an Iranian nuclear scientist by "somebody," without speculating on who might have done it, and at the end of the piece said that, "Last Sunday Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told CBS News that Iran was within one year of being able to build a nuclear weapon."

Actually, what Panetta said to CBS on that network's Face The Nation was, "Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon, no."

It's difficult to take our any of our news media seriously when all of last month we were being told what a booming event the current Christmas shopping season was, with malls crowded, deals being offered, stores being open long hours and shoppers buying at a frenetic pace, and that all of this was turning the economy around and look at how low the unemployemnt application numbers are going.

And today we see that December consumer spending was, in fact, less than stellar; rising 0.1% for the month after a 0.3% increase the previous month. Not only that, but unemployment applications are rising again, just 1000 short of the 400,000 mark as employers discard holiday temporary help, which surprises everyone for some strange reason.

Cold Turkey v. The Patch

2012-01-11T07:22:00.000-08:00

New evidence emerges that "the patch" doesn't help one quit smoking. Take out your coloring book, turn to page four and color me surprised.

After almost thirty years of smoking 4+ packs per day of Pall Mall regulars (yes, you read that right), I had made several efforts to "cut back" or "taper off" and quit, with no success whatever. Then I read the doctor's report which contained the phrase "well advanced emphysema" and became motivated, and quit cold turkey. It was not easy, but I have not had a smoke of any description since.

I'm always a bit embarrassed when a doctor says "good for you" that I quit smoking. Reality is it's damned stupid that it took such a degree of damage to motivate me to stop.

I can't read people's minds, but I suspect that people who use "the patch" and can't stop smoking are not sufficiently motivated to beat a serious addiction, while people who use it and do quit would have quit without it. If you really want to stop smoking and are committed to doing so you're going to stop no matter what method you use, and if you lack that serious commitment then all the tricks in the world are not going to help you.

Because, make no mistake, it requires serious intent, and half measures don't get it done. I think that, in order to beat that addiction, any addiction really, one has to make up your mind that you want it badly enough to stay with it no matter how much it costs or how badly it hurts in the short term. If you want freedom badly enough then whatever the symptoms are, they will pass and that freedom will come.

PS: the "cold turkey" method is much less expensive & probably faster.

Debacle

2012-01-10T07:47:00.000-08:00

I would not hav minded LSU failing to win, had they played a competitive game, but that performance last night was shameful, and was a disgrace to a great school and a great football conference. The defence was tentative, lethargic and was tackling like NFL players, while the offence... Well, the less said about the offense the better. They were not even trying to advance the ball and only twice even attempted a pass of greater than three yards.

Not to take anything away from the Crimson Tide. They have played great football all year all year, and they did so last night. But the game was far more of a blowout than the score would seem to indicate. Alabama had reached scoring position seven times in the first three quarters, while LSU had never crossed midfield and had achieved a whopping two first downs.

We are all liberals now.

2012-01-09T08:10:00.000-08:00

David Atkins, at digby’s place, writes a lengthy and rather incoherent piece on what he views as the principles of liberalism, which illustrates that he doesn’t have a clue what the hell a liberal is, and that he is totally incapable of any form of coherent thought. He says at one point that, “For a liberal like me, who is primarily interested in the well-being of the American middle-class…” Someone who has that primary interest is not a liberal; he is a smug, ignorant, self-satisfied, greedy pig.

This is the kind of bigot who cheerfully declares that brown people in other countries should be blown to pieces if doing so will preserve the "freedom” of the American middle class people whose well being is his primary interest. Read his piece, if you can stand the smug self adulation which he spews at great length, and you will discern that David has essentially no idea whatever what a “liberal” is, a trait which he shares with most other writers who call themselves liberals.

The dictionary gives a couple of basic meanings for the word, one of which is “tending to give freely; generous,” and I’m sure politicians in the Democratic Party are leaning on that one rather heavily. The more important one is “favoring proposals for reform, open to new ideas for progress, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; broad-minded.” Oh yeah, right. How many Obama supporters meet that definition? I was blacklisted from commenting on one “liberal” blog because I refused to admit that Obama was justified in starting the war in Libya.

But the term is more than a word, it is a political theory defined as,

A political theory founded on the natural goodness of humans and the autonomy of the individual and favoring civil and political liberties, government by law with the consent of the governed, and protection from arbitrary authority.

It is difficult to square that “autonomy of the individual” with David’s statement that, “Liberalism is and has always been about intervention.” He goes on to say that liberalism “is unavoidably, inescapably paternalistic in nature,” which contradicts, just a little bit, the concept of “protection from arbitrary authority.”

His jackassery reaches something of a crescendo with his admission that, “Conservatives use force of government as well, of course…” and goes on to say that while liberals are using the “force of government” for good purposes, conservatives are using it for bad purposes. At this point we are all supposed to run to the polls and vote for Obama because, of course, we all agree with David’s definition of “good purposes.”

He’s on a par with the lady who would not vote for Nixon because “his eyes are too close together.” He just uses more words.

Professional Football? (updt Monday)

2012-01-08T18:14:00.000-08:00

I swear to heaven, the lack of ability on the part of NFL players to tackle ball carriers is absolutely astonishing. I watched four NFL games this weekend, eight teams, and not one of them had the tackling ability of a decent high school team. More than once a defender made a clean miss on a ball carrier that was standing flat footed; just plain whiffed on a stationary target. And these are the playoff teams. Utterly ridiculous.

Update: A comment at another thread pointed out that it took longer to explain the new overtime rules than it did to actually play the overtime. True, but at eleven seconds of playing time, the damned coin toss took longer than the actual overtime did.

Monday thoughts: When you get really bad service in a dining establishment, a 2¢ tip is a more insulting message than leaving no tip at all. Those two points scored by the Falcons was sort of like that 2¢ tip.

Phil Simms ia an idiot. At one point he commented "This is what Denver does, they throw the ball down the field." Actually, vast numbers of writers and fans have been harshly critical of Tim Tebow for not throwing the ball down the field, and I was one of probably several million viewers who were astonished that he was actually doing it in that game. Then he wondered why Big Ben was not being used in shotgun formation more often, apparently not having heard dozens of sports figures discuss how ineffective Ben is from the shotgun and how much more accurately he throws when taking the snap from under center. He also apparently had not noticed Ben taking the snap from shotgun more than half the time before he said that. If Simms had a brain I would wonder if his mouth was connected to it.

The officials at ~~Mile High~~ Sports Authority Field need to quit checking out the cheerleaders' asses and watch what is happening on the field. The Steelers were grabbing Tebow's face mask every time they tackled him and it was never called, and that was clearly a backward pass.

I have to admit, it was sort of fun watching Denver beat the vaunted Steel Curtain. That was a fun game to watch; best of the weekend.

Fool Me Once...

2012-01-08T08:29:00.000-08:00

I don’t know why the American people keep falling for this. I’m talking about Obama at the moment, but it is by no means unique to him. All politicians do it, and have been doing so for years. What I’m talking about is illustrated by the number of articles headlined to the effect of, “Obama finally gets aggressive with Congress.”

For the first three years of his first term, Barack Obama was clearly a creature of moneyed interests. Before he even began the “health care reform” process, he sat down and made a deal with the pharmaceutical industry that drug price negotiation by Medicare would not be part of that reform, and he never gave more than lip service to the “public option.” He named Wall Street insiders to his cabinet. He watered down the “stimulus bill” in size and diluted it with Republican tax cuts. He allowed financial reform to be a farce.

As the election year approaches he suddenly is making impassioned rhetoric about “taxing the rich,” a nominal tax that leaves capital gains protected, about “payroll tax cuts for working men and women,” and he makes a recess appointment that pisses off Congress. The Democrats all cheer wildly, make statements to the effect that now they “finally see the leadership we have been waiting for” and declaim about how they cannot wait to rush to the polls to vote for him.

For the first three years of his first term Obama’s administration arrested and deported undocumented immigrants at an unprecedented rate, far more than the Bush administration had done before him. Now, as he enters a reelection campaign, Obama signs an executive order easing the deportation process for families. His chances of maintaining the Hispanic vote are projected to improve because of “his record on immigration.”

During the second full year of Obama’s first term the release of toxic chemicals into the environment rose by 16% nationwide. The following year’s budget for the EPA was cut from $10.3 billion to $8.3 billion. Obama’s role in that cut is unclear, but he certainly did not lead any public resistance to the reduction, nor does he include environmental issues in his campaign rhetoric today.

Voters listened to his promises of change during the campaign, suffered through three years of corporatism, and now are willing to be suckered again by the campaign rhetoric that they were suckered by the first time. This is not “the real Barack Obama.” This is the Barack Obama who is campaigning for reelection. The things he is doing now are not what he will be doing for the four years of his second term. The things he was doing for his first three years are the things he will be doing for the four years of his second term; making deals with his corporate masters.

Fearless Forecast

2012-01-07T11:30:00.001-08:00

Make a note of the date and time of this post, so that you do not accuse me of hindsight. The Detroit Lions will defeat the New Orleans Saints. It will not be a fluke, freak or miracle. It will be an earned win.

Update: Well, I made this prediction before I knew that Detroit was going to use the "San Diego defense" strategy. I have never understood the concept that one counters a potent passing offense by lining up the secondary ten yards from the line of scrimmage and backing away from the receivers when the ball is snapped and not rushing the opposing quarterback. It is based, apparently, on the rather bizarre theory that four pass completions of fifteen yards each is somehow less damaging than one completion of sixty yards.

