December 22, 2009
He Hate Me
Capturing my thoughts in the wake of the Nebraska (and Louisiana and Vermont and Massachusetts and Connecticut and NEVADA) windfalls.
love it. nice XFL connection.
Posted by: AlexC at December 22, 2009 5:27 PMDecember 2, 2009
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
Coach Josh McDaniels has apologized to the six million viewers who heard him use bad language when (Dave Barry would herein point out that the author is not making this up) yelling at professional football players.
Y'know, I'm a bigger fan of civility than my blog posts let on. I watch the 1956 Stanley Cup finals and believe that we are really missing something not having Joe Louis Arena populated with fans in suits and ties. Yeah, they're all male and white, but the boorishness of society does get me down. Freedom and civility need not be mutually exclusive.
But, darn it all, I don't think anybody is too surprised that a pro football coach might use a few salty bon mots after his team gives up 15 ^%&%@ yards in procedure penalties in the %^&*$@ red zone when the team is trying to snap a &^*%$@# four game losing streak.
The broadcast was done by the NFL network, which gets to follow cable rules. The local FOX affiliate rebroadcast it. If we must have a witch hunt, I think they should have probably caught it. Personally, I would just say "Shit Happens" and move on...
But forcing the coach to apologize? I saw some smarmy nanny-moms on TV who were aghast. There is something really wrong here, that we can feign this hyper-sensitivity in an ocean of crassness.
Can't swear in a football huddle...
Can't smoke in the armed forces...
Can't use arm-twisting tactics on spies and terrorists...
What is this country coming to? Before you know it there will be no praying in foxholes.
Posted by: johngalt at December 2, 2009 3:15 PMI can't tell if he's smiling or not -- can you?
Posted by: jk at December 2, 2009 4:20 PMNovember 2, 2009
A Philosophical Ramble
Ulysses Grant drops an interesting line in his (awesome, awesome, awesome) autobiography. He says -- during an uncharacteristic digression in the middle of military history -- that he "always thought the South could profit from defeat." He explains that the Confederate States were built on an inferior economic system and that both slaves and non-property holding whites would be better off under the North's economic system.
I'd suggest that the bulk of the country today, myself included, agrees with that. I got to wondering why "enforcing our values and way of life" is accepted for slave-holding States who were following the United States Constitution, but it was not acceptable for us to impose those same values on the indigenous peoples of America who had generally far worse governments than Mississippi, South Carolina, and Alabama. I’m very sympathetic to those who feel that the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were forced on the returning States. But I think that is a procedural question, the abolition of chattel slavery by force is accepted mainstream thought.
This is the kind of thought that will ensure that I never hold elective office. If anybody wants to throw their futures away in the comments, I'd be extremely interested.
I got to wondering why "enforcing our values and way of life" is accepted for slave-holding States who were following the United States Constitution, but it was not acceptable for us to impose those same values on the indigenous peoples of America who had generally far worse governments than Mississippi, South Carolina, and Alabama.
Simple: because we never did such thing in the first place?
Lets take the Cherokee as an example. We did not enforce our values on the Cherokoee. Heck, they tried their best to emulate the Western example, inventing a syllabary alphabet, published their own newspaper, built upwards of 60 black smith shops, and wrote their own constitution. How did we reward the adoption of our ways? We killed their leaders, took their land, and forced them to move a thousand miles away to federally defined and enforced reservations.
Forgive me for sounding like Howard Zinn, but this is exactly what we did. We did not play the role of a benign enforcer of proper morality and governance. Following the Jackson administration, we took indigenous property, broke treaties with indigenous peoples, and destroyed the liberty of indigenous peoples. We did not impose values. We betrayed them.
Posted by: T. Greer at November 2, 2009 10:36 PMCan't argue. I'm most disappointed with the abrogation of treaties (and the 11th Amendment denying them a chance at redress). I don't think Howard Zinn and your local History Professor would agree that we should have simply conquered and forced assimilation.
But the real anger at American policy that I read and see is not that -- it is the subjugation of their lifestyle: our (and it's always second person) enforcing our values on another culture. Who are we?
