I don’t celebrate it personally, but in case you’re one who likes hearts & flowers, here’s a heart for you, courtesy of NASA. 🙂
update: for some reason, it’s showing up sideways. Sorry about that.
Hey – that’s one of my faves 🙂
|
You Are Peanut Butter Sandwiches / Do-si-dos |
 You are easy going and naturally happy. You don’t need a lot to make you smile. You genuinely care about people and are a great friend. You’re always doing your best to make the world a better place. Even though there isn’t an immature bone in your body, you still are like a big kid sometimes. |
h/t: Blonde Sagacity
Not really. But I don’t know what else to call it. The end of accountability? The end of personal responsibility for choices? The beginning of the end of capitalism? Or maybe it’s just plain old greed, and the thought of getting something for nothing.
This might be old news, but it’s the first I’ve seen of it, so it’s news to me. It seems that a Florida jury has decided that a man who chain-smoked for 40 years was helplessly addicted to nicotine, and therefore Philip Morris is responsible for his death. Now they get to decide how much Philip Morris should give the grieving widow.
The article says he was 55 years old when he died in 1997. So he started smoking at 15, in or around 1957. By 1966, when warning labels appeared on all cigarette packages, he’d been smoking almost 10 years then, so I’ll cut him a little bit of slack. That was plenty of time to get addicted to nictoine, and I don’t know what kind of information was available then regarding the dangers of smoking.
So yes, the tobacco companies bear some responsibility in all this. But the ultimate responsibility rests with the human being who made a choice to smoke, and continued to choose to smoke even as medical evidence mounted that it was an unsafe practice. According to the article, he tried to quit on numerous occasions, but kept going back to smoking. Addictions will do that to you, and he was, indeed, addicted. But the original culpability belongs to him, not to Philip Morris. Philip Morris did not come along, tie him to a chair, and force-feed him cigarettes.
What’s next? Can alcoholics who die from the ravages of their disease sue the liquor/beer companies? What about morbidly obese folks who die from complications of being overweight? How about this one – can I sue the credit card companies because they kept increasing my credit limit and so I kept spending their money?
At what point does personal responsibility enter into this? Or have we as a nation moved away from the concepts of being responsible for our own actions, and moved into the concept of doing/saying whatever will give me the most free stuff, especially if it’s coming from a greedy blood-sucking corporation that is only out to advance its own agenda on the backs of the poor uneducated masses (in other words, any company that wants to make a profit). What will happen when they bankrupt the tobacco companies and all the folks who are currently addicted to nicotine can no longer get their cigarettes?
I should probably add that I am not a smoker. In fact, I am almost allergic to cigarette smoke, and hate the smell of cigarette smoke or stale cigarette smoke. That said, I firmly believe that as long as something is legal, then companies have a right to provide it, and people have a right to indulge in it. Cigarettes are legal, and it’s well-known that they are addicting. I don’t know when we first realized they were addicting, but it seems to me that anyone who started smoking after that became common knowledge has no grounds to sue any tobacco company.
So, I belong to a number of different chat-groups about books, and historical novels and Westerns and all … and at one of them, fans of Westerns are trying to raise interest in that particular genre, by mobilizing other fans, around the world to go into their local library or bookstore and ask for Westerns – any western, new, traditional or somewhere in between. The thinking is, we can achieve a critical mass of fans, and maybe take the book-selling world – if not by the throat, maybe we can gum their ankles a little, when it comes to stocking genre Western books. Which are really madly popular, but you’d hardly know it, to look at the shelves in your local Borders or whatever.More here, thanks to Gary Dobbs of “The Tainted Archive“.
Gary says, in part:
“At the moment we are in a situation where bookshops control the market (a select amount of buyers chose the titles they think we want to read ) and they seem to think all we want to read are massive tomes with more padding that substance. The days of cheap paperbacks that existed to entertain, excite and delight are long gone. Strange when those are the reasons we started reading in the first place. But it doesn’t have to be so – so come on get involved, hit the bookshops, hit the libraries. All of us on MARCH 2nd.
Come on get involved.”
Not just my books, which count as Westerns if you get down and squint at them sideways, but a whole range of others. Some of the classics are being profiled at Gary’s blog, and I would like to throw in a mention of a book by the micro-publisher who helped me launch The Adelsverein Trilogy, Michael Katz at Strider Nolan. His Western is called “Shalom on the Range”, and is about the adventures of a Jewish railway detective who knows nothing about the west but what he has read in dime novels, investigating a train robbery in the 1870s. Think ‘Seinfeld on the Prairie’.
Mark it on your calendar, if you are a fan of Westerns: March 2 is Wild West Monday!
Hey – what’s up Team Obama?
The media is filled with numbers about the economic crisis. But the numbers do not tell the full story.
They don’t? I’m confused – I thought unless you had numbers you didn’t have the full story.
The story of this crisis is in homes across the country — homes where a family member has lost a job, where parents are struggling to pay a mortgage, and where college tuition has slipped out of reach.
Usually when a politician wants anecdotes and not numbers he’s trying to spin a story to a conclusion not supported by the facts.
But Barack doesn’t play that way.
You know when Tom Clancy totally let his muse get on top of him and he had Jack Ryan catapulted to the Oval Office and it was like all was Suddenly Right in the world?
Barack is like Jack Ryan, but real. Totally.
Share your story about how this economic crisis is affecting you and your family and join your fellow Americans in supporting bold action to speed our recovery:
Well, OK then!
My Crisis Story
My government wants to spend a whole bunch of money on a whole bunch projects of dubious value.
The crisis will end once the government stops helping.