Not to mention that the Lions defensive players would have difficulty tackling my twelve-year-old neice. Well, grand neice, to be precise.

It's pretty embarrasing that San Diego's offense was only able to score ten points against this defense, and the head coach kept his job. Wierd.

Darth Vader Burger

2012-01-07T07:25:00.000-08:00

Oho, so that's what you call it. My wife has been cooking these for years. I call it incineration. It's why you don't see her posting recipes here; you don't need a recipe for boiling water.

Military Spending Plans

2012-01-07T07:15:00.000-08:00

Obama is talking about cutting military spending by $487 billion over the next ten years, and making vague references to a further $500 billion in addition to that. Republicans are, of course, aghast. I like it, and wish that the cuts went far deeper.

One problem is that Obama, like all politicians, has a different definition of “cuts” than you and I do. We think of cutting our budget and it means we buy fewer hamburgers, or we don’t buy that television we wanted. Politicians think of cutting a budget and they spend more next year than they did this year, but instead of increasing their spending by $15 million, they increase it by a mere $10 million. That’s a “budget cut” of $5 million.

The other problem is that each session of Congress is independent; the 112th Congress cannot tell the 113th Congress what to do, and that matters in a number of important ways. For one thing, it means that multi-year budgets are completely bogus.

So the devil is in the details, and we don’t have any yet. If his cuts are $487 billion, but only $4 billion of it is next year, and that $4 billion turns out to be merely a reduction from a $14 billion increase to a $10 billion increase then he hasn’t really done much for us. Don’t be taken by the ten-year planning numbers. We need to know from Obama what his spending plans are for the remainder of his time in office; anything that he says about military spending for the year 2020 is utterly meaningless.

Show Me The Carfax

2012-01-06T09:27:00.000-08:00

From Salon.com we have a headline reading, “A jobs report to make the White House smile,” with a subhead to amplify that reading, “The U.S. economy added 200,000 jobs in December, and the unemployment rate fell to a three-year low.”

Let’s not bother to hold an election, let’s just name Obama to another term.

Oh, wait. Let’s look under the hood of the current employment report. In the last year, the civilian population rose by 1,695,000. Yet the labor force only rose by 274,000. Those “not in the labor force” rose by 1,421,000. If you have given up looking for work you are not “unemployed” and are not counted in that 8.5% unemployment number.

In December alone, while the unemployment rate dropped to “a three-year low,” those "not in the labor force" rose by a whopping 194,000, almost equaling the reported 200,000 new jobs. Civilian population increased by 143,000 people.

Boy, this economy is really humming right along.

Obama's Version of "Shock and Awe"

2012-01-06T06:23:00.000-08:00

I have now read six different accounts of Obama's speech regarding the "revision" of the military's role in the future and his "vision" for how the military will be shaped in the future, and all I hear is a lot of words that sound like a prettied up version of Donald Rumsfeld. And we all know how that worked out when put to the test, don't we?

We are going to rely on high technology and "innovation," and are somehow going to do that while spending less money, which is going to be a nice trick. The military has never before in history bought new toys at low prices, so we'll see how that works out. We're going to focus on computers, which sounds good. When China occupies some oil country in Northern Africa, for instance, we'll throw them using a few dozen geeks heavily armed with Apple MacBook Pros.

He actually says that we are going to be improving technology while cutting procurement and slowing research and development all at the same time, which is on the same level of reasoning as "We are denying them space in which to plan their attacks." Pretty words which, when examined for meaning, have none.

I have to laugh, however, at critics who bemoan ending the policy of us being able to "successfully conduct two land wars at one time." I mean, really? They seriously thought we had that capability?

Unaccountability Defined

2012-01-05T09:01:00.000-08:00

I object as much as anyone to the concept of the “imperial presidency.” I didn’t like it when a Republican president was advancing that policy, and one of the biggest “issues” I have with Obama is the degree to which he has followed the same path, thereby making the process no longer a partisan issue but turning it into a normal part of our method of governance.

That being said, the president must be allowed to appoint people to positions authorized by Congress. The present Congressional practice of blocking those appointments out of petty partisanship is appalling, and I have no problem with Obama using recess appointments to whatever degree he finds necessary. I think, in fact, that he has been remarkably restrained in his use of them.

The only problem I have with his appointment of Richard Cordray as director of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau is not with the appointee, or the method, or with Obama; it’s with the Bureau itself. This is one of those Congressional abdications which I objected to when it was first passed by Congress as part of the Dodd-Frank illusion.

It was created with enormous powers and no oversight. The rules which it will impose on banks, credit unions, lenders of every description, financial institutions of every description, debt collectors, and essentially every business which deals with business on a non-cash basis, were not written by Congress but will be created by the bureau and will not be subject to review by Congress or any elected legislative body.

I have a problem with unaccountable government bureaucracies. The only thing worse than regulations being subject to the whims of 535 legislators elected by the population of this nation is regulations being subject to the whim of one person appointed by an imperial president.

Leadership Redefined

2012-01-04T08:06:00.000-08:00

The Philadelphia Eagles are keeping Andy Reid, the San Diego Chargers are keeping Norv Turner, and America will almost certainly reelect Barack Obama. Leadership has been redefined in this country.

Spanos said that he is keeping Turner because the players really like him and that they "play hard for him." Did he watch the Detroit game? In the last game, winning against Oakland, the defense gave up 520 yards. In the entire season, the team defeated only one opponent which had a winning record. In any case, the fact that his subordinates like him is probably the very worst reason to keep a manager.

In Obama's case, of course, he's being retained by his subordinates, so... And yes, I do know precisely what I just said.

In the Chargers case, I think it's money. Turner has two years remaining on his contract and Smith three, and Spanos doesn't want to pay off those contracts and have the expense of hiring to replace them. Sure, they'd both get new jobs, but he'd have to pay the difference between their present contract and their new ones. Some other team would get cheap leadership and he would pay the price. Without a fancy new stadium, which he isn't going to get, he's not willing to spend that much money.

Spanos doesn't care about the fans; doesn't need to because his real income is from television revenue. When the NFL strike was pending it was pointed out that owners actually made more money if games weren't played, because player salaries didn't eat into the money that television still had to pay.

Alternative Thoory: Jim Trotter of Sports Illustrated, who wrote locally for many years, suggests that it is simply that Dean Spanos lacks the courage to do what is necessary, and I suspect that may well be the case. It would certainly not be the first time that a family business has been ruined by the second generation because the children thought that simply growing up rich made them intelligent and brave, and exempted them from having to actually learn how to do anything.

I think we saw that with George W. Bush, where many in his administration openly admit that much of the reaction to 9/11 was simply to panic. "We were terrified that another attack might be coming."

Eight Games

2012-01-03T12:09:00.000-08:00

That's how many Chargers football games will be televised in San Diego next year, as no home game will be sold out. Both general manager A.J. Smith and head coach Norv Turner will be returning next year. The players and the San Diego Union-Tribune sports writers are thrilled, as are the coach and GM in question, but no one else in San Diego is. I'm sure that people in Denver, Kansas City and Oakland are pleased.

The good news is that no new stadium will be built with taxpayers money in San Diego, so I guess it's not all bad.

Bowl Games Note

2012-01-03T08:47:00.000-08:00

The ladies wearing the pretty dresses won whatever that was last night. Supposedly football. Does any conference other than the SEC play defense? I can't wait for January 9th. Geaux Tigers.

Now Its The Trade Deficit

2012-01-03T07:58:00.000-08:00

Dean Baker is of the “Krugman School” of government debt economics, “it’s money we will be paying ourselves,” but with a slight twist. He says that, “the foreign ownership of US financial assets, including government debt, is determined by our trade deficit, not our budget deficit.”

Again with the pretense that there is no difference between government debt and private corporate assets, and he even goes so far as to include government debt as a “US financial asset.” If somebody owns the Bank of America, they own a “US financial asset.” (Well, maybe.) If they own US government debt, they own a “US financial liability.” Their ownership of that debt is an asset to them, but it is a liability on the US side of the equation.

And that debt has nothing whatever to do with the trade deficit.

If we owe $600 million to Japan, we are going to owe that money to them no matter what the trade deficit does, because the government does not participate in the trade deficit. Private companies import and export goods and services, and it is that import and export which creates the trade deficit. That’s why it is called the “trade deficit,” because it is caused by trade. Get it? If that trade deficit drops to zero, we still owe $600 million to Japan.

Krugman at least had enough sanity to pretend that our government owing money to China was balanced by American companies owning subsidiaries located in China. Baker tries to tell us that our government owing money to China is balanced by our population buying televisions made in China, and that everything will be okay if we just make our money worthless. We won’t have to pay our debt if nobody wants our money.

“Ha, ha. Fooled you, didn’t we? Bought all your televisions on credit, then turned our money into garbage. That’ll teach you to mess with America.”

He then goes on to talk about the enormous debt which we are passing on to our children in the form of the effects of climate change, and that is a point with which I am in total agreement. I suspect, in fact, that we are underestimating the damage that has already been done. It seems odd to me that someone who is as clearheaded about that can be so stubborn about the need to serve the immediate economic wishes of a greedy generation and unwilling to seek financial stability.

