Gardens, Bunny Huggers, Clouds of arrows to blot out the sun, Abandonment and Raw Sex

The other evening we had the last three pathetic figs in our salad, an anticlimactic cap to a very disappointing garden year. Then last evening on our walk Linda raised the question, "What ever happened to the White House garden?"

As it happens Michelle Obama's garden, which was quite famous in the spring for a time, hasn't been getting much national attention since then. But it turns out to have produced pretty well if the Huffington Post can be trusted:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/29/michelle-obama-fall-harve_n_339172.html

Good for the First Lady! Her garden did a whole lot better than mine this summer even if she is, as I suspect, shading the cost figure just a bit. Huffington Post quotes her as saying the garden cost $180.

I'm figuring the real cost of the Ph.D. agronomist who must have tested the soil and planned the amendments was all by itself a whole lot more than $180. And that's leaving out the cost of the round the clock Secret Service guards who had to protect that patch from rabbits and other varmints in a manner calculated not to enrage the bunny and chipmunk huggers. There's simply no way they could have gotten away with fencing that White House garden on the cheap and ugly the way I fence my garden. And there's no way the Secret Service could just blow away any intrusive White House garden bunnies who yearned for a taste of the greenery.

Back here at home I had a visit from two local bunny huggers the other day. They stopped by with their medium sized kinky haired sort of black poodles to ask about the monster pickup truck that Chris the bowhunter parks on the circle near their homes while he's sitting in his tree stand slavering at the chance of putting broadheads into Bambi's mom and dad. I agreed to talk to Chris when I see him about parking his truck in our driveway.

They also expressed concern about the danger to their children of hunters filling the air with far flung arrows. I explained that Chris does not shoot in the manner of Persians raising clouds of arrows to block the sun shining on Spartans so they can fight in the shade. And I assured them that Chris is a very qualified and careful hunter who's unlikely in the extreme to shoot arrows at or anywhere near any children. I didn't feel it necessary to warn them not to dress their children in realistic deer suits complete with big racks of antlers.

On another front, Jas and Kathy left for The Villages on Sunday morning and probably arrived there on Monday night. We've heard no word from them as of yet; but that isn't terribly surprising. They put the Postal Service behind them last Thursday after 35 and 20 years respectively; and now they've put all of us who remain condemned to this chilly northern climate behind them as well.

Not that I'm complaining that Jas is down in Florida and has forgotten all about his older brothers and sister. It's a beautiful sunny day, and the ten point buck spent quite a bit of time earlier chasing does thither and yon about the lawn, over the creek and around the pond. I hope he doesn't wander over toward Chris's tree stand for at least a couple more days. He's pretty magnificent on the hoof.

Gather ye does, buck, while ye may; for at any hour thy time may come.

I will certainly call Al R tomorrow morning at about 10:30 to see if Jas has stopped over there for coffee. Can't count on him to remember to call me.

Warren Buffett made a big bet on coal

Roger Pielke noticed Warren Buffett’s big bet on coal the other day and wondered what the Sage of Omaha knows.

http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2009/11/warren-buffetts-big-bet.html#comment-form

As it happens Alex sent me a long DOE report the other day that made me think things aren’t as bad as I had thought even if global warming fears are wholly reasonable. Or perhaps I’m just in an optimistic frame of mind.

http://www.netl.doe.gov/energy-analyses/pubs/Bituminous%20Baseline_Final%20Report.pdf

If the assumptions of the study and the analysis leading to the executive summary aren’t too far wrong electricity from coal will cost about 50% more with very high CO2 capture and storage. That means fossil fuels alone can support recently normal rates of economic growth for a hundred years or more. If the transition can take place over twenty years it’s not an insurmountable economic problem, if only because many existing uses of electricity are pretty inefficient and the economy will enforce a lot of energy conservation as electicity costs rise. So the actual economic effect of the energy cost change in terms of living standards will be less than a 50% rise.

And that leaves out the possibility that the public will eventually get comfortable with nuclear fission, which is operating now at cost levels that must be at least comparable to coal plants without carbon capture (or else it wouldn’t be operating). It also leaves out the possibility that fusion will eventually become possible at some cost that’s reasonable in the context of rising fossil energy costs due to carbon capture and depletion. Plus, it leaves out wind and solar and biomass and such; but they strike me as nearly trivial in the 20 year term next to the bigger sources of energy despite all of the hype.

The economy commonly reacts to such cost changes, and even worse cost changes, over time without too much disruption if the politicians don’t meddle too much, as they did in the 1970’s for a time. For instance oil and thus gasoline prices can rise and have risen in the past by more than 50% in a year or two without causing more than moderate pain, at least to anyone who has access to the technology to read this, despite all of the whining that always attends such price changes.

Perhaps that’s why Warren Buffet made his big bet on coal.

I also posted this on Zombie Contentions at http://ckmac.com/thewholething/2009/11/buffets-big-bet/

Obamandias

I met a traveler, late of Norwayland,
A meme park, cloying as Candyland,
Who said, “A vast, nay global, king is crowned,
Hawaii spawned, of earth split diverse strand,
Pre timely marriage, by two not long for him around.
Oft’ stoned, he education gained, and phlegm,
Plus caustic wife, and rep for writing great renowned.
From him pure peace will sure from passion stem,
To one and all astound, stamped on world around.

On Nobel plinth we erect his image,
Sing fulsome praise unto his visage.
“Here’s to you Obama, this prize of prizes,
We predict, imagine, the deed that to it rises.
To you great king, serene Obama,
Fond hope of hordes of baser mopes,
We grant, we sing, this hail, hosanna,
Based whole on horde of our fond hopes.”

To you who question, we render this,
“Look on his glory, ye deniers, and despair,
For from your every taunt re things amiss,
There’s nary doubt the writers most folks read,
Who grant no wrinkle, on those who leftward lead,
Will with airy twinkle, his flawless rep repair.”

With apologies Percy Bysshe. I also posted this at Zombie Contentions
http://ckmac.com/thewholething/2009/11/obamandias/

Dave is going South and Deb is irked about holidays

I've been remiss in reporting that Dave, our man of the woods, told me on Monday that he's moving in with a friend from Norristown for a couple of weeks and then he will he heading south to Florida. That's sort of good and bad news. The good news, for Dave, is that he'll no doubt be a lot warmer in Florida over the next few months than he would be here. The bad news, for me, is that I'll miss running into him in the woods.

The worse news is that Dave mentioned the possibility that he won't return north, at least this far north, next summer. He's thinking of summering in the mountains of Georgia. I told him to keep in touch, which he will hopefully do with Alex when he stops by the occasional library and can get on email.

In other news Debra showed up for a visit a couple of hours ago because she had dropped her mom Dolores off at the hairdresser nearby. We talked her into having a bit of dinner after which she complained that at her school they are not allowed to refer to Christmas and Easter as holidays, instead calling them winter and spring break. But they do refer to Yom Kippur and Kwanzaa as holidays. Kwanzaa, of course is a fake holiday invented by an FBI informant, if memory serves; but Yom Kippur is definitely a religious holiday.

Well. . . after Deb left I got on the computer and one of the first things I found was a post on The Corner by Jay Nordlinger of National Review complaining about the same sort of thing. Here's what he had to say in a post titled Unsilent Night:

"A reader from Boulder, Colo., sends a note that may interest you. It responds to an item in Impromptus today. She says, “In 1994, the Fairview High School Christmas concert was going to close with the students processing out of the auditorium singing ‘Silent Night.’ Huge controversy, with multiple cries against ‘religion in the public schools.’ The school district’s attorneys said no. Since it was too late for the music teacher to arrange for something else, the students began to recess in silence. The audience was having none of it, and started singing ‘Silent Night’ themselves. That story still gives me goose-bumps.”

Holy mackerel, that took brass (and I’m not talking about trumpets and trombones). By the way, I imagine the Boulder people were not able to call that concert a “Christmas concert.” “Winter Serenade”?

Another reader writes to say, “Every December in Chicago, they have the Christkindlmarket. If they called it the ‘Christ Child Market,’ the world would come to an end! And the local bank flashes ‘Happy Holidays,’ followed by ‘Feliz Navidad.’” True, true: You can’t say “Merry Christmas,” but you can say it in Spanish. “And, in my daughter’s public school, they banned Handel but allow black spirituals.” For sure, and thank goodness for spirituals.

We could do this forever, but I’m stopping now. Happy Halloween! (Actually, it’s the day of the Crash, but in any case . . .)"

You can find Jay's post here: http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NGVjOTg0NzY1MmQ4MjRjOTEzZmM5YTFmZWU0OWFmM2M=

Things are getting beyond ridiculous

A Yale educated sycophant named Rocco Landesman made a fool of himself the other day. Based on what he said in his address of October 21st to the Grantsmakers in the Arts he would have better spent his time and money studying wrestling at Bobo Brazil University rather than Drama at Yale. Mr. Landesman is Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.

He said about President Barack Obama, "This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln. If you accept the premise, and I do, that the United States is the most powerful country in the world, then Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar."

First off I'll give him a break and not quibble about the fact that a specific president is a "who" rather than a "that" even though I would have expected better usage from a holder of a Doctorate of Dramatic Literature, even one from Yale.

But let's get on to serious stuff.

Barack Obama is certainly not the first president to write his own books since Teddy Roosevelt because (duh!) since TR there have been many other presidents who have written their own books. Woodrow Wilson wrote multiple books while he was a professor. And Calvin Coolidge wrote books. And Dwight Eisenhower wrote a book. And Richard Nixon wrote books. And John F. Kennedy wrote a book, And even Bill Clinton wrote a book.