Respectfully Submitted,
Brian Dunbar
Neenah, Wisconsin
I’m sure their filter will have that sucker right back into the public’s face. Real Soon Now.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
I am immersed in a schedule of reading over the next few weeks, devouring omnivorously a stack of books from the local library branch, another stack from my sometime employer at Watercress Press – she has a splendid collection of Texiana – and re-reading some of my own not-inconsiderable collection. This is where the stories, characters and incidents are planted and begin to grow and entwine; but the soil they sprout from is composted from all this reading, if I am allowed to milk out the gardening metaphor as far as is possible… well, anyway, circling back to the beginning again – I’ve got a tall stack of books about Texas, about the Gold Rush, and the 19th century in general. Too many to stack up on the nightstand, so the overflow is piled up on the flat-topped cedar chest, in three or four tall stacks. One of the potential story-lines in the projected trilogy is about how the American cattle business boomed and collapsed in the 1880s, which is about the very same time that many of the most popular envisionings of the Wild West were laid down in the form we have come to know best. It is also the setting for the concluding volume of my projected new trilogy; picking up the story of the next generation of the Becker family, once the Texas frontier calmed down a little.
There were a lot of other things going on at about that same time, including a veritable explosion in the number of American millionaires. In the post-Civil War years, enormous fortunes were being made in industry, from building railways, in steamship lines, in mining, in mercantile interests. The post-Civil War decades increasingly came to be dominated by ‘new money’ men, beside which the ‘old money’ families – with fortunes based on land, banking, the fur trade, sailing ships, or cotton and rooted in the earlier decades of the 19th century began to appear pale, and dull to everyone but each other. Mark Twain called the latter decades of that period ‘The Gilded Age’ – and he didn’t mean it particularly as a compliment, even if people have used the expression ever since as implying something rather fine. Twain meant it in the sense of something cheap, of a microscopically thin layer of gold overlaid on cheap metal, something flashy, over-ornamented, an object which would not wear very well, but caught the eye and impressed no end in the short term.
That era seemed strange and uncomfortable to someone who remembered an earlier day – for all it’s comforts, convenience, riches and plenty. Changes came thick and fast; the telegraph, the transcontinental railway, the ease of taking a steamship passage across the Atlantic and being there in a week or so, where once it had taken months. Americans of the upper crust began traveling for pleasure and for education, rather than strictly business and in numbers, once the crossing became relatively pleasant and short. The United States had never, even before the Civil War, been particularly isolated, but the 19th century world became appreciably smaller. Mark Twain himself became a part of this trend, by participating in one of the first great American tourist excursions, the 1867 voyage of the “Quaker City” to the Holy Land and elsewhere, which was documented in one of the funniest travel books ever, “The Innocents Abroad”.
It was an interesting time, no two ways about it – and one of the interesting aspects is that there were so very many assorted experiences recorded in the years between the end of the Civil War and the turn of the new century – rich pickings for someone like me, doing research. One of those collisions that I am interested in exploring is the same collision that Twain wrote about so humorously: the Old World and the New. There were quite a lot of opportunities for them to collide, and nowhere more than among the very newest of the new money, or even the semi-new money of the New World and the aristocracy of the old. One book I picked up at random was a joint biography of Alva and Consuela Vanderbilt – of whom I was sort-of-aware, mostly because the Vanderbilts are one of those filthy-rich families that you can’t help not having heard of, and because Consuela Vanderbilt was married off – mostly unhappily – to an English Duke. It was kind of ick-making to think about; fabulously wealthy American heiresses married off to the impecunious inheritors of ancient name, royal favor – and crumbling stately homes. Their vulgar American new dollars in exchange for an old name, a title and a coronet with strawberry leaves on it; it’s hard to decide which is more awful, the decayed noblemen hunting for heiresses that they would condescend to honor with their titles and past-due bills, or the social-climbing and wealthy American families of a supposedly democratic and more or less equalitarian nation going all weak-kneed at the thought of a title in the family.
(to be continued)
This tickled my funny bone. Dynamic entry … Sluggy Freelance style:
And what are Torg, Riff and Gwen doing? They’re hunting zombies, duh.
And what am I doing at zero-dark thirty? I was woken up by the forces of darkness and e-vil [1] because a Very Important Server had stopped talking.
Windows – man don’t tell me it sucks: it is such a kick-ass operating system that it finds a way to issue a BSOD at 01:00 in the a.m., just so I know it cares.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
[1] Also known as third shift.
Rangel Rule Act of 2009, HR 735
would prohibit the Internal Revenue Service from charging penalties and interest on back taxes against U.S. citizens. Under the proposed law, any taxpayer who wrote “Rangel Rule” on their return when paying back taxes would be immune from penalties and interest.
Now that is an example of a good law: it’s just, it makes sense and it pokes fun at an individual who richly deserves it.