Rose Bowl Note

2012-01-02T14:24:00.000-08:00

Furore arises over the mirrored helmets being worn by the Oregon Ducks. Now it occurs to me why I dislike the Ducks and their zillions of different uniforms so much. Bunch of damned teenage girls giggling over their pretty new party dresses. Football is about how you perform an athletic contest, not how pretty you look with the feathers on your damned outfits.

LSU kicked their ass, here's hoping Wisconsin does likewise.

Krugman's Single Tune

2012-01-02T07:25:00.000-08:00

Krugman is at it again, this time in an op-ed column in the New York Times. First of all he actually debunks Keynesian theory, which he claims to support and which says that governments should spend and create government debt during lean times, and pay down the debt during times of economic plenty. Here’s Krugman’s theory,

First, families have to pay back their debt. Governments don’t — all they need to do is ensure that debt grows more slowly than their tax base. The debt from World War II was never repaid; it just became increasingly irrelevant as the U.S. economy grew, and with it the income subject to taxation.

Krugman needs to take a reality pill, although he may already be beyond any such remedy. The debt at the end of World War II was about $3 trillion and indeed has, essentially, been swallowed up by a population increase from 130 million people to 313 million. What sort of increase will be needed to swallow up our present debt of $14 trillion? My calculation says it would require a national population of about 973 million people, and I don’t even want to think about the problems that would present.

Or, perhaps, merely 400 million people, each with an income of $6 trillion. What would the “poverty level” be in such a society?

When I was a teenager I once grew 6” in a six month period. Applying Paul Krugman’s theories, I should be about eighty feet tall right now. Feeding me would be a problem. Of course, feeding an American population of 973 million would be a bit of a problem.

He also sort of slides past the fact that even by the “Krugman Theory” of not paying it, our debt is still a problem because we are not even within hand grenade distance of “ensuring that debt grows more slowly than our tax base.” Our population has gone from 130 million to 313 million since World War II, a 240% increase, while our debt has gone from $3 trillion to $14 trillion, which is a 467% increase.

Krugman only uses facts which are convenient to his purpose.

Then there was the whole “debt ceiling crisis” in which the government’s integrity was at stake. The world needed to be assured that “America would pay its debts.” Paul Krugman says America will not pay its debts, because that’s not what governments do.

Then, to the larger audience reading the op-ed than earlier read his blog, he trots out the “it’s largely money we owe ourselves” argument and is a little more open about the fact that “foreigners now hold large claims” on our government debt. He carefully omits saying that those claims amount to a full one-third of our government debt, nor does he come right out and reiterate his claim that we should not worry about it since we aren’t going to pay that money back because governments don’t pay debt.

What he does say is that “every dollar’s worth of foreign claims on America is matched by 89 cents’ worth of U.S. claims on foreigners,” as if that meant anything. One dollar of American government debt held by the Japanese government is matched by 89¢ worth of factory owned in Japan by General Electric. So what? I owe the bank money on my house, and I own a car. Can I tell the bank to kiss off because my car is paid for?

I don’t happen to think we should be raising taxes at this moment, but Paul Krugman’s arguments are simply idiotic, and I certainly do not think we should continue cutting taxes. If I’d wanted a continuation of the pandering to taxpayers with tax cuts, I’d have voted for a Republican. Debts do matter, the bill will come due, and we need fiscal sanity not only in our government but in our nation.

Oh Good, We Won...

2012-01-01T17:12:00.000-08:00

...against the 25th ranked overall defense, 27th against the pass. If the Oakland pass defenders could find our receivers at all, it was only to commit pass interference against them. The Raiders' secondary did a very good imitation of the Keystone Cops, so now we will hear peans of praise from the San Diego sports writers about the excellence of the Chargers coaching staff and how it was their brilliance that achieved an 8-8 record in the face of millions of injuries to everyone including the ball boys.

Meanwhile, Tim Tebow racked up 50 yards passing on 6 completions of 22 attempts for a 27.3% completion percentage, and took the Denver Broncos into the playoffs with a 7-3 loss to Kansas City.

Broncos, Chargers and Raiders are all at 8-8 with Broncos winning the division on third tie breaker, since all four teams in the division are 3-3 in division play. Has to be the NFL's most pathetic division.

Look, people, I'm recovering from surgery. I can't stand all this excitement.

Happy New Year

2012-01-01T07:43:00.000-08:00

I can remember when the BIG GAME was on New Year's Day. The college football Holy Grail. The two best teams of the gridiron duking it out as we gathered on our couches and nursed our hangovers to cheer our favorites and/or grouse about what might have been. Now it's just another NFL weekend, a few more "bowls" of 6-6 college teams, and the college championship still nine days away.

I never went out on New Year's Eve, because that was "amateur night." Damn fools didn't know how to drink. They'd throw up right on you. Us professionals always had a clear thirty second warning that barf was coming. "Excuse me, I need to go puke." Amateurs will keep both eyes open while driving. Idiots; then you don't know which center stripe to follow. Keep one eye closed and there's only one stripe.

I still don't go out. Different reason these past thirty years.

But I celebrate the years and treasure every one of them. There are no good years, or bad ones. Rain is "bad" if you're having a parade, but it's "good" if you're a farmer. Rain is just rain, and a year is just a year. "Good" and "bad" are value judgements that we place on things, and we place them based on how those things affect us. But I'm not the center of the universe, and how something affects me is not the true measure of what it is.

So 2012 is here. Treasure the moment.

He Still Has His Shovel

2012-01-01T07:05:00.000-08:00

Paul Krugman clarifies his somewhat obscure reference to the balance between foreign held US debt and American-held foreign assets. It turns out he was pointing out that while foreigners own some US government debt, we should not worry because Americans own investments in foreign holdings. Private corporations, that is, own subsidiaries in foreign countries, and that offsets our government debt held by foreign governments.

Could anything more clearly illustrate that we have become an oligarchy?

Government debt is a liability offset by corporate assets. In reality, of course, that's like saying that Bank of America is broke, but don't worry about it because Wells Fargo has money. That's factually useful only if Wells Fargo buys Bank of America, and Krugman's latest is useful only if corporate America buys the American government. Oh, wait...

In the normal course of things, you have a secured debt in your house because, while you owe money on it, you own the house which is worth more money than you owe. Today's economy has thrown that whole principle in the crapper, of course, and "secured debt" doesn't mean what it used to mean, but still...

In Krugman's new theory I could have a secured loan by borrowing money without owning anything, but by assuring the bank that my friend's house was worth more than I was borrowing. I could write up a balance sheet that showed all of my credit card debt, and then list a house owned by the guy I graduated from high school with as an asset, and the bank would throw money at me.

He then goes on to say that our government is paying less interest to those foreign holders of our debt than private corporations are realizing in income from their foreign assets, and that neatly proves that your idea about the government being "in hock to foreigners" is wrong. How, exactly, it proves that he does not say.

Sam owes money to Fung Yoo. David owns property. David is earning more income from his property than Sam is paying in interest. That reduces the amount of Sam's debt to Fung Yoo? We may need some butterfly nets and white coats.

This Is My Solution

2011-12-30T08:09:00.000-08:00

I think Paul Krugman will get here eventually, so I'll beat him to the punch. If the national debt is money that the government owes to American citizens, then there is a very simple way to deal with our national debt. Just write it off. Cancel it. Erase it. To compensate the people who were holding that debt, just tell them that they don't have to pay taxes any more.

Two huge problems solved in one fell swoop; the debt problem, and the tax problem. I think I am just freaking brilliant.

If You Can't Dazzle Them With Brilliance

2011-12-30T07:40:00.000-08:00

The rest of that is “baffle them with bullshit.” Everyone thinks that Paul Krugman is doing the former, but I have a very good bullshit meter, and Paul Krugman is pegging that meter again.

He’s been making the claim that our national debt is not a problem because it’s money that we owe to ourselves. I have been unable to address that issue on his blog because you can’t comment there unless you are a New York Times subscriber, but apparently someone did challenge that position directly because he is responding with an acknowledgement that yes, a “substantial portion” of our debt is owed to foreign investors.

But his counter deals with total investment, assets v. liabilities, and since the government doesn’t invest money at all the chart he displays is clearly dealing with private investment, which relates to government debt about the same way that a Boeing 747 relates to a groundhog.

He further “clarifies” the situation by saying, “as the budget deficit has exploded, the trade deficit has actually been lower than pre-crisis” and says that proves that, “rise in debt is very much a rise in the amount Americans owe other Americans, not a matter of selling IOUs to foreigners.”

That sounds really good if you are talking to someone who doesn’t know what a treasury note is and doesn’t know that it has nothing to do with the trade deficit which involves consumer trade. Whether the trade deficit is positive or negative, and whether it is big or small, when you sell a treasury note you are effectively “selling an IOU,” and when you sell it to the government of Japan or China, you are “selling an IOU to a foreigner.”

Paul, a shovel is not the best tool to use for getting out of a hole.

Chargers In The Pro Bowl

2011-12-29T08:30:00.000-08:00

Philip Rivers is in the Pro Bowl, but I'm not sure I can figure out why. He leads the league in interceptions and his team will finish with, at best, an 8-8 record. He's 12th in quarterback rating, 7th in percentage of completion and 6th in total yards.

Antonio Gates might make a bit more sense, but even there Aaron Hernandez of the Patriots and Tony Gonzalez of Falcons have outperformed him by a wide margin, and both of those tight ends have contributed to their teams being in the playoffs.