It's true that Eisenhower, Nixon, and Clinton arguably had at least some help with their books, and Kennedy almost surely had a whole lot of help. But it has been credibly argued that Barack Obama may have had a bit or more of help writing his books as well.

Now, about that other assertion, that Barack Obama is the first president to write books really well since Lincoln. First off, it's a bit of an odd assertion since Lincoln never wrote a book even though he did a pretty fair job as president and he wrote very good speeches. But regardless, it for sure ain't true, no how, no way; as Huckleberry Finn might have said. For Ulysses S. Grant was a president after Lincoln, and his book was highly praised by no less a critic than a fellow named Samuel Clemens who went by the monicker Mark Twain.

Back before the utter degeneration of university academic standards I would have assumed that a person with a doctorate from Yale would recognize the name Mark Twain; but in case Rocco is reading this, I'll mention that Twain was a middling fair writer back a while ago. One of his many books was titled Pudd'nhead Landesman, or Rocc'nhead Wilson, or something like that.

Now we come to that curious construction whereby Rocco asserts that Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar. Aside from it being a tad strange to liken an elected American President with a usurping Roman Dictator, that's simply not true as well, if only because there have been numerous presidents who have certainly been writers, although admittedly some of their books are not very highly regarded.

But if one were to set out to think of a writer president in connection with Julius Caesar, I would have thought it impossible for a Ph.D. to fail to think of Dwight Eisenhower long before thinking of Barack Obama, unless he was on a crusade to find something nice to say about Obama.

For Rocco's benefit I'll point out that, like Caesar, Eisenhower's most famous deed before becoming president, was conquering Gaul. He even wrote about it in his well regarded best selling book, Crusade in Europe, pretty much the way Caesar wrote about it in his well regarded best selling book The Conquest of Gaul.

Now, in fairness to Rocco, I'll mention that they may well not have copies of Caesar and Eisenhower's books at the Yale Drama School, but they're fairly readily available. Really Rocco. Even I have a copies of them.

My copy of Caesar's book starts, "Omnia Gallia in tres partes divisa est." No it doesn't. I lied. My copy doesn't start that way because I pretty much cruised on autopilot through Latin One and Two in high school. So my copy starts, "Gaul is divided into three parts." Like Rocco Landesman's common sense, of which he must have left two parts back at his other job when he moved to Washington.

In that regard I'm reminded of a little piece of trivia that gives another reason why Rocco shouldn't be quite so ready to praise President Obama's intellectual heft to and beyond the sky in comparison with all presidents "since Lincoln".

President James Garfield, who I'll mention came after Lincoln in case any Yale Ph.Ds are reading this, was said to be able to write an answer in Latin with one hand and in ancient Greek with the other hand in response to a verbal question put to him in English. I just found out he could also juggle indian clubs, with one of which Rocco Landesman should perhaps be smartly tapped upside the head in hopes of loosening the cobwebs in there.

Here's the whole text of Rocco's spiel to read if you think you can stand it. It actually does have some other funny parts besides the paragraph I quoted above; but I don't think Rocco meant them to be funny. They're more like funny pathetic. If he doesn't have a speechwriter he should get one; but before that he should dispose of the crayons they gave him to write and color with at Yale.
http://www.arts.gov/news/news09/arts-works-release-and-speech.html

Update - Hat tip to Scott Johnson at the Powerline Blog http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2009/10/024805.php
On reflection I'm realizing that's where I originally learned of Rocco Landesman's speech

And: I also posted this on Zombie Contentions at http://ckmac.com/thewholething/

A brief visit to the Peoples Republic of Massachusetts

Three days we've been away, and in that time the big sugar maple tree has dropped about half of its leaves. It was at the very peak of its splendor on Sunday of last week, all shades of gold and red and green. What leaves now remain on the tree are yellow or brown.

But I don't want to write about the swift decay of the splendor of the sugar maple, its leaves deprived of essential nutrients by the choking off of tree's systems. I want to write about the splendor of the great Peoples' Republic of Massachusetts, which Linda and I visited this weekend.

We stayed in the Brookline Holiday Inn, which Christina got for us via Priceline. A great location for observing some pretty interesting stuff, and only ten blocks or so from Alex and Christina's apartment. The very first evening was made special when I observed a local copper making time with nine well oiled young ladies who emerged from a building across the street as part of a much larger group who were perhaps the competitors for the Miss Miniskirt Massachusetts title. Every one of those girls had their heads in the clouds; but their legs reached all the way to the ground.

The copper, Steve was his name, loaned his uniform hat to one of the nine he was wooing. I was hoping she would try to make off with it the way Dillon tried to do with the Guardia Civil's fancy tricorn back in Barcelona in the 1960's; but she meekly handed it back after trying it on and displaying it to the passing cab drivers. Those cab drivers were not looking at the hat, and neither was Steve. The Guardia Civil back in Barcelona was definitely focused on his tricorn when he gestured very meaningfully at Dillon with his submachine gun. He looked pretty determined to me; but to this day I don't rightly know if he would have fired had Dillon not thought better of keeping his hat.

Steve got his hat back before he guided the nine young ladies into a cab and told the cab driver it was okay to take the passenger overload. Whether he scored a phone number or not I don't know; but he did give the dollies his email address. I hope he got a number because I don't think those lasses were in condition to remember an email address.

To be continued. . . The next thrilling episode will include our encounter with the exuberant
Russkis at the restaurant, and our tour of the Harpoon Brewery. It may also include
commentary on the events that did not occur when we found our car boxed in by the idealistic young civil engineer who was so preoccupied with saving humanity by delivering materials to the Boston Headquarters for Idealism that she had no time to worry about inconveniencing a few mere humans.

Ah to be young and heedless of the risks of rudeness. Hopefully the next time she will block in someone like me in my much younger days, for even idealists, perhaps especially idealists, need learning in the wages of sin. Randy or Dillon or Paul or Dave or Nick and I would have levied quite some wages on the car of someone who boxed us in back in college days. Thomas Harris had his character Hannibal Lecter go perhaps a smidgen too far; but it is a very certain truth that free range rudeness should be answered with consequences by anyone truly idealistic upon whom it is practiced.

Update: In other news I just got an exceedingly pleasant surprise when I leafed through the mail we collected upon returning home the other day. It included a very nice postcard from Aruba where Alex and Christina are enjoying a great honeymoon, or at least they were when they sent the postcard more than a month ago. They mention seeing "enough colorful fish, sunsets and iguanas to fill at least two honeymoons". The Aruba post office must have tied this postcard to an iguana who then hitched a ride on a fish to bring it to the U.S.

Just think how quickly and efficiently our medical care will be attended to when health care is run by the government the way the post office is.

The promised recipe for Pasta e' Fagioli and some other stuff

There is a squirrel with a kinked tail sitting in the pot of the baobab. He's been sitting there grooming that tail, looking around, occasionally licking for salt at the sides of the pot for a good fifteen minutes. When Linda came over and stood by the patio doors he froze up until she moved away. His threat recognition system ignores a giant monster sitting fifteen feet away; but it reacts to one standing ten feet away. The amount of time and careful attention devoted to studying such things by the wildlife biologists and such must be truly stupendous.

This particular squirrel has time to waste playing with his tail because the big white oak by the back door has produced a fall of acorns practically beyond all imaginings. Like all the other squirrels, he's probably glutted with acorns and already possessed of enough caches of them to last the winter. Plus he knows he can be blase' about acorns because the black walnut trees have also produced a bumper crop. The walnuts are still in their thick and nasty iodine smelling outer coats on the ground right now; but those coats will rot away and leave just the nuts in their shells, which will lie there contentedly until the squirrels get around to them; because nothing else can eat them. Those nuts are everything but squirrelproof.

But enough of that fat and lazy rodent; who better save his teeth for the walnuts and keep them off the trunk of my baobab tree. I sat down here to complete the recipe for Pasta e' Fagioli that I started a few days ago and then abandoned. I set the beans to simmering on Columbus Day before Jas came to get me for our tour of the new Wegmans and Best Buy, and then I forgot to finish the preparation - at least I forgot to finish the description of the preparation - of the meal. And I just remembered that I promised Linda L a description of the full recipe when we had dinner with her and Mark at the creole restaurant down in Royersford.

Linda L wanted that recipe even though I mentioned that my Pasta Fagiole, which used to be Mom's, and before that her Mom's and Pop's Mom's Pasta Fagiole, has nothing much in common with the recipes the restaurants use and the one that appears on the box of ditalini. Those other recipes are for a watery bean and vegetable country soup which contains some macaroni. My recipe is for a fairly thick bean and macaroni stew flavored with garlic, salt and pepper, and olive oil. Linda L told me that she had tasted my version one time; but for the life of me I can't remember when I ever served such a thing to a crowd.

We ate the finished Pasta Fagiole for dinner on Columbus Day and then again on Wednesday, I think it was Wednesday, of last week. And, of course, I ate some of it for lunch a couple of days last week also, and one time for breakfast even. If you remember, I cooked two pounds of great northern beans pretty much according to the directions on the package, except about four times longer. I did not make Pasta Fagiole out of all of those beans because that would have been enough to feed me and Linda and much of Royersford. Out of the pot that resulted from cooking all those beans I used nine cups for the recipe I made last week. And I also froze three containers, of five cups each.