Too bad it’s got a snowball’s chance of passage.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
There is a dog park, hidden away in the back forty of McAllister Park, a sprawling public park/semi-wilderness area in Northside San Antonio. It is formed by a large fenced area, about half an acre of trees and shrubs, dotted with benches, a pavilion with a concrete table and benches under it, a couple of structures that hopefully the dogs might find amusing to run through or jump on top of and a lavish number of heavy trash cans and dispensers offering what my daughter describes as ‘poopy-bags’. There is a paved path leading around the perimeter of the fenced area, the rest of it being spread with free mulch generated by the city waste disposal department’s industrial-sized tree shredders. Another long paved path leads from a parking lot: on any given afternoon when the weather is fair and mild, and most especially on weekends, that path is alive with leashed dogs and their people. The dogs are normally wild with excitement, for they are either coming from or heading toward their social-hour, play-date or mad-minute. It must be something they look forwards to all the rest of their limited, doggy lives – if they are capable of retaining a pleasurable memory. I rather think they are; at least they know, through constant repetition, that something nice is about to happen. Spike and the Lesser Weevil are insane with excitement every morning when I put on my exercise things; for they know that it means the morning walk is imminent. So when the dogs are decanted from their owner’s cars in the parking lot on the third or forth time around – they must know. By the time they get to the double-gated entry-way enclosure to the park itself they are usually mad with excitement
It was one of our neighbors told us about the park; admittedly, we were nervous when it came to the whole off-the-leash concept when it came to the Lesser Weevil. We know that she is part Boxer; it’s obvious, just to look at her. But we don’t know for sure what the other half is, and suspect that a considerable lashing of what is usually described in screaming headlines as ‘pit bull’ is included in her genetic makeup. She is adoring and lovable to all humans. Without exception everyone she meets is instantly her bestest friend in the whole wide world, and the way she went all gooey and affectionate over the cable guy was quite embarrassing – especially since she is supposed to be a guard/watch dog. No, we have no apprehensions about the Weevil and humans – it’s other dogs, and only now and again in the early months that she took an instant and abiding dislike to another dog on a leash. If she had not also been on a leash herself, and for Blondie or I instantly half-strangling her in the pinch-collar, it might have gotten very ugly. But our neighbor assured us, over and over – that it is all right, the dogs seem to govern themselves very well, off leash, and the more there are of them in the confines of the park, the better they all behave. So we took a chance – and we stuck very close to her that first time, and waited until she had behaved well for the first half-dozen dogs who came romping up for a bit of friendly butt-sniffing.
Weevil still does not play quite so uninhibitedly with the other dogs as some of them do. She will chase a thrown tennis ball and race with some of the others, but she will stay fairly close to Blondie. And Spike basically attaches herself to my ankles, never going much farther than ten feet away, even if there are other small dogs – Shi Tzus, Jack Russells and Chihuahuas and the like who want to play with her. It was quite lively this last Sunday; not least because it seemed to be Big Dog Day. No kidding – don’t they keep insisting that everything is bigger in Texas? Sometimes people tell us that the Weevil is a big dog; no, she actually is rather agreeably medium-sized. On Sunday she looked positively dainty, next to a Newfoundland the size of a small sofa (there were three of them there, that day), two mastiffs who topped out at a couple of hundred pounds each, and a Great Dane who looked big enough to put a saddle on and ride like a horse. No kidding, that last dog’s nose alone was bigger than the smallest dog present – a four-month-old Chihuahua puppy, too small even to be put down on the ground among all those specimens of canine gigantism.
And of course, the Weevil behaved herself – how could she not, when the whole place was seething with dogs; dogs running, chasing tennis balls and each others’ behinds, begging to be played with and petted, and romping in front of, or behind their people making a slow circuit of the path around the park? No, it was a good day and good for her – and kind of a relief to know that Blondie has trained her to obedience well enough to trust her off the leash and with a large number of other dogs.
Watch the government piss away [1] your money! On the Web! [2]
StimulusWatch.org was built to to help the new administration keep its pledge to invest stimulus money smartly, and to hold public officials to account for the taxpayer money they spend. We do this by allowing you, citizens around the country with local knowledge about the proposed “shovel-ready” projects in your city, to find, discuss and rate those projects. These projects are not part of the stimulus bill. They are candidates for funding by federal grant programs once the bill passes. Learn more by reading the FAQs.
So .. what are you – my out of state virtual friends – being asked to pay for in my fair state of Wisconsin? Welp, I’m glad you asked!
- $500,000 to eliminate bus fares for one year in Sheboygan.
- $2,000,000 for new sidewalks in Superior.
- $3,800,000 for a recreational trail in Green Bay.
Anyway – this is what my state wants from the stimulus pork: Subsidized bus fares, sidewalks and walking trails.
We thank you kindly for your participation.
[1] Sort-of Stimulus Watch. Anyway, it’s Transparent Government. Whatever that means.
[2] This would work, I think, if the people spending taxpayer money had a sense of shame. Which we can see that they don’t. [3] It’s not enough to to simply watch the bastards at work, we gotta raise a ruckus, get people involved.
For Pete’s sake, last year I had to take the day off and cart my family down to Madison just to make sure the Lege didn’t enact a bill that would have shut the school down.
You can do this once, or twice. But you can’t get all excited about every bit of pork the government wants. There are more of us than there are of them but for them it’s a full-time job. We’re busy making a living and can’t afford the time needed.
[3] No, seriously – we’ve got candidates for the highest office in the land who are not ashamed at lying, but only chagrined they’ve been caught. People who want cabinet positions who (whoops) forget to pay taxes. Congress critters who pay back taxes only when people raise a shit storm .. and don’t have to pay any penalties. Who, not to drag on and on, feel that because they’re on the People’s Business they can act like immoral shits.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
For the past couple of years I’ve been logging about 55-60 hour work weeks and it has been getting to me. Last night when I finally logged off the VPN a half hour into the Big Game, I kind of freaked out because I could actually not remember what I had accomplished on Saturday. I checked my home computer email logs and doc files – nothing. Then I remembered that Saturday was spent in the office all day. Pathetic. Maybe it is my age (going on 55), but I remember working even more hours back in the early eighties designing automotive test electronics and loving it. Maybe it the stress of knowing that you do what you do because you have a wife and daughter that absolutely need you employed with insurance, combined with psychotic management that, in their relative youth, cannot comprehend that some people would rather not rise all the way to the top – instead just be enormously competent two or three levels down. In the past year, in a town of less than 3,000 people, our company has shed more than 500 manufacturing and probably 150 engineering/admin jobs (hable Espanol or Cantonese?). I think we are down to around a hundred souls from what was, ten years ago, about sixteen hundred.