Eric Weddle? Sure, he shares the league lead with seven interceptions, but that is by no means the only measure of a free safety. When it comes to number of tackles he's not even in the top forty rankings, and he's contributed to a pass defense that is no better than tenth in the league.

There's little to celebrate about the Chargers' season, and Pro Bowl selections that are about as reasonable as Obama's Nobel Peace Prize doesn't help much.

The Bill Will Come Due

2011-12-28T07:37:00.000-08:00

Paul Krugman has a new and rather innovative theory why we should neither stop spending government money at the present pell mell rate, nor begin taxing to cover the cost of that spending. It’s similar to his, “we will never have to pay the debt because inflation will make it disappear.”

This one is that “it’s money that we owe ourselves” and so we can simply ignore the debt. Basically, he claims, when we borrow money we are merely taking it out of one pocket and putting it in a different pocket. It’s still our money, and it doesn’t matter which pocket we have it in, so let’s keep borrowing and spending because life is good.

He is “refuting” the argument that we are leaving a huge debt to our children and there’s a certain logic to what he says, albeit a very shallow one. The government debt is in the form of treasury bonds and, while the debt is being left for our children to pay, so are the bonds being left to our children, and so it’s essentially a wash.

The first flaw is that our children will not inherit anywhere near all of the assets which he claims, since some 32% of them are currently owned by foreign governments. So the statement that “it’s money we owe ourselves” is a false premise to begin with and about a third of it is money that we owe someone else. Even when he throws that little parenthetical “mostly” in there, 32% of $14.1 trillion is a rather massive debt that we are, in fact, passing on to our children with no offsetting asset.

There is also the little fact that the people who receive government services and the ones who hold government bonds are not the same people. How many people receiving unemployment benefits and food stamps do you know who also hold treasury bonds? I didn't think so. So, yes, we are leaving a huge debt to that portion of future generations which is not rich and does not hold enough treasury bonds to offset the government services which they will lose.

The more serious flaw, however, is that we are setting future generations up to lose governmental function twofold, because when the bill comes due not only will that generation be taxed to repay the debt, but it will be taxed to pay for the services that we are presently getting without paying for them.

We absolutely are leaving a debt to future generations when we pass along to them the requirement that not only must they pay for their own needs, but they must at the same time pay for the services which we received and for which we did not pay. Paul Krugman and his cohorts may be able to play some numbers games which make that look okay on paper, but it can never be okay in practice.

The really serious flaw Krugman's argument is a moral one; the endless insistence in this nation that we receive that for which we do not pay.

The Little Comet That Could

2011-12-27T06:59:00.000-08:00

Just a week or so ago we watched a comet dive to its destruction in the Sun. Oops, not so fast; seems it survived the trip, but had its tail burned off in the process.

Well, maybe not so much. Lovejoy not only regrew its tail but did so in a rather spectacular manner. It seems that, “It’s just not wise to mess with Mother Nature.” Unpredictability reigns.

That's Earth's horizon at the bottom. Click on the image for more, and bigger pictures, which were taken from the Space Station. They are reason enough, seems to me, for maintaining that platform.

The Turner Apologentsia

2011-12-25T14:01:00.000-08:00

The media is generally showing no mercy on the heels of the latest Chargers debacle, but Norv Turner still has his apologists. This from Tim Sullivan of the San Diego Union-Tribune today,

That the Chargers were able to overcome crippling injuries on their offensive line, rebound from a six game losing streak and win three straight blowouts is a credit to Turner’s constancy and his competence.

First of all, the Green Bay Packers won playoff games and the Super Bowl last year with more injuries than we have had at any time this year. Second, two of the “three straight blowouts” were against truly pathetic opponents. Third, six losses followed by three wins is hardly “constancy.” Fourth, if the wins were a “credit to Turner’s constancy and his competence,” which isn't even English, what was the six game losing streak a “credit” to?

I cannot for the life of me figure out what these guys see in Norv Turner. His teams always stink like a long-dead fish for the first half of every season, and at no time during the season are they ever able to play a complete game. Much is being made about this season’s “fast start” with its 4-1 record, but it was nothing of the sort. Despite the record, the level of play was abysmal, with the team barely eking out narrow wins against shabby opponents. As soon as they played against quality opponents they folded like a cheap suit.

Norv Turner has never produced and will never produce a championship contender, and he needs to go.

Home For Christmas

2011-12-24T17:18:00.000-08:00

The "overnight" hospital stay turned into two full days. The surgery went fine, but in the small hours of the morning following I had another stroke. This time it was after the surgery rather than before, so I finally got that done with. The episode freaked the medical staff, as usual, more than it did me, although this one was quite a lot bigger than any that I've had before.

So I'm back at it, but sore and not feeling very well, so it may be a while before I'm doing much.

I did manage to watch the Chargers/Detroit game today, and I wonder if the Union-Tribune sports writing staff still thinks Norv Turner is some kind of coaching genius who should be retained.

Update, Sunday am: No, they don't. They are being rather brutal, in fact, in their condemnation of him. The readers comments are even more harsh, suggesting that the fans might not settle for mere firing; something involving tar, feathers and a rail might be needed.

On Hiatus

2011-12-22T07:58:00.000-08:00

Leaving for the hospital to have the surgery which was scheduled for September and postoned due to the stroke. Will be in the hospital just overnight, but the surgeon said 7-10 days recovery, so posting may be scanty for a while.

Pointing Fingers

2011-12-22T07:49:00.000-08:00

Ian Welsh is a Canadian who does not have a terribly high opinion of America or it’s people, a point of view which I am increasingly coming to share. His latest post is that the people of this nation are to blame for our own problems, that pointing fingers at the rich and at politicians is avoiding our own role in this mess, a view with which I am in complete agreement.

Congress has a 9% approval rating? Bullfeathers. We not only elected these criminals, the vast majority of them have been reelected many times. We knew precisely who they were when we reelected them, and at least 80% of them will be reelected next year.

Stolen elections? As Ian points out, possibly in 2000, but we reelected George Bush in 2004 when we knew full well that he was a murderous thug.

We cannot place blame on our elections being controlled by two parties. They are such because we don’t bother to vote in primary elections, leaving the choice of candidates in the hands of a few ideologues in the primaries and then complain about the choices we are faced with in general elections. We are faced with those choices because we did not bother to participate in the process of making the choices.

We elected a Democratic majority in 2006 based on a promise to end the war in Iraq and when they reneged on that promise and instead funded the “surge” in that misbegotten war we reelected them in even larger numbers in 2008. And look where that got us.

We reelect federal legislators based on the amount of federal pork they bring home to the state, and reelect them because we fear that a “freshman” will not have the power to get the “home state” projects passed. The legislators even say that their responsibility is to “represent the interests of the people of my state” above the best interest of the nation, turning us into a nation divided against itself based on greed.

The people of this nation vote for tax cuts, and only for tax cuts. The claim they want a balanced budget, but they fight tooth and nail to prevent any reduction in spending. In California, the vast majority of propositions which require the government to spend money pass with healthy margins, and 90% of those which raise revenue fail to pass.

Obama’s popularity is rising big time again, and over what? Health care reform did not do it, financial reform did not do it, the stimulus did not do it, repealing DADT did not do it, ending the war in Iraq did not do it, a new stimulus this year did not even get out of the gate, but a 2% tax cut has made him wildly popular.

It is not the wealthy 1% who put us in this mess, it is our government, and it is we the people of the United States who elected this government and who have kept it in office. We have the government and the economy which we deserve.

Seriously?

2011-12-21T19:06:00.000-08:00

After weeks of carping about the coaching failures of a Chargers six game losing streak, the team wins three games, two of them against pitifully weak opponents, and suddenly Norv Turner is a coaching genius whose team would probably have a record of 4-10 if it were not for his brilliant and dazzling leadership and play calling genius.

Give me a break. This is a team whose performance routinely stinks like skunk roadkill for the first half of every season. The Green Bay Packers won the Super Bowl with more injuries throughout the playoffs than the Chargers have had this season. Turner's team has beaten two powder puffs and a team that has not won on the road all season, and suddenly he's a genius.

Publishing Ignorance

2011-12-21T09:53:00.000-08:00

The San Diego Union-Tribune published a "letter to the editor" today which expressed gratitude that military retirement pay is being increased the first of the year, but bemoaned the "fact" that the increase would be "wiped out" by the failure of Congress to pass the most recent tax cut because military retirement pay is taxed.

The Union-Tribune did not point out in an editorial rebuttal, which I believe it should have, that the tax cut in question is a reduction of Social Security withholding and that, while military retirement pay is indeed subject to federal income tax, it is not subject to Social Security withholding, and that the "tax cut" in question will actually not affect military retirement pay.

The Rest Of The Story

2011-12-21T07:43:00.000-08:00

Nick Turse writes a rather odd piece which seems to tell us that the U.S. drone program is headed for failure because no fewer than 13 of its drones “crashed in spectacular fashion” this year. I’m guessing Nick would say that the Ford F-150 is a massive failure as well, given how many of those trucks have crashed in spectacular fashion.

His report has lots of big numbers, like that the MQ-1 Predator flew 228,000 hours this year so far, but is remarkably lacking in actually useful numbers, like how many drones that was. Some thirteen drones crashed, but at least 182 did not crash as far as I can tell, and probably quite a few more than that, because the Air Force had 195 of these things in 2009 but continued to take delivery of them until March of this year. Even with the 2009 count, though, that makes a 6.7% crash rate, which I’d consider to be somewhat less than disastrous.