So, let's get that recipe out of the way before I get off on another digression as I am sometimes wont to do. Cook two pounds of Great Northern Beans on low for several hours, stirring occasionally, until most of them have been reduced to mush. Mom used to like a greater percentage of the beans whole; but then Mom sold out to the point of using canned beans eventually. Pop liked Mom's canned bean ersatz concoction; but he preferred the more mushy bean consistency you can only achieve by simmering those beans to death and beyond. This I know because Pop used to describe how good the bean scrapings from the bottom of the pot tasted when his mother gave them to him. She, Grandmom Filomena, used to cook her beans on the big woodstove that sat in Aunt Carmella's kitchen, and may still sit in that kitchen now, ten years and more after Aunt Carmella passed away.

That stove was huge, and the iron top of it was at least a half inch thick, which I know from playing with the round cover things that were about the size of CDs only much thicker while Mom and Aunt Carmella and Aunt Tavia and sometimes Aunt Mary were having coffee and cookees at the table. You could lift those round things and then let them accidentally clang down very satisfyingly onto the stovetop with that iron tool that slotted into them until you were given another cookie and chased from that kitchen.

You only get the sort of bean curd effect on the bottom of the pot that Pop described if you cook beans until they disintegrate. Which I would remind Mom about whenever I saw her opening bean cans in her later years and I wanted to generate a sharp reaction to liven things up. Despite her immediate reaction, which usually entailed the waving of her big spoon, Mom loved that line of discussion because it inevitably led straight back to feeding families cheaply in the days when she made great pots of beans and macaroni from scratch down on Penn Street. Sometimes it even led all the way back to the story about trapping blackbirds in the back yard of 403 Walnut Street; or the story of Grandmom Angela catching the boarder not shaking the milk and using the cream on top for his morning coffee; or the story of the men sneaking into the rail yard at night to dislodge coal from the cars, so the women could go in the morning to gather it; or the story of Grandmom Angela feeding ten, or was it fifteen, or twenty, with one pound of beef and a whole lot of potatoes and greens - in the era after the blackbirds had learned to avoid her back yard.

But I see that I've done it again, digressed from providing the recipe. Cook two pounds of beans according to the package directions but much longer. About 2/3rds of the way through cooking the beans add two bulbs of garlic, the cloves peeled and more or less finely chopped, of course. Fry the garlic just a bit in about a cup or so of olive oil, to drive the hotness out of it, before adding it and the oil to the bean pot. Also add two or three level teaspoons of salt and half or maybe a whole level teaspoon of pepper. And add a 14 ounce can of tomato sauce for color. If you don't have tomato sauce you can use ketchup or diced tomatoes, but if Mom heard you say you did that the spoon would really have waved. The addition of the oil and garlic will help in keeping the beans from sticking. This is the modern age of dials to control the heat and flat ended stirring spoons with which to scrape the bottom of the pot, not the age of cooking over a wood fired stove and wooden spoons shaped pretty much like blunt sticks. We do not end with bean mush stuck to the bottom of the pot, if we're careful.

From the resulting pot of beans, oil, garlic and tomato sauce for color, remove 9/24ths of the total and mix that with about 2/3rds of a pound of Ditalini cooked to the bare minimum time suggested on the package and then almost completely drained. If the beans are especially thick drain a little less water from the ditalini. If the beans seem a bit thin drain all of the water from the ditalini. That's the recipe I made the other evening. Each of the three containers I have in the freezer contains 5/24ths of that pot. I will probably mix each with about a third of a pound of ditalini, maybe a little more.

Pop used to eat Pasta Fagiole for breakfast whenever there was some of it in the refrigerator. In later years he would sometimes be sitting there in the kitchen window when I went over there for coffee, eating beans and macaroni with that giant flat bowled tablespoon he liked for that specific purpose. We have that spoon, the one with the slightly kinked metal fatigued spot on its handle. We still occasionally use it as a serving spoon for salad, although I prefer a different spoon for that purpose.

Pasta Fagiole is perhaps the ultimate comfort food from the days when people ate cheap and hearty stuff like beans and macaroni for the comfort of a full belly; before some wiseacre thought up the term "comfort food" and thus consigned such foods to mild association with eating to assuage our neuroses.

Update: In other news, scientists have discovered a new species of web spinning spider whose females grow to be bigger than a CD. So far they haven't actually seen a live one, just dead specimens in museums and parts of recently alive ones that have fallen to the ground in the rainforests of Africa. They think the reason they haven't seen a live one in its web is that the females live in the tops of the tall trees where they don't fear most birds and lizards and other such predators on ordinary two or three or four inch in diameter spiders because they look upon them as comfort food.

The scientist who study spiders are apparently short of help. They desperately need a few assistants to climb up those trees, ignoring the trifling snakes and foot long centipedes and other biting stuff, to find those giant spiders and study them, perhaps even capture one to bring down to the ground alive. They assure me that these particular spiders do not jump on things they want to eat but rather wait patiently, camouflaged in their sturdy webs, confident that plenty of food will come to them.

Who says there are no jobs available in this economy?

Update 2: The other night, after I told the story of Lefty and the drapes which Mom always used to tell, Linda told me she had never heard Mom tell her Lefty story, which was a cautionary tale about the taking in of stray troubled souls. Jas and Kathy also seemed to have never heard that story even though Jas remembered that Lefty used to sleep on the pile of burlap bags in the back of Harry's Potato Market until he pulled the knife on Patty. Lefty had a lot, a very lot, of very hard miles on him when we knew him. Mom's story predated that. One of these days I have to tell it here, but not in connection with a food recipe.

Harry took in strays all the time. He took in the quiet and nice black guy from down at the wharf who later stole some money Harry had in the trailor for a trip South to buy watermelons, which caused Harry to buy the pistol about which Patty used to act out a very funny story. And, of course, Harry later took in Eddie Fight, who never stole anything, but who also never did even a lick of work that I ever saw. Eddie had a lot of hard miles on him also, and he could be provoked to crack us up with one of his sayings. "Smarty, eh, smarty had a party." and "Nice man, Harry, very nice man. He'll give you a leaf for a lettuce patch any day."

Those idiots can't even carve up and pass out pork intelligently

Mark Twain famously said, "Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself."

Well. . . we've just had an example of the liberals in congress passing out pork so stupidly that they gave far more to their opponents than to their supporters.

According to analysis at The Audacious Epigone blog the three most liberal states are Massachusetts, Hawaii and Rhode Island; and the three most conservative states are Wyoming, Idaho and Utah.

Now you would think that the liberals in congress would have passed out more juicy pork to the liberal states than to the conservative states when they put together their big stimulus bill back in February. But according to Recovery.gov the three most conservative states overall got one job for every 3,898 residents; while the most liberal states got only one job for every 10,544 residents.

Wyoming – 61 jobs/532,000 population = one for every 8,741 residents
Idaho – 632 jobs/1,523,000 population = one for every 2,410 residents
Utah – 536 jobs/2,736,000 population = one for every 5,104 residents
Total - 1229 jobs/4,791,000 = one for every 3,898 residents

Massachusetts – 583 jobs/6,497,000 population = one for every 11,144 residents
Hawaii – 249 jobs/1,288,000 population – one for every 5,172 residents
Rhode Island – 6 jobs/1,051,000 population – one for every 175,166 residents
Total - 838 jobs/8,836,000 = one for every 10,544 residents

Congresscritters aren't even smart and efficient when it comes to rewarding their friends. How can it possibly make sense to want to give them more control over the national economy?

State by state conservative versus liberal rankings from http://anepigone.blogspot.com/2009/10/economic-social-and-foreign-policy.html

State by state job creation figures from
http://www.recovery.gov/Pages/TextView.aspx?data=recipientTopJobs&ViewAll=100

State population figures from
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=phNtm3LmDZEMdMS7_GYVYYQ

Hat tip to Razib Khan who writes as David Hume on The Secular Right blog. His post there got me started on this train of thought with his link to The Audacious Epigone.
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=phNtm3LmDZEMdMS7_GYVYYQ

You break it, you own it

Colin Powell and Richard Armitage famously cited the Pottery Barn rule in talking about intervention into the affairs of other countries – “You break it, you own it.”

It seems to me that application of a corollary of that rule is a cure for one big problem that ails our current health care insurance system.

Currently, under COBRA, a company’s health insurance provider is required to offer continuation coverage at the company cost rate for two years after someone leaves the company. But after that the provider has no further obligation.

For people with pre-existing conditions continuation coverage is a great boon since they can’t easily get other insurance. On the other hand it’s a potential trap for people who don’t have pre-existing conditions when they leave a company because at that point they can get alternative coverage, but if they stay with the company’s provider they court the danger of developing a pre-existing condition during the two year continuation period.

If COBRA were amended to require insurers to offer continuation coverage to age 65 to anyone they once insure that problem would go away. People who develop pre-existing conditions would have the option of extending their coverage with the insurer who had them when they developed the condition.

Naturally, insurers would have to take this new obligation into account in setting their rate tables. And they would have to negotiate to swap responsibility with other insurers when people move to other states and such. But doing stuff like that is what insurance companies are good at.

All in all, it seems to me that this change would be far less onerous than what the insurers are going to get in the way of regulation because of the very understandable sympathy there is for people who become orphaned and uninsurable two years after being laid off.

Why can’t insurance companies be required to follow a “You own him when he breaks, you own him for life” rule.

Update: Another thing about the health care insurance debate. Why do many persist in saying that a new not-for-profit health care insurance provider is necessary without mentioning that there is already a national association of not-for-profit providers that’s a major factor in the market – namely the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association?