It fell to me (because I volunteered .. because nobody else would do it) to scan and catalog about 1000 photos from various sources taken in the office and plant floor over the past thirty years. At first it was fun; all the guys back then looked like John Holmes wannabees and all the women had big hair. But it got to me by the time the project was finished. We are now all ghosts, some of us actually dead, others just old. I see many of the old ones regularly – as I said its a small town – and even those who were once close friends somehow make me feel as though I betrayed them because I am still there and they are not.
Now we have these asshats that seem to have a problem paying their own taxes telling me that I’ve got to fork over to pay for rubbers, community organizers, and whatever socialist item is on The One’s list of chits that he owes. Okay, but at the same time it is the group of, what – 40% of the population that doesn’t even pay taxes (not counting Democrat politicians; they get Extra Special treatment) – that will be the recipients of my largesse?
My fallback plan was to work at home, maybe even 55-60 hours a week, blogging for Pajamas Media. That is not looking very good (not that it ever did – I can only write well when it is technical and/or dry).
Fuck it, it don’t mean nothin’. I think I need a vacation.
They’re working hard for you …
Mr. Obama’s tendency to work late into the night will also pose problems. Politico.com reports that the White House staff is “preparing for a return to long nights, heavy weekend shifts.” Requiring a senior staff that meets at 7:30 a.m. to work until 11 p.m. or 12 a.m. will quickly cause burnout and diminish the quality of advice and oversight.
Perhaps too hard?
I don’t know running a large organization from fishing for cod in the Atlantic, but I do know about working long hours.
Meeting at 07:30 means getting to the office at 07:00 at the latest – you gotta get your stuff lined up for a meeting. Which means leaving for the office by 06:15, so awake by 05:45. So .. 5 1/2 hours of sleep at best after getting home after working until midnight.
Every .. day.
And this is the senior staff – the younger and dumber junior staff will man up and come in earlier and leave later than their bosses.
You can work seventeen hour days for a while, when it’s important. But you can’t really do that on a regular basis without burning out. You start making dumb mistakes and your thinking gets sloppy.
Which might not be a great idea when you’re the guys who want to run the country.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
Received the following yesterday afternoon, while working away on a poetry book for Watercress Press:
“As you know, last September Pajamas Media began a new initiative in Internet television called Pajamas TV. When we started with our RNC coverage from Minneapolis, we noted that we would be in a Beta Phase through the first quarter of 2009. In the last few months we have strengthened the PJTV lineup with shows covering Media Bias, Education Bias, Middle East Update, Sharia and Jihad, Powerline Report, Ask Dr. Helen, Hugh News, Poliwood, Conservatism 2.0, Economy and Finance, National Security, and others.
As the end of the first quarter approaches and we near the production phase of Pajamas TV, we will continue to build our emphasis in this area. As a result we have decided to wind down the Pajamas Media Blogger and advertising network effective March 31, 2009. The PJM portal and the XPressBlogs will continue as is.
You may continue to display the Pajamas Media ads through March 31. We will be sending you information in mid-March on removing the ads.
We thank you very much for participating during the formative years of Pajamas Media and we look forward to working with you in other ways. One of those is, of course, Pajamas TV. If you have any ideas in that regard, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Our best wishes in the new year and again our deepest gratitude for your participation in Pajamas Media.
Sincerely,
Roger L. Simon
CEO, Pajamas Media”
It seems that quite a lot of other blogs which were initially a part of PJ Media are also being kicked to the curb, as regards the advertising revenue. When PJ was first put together and the Daily Brief invited to join, it seemed like one of those ideas whose time had come; there would be an enormous range of linked blogs with all kinds of interests and specialties, and in a position to negotiate for serious advertising opportunities and the income arising from it. At least, there would be enough coming in to cover the hosting fees, and a little over. This didn’t last at the Brief for more than a couple of years: about three years ago, I was informed that the Brief didn’t get enough page views to justify any revenue for running the ads – but if page views went up, then the Brief would have that revenue stream restored. So, I went back to paying the hosting out of my own pocket, and kept the PJ ads in place, partly in hopes of eventually getting some revenue out of it and partly for the association. Because of sticking with the PJ ads, I couldn’t place ads from another agency, since PJ had the top place: so, nothing out of having them there – and nothing from anywhere else, either.
I will remove the PJ ads with the greatest pleasure, possibly even before the drop-dead date. I haven’t gotten much out of the association at all, save for PJ including my books on their “Christmas Gift” page throughout December. Frankly, it looks to me that PJ Media has become what they professed to counter – Big Media, in all it’s glory. A handful of the top blogs, all linking to each other, and the rest of us pretty well shut out. All things change, and often not much for the better.
I might as well have a bigger ad for my own darned books. I’m a little tired of looking at that Joe the Plumber picture, too.
Still here, finally over the massive, incapacitating head cold/allergy I came down with in the middle of last month. I missed a week of work at the telephone center, and cut short a couple of shifts when volunteers were asked for, mostly because the cough lingers on. I don’t think it sounds at all good when a hotel reservations agent sounds like she is hacking up lung tissue whilst entering guest data into the hotel reservations data base, but that’s just me. I had originally planned to quit after Christmas, but since Blondie lost her job, and my other employers have work for me on such an erratic basis, a regular check has certain charms. Even if I loathe everything about the call center – the break room is a pit, the two computers there which employees can use for personal stuff like checking emails barely function, and the restrooms smell like ass, I’ll have to stick it out a couple of months longer. I also confess to such a deep dislike for the client, a certain hotel-resort-casino chain, that I will never, ever set foot in any of their properties, because I now hate it so much. Eh, I’ve had jobs that I hated even more. The last one took me a year of plotting my escape, and that was a full time, 40-hour a week hellhole. This is only mini-hellhole.