Apparently his "crashed in spectacular fashion" is based on the fact that each crash caused $2 million or more in damage, but since the Predator itself costs $4.2 million I'm not sure how "spectacular" the crash has to be to exceed $2 million in damage. It doesn't even have to total the aircraft.

It also works out to one crash every 17,538 hours of operation. I suspect Ford would be delighted if one of its vehicles crashed only every 17,538 hours of operation, since that's almost precisely two years. The planes operated by airlines do better, of course, but then they have pilots. Ones who are not texting while driving, and are not drunk. Okay, I might be getting a little bit off track here, and maybe not making much sense, but then, I'm not sure Nick Turse is either.

Anyhow. Compare that 6.7% with the beginning of the program when, in 2001-2002, 50% of the drones crashed. I’d say the drone program is improving rather spectacularly, wouldn’t you?

I’m all in favor of criticizing the government and the military, and I am strongly opposed to drone warfare. But let’s oppose it for valid reasons, like the fact that it too often kills civilians, and that it violates the sovereignty of nations with which we are not at war. We just need to stop this endless nonsense of making up bogus arguments because we don’t like something.

Iraq Redux

2011-12-20T10:49:00.000-08:00

Leon Panetta is one scary dude. CBS News carried a piece last night that was an excerpt of an interview with him for 60 Minutes. In it he claimed that Iran has the capability to “assemble” a nuclear weapon in a year or less and that “we will not tolerate” Iran possessing a nuclear weapon. Asked what his reaction to an Israeli strike on Iran would be, he replied that, “We share the same common concern. The United States does not want Iran to develop a nuclear weapon. That's a red line for us and that's a red line, obviously, for the Israelis. If we have to do it we will deal with it.”

He went on to use the infamous, “no options are off the table.”

I find it rather repugnant to hear the leaders of my country talking about what they will or will not “tolerate” another sovereign nation doing within the borders of their own country.

I find it both repugnant and frightening to hear the leaders of my country threatening to commit acts of war against another sovereign nation, especially on unsubstantiated charges of “weapons of mass destruction” programs which most of the world finds not credible. Did we learn nothing from Iraq and, “We don’t want the next evidence to be a mushroom cloud” rhetoric?

Update, 9:00PM: According to the NY Times, aides in the Pentagon are now backpedaling furiously from Leon Panetta's remarks; No one-year timeline, no war, no "all options are on the table." Hmmm. Interesting, if not altogether reassuring.

Role Reversal

2011-12-20T09:22:00.000-08:00

I’m not sure I even understand the conversation any more. Democrats are now heroes for passing a tax cut, which used to be what Republicans did while Democrats railed against the folly of repeatedly cutting taxes. In fact, Obama is even now railing about how the Republicans ruined the economy by cutting taxes, while at the same time demanding that Republicans pass this Democratic tax cut.

Republicans, meanwhile, are being excoriated because they want to pass the exact same tax cut for a full year rather than merely for two months.

So a two-month tax cut is a good thing because we cannot let American working men and women “face a tax increase” on January 1st but a twelve-month tax cut tax cut is a bad thing because, apparently, we must have American working men and women “face a tax increase” on March 1st.

Somebody needs to explain to me why a "tax increase" on January 1st is a bad thing while a "tax increase" on March 1st is a good thing, because I’m not sure I’m following the logic on that.

Democrats Never Make This Point

2011-12-19T10:39:00.000-08:00

And I'm not sure why. Republicans keep honking about "big government" being a bad thing, but for a nation this size it seems to me that we damned well better have a big government. For one of the largest nations in the world, and the nation with the world's largest economy and by far the world's largest military, to have a small government would be utterly stupid.

Yes, I know that's inane. That's my point. So is the Republican yammer about "big government."

And, as Barney Frank points out, it's Republicans blatting against over- regulation who want to pass laws regulating what we can and cannot do in the privacy our own bedrooms. Morons.

"We're Just Playing Better"

2011-12-19T06:34:00.000-08:00

One certainly cannot argue with that statement, made by Norv Turner, Philip Rivers and Vincent Jackson after the Chargers not only defeated the Ravens but utterly dominated them and destroyed them in every aspect of the game. The Chargers punter, for instance, never took the field for the entire game, while the Ravens scored only once, other than a meaningless touchdown late in the fourth quarter.

The question one needs to ask is, "Why not in September and October?"

Fan are no longer clamoring for Norv Turner to be fired, dazzled by the brilliance of his play calling the last couple of weeks. News flash; his play calling has not changed and the past couple of weeks is further proof that he does need to be fired.

This is a team overawed by perception of it's own level of talent, believing that it does not need to apply itself to win against an average opponent. When backed against the wall or facing an above average opponent, they wake up and actually focus on the game, but until then they are like rich kids in a private school, counting on entitlement to carry them through. That is a leadership problem, and Norv Turner is that leader.

Chargers Preview

2011-12-18T09:13:00.000-08:00

Nick Canepa and Tim Sullivan of the San Diego Union Tribune are picking the Chargers to win tonight over the Ravens. I'm not saying that it cannot happen, "any given Sunday" and all that, but those two guys are delusional to expect for it to happen.

The Chargers have not yet won a game against a team with a winning record, and only one of the teams they have won against has a winning record even now, that being Denver. The team with the best record against whom the Chargers won was the Bills, at 5-7, and that team had a 5-game losing streak at the time. The Chargers won against a record of 9-23, and those teams have a current record of 28-51.

And these writers are picking the Chargers to beat a team that not only has a record of 10-3, but has the third ranked defense in the league and the second ranked running game. I'll be happy if they do, but I am not predicting that they will.

You Have To Be Kidding Me

2011-12-18T08:07:00.000-08:00

~~Congress~~ The Senate extended the payroll tax cut, which I consider to be of questionable value, and unemployment benefits, which I consider to be vitally necessary, for two fucking months. Has there ever been a more feckless action performed by a more thoroughly useless organization?

Update, Sunday: And the House cannot even agree to that. Congress is about as useful as putting screen doors between compartments in a submarine. Teats on a boar hog work better. A bucket of warm vomit is more attractive. Pissing into the wind is about as pleasant. And your average pedophile has more decency.

Things I'd Never Heard Of

2011-12-18T06:59:00.000-08:00

First of all, I'd never heard of R+L Transport, who sponsored the New Orleans Bowl, which I'd also never heard of. I have heard of New Orleans, of course, my mother and one sister were born there, and my parents met there while my father was in medical school at Tulane.

Apparently the Aztecs had never heard of the concept of pass defense.

Actually, that's a bit unfair, since for quite a few of the Ragin Cajun catches the nearest Aztec was not only pass defending, he was comitting pass interference, with the penalty declined since the receiver made the catch. The Aztecs did, however, surrender 470 passing yards in the game, and three touchdowns through the air.

I'd never heard of a dead ball penalty for "illegal spinning," and apparently neither had any of the announcers, since they didn't explain it to us. It turns out the call was actually "illegal stemming," which I've also never heard of, and which doesn't make much more sense. It seems it consists of the defense charging toward the offensive team before the snap in an attempt the get them to move before the snap and trigger a "false start" penalty.

That raises a question or two, of course, one being why does everyone else simply call an "offsides" penalty for that? Why is moving toward the other team called "stemming," and if it's illegal when attempting to make them move, thus the "illegal stemming" call, when is it legal?

Anyway, San Diego State managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory last night. That "illegal stemming" call turned a 55-yard field goal attempt into a 50-yard one which won the game with the clock expired.

This Is Tough?

2011-12-17T08:39:00.000-08:00

President Obama may not strut around the deck of an aircraft carrier wearing a flight suit, but he has his moments. At a news conference last week he had the following exchange with the Associated Press,

Ben Feller, AP: “Republican candidates have taken aim at your approach to foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East and Israel, and have accused you of appeasement.”

President: “Ask Osama bin Laden and the 22 out of 30 al Queda leaders who’ve been taken out of the field whether I engage in appeasement. Or whoever’s left out there.”

So our president’s perception of “foreign policy” is assassination by military incursion into nations with which we are not at war, and by unmanned drone. That’s his response to a question about foreign policy.

Democrats are cheering about how decisive and tough that statement makes him, just as Republicans swooned over George Bush on the carrier’s flight deck. Why do we fall for such dreck? Riding in a jet wearing a flight suit is not tough, and neither is the Mafiaesque telling of a general to, “Go kill that guy and dump his body in the ocean.”

Chris Hitchens

2011-12-17T07:39:00.000-08:00

I was not going to comment on his death. I loved the way he used words, but loathed the content of his commentary. He always took the wrong side of the debate, and he always verbally destroyed his opponent. I will, actually, miss his oratory but my cardiologist will probably not.

The one good comment about his passing that I read was someone who visualized him and Tim Russert forced to sit together in Heaven's waiting room for an eon or so. Now, isn't that an image?

Campaign Rhetoric

2011-12-16T07:19:00.000-08:00

If you thought that deceptive rhetoric ended when George Bush left the White House, think again. This was yesterday in the New York Times.

“Congress should not and cannot go on vacation before they have made sure that working families aren’t seeing their taxes go up by $1,000 and those who are out there looking for work don’t see their unemployment insurance expire,” President Obama said Thursday as he encouraged Congress to reach a compromise.