I also posted this at Zombie Contentions - http://ckmac.com/thewholething/

Being the continuance of Jas and Sull's excellent adventure

When I left off the other day Jas and I were pretty much finished with our exploration of the big new Wegmans, so we drove over to the new Best Buy. We had to drive because the Best Buy is a pretty long way from the Wegmans. That shopping center is big; it has more length of commercial streeds than Norristown did in the 1950's when Al Martino was still a young pup of a crooner and Mom and Pop used to take us down to see the Christmas lights on Main Street.

We would go into Chatlin's Department Store and marvel at the toys, which were up on the fourth floor as I recall. Days of Wonder! Erector Sets and cap guns and bows and arrows and Daisy Air Rifles; and a Lionel Train display with working trains going around and around the tracks. Chatlin's display of trains was almost as big as the one Uncle Froggy used to set up in the combination living room and dining room of Grandmom and Grandpop's row house up on Walnut Street.

All four floors of that old Chatlin's would be lost within one corner of the Best Buy. The place is as big as an aircraft hangar. And it's positively crammed with toys for boys that would have been beyond our wildest imaginings back in the 1950's. The TV in our old house on Penn Street had about an 8 inch screen on which little cowboys and indians may have ridden; but I can't remember ever seeing that TV on. That was no terrible hardship because Uncle Chick and Aunt Mary had a big screen TV next door. Their TV was the most amazing thing I ever spent much time with until Uncle Froggy got the first color set any of us had seen in the 1960's.

I watched Hopalong Cassidy with Uncle Chick on many and many a Saturday morning, both of us lying on the floor with our noses a few inches from the twelve inch screen. Uncle Chick was a big kid on those Saturday mornings. He was also a Slovak, the only Slovak I knew. So I thought for quite a while that all Slovaks were big kids, just as I thought all South Philly Italians were big kids because Uncle Froggy was a big kid.

Uncle Froggy lived in Norristown, but he had grown up in Philly and you could tell. He acted like a kid much more than my other uncles. First off, he was a fireman, and when the fire siren sounded he went running. Plus, he drove a big dump truck around as his regular job. But he seemed to go where he wanted pretty much as he pleased with that dump truck. He was sort of like a foster son of the guy who owned the mill where the dump truck was supposed to be; so I guess nobody was keeping real close tabs on him. He also did unusual things when he worked the counter down at Babe's luncheonette. If me or Matty or Sonny went in there and gave him a quarter for a lemonade he would give us a big lemonade, and he would also give us three or four dimes and a nickel back as change. I was pretty little when we still lived in Norristown; but even when I was little I knew that getting four dimes and a nickel back as change for a quarter was unusual.

But I need to stop dwelling on my first childhood and get back to the present one. . .

The Best Buy has a wall of big screen TVs that's about a hundred yards long. Jas and I started off at the left end looking at the little 40 inch sets and then strolled up the marching line of sets until we got to the end of the selection of 55 inchers that cap off the display. In the cavern of the Best Buy those 55 inchers are suprisingly small looking even though any one of them is probably as big as the table in Aunt Mary R's kitchen that would hold enough meat ravioli to feed the 20 or so of us who would eat around it in shifts on Christmas Day because the dining room was, of course, filled with Uncle Froggy's train layout. Matty used to crawl under the train table and pop up through the hole in the middle of it to run the display.

After spending a good bit of time with the TVs we moved along to the laptop computers, the very smallest of which has a screen about the size of Uncle Froggy's first color TV set. The people on those laptop screens don't have green faces and the grass on them is not blue.

But enough of the Best Buy. We left there after spending some time with the young pup salesman near the laptops and learning that he had to go ask somebody else what the difference is between 3G network and a 4G network, or whatever, which Jas wanted to know for some reason. As if either of us would have understood the answer even assuming the salesman had come back with a coherent answer. I just looked up the matter on Wikipedia and I still don't think I understand it even though Wiki probably does have a coherent answer.

I made coffee when we got back to our house, and Jas and I discussed the usual things that we've been gnawing at like bones for thirty years over coffee. Then he suggested that we go for a walk becaue he wanted to see Dave's little camping compound in the woods. So we strolled out the driveway and over to the right of way on our neighbor's property that leads past the water company's little chlorine gas danger building and then past the little strongly fenced enclosure that I think has something to do with the sewer interceptor. That right of way took us back onto our property and put us on the path I keep mowed along the sewer line right of way.

Incidently, our neighbor may not know that the right of way on his three quarter acre suburban lot is not necessarily intended for use by private guys with tractors like me who are too lazy to make a ford across the big creek to allow easier direct access to the other side of their property, so if you see him don't say anything.

Anyway, Jas and I shortly came to where the side path leads to Dave's kraal, for that's what it's become, in the woods. Dave has been more or less been living back there in our woods, happy as a clam or a Masai, for a few years, but the kraal is new this year. Formerly Dave moved around between three or four little campsites where he would simply stretch his hammock between trees but he became more ambitious this year as the cold has started to come on. He now has a little low cabin made of cast off lumber, surrounded by a brush stockade which is quite impressive. Dave doesn't have any livestock in his kraal; but he does have a little semicircular seating area aound the firepit in front of his cabin for visitors.

By a miracle Dave was home at about noon when Jas and I stopped by. I say a miracle because the other day was the very first time I've ever come upon Dave sleeping in any of his campsites in all the times I've walked or driven my tractor over there. A bit inconvenient - I will no longer be able to say to the neighbors or the police that I don't actually know for a fact that Dave sleeps in the woods. Dave has always been elusive. I usually see him coming or going from his dad's house up in the neighborhood on the other side, or I see him on the paths, seldom more than once every couple weeks.

Jas and I spent a few minutes talking with Dave, learning that he's making a longbow, inspired no doubt by Chris the bowhunter who just got his first deer with a longbow a few weeks ago. Dave also told us that it was Chris who made the deer that died of natural causes a couple of weeks ago right near the pond disappear from the place where I dragged it with the tractor. Dave said Chris dragged the deer to a low spot in a gully where it will decompose faster. A mystey solved!

When we were done talking with Dave, Jas and I continued up the paths toward the old house on Route 29. And who should we encounter but Dan who was fueling his chainsaw. I gave Dan permission to cut wood on the property earlier in the fall because I want the field behind the Route 29 house to become a pasture. And Dan needs the money he's been earning by selling firewood since he's out of work. So far he's cleared about an acre of our land, doing a very nice job of it. The stumps are cut low enough so I'll be able to keep it mown without trouble.

It was at that point that Jas suggested lunch at the new Ray's across 29, his treat. Dan commented that he had found the hamburgers at Ray's very good, but considered the french fries a bit greasy. We found him to be right about the french fries, but thought them greasy in a good way, like Boardwalk Fries in Atlantic City. Route 29 isn't Park Place quite yet; but it's come a very long way from the two lane road with no shoulders that it was back in 1978 when we bought this property. It's now three lanes wide in front of the our old house there, and four lanes wide just up the way where the commercial office buildings are across from the big new Wawa.

I doubt that a single one of the pharmaceutical company yuppies who endlessly zip back and forth along that road are aware that Dan is patiently clearcutting in the woods behind a screen of trees and brush that I suggested he leave standing for the moment, piling up dozens of cords of firewood, about seventy yards away. I'm practically certain that not a one of them is aware that Dave is happily living in his kraal, making a longbow and practicing with his sling, generally living a bit of the life of a solitary pre-industrial Masai or Navajo, less than three hundred yards away from their bustle.

For God's sake don't tell them any of this. The new world those yuppies are making is an excellent, a fantastic, world, containing many new wonders; but I like being able to come across older style wonders as well.

Postscript: It would be wrong of me to close this out without mentioning that I just saw that Al Martino died yesterday at 82. Al got his start as a crooner in South Philly back in 1952, the year that Sam was born, and the year before Jas was born, when I was four and just becoming aware of the wonders in the world. http://tinyurl.com/Al-Martino-Dead-at-82

A day of wonder in second childhood

First off, it's impossible to find time to think undisturbed. It's about 1:00 and I just sat down to write up this day of wonder. And almost immediately that possibly winter damned little woodpecker came back and started tapping at the patio door window and shamelessly displaying to his reflection. Yesterday he woke me up, very thoughfully just before the alarm went off, by tapping on the bedroom window. All the little buddies he was playing around with last week are gone. They may already be headed south. You had better give up with the windows guy, and get your backside south. It's getting cold.

Maybe he listened to me. He's gone now so I can get back to the events so far of the day.

Jas, who is off work because of Columbus Day, called at about 9:30 to ask if I wanted to go out and play. Of course I did; so he came by after stopping at the drugstore. While I was waiting for him I started two pounds of great northern beans on low. The package directions call for simmering them only a couple of hours after soaking them overnight; but I like them mostly disintegrated for Pasta Fagiole, so those beans are still over there slow cooking.

After Jas arrived we went over to the big new playground that just opened and took a couple of hour walk through the Wegman's and then through the Best Buy which are pretty much the only stores open over there at this point. The Wegmans is enormous! And it has friendly people giving out sample snacks here and there, which the little dusty playgrounds of my first childhood did not have. And even if those old time playgrounds had had people giving out snacks they would certainly not have included samples of buttery brie on bread. Very good brie, and the nice lady insisted on giving us some even after we told her we weren't shopping but only walking around.

As we were walking down one of the aisles I heard an old woman exclaiming to her buddy about the price of the gourmet cat food she was looking at. Once we were out of earshot Jas mentioned that she probably drove ten miles to price out the cat food the way Mom and Aunt Mary used to run around to all the stores buying this here and that there. Mom and Aunt Mary never bought catfood though. Cats ate leftover people food back in those days.