The income from books is still a trickle: one very nice check straight from the publisher for books bought outright immediately upon release by several different shops. Alas, I won’t get much from royalty payments in February, mostly because sales made through Ingram (the book distributor) and through Amazon and other Humongous Sales Outlets are only reported and paid quarterly. So, the results of sales of the Trilogy made in December will show up at Booklocker in March, and in my bank account maybe in April. This kind of delay in registering results of sales efforts makes it damned hard to figure out what works, let me tell you! It’s also the after-Christmas sales slump, also – things won’t pick up again in the Hill Country until spring break time, so I am making plans to gear up again then, and in late spring, when the tourist season, such as it is, kicks into high gear, with the wildflowers and all. I do have a talk in March, at the German –Texan Heritage Society, in Austin, and the Trilogy is now available to readers with vision impairments at www.bookshare.org. In March, The Gathering will be the book for an on-line book club of Bookshare members, thanks to the interest of another IAG member who posted a very nice review of “The Harvesting” on her own website.
I also had a lovely interview on another Western enthusiasts blog – The Tainted Archive which may have bumped up the Amazon rank a notch or two with a couple of sales
In the meantime, my campaign to have the Trilogy stocked at various Texas historical museum bookstores continues apace: the George Ranch management sent me a very nice reply, and the buyer who manages stock for the store at the Alamo asked for two copies of The Gathering for review. Talk about the Ground Zero of museum bookstores – the Alamo would be it. I have to sit on my hands and wait patiently for their response, at this point. I don’t think I’ll pursue too many more signings in the big-box stores, though. There’s a brand-spanking new Books a Million over on the other side of town, but all signing events for it apparently have to be requested/approved/coordinated through either their regional manager, or god help us, their corporate HQ. It’s the same thing with Barnes & Noble; local managers are exceedingly cold to independent writers, and the signing experiences I have had at Big Box places have been so miserable, I’d rather put my efforts into museum stores, independents and on-line.
And I started on the next book, this week. The prelude, and most of Chapter One already done, finished, backed up onto disc. Am I a glutton for punishment or what?
NPR’s ‘All Things Considered’: The relief for Americans that President Obama spoke of in his Inauguration speech are on the floor of the House today for a vote …
Excuse me, President Obama? Which part of
For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act — not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do.
translates to these bits of crap from the stimulus package?
$19.99 billion in mandatory spending for the Food Stamp program.
$726 million for the after-school snack program.
$650 million for additional Digital TV transition coupons.
$200 million to pay Americorps volunteers.
Graham crackers and juice for the kiddies is bold swift action to revitalize the economy? Food stamps are going to lay a foundation for new growth? Television for the love of sweet thorny-headed Christ.
Pigs .. to .. the .. trough.
Legislators in committee dickering over provisions of the Stimulus Package
We seem to have collectively decided in November that something must be done and the government was the one to do it.
I can’t deny that – for a lot of reasons – we’re in a pickle.
But the problem with having the government do this is that – at best – a few thousand people in Washington decide what is best. To quote Tommy Lee Jones from ‘Men in Black’
A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.
Or to be more charitable: they’re making some very important choices on your behalf, for you, based on their own self-interest.
Whatever comes out of a mess like that in the best of all possible worlds might work. But more often for everyone except those few thousand people the results will be sub-optimal.
Do we need the government to do something? Probably. But the very best thing the government could do at this point is to just go away.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
I hate when you almost run smack dab into a great big wad of dark first thing in the morning.Ă‚Â And they you practically kill yourself tripping on the bathroom rug trying to avoid it but you run right into anyways and of course, it’s just dark, so you go right through it and bump your shoulder on the wall.
This is my brain on cold medicine.Ă‚Â Any questions?
My first three years of school (after kindergarten in an old one room building affectionately known as the chicken coop) were at St. Mary’s in Fulton NY. I absolutely hated it. Nothing against the religion, or my parents, but it I recall it to be a terribly traumatic experience. I never could connect with the nuns – the exemplar memory being the time I walked the twelve blocks to first grade circa 1960 (uphill as I recall) in a drenching rain, wearing an old rain slick three sizes too small. My legs got wet – very wet. Sister Mary Lawrence (yes, I’m going to name names here) accused me of deliberately jumping in rain puddles. On one level I am thinking “Lady, it’s f***ing raining out there like a b****, I am cold and wet, and you are f***ing laying this s*** on me?”. On another level (the one that manifested that day) I am beginning to cry, denying that I frolicked or did ANYTHING that would mock the seriousness of the religious predicament that was unfolding more and more each day, and was unique to me as a Catholic (the protestant – or as I understood them to be at the time – public kids seemed oblivious to any of what was really going on).
Over the years I have often expressed that the Catholic school experience was not something to recommend. Invariably the response was “Oh, you must have gone to a Catholic school back ‘in the day’ when nuns did all of the teaching – things are a lot different now”. I’ve also talked to many who recalled an altogether different experience; one that they regret that their children and grandchildren could have never benefit from.
I was in L.A. on 9/11, and on the first flight out, when flights started, my seatmate was a distinguished doctor from Fulton NY who was four years ahead of me at St. Mary’s. He went all the way through the local system, and attributed it to his success. Over the years I started thinking about that, and began to more often remember Sr. Mary Patrice (second grade). She was really OK for a nun. I actually saw some of her hair once – a “call-every-other-second-grade-kid-you-know-moment”. Then I graduated second grade (and completed First Communion – by now I’m really getting in deep), had a not too bad summer, and started third grade with – Sr. Mary Lawrence. Here we go again. By the way, I failed to mention earlier that Mother Superior, I truly believe, made the mold that Sr. Mary Lawrence was cast from. When Sr. Mary Lawrence was done with you, you went to Mother Superior to ensure that you “got your head right”. (I use those quotes because I didn’t really understand the dynamic until, years later, I saw Cool Hand Luke)
My general conclusion is that it probably was me and not them. I’ve noticed as an adult that certain executive officers that I’ve encountered professionally over the years have also put me in the same frame of mind. Substitute the Catechism for Sarbanes Oxley, a nun’s habit for a $2,000 black suit, eternal damnation for unemployment at an unemployable age and you get the picture. Anyway, I digress.