One minor point is that what states provide is unemployment insurance; what the federal government provides is extended unemployment benefits.
It is not insurance at all, because insurance payouts are the result of premiums paid into the program. State benefits are paid from premiums paid by employers, federal benefits are paid from general revenue. The President’s phrasing here is less deception than it is merely ignorant. It’s
a minor point, but I expect better from the chief executive of my nation.

The bigger point is his argument about a tax increase and his claim of its effect on a “struggling economy.” Republicans have long claimed that tax cuts stimulate the economy, while Democrats and economists have long provided convincing evidence that they harm the government more than they help the economy, and from the day he took office Obama has embraced a policy of repeated tax cuts with all the fervor of the most ardent Republican.

And what he’s talking about is not a tax increase, it’s the expiration of a tax cut, so he is not arguing against a tax increase, he is arguing in favor of the repeat of a previous tax cut which is expiring. And again, tax cuts are a Republican policy, not a Democratic one.

He might more accurately phrase it, “...working families aren’t returned to a policy of saving for their future retirement.” Or, “...working families aren’t required to pay for future benefits.” Or, “...we extend the Obama policy of government borrowing money to pay for people to retire.” But don’t give me that nonsense about a tax increase.

What is "Normal Growth?"

2011-12-15T08:15:00.000-08:00

Matthew Lynn at Market Watch describes the similarity between the current economic conditions and the depression, not of the 1930’s, but the one which began in 1873 and lasted 23 years. I’m not sure that I agree with all of the five points that he makes, purportedly in support of his theory that this recession will not end until 2031.

One of his points made is, for instance, that recoveries can take a long time. How is that a valid comparison to these economic times? It’s nothing more than an observation of historic fact, and a pretty obvious one at that. So what? It offers no evidence that this one will take that long.

He does, however say in connection with that, “when their origins are in a debt bubble they should be measured in decades not years.” Interesting point, but I’m not sure that it needs to be true. The current recession was certainly triggered by a debt bubble and has lasted for a long time (depending, of course, on how you define “recession”), but it has done so because we have never dealt with the debt. It has neither been paid back or written off, but is still being held and, as such, is still an anchor preventing recovery. My theory is that if we had allowed the companies which were financially underwater to collapse and written off all of the bad debt the 1% would be considerably less rich and we would be well on our way to recovery by now. I could be wrong, but there are a lot of people who think I’m not. I didn’t pull that idea out of my ass.

“[W]hen their origins are in a debt bubble they should be measured in decades not years” because nobody wants to deal with the debt, which means writing it off. If it could be paid back, it would not have caused a recession, so forget getting it paid back. It is bad debt and the people who hold it need to take the loss. Instead, we impose even more loss on the taxpayer and make the whole mess worse instead of better by throwing borrowed money at the holders of the bad debt, who now have a bunch of cash in one hand and a bunch of bad debt notes in the other.

He does say one thing that is, I think, brilliantly on point, “The parallel with the 1930s is dangerous, because it has convinced bankers and policy makers that if you can just pump up demand, everything will be okay.”

It’s convinced economists like Paul Krugman, who has an indomitable ability to look at events and draw the wrong conclusions. The sun came up at 6:05am and there was an earthquake at 6:06am, therefor the sunrise caused the earthquake. Likewise, World War Two caused the end of the Great Depression. Or, New Deal spending did that, depending on which theory he’s on at the moment. Of course, New Deal spending ended in 1937 and the economy went back into recession, which would prove to most people that “creating demand” actually doesn’t make everything okay, but…

World War Two created demand all right, but it did that by destroying most of the civilized world. It did not create current demand in terms of prosperity, my parents can tell you that for damn sure. Rebuilding the world after that war destroyed it created plenty of demand and built prosperity at a tremendous rate after that war ended.

If I’m building houses and the market has become so glutted that there is no demand for new houses, my business is going to suffer a depression. I can create demand by blowing up my neighbor’s house, can I not? He’ll need a new house and I get to build it, so there you are. That’s what World war Two did. I doubt we’re going to see anything like that to create a demand big enough to end this recession.

“The global economy,” he says, “will eventually get back to normal growth,” but I’m not so sure it will. When you start putting beans into a jar, for a long time it appears that there is no time in the future that you will ever have to stop putting beans in that jar. But the capacity of that jar is not infinite and at some point it fills up. There are some 7 billion people on this planet, and I’m not sure that 7 billion people can live the same way that 5 billion did. I suspect that what we have been defining as “normal growth” may have become “unsustainable growth,” in which case it isn’t coming back.

Where's the "Fraud"

2011-12-14T21:31:00.000-08:00

CBS Evening News tonight opened an item on the Texas A&M band story with the statement that a fraud inquiry had been opened, but then said nothing about it in the story itself, merely describing various hazing rituals imposed on new band members. The website synopsis for tonight's news includes the same teaser, "Authorities looking into the death of a band member at Florida A&M open a fraud inquiry" but the report, again, contains no discussion of fraud. Searching for news of fraud connected to Texas A&M, I find a story dated May 2009, and several in June 2010, but nothing reporting in 2011 by anyone. Wierd.

One More Time On Football

2011-12-14T08:06:00.000-08:00

The local news was, not surprisingly, filled with glee about the Chargers defense not allowing a touchdown in 7 of the last 8 quarters. I'm not sure how impressive that is, considering that it was against one team with a record of 3-8 and another which had a five-game losing streak going. The Chargers face Baltimore Sunday night, which is 10-3 and has a four game winning streak going. Um...

San Diego State football goes to the Big East in 2013. You've already heard my opinion of that. Now we find out that all of State's other sports will go to the Big West. The what? I had to look it up, since I have never heard of it.

Oh good, our basketball program will be facing such titans as Cal Poly and Long Beach State. Those are a couple of the big, better known schools in the conference. Steve Fisher says that it won't hurt recruiting. I guess he had to say that; the question is, does he believe it?

My other issue lies with having football and other sports being in different conferences. Kansas, for instance, has mostly had pretty crappy football teams but after losing to Kansas State on the gridiron the Jayhawks could usually take solace in knowing that come basketball season they would beat the pants off of the Wildcats. When the two sports are in different conferences...

Pithy Comment

2011-12-13T07:34:00.000-08:00

From Ian Welsh in a comment thread at his site, "Obama has a long history of proposing left-wing shit he knows won’t pass, and which if there is any danger of it passing, he will sandbag himself."

Indeed. I wish I had been able to put it as succinctly. It took me several posts, each of them several paragraphs, and he summed it up in one terse sentence.

Foot In Mouth Disease

2011-12-12T12:05:00.000-08:00

While Obama is undoubtedly intelligent and makes great speeches, although now that he is in campaign mode I don’t listen to him much, he is capable of saying things that are remarkably tone deaf.

For instance he was at the Army-Navy football game and made a very positive impression. He spent half of the game with the Navy and the other half with the Army, did not inject politics while he was on air, and seemed to just be having a good time. He did say one thing in his initial address which grated on me, however.

“The highest honor and greatest privilege which goes with the office which I hold is serving as Commander in Chief of our men and women in uniform.”

That’s one of those things that sounds good at first impression, but after a moment one begins to realize that he actually insulted most of the nation. I used to be one of those “men in uniform,” but I haven’t been in some fifty years, so what am I to him now, some sort of collateral duty? Serving internationally as the chief executive of the world’s largest economy is, what, some sort of side job? These are things that he does when he has spare time because what he’s really “into” is being the number one man in the world’s largest military?

He is accusing the Republicans of “raising taxes” because they are balking at renewing the temporary payroll tax cut which he sponsored, but two years ago he was disparaging them for using “deceptive rhetoric” when they accused him of wanting to raise taxes when he was declining to renew Republican taxes which were expiring. Why is it “deceptive” when they do it but not when he does it?

When he was accused by a reporter of being “soft on terrorism” he responded by suggesting that the reporter should “ask Osama bin Laden and Anwar al Awlawki” if he was soft on terrorism. You know what? Bragging about assassination is about the last thing that I want my President to be doing, unless it’s joking about assassination.

Republicans aren’t the only ones speak unadvisedly.

Cleaning Up The Swamp

2011-12-12T07:00:00.000-08:00

The problem is not economic inequality. The problem is not that the rich have too much money, or how they got that money. The problem is part of what they do with that money. They buy legislators.

You are not going to get the rich to quit buying legislators by telling them to stop doing it. People do not stop doing what is working for them until it stops working for them. Pitching tents in public spaces and screaming at rich people that you don’t like them may feel good, but it does not make anything stop working for rich people.

We have to make the sale of legislators stop working for them and, more importantly, we have to make it stop working for the legislators.

The argument has been made that if we throw these corrupt legislators out that we will simply have more corrupt legislators take their place and, furthermore, that even when an honest person is elected to office he becomes corrupted by the cesspool which is the seat of our nation's government. Perhaps that is so.

We can correct that, and the way we do it is to not merely throw the legislators out of office but to prosecute them for being unduly influenced by the money they receive from the rich, for taking bribes to act against public interest. To prosecute them for taking bribes to operate against the interest of the people who are paying their salaries as public servants. It is fairly certain that the example will in fairly short order clean up the swamp. Taking bribes is one thing when the worst you risk is leaving office with a pocket full of money. It’s something else entirely when you risk prison.