Old people sure are funny. They've got all the time in the world to go around doing stuff like strolling around five acre supermarkets eating free samples and checking prices. Which reminds me, I noticed that Wegmans sells the big bottles of soda for 89 cents, which is a lot better price than prevails at Redners where the best you can do, even on sale, is a buck a bottle. Not that I would save any money by going to Wegmans to shop. The place is positively filled with enticing stuff that is not priced at 89 cents and I'm an impulse shopper even when not hungry.

There is, for instance, and olive bar that has selections you don't even see down at the cheese and olive store in the Italian Market down in Philly. I could easily spend twenty bucks at that olive bar after I save 11 cents on a bottle of Diet Mountain Dew.

And Wegmans has five kinds of caviar. Imagine that, caviar for sale right here in Collegeville. And most of that caviar isn't even expensive. Four of the caviar varieties are bargains at only $5.17 an ounce; a pretty darn good price compared to the 28 bucks and change that they want for an ounce of the one expensive variety. Caviar for poor folks. I'm sure only really rich people buy that expensive caviar. Regular guys like me and Jas would never pay that outrageous price. We would stick to the cheaper stuff.

And the produce section! What a thrill that was for two kids who worked at Harry's Potato Market back in our first childhood. That was back when we told people to please don't squeeze the tomatoes displayed under the big cardboard sign that said "FLORDIA TOMATS - 3 lbs FOR 50 (CENTS)".

I put that "CENTS" in parentheses because this darn computer doesn't have a key for the little "cents" symbol. I'll bet Wegmans has computers that have a key for the "cents" symbol; and I'll betcha dollars to donuts they have somebody who knows how to reliably spell "Florida" as well - or maybe they have a spell checker on their computers. Harry apparently didn't have a spell checker on his computer, and he didn't trouble to use me or Jas or Sam or Patty as spell checkers when he made up signs. We laughed about that Flordia sign every year for three or four years when Harry took it out each fall after the last of the local tomatoes were gone.

Harry's computer used to do other funny things. One time, for instance, he priced the figs for individual sale at far less than their bulk cost. Which didn't much matter anyway because there was a lot of shrinkage of those figs. . . a very lot of shrinkage. Harry himself liked them quite a bit, and we did too. Working at Harry's had very few perks; but one of those was eating all of the fruit you could possibly want to eat. It was accepted practice, for instance that the last watermelon off the truck simply had to be dropped, not far enough to make it mushy, but far enough to make it needful of cutting up.

But back to Wegmans. They have fruits and vegetables in their produce section that I haven't seen since I walked through the outdoor markets of Singapore and Hong Kong and Bangkok back when live monkeys were to be had in out of the way places, and not for pets. And, even forgetting about the exotic stuff, there are brussel sprouts still on the stem, about fifteen varieties of lettuce and an aisle of different types of tomatoes that has more shelf space than Harry's whole potato market. The most impressive thing is that they have all of those fruits and vegetables in both normal form for people who eat normal fruits and vegetables, and in super high priced organic form for the kind of people who turn their noses up at cheap caviar and insist on the 28 buck an ounce variety. And the milk! Don't even get me started on the milk except to say that they have at least three big milk sections scattered around that store.

Not that I had a lot of time to pay proper attention to the milk sections. As always Jas was in a hurry, just like he always was back in first childhood. Now, as then, he even wastes time in a hurry. He was always a few steps ahead of me and making me feel guilty for not moving along fast enough. So now I'm going to have to go back to Wegmans one day to see if one of their milk sections is like their produce section. At this point I can only report that it will not surprise me one bit if I find that they have goat and camel and yak milk, all in both normal and organic varieties.

More later. . . I have some stuff to do for tonight's Pasta e' Fagioli. My next post will start "After we left the Wegmans. . ." That next post will include the thrilling tale of our stroll through Best Buy and our brief stop at the big new Wawa, along with the events that led up to our visiting Dave at his little camp in the woods and then coming upon Dan, who was refueling his chainsaw, and getting his opinion of the french fries at the place we were walking to for lunch.

With apologies to Samuel Taylor

Ode to NASA's LCROSS Mission

At Cabeus did NASA geeks,
A swifty Centaur rocket hurl,
Where dust, and mayhap water reeks,
‘Pon craters numberless, and peaks,
Under the cosmic whirl.

Sent a metric ton of massy metal,
To feel out lunar soil’s fettle.
And cunning careful cameras set,
To record impact on lunar rill,
Ensure the wants of public met,
Make time long record of the thrill,
Assure balmy days for budget till.

But, oh! When stopwatch ended countdown,
To indicate the mighty crashdown,
Appeared no hint of fiery flash down,
There on Selene’s apparition.

Were the cameras to be faulted,
For missing flash on Moon assaulted?

Or had some Lunar Politician,
Told Ace, a junior lab technician,
"Strip down that leftover techy thing,
From building that new Saturn ring,
Set a force field strong and watchful,
To stop this arrogant man tossed missile. "

"Include a grokking gizmo, Ace,
To do that thing of the Martian race.
Twist that racing Terran thing,
Clear outa this here four D space.
Enough of taking human guff!
Teach those Earthlings right enough,
That they're not really red hot stuff!"

Cow Peas, Political Kings and Saturn's Rings

Usually I'm the one who brings up scientific trivia during our nightly walk; but the other night Linda surprised me with news that scientists have discovered a new ring around Saturn. Then she moved on to calling the Nobel Prize given for ribosome chemistry "boring."

That led to me, falsely it turns out, criticizing the Nobel Committee for the "fact," as I then thought, that Norman Borlaug had never been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize while Fat Albert the Gorester and Jimmy the Peanut Farmer Carter had each been awarded one, along with Henry Kissinger and Yasser Arafat, at least one of whom should have been awarded iron shackles and a copper jacketed bullet to the head rather than a peace prize gold medal, depending on your point of view.

And thus I learned that Linda, who's probably better informed than 90% of this country's population, and 95% of the world's population, had never heard of Norman Borlaug.

. . . never heard of Norman Borlaug, even though he actually was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, plus a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977, and a Congressional Gold Medal in 2006.

Norman Borlaug was also awarded a Padma Vibhusan, which is India's second highest civilian award, also in 2006. He wasn't apparently thought quite as worthy as Nelson Mandela, who holds the distinction of being the only foreigner ever awarded the Bharat Ratna, which is India's highest civilian award.

Now, I certainly have nothing against Nelson Mandela, who is a very great man as men go; but, but, but. . . what sort of world is it where Nelson Mandela deserves India's highest civilian award while the best it could do for Norman Borlaug was to award him its SECOND highest civilian award.

India, of all places, where probably a third of the population is alive and eating instead of dead and rotting because of Norman Borlaug. . .

It's true that Norman Borlaug did nothing but stunningly boring and tedious work in agronomy, a stunningly boring field, from when he got his PhD in plant pathology and genetics in 1942 until he died on September 12th of this year.

First he fed millions of Mexicans by developing a high yield, disease resistant, semi-dwarf wheat. Then he doubled down and fed tens of millions more Mexicans by bucking his boss and the agronomy establishment and going on to develop various varieties of his special wheat to allow double cropping each season.

In 1962 he got bored with feeding Mexicans, so he moved to South Asia, where he fought and won a long battle with hidebound government bureaucrats (oxymoron alert) and proceeded to feed hundreds of millions of Indians and Pakistanis by proving to farmers that they could plant and harvest and eat his Mexican semi-dwarf wheat varieties without having to give up their naan and raga rhythms in favor of tortillas and mariachi music. In the process he made a fool of Paul Erlich whose Population Bomb, thereby, er, bombed, big time.

Probably because he missed the Mariachi music he was back in Mexico and had already left for his test fields in the Toluca valley by 4:00 AM on the day the Nobel Prize Committee called to tell his wife that he had won the peace prize. After she told him about that, totally in character, he finished his work in the fields before he came back home to where the microphones were and pretty soon made his name mud with the environmentalists by hurling a big cow flop at them.

. . . "some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things."

Having skewered the well fed and self satisfied Al Gore types like so many kebabs he retired to rest a bit, soakin' up the rays part of the time in Mexico and part of the time in Texas. But there was to be no enduring rest for him; because well fed Western European and American environmentalists were determined to keep most black Africans starving, their children stumbling dazedly around with hunger swollen bellies, even as they praised Nelson Mandela for achieving change by voluntarily starving himself in prison.

So it was that a Japanese shipbuilding tycoon, Ryoichi Sasakawa, called up Borlaug, who was probably enjoying a well deserved marguerita by the pool, and lured him to Ethiopia, where what he saw convinced him to stay in Africa for a while to feed tens and hundreds of millions of people there.

"I assumed we'd do a few years of research first," Borlaug later recalled, "but after I saw the terrible circumstances there, I said, 'Let's just start growing'." Soon, Borlaug had projects in seven countries. Yields of maize and sorghum in developed African countries doubled between 1983 and 1985. Yields of wheat, cassava, and cowpeas also increased in these countries."

Even Jimmy Carter was impressed enough to put down his knife and fork for a while to help a bit by travelling to Ethiopia and convincing the latter day pharoah there to let his people go. . . and use fertilizer. . . no matter how much the environmentalists who were growing fat eating lobster and caviar on the self congratulatory lecture circuit whined and stamped and insisted that Africans were better off dead or starving than alive and well fed enough to stomp around to the music of their koras and mbiras and bougarabous.

That's who Norman Borlaug was until he died last month at age 95 after a life spent saving the lives of perhaps a billion people.