Real Wife asked me last week if I wanted to participate in a community trivia challenge type of fundraiser. It works like this – you recruit about 20 – 30 teams of eight people who sit in a cafegymatorium and compete in about a dozen ten question trivia rounds. I said sure.
Then I found out that the beneficiaries of the charity were children headed for Catholic summer camp. Immediately, I sensed the presence of Sr. Mary Lawrence on one shoulder, and Sr. Mary Patrice on the other. On the one hand, it’s an enjoyable Sunday afternoon which benefits the children. On the other, I might as well be herding them into the cattle cars.
Our team had two no-shows; the high school biology teacher and another teacher who is also the middle school scholastic bowl coach; a fact that was not in our favor. We had Real Wife (a teacher), two other teachers, two affluent farmers and yours truly, a self proclaimed renaissance man with nun love-hate issues.
It was a hoot. The M.C was a young priest who peppered the proceeding with both self deprecating and sharp humor, we had all the popcorn you could eat, and none of it mattered one whit except having fun on a snowy day.
We sucked worse than all but two other teams. As noted above, however, we were short two key members who would have undoubtedly helped our fortunes (damn them). My personal contribution that I am most proud of was knowing that WORM stands for(within the current vernacular of the Catholic church IT group) Write Once Read Many.
It’s fun to get together with friends and neighbors in this sort of format. As a conservative (otherwise introverted) person I highly recommend it as an alternative to say, for example, expecting The One to provide the funds to send the kids to camp.
I really wish I could have hit it off better with Sr. Mary Lawrence. In retrospect, she may have been the factor that got me through boot camp just twelve years later. I’d still like to have seen her hair – I think that I would be psychologically better developed.
An Iraqi soldier wears a mask with a skull print during
a patrol on the outskirts of Basra, 420 km (260 miles)
southeast of Baghdad November 23, 2008.
Say what you will about the Iraqi army – but if this guy is representative they have their motivation fixed at a very high level.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
…and repenting at leisure, or so it would appear with a new consumer product safety law, which will go into effect in about twenty days. Yes, indeedy, Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008, or HR 4040 which is supposed to take effect February 10th, was supposed to strike a mighty blow against the forces of evilness and icky lead contamination in children’s toys, but instead looks fair to bankrupting all sorts of micro-and home businesses in the US, instead – and to plunge a dagger into the hearts of all kinds of well-meaning handicrafters, thrift-stores and various enterprising individuals scrounging a living by selling stuff on e-Bay. Not to mention any parent on a budget, hoping to save some of their diminishing funds by purchasing second-hand clothing, books, toys and accessories for their children.
And I am not about to be frivolous about the problem of lead contaminates in children’s toys, although the temptation is there.
(Hey, did you hear the one about the shipment of lead from China that was turned back at the port of entry because it was contaminated with children’s toys?)
Yes, lead is not healthy for children or other growing things, and frankly, those manufacturers knowingly or unknowingly contaminating their export crap with lead, arsenic or any other dangerous substance ought to be taken out and have their pee-pees whacked with iron bars. Repeatedly – so yes, there ought to be a law. But oh, what a lesson in unintended consequences there is in the hurried and apparently careless formulation of this one! No lobbyists around who speak for the thrift shop industry, I guess, or the little workshops making this or that specialized product, or all the little church ladies across the US, piecing quilts or knitting baby-clothes. The law as written flatly mandates a level and degree of safety-testing which – it may might be argued and probably already has – is appropriate to a large manufacturing industry. Say, something that churns out product by the box-car load daily, weekly, or even hourly.
What got overlooked until the last few months, what with all the good intentions about ‘protecting the cheeeeldren’ was that all those mandated testing of all the elements of every product meant for the use of those under the age of 12 also applied to just about every body who makes stuff for kids, either for sale or charity. Everyone from the guy with a small woodshop making high-end traditional wooden toys, to the lady with the small business making ornamented hair scrunchies, those little businesses making doll-clothes or children’s clothes will fall under this law. Even the POD publisher who designed and printed my own books – they do children’s books; Or they will, up until February 10th. Heck – this law might even apply to me; I made clothes for my daughter, and now for my niece. Once upon a time, I also made bespoke doll-clothes and stuffed toys for sale at church bazaars and craft shows; I still have several boxes of finished outfits in the den closet, which is where they will remain, now. I’m not out all that much, for this was a hobby for me a good few years ago, but serious crafters who depend on small retail sales of their output are stuck with an inventory that they can’t sell legally, or even give away, after having invested in their raw materials and done the work. According to the scattering of news stories (linked here, here and here) second-hand and consignment stores are already feeling a pinch; how can they possibly test every garment or toy, according to the letter of the law? They are either refusing donations or consignments of those items, and very likely making plans to dump those stocks already on hand into landfills or into the market in the next couple of weeks. The fines are insupportable for an individual or a small business; practically no one wants to risk being charged with a violation of the act. Assurances that ‘oh, no – boutique handicrafters and second-hand stores will not be prosecuted under this act, everyone knows it’s really meant for the big mass-producers’ are falling flat among those most concerned. And rightfully so – for what is a law that is on the books, but enforced by bureaucratic or prosecutorial whim? It is a suspended weapon, to be used selectively against people who have drawn the unfavorable attention of the state upon themselves.