The rich cannot buy legislators when legislators are not for sale.

Oh Keep It Under Your Mattress

2011-12-11T07:01:00.000-08:00

CBS News did a piece the other night about how the collapse of MF Global had wreaked havoc with farmers who had put their cash reserves, which they “were saving to buy feed and seed” into that financial firm. “They thought their money was as safe with MF Global,” the reporter intones, “as
it was at the local bank.”

Oh, give me a break. They thought nothing of the sort. They put the money at MF Global because they were greedy and they got burned. The local bank was offering low interest rates while the New York financial house was offering high returns, and the farmers wanted the extra money.

Everybody who puts money into investment has to know that high return on investment is a trade off against risk, and that safety and return exist in inverse proportion to each other. If they don’t know that, then they should keep their damn money in a sock under their mattress and allow it to lose value.

Endless Tax Cuts

2011-12-10T05:51:00.000-08:00

Obama and the Democrats are still flogging the payroll tax cut and, at the risk of sounding like an elitist Republican jackass, which I most emphatically am not, I’m not all that crazy about the tax cut itself, and I have problems with this rhetoric on several grounds. I’ll try to explain.

The tax cut weakens the Social Security program, which is under heavy attack and doesn’t need weakening. I understand that that funding is being replaced from the general revenue stream, but separateness from general revenue is one of the program’s greatest strengths, and reducing it at this point is very bad judgement.

I’m not crazy about tax cuts in general. After eight years of Bush tax cutting do we really need four years, or perhaps eight years, of Obama tax cutting? We cannot seriously continue to believe that tax cuts serve any useful purpose. After almost twelve years of cutting taxes and no gains in any dimension we have to realize at some point that they are merely self destructive pandering to the voters.

This tax cut is being promoted for the express purpose of “giving people more money to spend,” and that strikes me as contributing to an American attitude that is unhealthy and which is a good part of what got us into this hole to begin with. It is a different wording of George Bush’s “go shopping.” This national obsession with spending is beginning to sound a little sick, really. What do Americans do? They spend money.

Finally, I have a major problem with Obama’s insistence that the payroll tax cut be “paid for” with a tax increase on the rich. The whole concept behind the formation of Social Security was that it was people putting their own money into a fund upon which they would retire, such that in old age they would not be subject to the charity of others but could retire with dignity on their own resources. Obama thinks we no longer need to do that, that the retirement of the middle class should now be funded by the rich, and I find that idea deeply repugnant.

The American people, of course, love it. "I can buy a television and a car, because some rich guy is contributing to my retirement fund."

I am all in favor of a progressive income tax, and I think it should be significantly more progressive than it is now. People should pay to support the government proportionally to the degree to which they benefit from the operation of that government. But the endless prating about tax cuts, the standalone rhetoric of “tax the rich,” and the idea that the rich should provide funding for the retirement of the middle class are all concepts that are not consistent with what I perceive the American vision to be.

Well, He's Consistent

2011-12-09T21:29:00.000-08:00

Obama has one to add to his "We're denying them space in which to plan their attacks" with his stance banning the Plan B contraception bill. He says that little girls shouldn’t be able, “alongside bubble gum or batteries -- be able to buy a medication that potentially, if not used properly, could end up having an adverse effect."

Indeed. If you consider making them not being pregnant an adverse affect. And since the pills cost $45 per pill, I doubt that "little girls" are going to be buying truckloads of them with their bubble gum. And when is the last time you saw batteries next to the bubble gum in a store?

They are also very difficult to use properly, you know, and the instructions are very difficult to comprehend. "Take one pill."

And this is the president known for his towering intelligence.

Double Standard?

2011-12-09T10:21:00.000-08:00

I have been waiting for outcries about "income inequality" to erupt over the baseball contract of Albert Pujols, but none have been forthcoming.

Apparently $100 million bonuses for bankers are an abomination and evil, while $250 million for a baseball player is just fine. Okay, if you say so.

It Is The Season

2011-12-09T08:08:00.000-08:00

I’ve never before seen the actual numbers on the “seasonal adjustments” that the government uses for various things, but I’ve always distrusted them. I basically don’t believe anything that the government, its representatives, or its politicians say to me about pretty much anything, and I’ve assumed that “seasonal adjustments” were the government’s way of concealing bad news to assure that present elected officials would be reelected.

So when The Market Ticker provided a link to the “unadjusted” numbers for yesterday it came as no surprise to me to see what the revealed.

The market was ecstatic that “seasonally adjusted initial claims” for unemployment compensation was the lowest in nine months, at 381,000 for the week and that, further, it had dropped from 404,000 the previous week. Joy from all sides, everyone, and reelect Obama in a landslide.

But wait. The “unadjusted initial claims” for unemployment, meaning the actual number of people who walked in the door and filled out applications because they lost their jobs, was 523,642 for the week and was an increase of 151,000 over the previous week.

Well now, isn’t that interesting? Instead of being a bit under 400,000, it was well over 500,000 and instead of decreasing by 23,000 it increased by 151,000. That’s one hell of a “seasonal adjustment” isn’t it? What “season” are we in that requires a 27% adjustment? And of course I know this is a stupid question, but it’s rhetorical, why are only the “seasonally adjusted” numbers reported?

I’ll bet the title led you to think this was going to be a Christmas story.

A Man's Actions Speak For Him

2011-12-08T08:23:00.000-08:00

Salon has headlines reading “The evolution of a populist” and “The Obama we’ve been waiting for.” Robert Reich is swooning over “The Most Important Economic Speech of His Presidency.” While I will not say that what Obama is saying is bad stuff; people, he is campaigning for reelection. He is giving us the same rhetoric he gave us for an entire year during 2008. We loved it then, and we love it now, but are we going to love what we get during the four years of his second term?

Well, how much of what he said in 2008 turned out to be real? No, we’re not going to play word games about promises kept; like a promise to end the war in Iraq and troops coming home by Christmas, a promise made by him and kept by Bush. How much of what he portrayed himself to be did he turn out actually to be? Why, in the face of pretty speeches during campaign season do we suddenly forget almost three years of corporatism and catering to the wealthy?

His actions speak so loudly I cannot hear what he says.

Heat Is Good

2011-12-08T06:40:00.000-08:00

We have heat. That's fortunate, since the silly frost advisory is continuing and it is 37 degrees again this morning. I care a lot less, what with having a working furnace. Interesting; I would not have guessed it, but some of our local dog walkers actually own parkas.

The new furnace came with a CO detector, so we are now legal, and a programmable thermostat. So much for my wife turning the thing down to an arctic setting when I'm not looking; she doesn't know how. Heh. One of the few instances in our house where I hold the power.

Now, if I can just figure out how to reset the damned thing myself...

But This Is Progress

2011-12-07T10:56:00.000-08:00

I’m not sure this is entirely the right target yet, but it one whole hell of a lot better than Kumbaya gatherings in public parks with tents, campfires and singalongs. Going after legislators themselves would be my preference, but targeting lobbyists is definitely a worthwhile endeavor.

Update: Aha, and it gets better! They are going after legislators.

More than a thousand activists and constituents came together for a “Take Back the Capitol” action, as 99 or more delegations descended on congressional offices, demanding meetings with members of Congress...

This is getting better. I might be beginning to think this could actually accomplish something. It's early, but it's a start.

Not Exactly Progress

2011-12-07T09:03:00.000-08:00

The San Diego Union-Tribune is in new hands as of yesterday, when Doug Manchester took over control. This is a local guy famous for building hotels, the major one of which was boycotted due to his financial support for the infamous Proposition 8. That may give you an idea what is going to happen to what was already pretty much a rag, useful only for wrapping dead fish.

I Give Up

2011-12-07T07:23:00.000-08:00

I'm just not going to even try to make sense of it any more. San Diego State football will be in the Big East Conference, while all of its other sports will be in the Western Athletic Conference. What part of that makes any sense, other than the WAC? Splitting the sports into different conferences is pretty bizarre but, the Big East? Does anyone realize how far West SDSU is? It can go no farther without falling into the furshlugginer ocean. Well, okay, it's actually the Pacific but...

Oh, That's Good Timing

2011-12-06T18:48:00.000-08:00

The guy came to inspect our 35-year-old furnace today. The verdict: toast.
It is so bad, in fact, that he red tagged it, so we have no heat tonight. The weather forecast for tonight:

Do I have to tell you how rare it is to have frost advisories in San Diego? The good news is that a crew will be here tomorrow morning to install a new furnace and air conditioner. The bad news is that we will have to cough up some $9000 for that exercise.

Update, 6:30 Wednesday morning: Ah yes, I now recall that our fireplace is cleverly designed to send all of the heat up the chimney so that we can admire the flames visually without having to run the air conditioner too much. This is, after all, Southern California. Shit. I am considering setting a chair or two on fire in the bedroom. I am too old for this and there is a reason, after all, why I live in Southern California.

Where the temperature is currently a toasty 37 degrees. Shit.

Even New Planets Are Not Immune

2011-12-06T10:42:00.000-08:00

Liberal blogs are so filled with hatred for Republicans that even the discovery of a new planet is used as an opportunity to mock and criticize the GOP. After citing the discovery of a planet which might have an Earth-like climate, a Balloon Juice poster went on a tirade about how the GOP would stand in the way of us traveling to that planet and would demand an end to Social Security, etc. Dude, it's just a new planet light years away, and has nothing to do with politics. You need a hobby.