In my darker moments, I answer that "we" were the guys who created the free business climate that enables Sam Colt to invent interchangeable parts.
Reading about Tecumseh's brother, "The Shawnee Prophet," I have been held captive by the disconnect between the numinous native American of today's history and media compared with the reality of tribal rule that recognized no minority rights and was less of a stranger to atrocities than our history.
It's quite possible that I have rebelled against the Kevin Costner vision too far and have lost center. It doesn't help that the topic is so taboo I feel guilty typing this. There's no search for truth.
Fair enough. Your right of course -- if the Indians owned slaves (some of the afore mentioned Cherokee did, oddly enough), the men in blue would not be celebrated for forcing a "more just value system" upon the Indians.
Along a similar vein of thought is this: if the slaves of early American republic were multiracial, would academics still be so angry about the subject? At times I can't help but think that it is not the restriction of liberty the racism of the slavers that so disgusts progressive-types.
Posted by: T. Greer at November 4, 2009 11:15 PMSeptember 7, 2009
I Love Oil
(And why everyone else should too.)
JK recently heralded America's Petrosesquicentennial, the 150th anniversary of the first American oil well. We are quite enamored of the "black gold" on these pages. And why not? 3.8 gallons of oil derived gasoline (you may have heard of it - it's been used as a primary motor fuel for nearly a hundred years) which can be purchased on any street corner for about ten bucks, produce as much energy as an average lightning bolt (about 500 megajoules.)
And the safety of this miracle fuel is such that anti-industrial zealots like those on Dateline NBC have had to use remotely detonated explosives to recreate accidental fuel tank explosions.
But there's more to oil than gasoline. Much more. Modern necessities made from oil include jet fuel, propane gas, plastics, asphalt, and dozens of petrochemicals essential to hundreds of industries we could hardly imagine living without. (Paints, fertilizers and textiles to name just a few.)
I went searching for the historical significance of the Petrosesquicentennial and found the following graph of world population and income since 1500. It shows a precipitous rise in population around the time of the Industrial Revolution. But the per capita world GDP rose only 31 percent in the early decades of the Industrial Revolution (1820 to about 1870). In the next 30 years however, inflation-adjusted individual incomes went up another 45%, and 20 years later nearly doubled from there. Finally, by the end of the 20th century, individuals earned a whopping SEVEN TIMES what their ancestors did at the time commercial oil production began.
(Click on graph to enlarge)
While the Industrial Revolution began in the early 1800's without oil it "centered on improvement in coal, iron and steam technologies." The truly modern developments "steel, electricity and chemicals" were hallmarks of the Second Industrial Revolution which, though not clearly delineated from the first, roughly coincided with the commercialization of oil in America.
So if you love iPods, cell phones, jet planes, mass transit, modern medicines, supermarkets, artificial light, white collar jobs ... and the income to pay for all of these and more ... you'd best come to grips with your closet love affair with oil.
UPDATE [10:43a EDT]: As often happens, I omitted a key argument in the thread. The point of all this was to set up the assertion that the advent of cheap and abundant oil was not only coincident with the Second Industrial Revolution, but catalyzed it. Try to imagine the course of the industrial age without it. Certainly a gallon of gas could have been replaced, say with 121 cubic feet of natural gas or 9 pounds of coal, but extracting and using a liquid fuel proved far more practical and economical than those gaseous or solid ones, at least for some uses. And I contend those uses were - and remain - important. Add to this the less obvious fact that many chemical uses of oil may be irreplaceable.
Oil has clearly fueled prosperity. Not only that, it did so for everyone.
And let's not fail to celebrate John Rockefeller, who gave non-wealthy Americans the gifts of affordable heat and light. His nickel-a-gallon kerosene provided productive hours of reading and working to those who could not afford dollar-a-gallon whale oil.
For this generous gift to our nation's poor and his unprecedented philanthropy, we call him a "robber baron."