And it is purely ironic, that just as the economy is in dire straits, with businesses large and small going through tough times, and individual entrepreneurs doing their best to stay above water, and people who are desperately trying to economize – a consumer safety law is about to wallop those very same small businesses and entrepreneurs whose hold on economic security is least secure. It’s almost as if the captain of the Titanic called for another iceberg to crash into the other side of the ship – just to make sure the whole thing sinks on the level.
… without a taste / of culture / cool .. culture. [1]
If you thought the response to Hurricane Katrina, the IRS and the DMV were bad, just wait until the government gets it’s piddy-paws on ‘culture’ …
By yesterday, 76,000 people had signed an online petition, started by two New York musicians who were inspired by producer Quincy Jones. In a radio interview in November, Jones said the country needed a minister of culture, like France, Germany or Finland has. And he said he would “beg” Obama to establish the post.
If the government was responsible for culture we’d never have had have Hee-Haw. And that would be a tragedy.[2]
“We are not quite sure, especially in this environment, what the secretary of the arts could provide, but foremost is advocacy for arts education and awareness of the financial rewards the arts bring to a community,” said Weitzner, the host of a chamber music series at the Brooklyn Public Library.
“We want to get some of the gravy for stuff we like instead of seeing all the money go to hillbilly music and those rock and roll fellows.”
“A month ago at my high school in Seattle, I asked a student if he knew who Louis Armstrong was. He said he had heard his name. I asked him about Duke Ellington and John Coltrane. He didn’t even know their names. That hurts me a lot,” Jones said.
Aw, man. Jones is hurt because kids choose to listen to Beyonce instead of Louis Armstrong.
Everyone – let’s give him a salary and a position and an official bully-pulpit to shame us for liking stuff that is hip and cool and with it.
Or, let’s not and reflect on the wisdom of Ralph Peters instead …
It is fashionable among world intellectual elites to decry “American culture,” with our domestic critics among the loudest in complaint. But traditional intellectual elites are of shrinking relevance, replaced by cognitive-practical elites–figures such as Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg, Madonna, or our most successful politicians–human beings who can recognize or create popular appetites, recreating themselves as necessary. Contemporary American culture is the most powerful in history, and the most destructive of competitor cultures. While some other cultures, such as those of East Asia, appear strong enough to survive the onslaught by adaptive behaviors, most are not. The genius, the secret weapon, of American culture is the essence that the elites despise: ours is the first genuine people’s culture. It stresses comfort and convenience–ease–and it generates pleasure for the masses. We are Karl Marx’s dream, and his nightmare.
Secular and religious revolutionaries in our century have made the identical mistake, imagining that the workers of the world or the faithful just can’t wait to go home at night to study Marx or the Koran. Well, Joe Sixpack, Ivan Tipichni, and Ali Quat would rather “Baywatch.” America has figured it out, and we are brilliant at operationalizing our knowledge, and our cultural power will hinder even those cultures we do not undermine. There is no “peer competitor” in the cultural (or military) department. Our cultural empire has the addicted–men and women everywhere–clamoring for more. And they pay for the privilege of their disillusionment.
American culture is criticized for its impermanence, its “disposable” products. But therein lies its strength. All previous cultures sought ideal achievement which, once reached, might endure in static perfection. American culture is not about the end, but the means, the dynamic process that creates, destroys, and creates anew. If our works are transient, then so are life’s greatest gifts–passion, beauty, the quality of light on a winter afternoon, even life itself. American culture is alive.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
[1] Tip o’ the hat to the Sons of the Pioneers
[2] No, I’m not kidding. Hee-Haw was sincere and funny and they had good music.
For those of you who like audiobooks, you can currently get free downloads of inaugural speeches on Audible.com. You probably have to be an Audible member, but if you are, they have 14 speeches available, and go back as far as FDR’s 1933 inauguration.
They also have the complete 1/20/09 inauguration (with all speakers), and you can get the whole shebang in one download if you prefer to not download each speech individually.
The speeches they’ve chosen – FDR (1933)/JFK/LBJ/Nixon (1973)/Carter/Ford/Reagan (1981)/all 3 Bush/Clinton (1993)/Obama/Eisenhower/Truman
I’m not a political junkie, but I like *free,* so I downloaded them to listen to sometime. They’re all a part of my history, after all (well, my country’s history. FDR was before my time).
have sent a thank-you message to former President Bush. In briefly browsing the messages, I saw comments from Holland, Canada, France, NZ, Australia, as well as the USA. Some were from folks who totally disagreed with President Bush’s policies, including his Iraq decisions, but they still thanked him for his service.
h/t Baldilocks
I caught the Inauguration of President Obama mostly on Webcast, in between incoming calls and the flotsam and jetsam of work.Ă‚Â I work for my State’s Government and our Legislature is in session and yeah, we’re having all kinds of fun trying to figure out a budget in this economy.Ă‚Â But that’s not what I want to write about.
First of all, I want to thank President Bush for his service.Ă‚Â I know a lot of people think he was possibly “the worst President evah!”Ă‚Â They actually believe there was some evil purpose behind the Bush administration.Ă‚Â I don’t have time for them.Ă‚Â There’s some sort of psychosis there, be it Bush Derangement Syndrome or just plain conspiracy mania, I dunno.Ă‚Â I think 9/11 changed all of us and say what you will about his methods, we never got hit again under his watch and Iraq is better off today than it was under Saddam, and Afghanistan is better than it was under the Taliban.Ă‚Â I believe he’s a man of honor and integrity who put the American people first.Ă‚Â I still have no problem with our going into Iraq, but looking back I wish it had been done better.Ă‚Â I have that luxury.Ă‚Â I wasn’t the man making the decisions.Ă‚Â You look at Secretary Rumsfeld’s resume and shit, I’d have trusted him too.Ă‚Â Not sure if anyone else has read this little piece of trivia, but President Bush met with more families of fallen military members than any President before him.Ă‚Â That tells me volumes about the man and his sense of responsibility for what he was doing.Ă‚Â I was proud to serve under him.Ă‚Â I’m glad his name is on my retirement certificate.