Norman Borlaug, unlike Al Gore and a lot of other much more famous men, was a man who had a dream, a dream of well fed peasants in India and Africa and Asia and South America. A dream of a world without so many bloated belly babies to provide photo ops for Madonna and Bono and Sean Penn and Al Gore and Jimmy Carter.

And he was a man who patiently and incredibly made that dream a reality, with his hands and with his brain, on the ground amidst the cow flops, in a dozen countries, despite the carping of ivory tower environmentalist types and the foot-dragging of status quo government types. A man who actually did something, quite a big thing, about the simple fact that "Without food, man can live at most but a few weeks; without it, all other components of social justice are meaningless. . . Yet food is something that is taken for granted by most world leaders despite the fact that more than half of the population of the world is hungry."

And that's why it's a damn shame that there isn't even a plaque honoring his name in the hall in India, now home to a billion much better fed people because of his dream and work, where they mark the names of those, like Nelson Mandela, who have been awarded the Bharat Ratna.

Facts and quotes mostly from the well of Wikipedia. Outrage and shamelessly plagiarized Mario Puzo/Hyman Roth quote from my own deep well. The contents of a can of Campbell's Chunky New England Clam Chowder were heated and enjoyed during the writing of this message.

From a world lit only by fire to a world connected by the internet

Bob just bought my copy of A World Lit Only By Fire; and Bill just bought my copy of Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army. Bob lives in Virginia. Bill, who is a Chief Warrant Officer, has an APO armed forces address, so there's no telling where he lives right now; but I'm going to take a wild ass guess and say he's either in Afghanistan or will be headed there soon.

There's an old military maxim that goes something like, 'Amateurs talk about tactics, professionals talk about logistics.' And, if Bill is indeed in Afghanistan, he's living out a bit of what it was like when the world was lit only by fire.

Alexander had to worry quite a bit about logistics when he decided to go to Afghanistan, which wasn't a walk in a park, because Darius had gone on the lam up that way after running away from the battle of Issus. Alexander was pretty serious about catching Darius. He took about 64,000 fighting men with him when he crossed the Khawak Pass in the Hindu Kush; and he also took about 36,000 or so camp followers who straggled along with his army providing various more or less essential services. For one thing there were thousands among those camp followers who managed the tens of thousands of pack animals that carried supplies from the fertile areas to the barren ones.

Logistics were a lot simpler in those days, but men have had to eat three or so pounds of food a day in all ages, so something like a couple of hundred thousand pounds of food had to reach those fighting men pretty much every day, especially when they were taking sixteen days to file through the narrow passes where there was snow on the ground and the cold was nearly unfathomable to we who have lived all our lives with central heating. The pack horses and the cavalry horses had to eat pretty much every day while they were up in those passes too.

Most of us will never walk the passes of the Hindu Kush as Alexander's men did and as Bill may. But quite a lot of us have crossed Rocky Mountain National Park on Trail Ridge Road while going from Denver to Craig via Estes Park and Hot Sulphur Springs. When I was last there it was still pretty cold at Milner's pass even during the day in late May. For a fairly sedentary sort like me walking that route is nearly unimaginable, although it is possible for me to imagine Dave and Alex walking a good bit of it when they went out there hiking a couple of years ago. Part of the very distant reason a million Alex's are named Alex is because that distant past Alexander walked and rode the passes of the Hindu Kush with those 64,000 men.

Which sort of brings me back to the Bill who's interested in the logistics effort behind Alexander's conquests. By the miracle of the internet I may know a bit more about Bill if I give my assumptions some rein so they can run pretty free. For instance, there's a Bill with the same last name who is a Technical Chief Warrant Officer 3 and was just selected for promotion to Chief Warrant Officer 4. If that's the same Bill I congratulate him on his promotion and thank him for his long service to our country that has gotten him to that rank.

I think I'll put a congratulations and thank you note in Bill's book when I send it off today.

Incidently, I also know a bit more about Bob than the fact that he's interested in history and technology and the way the world changed at the end of the dark ages. I know he's retired, and I know he contributed a couple of hundred bucks to a Democratic Party candidate for a state office. I'm not going to hold that against him; but he gets no note with his book, although I hope he enjoys it as much as I did both the first time a couple of dozen years ago and the second time a month or so ago when I rediscovered it. When I rediscovered A World Lit Only By Fire I listed it for sale at an artificially high price to ensure that it wouldn't sell before I had a chance to re-read it. Learning now that Bob is a Democrat I can't help but feel just a little pleased that I never got around to re-pricing it lower.

By great coincidence I happen to be re-reading A Canticle for Leibowitz right now because I rediscovered it in the course of sorting out my books and putting the ones that have any value on Amazon for sale. It's about a future world lit only by fire and in part about the nitty gritty details, the logistics if you will, that are entailed in rediscovering technology after a long dark age like that which still befogs most of Afghanistan. A Canticle for Leibowitz is also about a problem facing all of us who are readers - so many books, so little time.

Update: In other news, there is a somewhat confused but very persistent woodpecker who has been trying to mate with his reflection in our windows for a couple of days. The other day he gave up and joined with a flock of other woodpeckers who came around to see what was up; but he's now back and patiently going from window to window, doing his thing, trying to get a reaction from his reflection.

Health care is expensive - so is the newest and biggest plasma TV

Recently there has been quite a lot written about how expensive health care is. Which isn't surprising, because health care is expensive, especially if you want access to all the latest technology, which most people do when their lives are at stake.

But the truth is that health care is just like TV. If you're satisfied to watch a ten year old technology TV you can get one at Walmart for a hundred bucks. If you want the latest huge screen plasma model it's going to cost you ten or twenty times as much.

The next time you hear someone whining about the cost of a new wonder drug remind him that he can save a lot of money by using an old generic drug that's probably almost as good. If there is no old generic drug that treats his condition you can remind him that the new drug is very logically worth quite a lot if he would have died before it was invented.

The government charges a young person something like 14% of his income for Social Security, which is insurance that he will get a fairly minimal pension in his old age. By that standard the value of medical treatments which will let him live to old age is quite high.

But just how expensive is health care? It turns out that it's not very expensive at all considering the alternative. There is a website called ehealthinsurance.com that will quickly give you quotes on health insurance if you put in your age.

It turns out that a 25 year old can get catastrophic coverage with a high deductible for $40 a month, or he can get a gold plated policy for about $175 a month. Figure one day a month working at the local McDonalds for basic catastrophic coverage and a few days a month of minimum wage work for gold plated coverage.

The rates for a 61 year old are, not surprisingly, quite a bit steeper since he's quite a bit closer to his sell by date and is probably already a medical mess. But even so, a 61 year old can buy catastrophic coverage for about $200 a month, which he can net with about a week's work at the local Wawa even after the government grabs its taxes. It's true that gold plated coverage at about $1,000 per month is pretty much out of the ballpark for the 61 year old unless he's saved up and/or built up the skills to make significant income; but if he's 61 he should already know that anybody who ever promised him a rose garden was bullshitting. A 61 year old is too dumb to be worth saving if he doesn't already know that life ain't fair, and then you die.

Another thing that gets to me is the constant whining about how the cost of extraordinary health care is driving some people to bankruptcy. Even as I feel sorry for those people, it's very hard for me to avoid thinking that bankruptcy is a whole lot better than dead, which is what they would be without the extraordinary health care.

The great circle of life

It's the season of the fawns. Three of the cute little tykes have been gambolling oer the lawn, stretching their little legs, testing the strength of their little haunches. Their mothers move in somewhat more stately fashion.

All very picturesque and life affirming, until one of the mothers ceases to move in stately fashion and comes to just lie there with one unseeing eye staring up at the sky, proclaiming a very inconvenient truth, dead in the middle of the path behind the pond, flies gambolling around that one accusatory eye.

She was still alive the other day, that visible eye occasionally blinking, her breath shallow. She didn't seem to be suffering, unlike that other one with the hurt hoof a few years ago that somehow got himself all tangled up in the wild rose bush where he struggled and struggled. Thankfully this one died on her own, so I was spared the very unpleasant necessity of putting her out of her misery.

But she couldn't stay where she was. So I went out this morning with the tractor and dragged her to a less conspicuous spot. She's pretty well off the path through the old horse pasture, down near where the local kids dragged those rectangular clay drainage pipes and set them up as supports for benches around a firepit a few years ago. Nobody used that firepit this spring; and they certainly won't be using it this fall.

Early on, way back in 1979 or so, Mom got an introduction to the whims of the country just after she and Pop moved into Colwell's old house. Colwell's dog found a deer carcass in the woods and had a grand old time dragging ribs and long bones and big pieces of hide around the lawns. Unlike Pop, Mom was not amused. She wanted me to go down in the marsh and bury the carcass; but by the time the dog got to dragging pieces around there really wasn't much of a carcass to bury.

The good news is that there aren't any big dogs around to tear this new carcass apart and drag pieces of it all over the place; the bad news is that if something doesn't tear it apart it's going to raise quite a stink. I won't be walking the lower loop of the path through the old horse pasture until the cold of winter sets in. Other walkers will just have to take their chances.

Not quite the same as knowing about every feather that falls from a sparrows tail, but. . .

These researchers set up a couple of cameras to watch the sky over part of the desert in Australia. Then they calculated where a meteor fell based on the track it made on the videos. They found the tennis ball sized meteorite within 100 yards of the place their system predicted that it had landed.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090917144123.htm

Springtime for Putin and Medvedev

President Obama has done some very dumb political things since taking office. He's appointed people who have had obvious scandal problems and he's later had to withdraw their appointments. He badly underestimated the resistance there would be to the Cap and Trade energy tax that the Green wing of his party wants badly. And he was clumsy in the way he tried to sell his health care plan with the result that his Democratic Party allies have been put into bad political positions this summer.