Posted by: jk at September 7, 2009 11:23 AMOctober 22, 2008
American Journalism Dismantled by ... a Democrat
If John McCain is going to win this election it will be with the help of great Americans like Orson Scott Card. A science fiction writer (who's work dagny likes) he's also a Democrat and a newspaper columnist published in North Carolina. And according to Rush Limbaugh (where I first heard this) he's far enough left to be pro gun control. And yet, he takes American newspapers apart:
I remember reading All the President's Men and thinking: That's journalism. You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know.This housing crisis didn't come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.
(...)
This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it. One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules. The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them.
(...)
Isn't there a story here? Doesn't journalism require that you who produce our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout? Aren't you supposed to follow the money and see which politicians were benefiting personally from the deregulation of mortgage lending?
I have no doubt that if these facts had pointed to the Republican Party or to John McCain as the guilty parties, you would be treating it as a vast scandal. "Housing-gate," no doubt. Or "Fannie-gate."
(...)
But right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie — that the housing crisis should somehow be blamed on Bush, McCain, and the Republicans. You have trained the American people to blame everything bad — even bad weather — on Bush, and they are responding as you have taught them to.
(...)
If you at our local daily newspaper continue to let Americans believe — and vote as if — President Bush and the Republicans caused the crisis, then you are joining in that lie.
If you do not tell the truth about the Democrats — including Barack Obama — and do so with the same energy you would use if the miscreants were Republicans — then you are not journalists by any standard.
You're just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party, and it's time you were all fired and real journalists brought in, so that we can actually have a news paper in our city.
Every blogger should link this column.
Every American should send it to his local newspaper.
September 22, 2008
If You Think the Price of Arugula is bad...
The Refugee was recently shopping and noticed that the price of his favorite cheese has increased from $7 to $8. What do they make this stuff out of - petroleum?
An eight dollar cheese eater! Out to coffee last week, The Refugee kept dropping french phrases and Sartre quotes. I am starting to worry.
Posted by: jk at September 22, 2008 7:40 PMAm I the last one to notice that even a small coke purchased separately (not part of a combo-meal) is a buck fifty?
Pick your favorite reason:
1 - Fuel surcharge for delivery of beverage syrup and (horrors) CO-2.
2 - Devaluation of the dollar through inflation.
3 - Congress' shiny new minimum wage law telling burger joints how much they must pay local high-schoolers to lean out of a window and hand you a cup of mostly ice and a little carbonated sugar water filling in the spaces.
Posted by: johngalt at September 23, 2008 11:22 AM4) Increased demand for corn sweetener from fuel mandates;
5) Fifty-cent tariffs on Brazilian sugar that could substantively lower the cost of sweetener and fuel (President Clinton famously took calls from sugar lobbyists while he was in consultation with that woman, Miss Lewinsky). Keep in mind that recent studies show sugar to have just as much nutritional value as corn sweetener.
6 - The emergency "Federal fast-food rescue from economic reality" plan hasn't yet been passed and signed into law "before the end of the week" in order to prevent "global economic disaster."
Posted by: johngalt at September 23, 2008 3:44 PMJuly 26, 2008
An Olive Branch from One America to the Other
John Edwards' greatest legacy in American politics may be in revealing the existence of "Two Americas" that uneasily coexist with each other in the same time and space on this continent. I propose the following olive branch, from one of those Americas to the other:
"You let us legalize drilling for oil and we'll let you legalize pot."
Now that's what I'd call a real kumbaya moment.
That would be win-win for the libertarians, where do I sign?
Posted by: jk at July 26, 2008 7:04 PMWouldn't it be win-win for everyone? Who could possibly want pot AND oil to be against the law?
Posted by: johngalt at July 27, 2008 1:17 AMYou need to use some smiley faces or LOL or something, I can't determine the sarcasm level.
At the risk of seriousizing frivolity, how many people would support legalized pot and ANWR drilling? I'd say about 9%, making a pretty good little-l-lib identifier. Though my favorite is still the Instapundit commenter: "I dream of an America where millions of happily married gay couples have closets full of assault weapons."
I tried to get my point across with a one-liner but it seems we've got different impressions of what "win-win" means.