I was moved by President Obama’s inauguration.Ă‚Â I didn’t miss the fact that he’s our first African American President.Ă‚Â Only an idiot could have missed it.Ă‚Â The fact that we no longer have that racial ceiling is exciting.Ă‚Â I’m serious, that just blows me away.Ă‚Â We can move on now and get past that crap.
I didn’t miss his message of responsibility.Ă‚Â That we all need to chip in and help get us out of the problems that face us.Ă‚Â If there’s one thing that’s bugged me about this decade is that while the military is at war, the rest of the country isn’t.Ă‚Â It doesn’t jive with the stories my parents told me about how people gave up things to help support the war effort in WW II.Ă‚Â There’s been something missing.Ă‚Â A sense that we’re all in this thing together. I think the new President realizes this as well.
I’m still cynical enough to not trust our new President because he comes from the Chicago Machine.Ă‚Â However, he’s my President and if the Clintons couldn’t find any dirt on the man that would take him down, I’ve got to conclude that there simply isn’t any.Ă‚Â I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.Ă‚Â For those on the far right who want him to fail, who want him to fall on his face, who won’t support him because he’s not from the right party or philosophy, I have no time for you either.
We’re in too much trouble to continue to play these bullshit partisan games.Ă‚Â “We’ll give Obama the exact same respect and support that the far left gave Bush!”
Listen you dumbshits, we’re in trouble.Ă‚Â We HAVE to come together.Ă‚Â We HAVE to.Ă‚Â I’m not thrilled that it’s under a man who seems to be a socialist at heart, but dammit, we gotta start somewhere.
So I made a pot of Sgt Mom’s Brown Rice/Lentil Soup today.Ă‚Â Used Green Lentils.Ă‚Â I add a pound of HOT Italian Sausage to it.Ă‚Â It’s simmering now and the house smells soooooooo good.
Won’t eat much today because I know it will be better tomorrow.Ă‚Â But there’s nothing wrong with it freshly made either.
Fox News is reporting that President Bush Commutes Sentences for Two Former Border Patrol Agents.
And that’s all I have to say about that.
So the impending Obama ordination/coronation/apotheosis is nearly upon us and of course the media is all girlish a-twitter, breathlessly declaiming yet again how extraordinary, how very historical, how bright-new-day-adawning it all is… meeeh. I switched over to a strict diet of the classical station two weeks ago, it was all getting to remind me of girly fan-mags like Tiger Beat going all gushy over Herman’s Hermits and the Monkees, and I have a low nausea threshold, anyway.
Still, there he is, and there he will be, in all his Urkel-geek glory – attended by a fawning press establishment, and the multitudes who see in him whatever they wish most to see – and no doubt trailed by all sorts of unsavory connections from the old Chicago hood. Commander in Chief, President of the Good Old US of A, and the current Resident of the White House – I shouldn’t wonder if he and the rest of his family might not be thinking second thoughts about the whole thing, at this point. It’s probably pretty different, actually being the one at the tippy-top of the chain of command, rather than just being able to skate past, by voting “present” .
Wish ya luck, Baracky… I really do. Wish ya luck and a real thick skin. You wanna hark back to Abraham Lincoln? Take a look at the pictures of him, before he took the Presidential oath the first time around, and then the pictures of him as he was starting his second term. Looks a couple of decades older, doesn’t he? But that’s what four years will do to you, in the highest office in the land. It isn’t all standing up and making mellifluous speeches to the adoring crowds … but I daresay you’ll be finding that out very shortly, of you haven’t already.
I shouldn’t sound all that discouraged, really I shouldn’t. We’ve had worse chief executives over the 19th and 20th century, although some of them were such pale nonentities considered over the long haul that even the actions they took while in office are relegated to the footnotes. I am sure people felt passionately about Millard Fillmore, at the time of his election, although at present I have no idea of why. The long haul tends to even out the bumps and the dips in the road. What was Warren G.Harding, after all, but a temporary rut, a long-ago embarrassment with a hatchet-faced wife, a mistress in the downstairs broom-closet and a scandal at Teapot Dome. At the very best (and we will be extraordinarily lucky if this is the case) Barak Obama might turn out to be presidential material like Truman – a hard-headed, competent and personally uncorrupted man who emerged relatively unscathed from a perfect sink of a political machine every bit equal to that which made Chicago famous. At worst, he’s Jimmy Carter with melanin.
Hey, I’m an optimist – I can dream.
And you know what the nicest part might be? Maybe we can finally hear the very last of “Amerikka is teh most racist nation evveh!” I’m personally looking forward to cutting off at the knees the next race-hustler who tries to lay that one on me. Really, I am. Almost as much as I am looking forward to hearing Garrison Keillor lampoon Barak Obama on Prairie Home Companion – or the Saturday Night Live crew do a similar parody.
Just to get them inspired, here’s a link to an entry on Protein Wisdom which has the most perfect photoshop eveh of the post-coronation appearance. Enjoy.
A send-up from Israel’s answer to “Saturday Night Live”, on BBC coverage of the current situation in Gaza
Link: 
Found by degrees through Rantburg and Hot Air. Enjoy – it’s subtitled, which puts almost everyone in on the joke. Look, haven’t I been saying we ought to make fun of these guys … and this one makes fun of the Palestinians as well.