But none of those mistakes were very surprising in light of the fact that he has not had much experience on the national scene. And none of those mistakes will necessarily doom Obama to being written down as one of the truly bad presidents, like Jimmy Carter. People forget that Bill Clinton, who is now considered a political genius, also made clumsy mistakes during his first few months in office. Lots of new presidents have made dumb mistakes early in their terms and then gone on to improve the quality of the advisors around them, reassess their plans and goals, and manage to do pretty well on the whole.

But today President Obama cancelled the missile defense system that's been negotiated for and planned for Western Europe since the Clinton Administration. As a result he betrayed the governments of Poland and The Czech Republic, which had each agreed to have one of the missile defense bases in their country despite knowing that it would cause them to get a lot of heat from the Russians. He made the Poles and the Czechs look profoundly stupid for trusting the U.S. and taking that heat over the past few years. And he gave a major psychological and political boost to Russia's thuggish leader Vladimir Putin, who had opposed the missile defense system even though it was not designed or planned to defend against Russian missiles but rather against potential Iranian or Pakistani missiles in the future.

This could have been put down to mere foolishness or inexperience on Obama's part if he had announced it last week, or next week, or even yesterday, or tomorrow. But he didn't do that. He announced it today, September 17th, of all days.

For those of you who didn't study any history in high school, today is the 70th anniversary of the Russian invasion of Poland in 1939. The Russians under Joseph Stalin invaded Poland on September 17th, 1939 as part of a cynical deal they had made with Adolph Hitler and his Nazi Germany to divide Poland up between them.

And on this day, of all days in the year, President Obama has betrayed the Poles and given a major concession to the Russians.

Anyone who thinks this is a mere coincidence, or the result of mere stupidity on the part of President Obama and his advisors must also believe in the tooth fairy. Certainly no one who has read anything about European history will believe it was a mere coincidence or the result of mere stupidity.

Vladimir Putin and Dymitry Medvedev certainly won't take it as a coincidence or mere stupidity. They will take it as a clear signal that the U.S. is no longer interested in central Europe and that the Poles and Ukrainians and Lithuanians and Latvians and Estonians are on their own. Those peoples, in turn will decide either to make accommodation with Russia or they will decide to prepare to resist, either of which will almost surely start again the whole insane central European power politics game that resulted in about a hundred million dead soldiers and civilians in the last century.

The lights will be on late tonight in every military headquarters and foreign office in Europe as prectical military men and diplomats start the process of revising all their plans and reassessing all of their assumptions about the future of peace in Europe.

Great news, if true

"The Arctic as we know it may soon be a thing of the past," says Eric Post, associate professor of biology at Penn State University.

I'm skeptical of Professor Post's belief that the weather in the Arctic will be toasty anytime "soon;" but I certainly hope that he's right. Just imagining all that land up in the north of Canada that will "soon" be toasty enough to produce amber waves of grain has me tempted to reach for a box of cereal.

But I was a bit surprised by another assertion included in the article about the discoveries of Post's team.

According to Science Daily: "The scientists found that the increase in mean annual surface temperature in the Arctic over the last 150 years has had dramatic effects."

I'm hard pressed to understand how the actions of man could be, like, totally, responsible for starting the Arctic to warming 150 years ago in light of the fact that man didn't really start producing significant CO2 until, like, many years after that. Could it be that Professor Post is one of those global warming deniers who admit that other factors might have something to do with the climate?

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090910142348.htm

Caught in a blatant lie within 24 hours

While watching the president's speech last night I was suspicious about the story he told of the fellow who lost his health care insurance. Here's a fellow at sweetness-light.com who probably works in pajamas at his computer doing the job that the mainstream media would be doing if they weren't so deeply in the president's pocket that they're covered with lint and smell like Chinese Chestnut flowers in the spring.

Obama Misrepresents Insurance Case

From Mr. Obama’s address to the joint session of Congress last night:
“One man from Illinois lost his coverage in the middle of chemotherapy because his insurer found that he hadn’t reported gallstones that he didn’t even know about. They delayed his treatment, and he died because of it.”

This is the sad story of Mr. Otto Raddatz, a case that Mr. Obama has cited several times before, including in his August 16th editorial in the New York Times.

For the record, however, the case is not exactly the way Mr. Obama has characterized it, at least according to the sworn testimony of Mr. Raddatz’s sister.

From Ms. Raddatz’s opening statement, from pages 58-59 of the transcript (a pdf file) of the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigation Committee hearings on ‘The Termination Of Individual Health Policies By Insurance Companies,’ Tuesday, June 16, 2009:

Otto began more chemotherapy for purposes of preparing him for a stem cell transplant. In the midst of his chemo treatments, Otto received a phone call and letter from Fortis Insurance Company stating his insurance was canceled. It was rescinded all the way back to the effective date of August 7, 2004.

This meant none of his cancer treatments would be covered. Most importantly, he would not be able to receive the stem cell transplant need [sic] to save his life. My brother only had a very small window of time in which to have the stem cell transplant. He needed to be scheduled within the next 3 to 4 weeks.

My brother was told he was canceled during what they called a "routine review" during which they claimed to discover a "material failure to disclose". Apparently in 2000 his doctor had done a CT scan which showed an aneurysm and gall stones. My brother was never told of either one of these conditions nor was he ever treated for them and he never reported any symptoms for them either.

After months of preparation, the stem cell transplant could not be scheduled. My brother’s hope for being a cancer survivor were dashed. His prognosis was only a matter of months without the procedure.

Mr. Radditz was faced with having to pay for the stem cell transplant himself in order to save his life.

However, Mr. Raddatz’s lawyer sister contacted the Illinois Attorney General’s Office. They investigated and found that the doctor who did the CT scans could not remember whether he had ever told Mr. Raddatz about his findings.

Consequently, the insurance company overturned their original decision to rescind her brother’s coverage, and he was reinstated in the words of his sister, "without [any] lapse."

Again, from Ms. Raddatz’s sworn testimony:

After two appeals by the Illinois Attorney General’s Office, Fortis Insurance Company finally overturned their original decision to rescind my brother’s coverage and he was reinstated without lapse. This is after weeks of constant phone calls between myself and the Attorney General’s Office and we were literally scrambling hour by hour to get this accomplished so that my brother wouldn’t lose his 3- to 4-week window of opportunity that he had prepared for and lose his opportunity to have the procedure.

In other words, Mr. Raddatz’s did receive the stem cell transplant without delay.
Indeed, Ms. Raddatz does not seem to claim anywhere in her testimony that the insurance company’s actions shortened her brother’s life. (Though she does accuse them of having been cruel and unethical.)

From page 75 of the hearings transcript:

Mr. Barton. My next question is to the gentle lady there in the middle. Your brother, has he had his stem cell transplant? Ms. Raddatz. He did indeed receive the stem cell transplant. It was extremely successful. It extended his life approximately 3-1/2 years. He did pass away January 6, 2009, and he was about to have a second stem cell transplant. Unfortunately, due to certain situations, his donor became ill at the last minute and so he did pass away on January 6. But again, it extended his life nearly 3-1/2 years and at his age, each day meant everything to him…
This is not quite the impression Mr. Obama gives with his rendition of Mr. Raddatz’s story.
Despite Mr. Obama’s claims, Mr. Raddatz’s treatment was never delayed. And he did not die because of it.

Meanwhile, in this very same speech Mr. Obama accused others of misrepresenting the facts.


Hat tip to Kathry Jean Lopez of National Review who pointed to this post at sweetness-light.com.

A great pick me up for when you're feeling dumb

Whenever you get to thinking that you've said or done something really stupid or inappropriate here's a column written by the Sports Columnist for the Orange County Register that will quickly convince you that you're not so stupid after all.

This is what he wrote about that young woman who was kidnapped and imprisoned in a shack as a sex slave for 18 years.

"It doesn't sound as if Jaycee Dugard got to see a sports page. Box scores were not available to her from June 10, 1991 until Aug. 31 of this year. She never saw a highlight. Never got to the ballpark for Beach Towel Night. Probably hasn't high-fived in a while. She was not allowed to spike a volleyball. Or pitch a softball. Or smack a forehand down the line. Or run in a 5-footer for double bogey. Now, that's deprivation."

Some jocks are dumb and some jocks are smart; but Mark Whicker, who writes about them, is dumb as a post, dense as lead and clueless as a conga drum.

If you want to read the whole column you can read it here: http://www.ocregister.com/articles/world-won-most-2555260-never-one

Too perfect to require comment - but I will anyway

Three quotations to think about:

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.
- George Orwell

Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy.
- John Derbyshire

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.
- Thomas Friedman

Back in the 1920's liberals made excuses for "the excesses" of Benito Mussolini because he "made the trains run on time." In the 1930's liberals made excuses for "the excesses" of Adolph Hitler because he built superhighways and claimed he was building Volkswagens for the masses. In the 1940's liberals made excuses for "the excesses" of Joseph Stalin because he industrialized Russia. In the 1960's and to this very day, liberals make excuses for "the excesses" of Fidel Castro because he supposedly increased literacy in Cuba.

Here we are in 2009 and a liberal idiot is making excuses for "the excesses" of the jackbooted thugs who run China because those thugs are supposedly doing good things for the environment, which is untrue in any case. China's rulers are making polite noises to lefty environmentalist idiots like Thomas Friedman about developing alternative energy sources while they're building coal powered electricity generating plants and spewing out increasing amounts of pollution at a far greater rate than any other country in the world.