In "my reality" it doesn't mean that a majority of voters win on BOTH counts, but that by giving up something of less value (to them) they receive in return something of greater value (to them.) Hence my question, with ZERO sarcasm: "Who could possibly want pot AND oil to be against the law" meaning that drilling for oil is likely of more value to those who want to "prevent the decay of our nation's moral fabric through abuse of the demon-weed" and I presume, from observation of citizen's initiative efforts, legalization of pot (use, cultivation, sale, possession, etc.) is more important to hippies than ANYTHING else on earth.
So the only subset of voters for whom this proposition is NOT win-win are those who value neither legal use of petroleum oil or legalization of cannibis. How many people are really in that group? Who would they be? Puritanical environmentalists? Show me one!
Posted by: johngalt at July 28, 2008 3:44 PMThanks for the explanation -- speaking slowly and using very small words usually works great.
I'm fine with drilling AND assault rifles AND pot AND gay marriage -- if we can only do something about those wicked trans-fats!
I am really intrigued by this book recommended by Samizdat Dale Anon. Anybody read it? (This full-color graphic novel re-tells the story of police Lt. Win Bear, who while investigating the murder of a university physicist, gets blown "sideways in time" and finds himself in a technologically advanced, fabulously wealthy world where government is nearly extinct and everyone carries guns.)
October 12, 2007
Two Personal Attacks
Don Luskin says "Conservatism is Doomed."
...when even reliable warhorses like columnist George Will start swallowing the Left's lies about economics. First it was Will's puff-piece adulating Austin Goolsbee, Barack Obama's economic hatchet man. Will's column was too crowded with charming lifestyle details about Goolsbee to bother to mention his 2005 "paper" claiming that any benefits of the Bush administration's Social Security reform proposal would be consumed in fees earned by the investment industry -- when, in fact, the administration's proposal specifically ruled out precisely the high-fee investment vehicles that Goolsbee used in his "study."
Conservatism may well be doomed, but Mister Will is not a reliable indicator. Will is "conservative" on some level, but he is "Washington establishment" far more than ideological. Will's whacks at President George Herbert Walker Bush gave us President Clinton as much as Ross Perot. I trust Will on Baseball, but not on politics.
While I am handing out disapprobation. I fell for the early reviews on Austin Goolsbee. He was associated with the University of Chicago (moment of reverence) and was recommended by a lot of libertarian bloggers. He has been a regular guest on Kudlow and Company, and while he is no doubt a bright guy, he truly is a party hack. He doesn't attempt an academic distance from politics, he proudly parrots the Obama/Democratic line.
Let's see, who else is on my list here: the impressionist who sings "Take me out to the ball game" on TBS every 17 seconds...
January 7, 2007
What Can Brown Do for You?
We love to shop online. Living on a farm and spending most of our time in town doing the ol' 9 to 5, it's incredibly convenient to point and click and have our "must haves" show up on the back porch some predictable number of days later. It also has a nostalgic element as I imagine my grandfather ordering from the Sears catalog decades ago.
Online tracking services make the experience even better. Until there's a blizzard the week before Christmas.
I don't begrudge UPS having delivery delays during the storm of the century. Particularly out here where the roads were frequently impassable.
I don't even really fault them for sending their employees home on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, despite the fact postal carriers worked both of those days to help make Santa Claus proud.
What I do hold them accountable for is the gall or incompetence or both to tell a customer (me) on Saturday that my packages were "on the truck for delivery today" and then, when they didn't arrive, to tell that same customer (still me) that all UPS facilities were closed and that "only air shipments were delivered yesterday."
Had they told me this on Saturday I'd have driven to their distribution center to retrieve the items myself. Perhaps they consciously decided to lie to people to discourage throngs of angry Santa's helpers arriving on their doorstep. Who knows.
What I do know is that the week before Christmas is for shipping companies what the day after Thanksgiving is for retailers. It's their Super Bowl. It's their chance to rise to the occasion and demonstrate their commitment to customer service and to win customer loyalty for life. As far as I'm concerned, UPS laid an egg.
Now my occasions for yelling at the television aren't limited to pick-pocketing politicians, they also include UPS commercials.