Big Win. Big, Big Win.

2011-12-06T07:06:00.000-08:00

When I predicted that the Chargers could lose to the Jaguars I had never watched the Jaguars play football. After last night I still have never watched the Jaguars play football. That team is an embarrassment to the NFL and should have its license rescinded. Games against them should only played on an exhibition basis, something like the Washington Generals against the Harlem Globetrotters. They should use a 5-6-0 defense, since if their defensive backfield ever served any useful purpose being on the field, it certainly was not apparent to me. The boos from the stands diminished only because the fans were leaving in droves.

Yes, the Chargers won, but it was a little hard to really enjoy it. It was like winning a battle of wits with Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann. It was like Lyoto Machida winning a fist fight with a six year old. It was like LeBron James winning a one-on-one with a fifth grader. I mean, you don’t really celebrate something like that. You shrug, say “Oh really?” and move on.

And I find watching MNF on ESPN excruciatingly painful. In part it is the jabbering of the talking heads, which is a bit more obnoxious than most because there are three of them to the normal two, and they call each other “Jaws” and “Coach” and engage in endless adolescent repartee about their good old days when they themselves were actual jocks.

The other issue is the endless commercials, which are interrupted once in a while for a football play. I lost count of the number of times that we would return from a string of commercials, there would be one football play and we would return to another string of commercials. Sometimes they repeated that sequence two and three times in a row. All televised games have commercials, of course, but ESPN is vastly more obnoxious with theirs than anyone else.

Hope Is Eternal

2011-12-06T06:40:00.000-08:00

Hope is now worth actual money. Reuters, no less, has a headline today that reads, “Wall Street set to edge up on euro zone reform hopes.” What’s really bizarre is that it is actually a credit downgrade upon which those hopes are pinned, because the article goes on (emphasis mine),

Stocks were set to edge higher at the open on Tuesday as investors hoped S&P's downgrade warning for the euro zone would help force budget changes at a European Union summit this week.

The illogic of this whole concept is stunning, of course. When the credit agencies were threatening to downgrade US credit there was huge alarm that it would cause the bond market to go crazy and the stock market to collapse. In the actual event, of course, everyone yawned and pretty much nothing happened because investors figured the credit rating agencies didn’t know what the hell they were talking bout.

Now the thinking resembles a billiard shot; being that the downgrade will alarm not the bond market but the governments and will cause the governments to do something about their budgets. That action would please the hell out of the bond buying deficit hawks, of course, but it would also trigger a recession and crash the stock market, but naturally “no one could have seen that coming.” Fabulous.

We won’t go into hope and its effect on general elections.

Our Big Chance

2011-12-05T09:18:00.000-08:00

With Kansas City beating Chicago, the Chargers now have it within their power to take sole possesion of last place in their division by losing to the Jaguars tonight. I am just breathless with anticipation. I believe our plucky little team can pull it off, despite being favored by three whole points over that hapless 3-8 team.

A panel of experts on the teevee last night was opining that the Chargers did not really need to stop the Jaguars' star running back, since our run defense is pathetic in any case, but could win by focusing on their inept passing offense. I'm like, "What?" If Maurice Jones-Drew runs for 500 yards and ten touchdowns, how is stopping them from passing going to help us?

Oh well, onward and upward. Eli Manning lost, but he didn't look bad enough in the process to suit me. I don't know how Green Bay is undefeated with that defense, because it absolutely stinks. They play a real football team and they will get creamed. The Cowboys lost to Arizona. Really? Denver's defense finally met it's match, but this time their offense finally got in gear and Tebow actually played quarterback, going 10 of 15 for over 200 yards and two well-thrown touchdowns.

And, sure enough, we do get LSU - Alabama for the title. Geaux Tigers.

Time Frame Matters

2011-12-05T08:16:00.000-08:00

Tom Dispatch has an article regarding the ongoing deterioration of our planet, and I guarantee it will be as thoroughly ignored as everything else on the topic has been, for one simple reason. It starts with, "...the International Energy Agency suggested that, by century’s end, the planet’s temperature could rise by a staggering 6º Celsius." That will cause 90% of the country's population to stop reading right there.

The end of this century is ninety years away, and nobody cares what happens ninety years from now. They should care, of course they should, but they don't. Not only that, but they have no clue what "Celsius" is and that makes them care even less. You're not even speaking their language.

If people cared about how future generations are going to live they would not be demanding tax cuts and continued government spending. We would not have a demand for lower taxes while we have an infrastructure that is crumbling to rubble in front of our eyes. We would not be demanding foreign policy that creates long term enemies to destroy imaginary threats.

We give lip service to the future and live for the moment, bankrupting ourselves in every dimension for the sake of instant gratification.

If you want to address the climate change issue you cannot talk about what it's going to do ninety years from now. No one will act on that. You need to show that it is damaging all of us today. Not just Texas, we don't care about Texas unless we live there, and too few of us do. All of us and this year, then we'll worry about it.

American Exceptionalism

2011-12-04T07:16:00.000-08:00

So, you have some visitors in your home and they start kicking the hell out of your dog. You tell them that you don’t want them doing that and tell them to stop. They say no. You tell them that you are really fond of your dog, that this is your home, not theirs, and that you want them to stop kicking your dog. They say that kicking your dog makes them feel good and continue to kick your dog. You can’t throw them out, even though it’s your house, because they are bigger than you are and, they claim, they are doing you a favor by being in your house.

In what universe does that make any kind of sense?

In the universe where we are making night raids on homes in Afghanistan and the government there has been trying for years to get us to stop doing it, with no success. Instead, we make even more of them, to the point where we average ten raids every single night. We say that it serves our purpose, has a “high risk to reward ratio,” and we really don’t care that it’s their damn country.

We are back into the Vietnam-era realm of “body count warfare” now, which is a sure sign that we are losing the war, and the claim is made, notably by unnamed “officials,” that, “Thousands of Taliban insurgents, hundreds of them midlevel commanders, have been captured or killed in the raids.”

What they don’t say, something that is reported only by overseas sources, is that 90% of those captured turn out to be completely unconnected to the Taliban and are released the next day. But we are generating numbers, as we did with the Vietnam body counts, to justify our military activity and to secure promotions for the officers conducting it. The fact that the host nation doesn’t like it does not concern us much.

More of the much admired American exceptionalism.

(Football) Tigers Redux

2011-12-03T19:10:00.000-08:00

Once again, after trailing 10-0 midway through the second quarter and failing to achieve a first down for the entire first half, the LSU Tigers wind up beating Georgia by a final score of 42-10. It must be something in the bayou water down there. And yes, it would not surprise me a bit to learn that Baton Rouge football players drink directly from the swamps. You should see the things that they eat. If it doesn't eat them first, they will fry it up in bacon drippings and eat it.

Cause and Effect

2011-12-03T08:16:00.000-08:00

Krugman, Baker and others are claiming that the current deficit and debt are not caused by a combination of excessive spending and inadequate taxes, but rather by the recession, which caused tax revenues to collapse and at the same time drove upward the costs of the “social safety net.” I'm calling nonsense on that, and here’s why.

Keynesian theory, even if you subscribe to it and for the moment let’s suppose that we do, says that the government should spend during lean times to support and “restart” the economy, and that it should pay off that debt and build a surplus during prosperous times, sort on the "save for a rainy day” concept. The current debt and deficit is caused by our failure to do the latter in the 90's and the first decade of this century.

The Great Depression and World War 2 caused us to build up a huge debt. Contrary to common Keynesian thought, the latter did not cause us to recover from the former, it added further to our economic woe, because we spent heavily to win that war, expenses which were not countered by tax revenue. An economic boom in the 50’s and 60’s brought our debt under control, but the growth of the Cold War exacerbated it once again.

The Clinton Administration raised taxes and balanced the budget, and then the Bush tax cuts were passed because we were developing excess revenue in a booming economy. Rather than pay down the debt, we reduced taxes for the specific purpose of not paying down the debt. I do not recall any Keynesian economists howling with outrage when we did that. Keynesians are only outraged by spending cuts, not by tax cuts.

Had we left the tax rates where they were and used the excess revenue to pay down the debt, then the economic downturn of 2008 would have caused far less governmental revenue problems. Instead of turning a small deficit into a huge one, it would have turned a surplus into a small deficit, and the debt would be far smaller and growing at a much slower rate.

So how do we respond to the deficit and debt in the midst of the economic disaster? Of course, the way we deal with everything, tax cuts. Payroll tax cuts, business tax cuts…

Reminds me of the carpenter with the saw and the baffled look. “I don’t understand,” he moans, “I’ve sawed it off three times and it’s still too short.”

And CBS Swoons

2011-12-02T21:32:00.000-08:00

CBS News did a report this evening swooning over the dramatic turnaround of the economy, citing the "unexpectedly large number" of new jobs and the "surge in consumer confidence." They did admit that "about half" of the drop in unemployment was due to people who quit looking for a job.

So 120,000 new jobs is a "large number" when 127,000 new workers entered the work force, is it? That seems about 7000 jobs short of a winner to me. And with 127,000 new jobs and 320,000 workers leaving the work force, how do they come up with that "about half" nonsense? If Tommy has one apple and Jane has three apples, does Tommy have "about half" of the net total of four apples?

Where do we get these idiots?