What can Brown do for me? "Go to jail. Go directly to jail. If you pass Go, do NOT collect $200."
And yet you are not coerced to support Brown with your tax dollars nor compelled to use it for letter delivery.
I order everything online as well, I was going to give a leg up to UPS through the triumvirate blizzard. They came a few times in very bad weather, USPS missed several days. A different scale but they have different jobs.
September 24, 2006
Nickname Fetish
(this is the part where I channel Jerry Seinfeld)
What's the deal with liberals and their nicknaming of people?
How many different variations of George Bush are there?
I think it's evolved into Chimpy McBushburton or something.
But here's a new one.
Let's break this down.
1) Felix. Some how appealing to the whole Jewish thing. Perhaps some latent anti-semitism. Hard to say.
2) Allen. To make the nickname work, you need the connection to Senator Allen.
3) Macaca. Apparently it's a vicious ethnic slur that can be found in high abundance on liberal blogs. Incredibly no one seems to know what it really is, nevermind using it on a regular basis. Unlike the other vicious ethnic slur that dare not speak it's name.
4) Jr. His father's name was George Allen. A football coach, hall of famer, too. Diminutive, however.
You may be familiar with the incumbent Republican representative of CO-4, Marilyn Musgrave. I posted a pair of blogs in August about her. Well, I finally heard what the local lefties are calling her when "Progressive Radio's" morning host Jay Marvin referred to her as... "Marilyn Manson Musgrave." Now THAT's a stretch of credulity.
Posted by: johngalt at September 24, 2006 10:59 AMI was wondering when "macaca" was going to find its way onto these pages. I've been waiting for the perfect joke opportunity to say "don't call me Macaca!"
TNR has been all fusillade all the time on Senator Allen. As a southern social conservative, I think he's easy to ridicule and they smell a bit of blood in the water (we're having a sale on metaphors this paragraph).
To be fair, I think the Felix-as-anti-Semitic charge against his detractors may be as risible as the "macaca" accusation against the Senator. Felix is a funny, French moniker (now Neds and Felixes are going to boycott ThreeSources) which is incongruous with the big cowboy booted Allen.
I think the answer, Jerry, is that they think they're being very clever. Now that's scary.
April 28, 2006
MySpace: The End of the Internet As We Know It
Web2.0 is a hot buzzword.
So everyone's got to get in on the hype.
- Both YouTube and MySpace fit the textbook definition of Web 2.0, that hypothetical next-generation Internet where people contribute as easily as they consume. Even self-described late adopters like New York's Kurt Andersen recognize that that by letting everyone contribute, these sites have reached a critical mass where "a real network effect has kicked in."
But the focus on the collaborative nature of these sites has been nagging at me. Sites like Friendster and Blogger that promote sharing and friend-making have been around for years with nowhere near the mainstream success. I've got a different theory. YouTube and MySpace are runaway hits because they combine two attributes rarely found together in tech products. They're easy to use, and they don't tell you what to do.
YouTube is actually pretty cool.
But I'm convinced you have to have a high threshold for pain to be a MySpace user. As a result of this article, I decided I'd see if any people from my high school were on there. (Bensalem Township HS, Class of 1995, btw)
Yes they are. (21 out of 450)
Unfortunately they have no self control when it comes to these pages. Is it possible to open up a MySpace page that doesn't peg your CPU @ 100% or kill your web browser? Not everyone wants to hear your favorite song when you load the page!
I finally opened up the web page source and found the host that serves the music, lads.myspace.com , put it in my hosts file pointing to 127.0.0.1 and now myspace is pleasantly quiet.
But that doesn't solve the problem of garishness. Which is why I bolded the above line.
Anyone can build a webpage. It's like 1995 all over again, except instead of obnoxious blink tags, we have superflous flash animations, multiple embedded videos, Bon Jovi and black text on a black background!
I shouldn't want to punch my computer when I want to see what old friends are up to.
I'm all for making the internet and computers easy. We all benefit.
I guess that's the downside of freedom to do what you want. No one's stopping you from being obnoxious... especially if you don't even realize it.