Does Thomas Freidman know this? Of course he knows it, every bit as much as his predecessor lefties knew that Uncle Joe Stalin was purposely starving millions of people in the Ukraine while the New York Times was writing about the Soviet economic miracle. For God's sake, the Chinese Communist government had to shut down the industries near Beijing in order to make the air quality decent enough to hold the Olympics. Does that sound like a country doing good things for the environment?

The more things change, the more things stay the same.

Hat tip to http://lyflines.blogspot.com/2009/09/quote-chain.html and to Jonah Goldberg of National Review who steered me to this.

A couple of questions for the president

I've been trying like hell, fairly successfully, to avoid listening to political ranting on the TV shows for the past couple of weeks. But, as a patriotic American, I was compelled to watch the president spout amazing nonsense for much of the 48 minutes that he addressed the joint session of congress earlier this evening.

So here I am, wondering if President Obama is the smoothest liar I've ever seen or heard of, or whether he managed to get through Harvard and several highly profitable years in Chicago and Illinois politics without learning anything about how government bureaucracies work.

For instance, he very forcefully said, several times, that he can pay for his entire massive health care program by saving more than a hundred billion dollars each year that's currently consumed by waste and fraud in the Medicare and Medicaid programs.

Now, as it happens, I'm very cynical about the competence of government bureaucracies, so I believe Medicare and Medicare are paying for quite a bit of fraudulent care; but even I don't believe they're being defrauded for over a hundred billion dollars a year. And if they are being defrauded for that much money, I fail to see why President Obama hasn't already done a wholesale shakeup of the management of those bureaucracies. If they're really wasting more than $12 Billion per month there should be bureaucratic heads rolling all over Washington, DC.

So I have a couple of questions that I hope some reporter will ask the president.

"Mr. President, you've said you can pay for your health care program by saving over a hundred billion dollars a year in fraudulent Medicare and Medicaid payments. And you have been in office for almost nine months. Why haven't you already done something to to stop such an outrageous amount of fraud?"

And here's a follow-up question:

"Mr. President, who is the great manager that you plan to put in charge of Medicare and Medicaid to stop all that fraud? Will it be the same sort of genius you put in charge of the cash for clunkers program that can't seem to pay it's claims within the two weeks that the law explicitly promised? Or will it be the kind of genius you put in charge of the stimulus program that has given hundreds and hundreds of billions of tax dollars into the care of the same executives who ran the huge banks that made a mess of the mortgage market with their bad decisions.

Can't run Cash for Clunkers? Here, take health care.

Democratic Congressman Joe Sestak is upset because the government's much talked about Cash for Clunkers program has failed the pay the auto dealers the cash it promised for the clunkers. It seems that the geniuses down in Washington (Sestak included) passed the Cash for Clunkers scheme without having the slightest idea of how to run it efficiently.

Among other things they grossly underestimated the speed with which people and auto dealers would grab onto the cash; and they failed to think through the effect on auto dealer finances; and they set up a bureaucracy that has proven to be a total clunker at administering the program.

You can find Congressman Sestak's letter complaining to President Obama about the program here:
http://blogs.mcall.com/penn_ave/2009/08/sestak-to-feds-fix-clunkers-program-red-tape.html

It's kind of rich that Congressman Sestak is complaining about the inefficiency of a program that he himself voted for. But I guess that's the kind of things you do when you're a congressman; you vote for unworkable and inefficient programs and then you blame someone else for then.

I have a question for Congressman Sestak. If this president and this congress and the rest of the federal government can't efficiently set up and manage a very simple little $3 Billion program like Cash for Clunkers, what possible logic can there be in thinking that they can run a very, very complex $2.5 Trillion industry like health care?

President Obama supports offshore drilling!

President Obama supports offshore drilling; but not in the U.S. of course. Instead he's loaning a couple of billion dollars of your tax money to Petrobras to drill off the coast of Brazil. At the same time he supports so called environmentalists who use all manner of legal maneuvering to make it impossible for oil and gas companies to drill off the coast of this country.

This makes not one lick of sense in any dimension.

Since our government is running a deficit it must borrow money by selling bonds in order to loan this money out. So our government is borrowing money from China and others in order to lend the money to an oil company owned and run by the Brazilian government.

And, on another level, Petrobras must be the only oil company in the world that can't make enough money to do its own drilling. Which says something about just how inefficient government run businesses can be.

The Wall Street Journal has the whole story at the link below. I've quoted some of it below.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203863204574346610120524166.html


Obama Underwrites Offshore Drilling
The Wall Street Journal - 8/18/09

You read that headline correctly. Unfortunately, the Obama Administration is financing oil exploration off Brazil.

The U.S. is going to lend billions of dollars to Brazil's state-owned oil company, Petrobras, to finance exploration of the huge offshore discovery in Brazil's Tupi oil field in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro. Brazil's planning minister confirmed that White House National Security Adviser James Jones met this month with Brazilian officials to talk about the loan.

The U.S. Export-Import Bank tells us it has issued a "preliminary commitment" letter to Petrobras in the amount of $2 billion and has discussed with Brazil the possibility of increasing that amount. Ex-Im Bank says it has not decided whether the money will come in the form of a direct loan or loan guarantees. Either way, this corporate foreign aid may strike some readers as odd, given that the U.S. Treasury seems desperate for cash and Petrobras is one of the largest corporations in the Americas.

But look on the bright side. If President Obama has embraced offshore drilling in Brazil, why not in the old U.S.A.? The land of the sorta free and the home of the heavily indebted has enormous offshore oil deposits, and last year ahead of the November elections, with gasoline at $4 a gallon, Congress let a ban on offshore drilling expire.

The Bush Administration's five-year plan (2007-2012) to open the outer continental shelf to oil exploration included new lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico. But in 2007 environmentalists went to court to block drilling in Alaska and in April a federal court ruled in their favor. In May, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said his department was unsure whether that ruling applied only to Alaska or all offshore drilling. So it asked an appeals court for clarification. Late last month the court said the earlier decision applied only to Alaska, opening the way for the sale of leases in the Gulf. Mr. Salazar now says the sales will go forward on August 19.

This is progress, however slow. But it still doesn't allow the U.S. to explore in Alaska or along the East and West Coasts, which could be our equivalent of the Tupi oil fields, which are set to make Brazil a leading oil exporter. Americans are right to wonder why Mr. Obama is underwriting in Brazil what he won't allow at home.

National Public Radio's lying host

Yesterday afternoon at about 1:30 or so I happened to catch a brief part of a talk show on National Public Radio. During the segment I heard the host, a woman, make a clearly false statement about health care.

She said words to the effect that health care reform is needed because insurance companies cancel the policies of people with pre-existing conditions, and her guest made no effort to correct her lie.

The true state of affairs is that insurance companies must continue to cover the medical expenses of people who develop new medical problems. There is no way they can cancel someone's insurance once they have agreed to provide it.

The NPR commentator was trying to blur the fact that the current health care reform legislation requires insurance companies to write new policies for people with pre-existing conditions at the same price as for people without pre-existing conditions. This is complete madness. Writing a new health care insurance policy for someone who needs an operation tomorrow, or who is already known to have an expensive to treat condition, is welfare, not insurance, and it would quickly result in driving all of the insurance companies out of the health care market.

It's exactly the same thing as requiring a fire insurance company to write a new policy on a house that's already on fire, or requiring a flood insurance company to write new policies on houses downstream of a dam that just broke.

The day after the government passes a requirement that insurance companies cover people with pre-existing conditions the smart people in the country will cut back their health insurance to the bare minimum. While they stay healthy they will save money. When they get sick or need an operation they will apply for a full coverage policy as soon as they learn that health care is going to cost them a lot of money. Insurance companies, if they want to stay in business, will have to hugely raise their rates to cover the new consumer behavior, and that will make even more healthy people cancel their policies. It will result in a spiral that will quickly kill off private health care insurance.

This sounds like a complex matter; but it's actually very simple. Would you pay for flood insurance on a beach house every year if you knew that you could always call and get a new flood insurance policy whenever a hurricane is forecast? Would you pay for auto insurance every year if you knew you could call from the scene of an accident and get a new insurance policy to cover the damage you've already done to your car? Would you pay for life insurance all your life if you knew that you could call from your deathbed in a hospital and apply for a new life insurance policy? Would you pay all your life for health insurance coverage if you knew that you could wait and apply for a new insurance policy after your doctor tells you some bad news?

Medicaid, which is a welfare program, already exists to provide health care for people who can't afford to pay for it. The attempt by President Obama and the democrats in congress to ban pre-existing condition clauses in new insurance policies is nothing but a naked play to destroy the health care insurance industry and thus force the country to a single payer government system.

And. . . a single payer health care system will put your health care in the hands of people who are not ashamed to baldly lie to get what they want, like the National Public Radio host I heard yesterday.

Don't like the cost of new drugs? Use generics!

Many years ago Aunt Mary A angrily told me that her eye operation had cost $3,000 and only took a couple of hours. I shocked her a bit, and made her laugh, by telling her that the next time she needed a similar operation I would read up on it and then do the operation for her for a lot less money.

Another time I was talking with Frank A at a reunion and he mentioned indignantly that a friend's mother was taking a heart medicine that cost (I think) $300 a month. What really burned him, he said, was that the same company sells the same medicine for dogs for only a few dollars a month.

Always willing to fuel a good argument, I pointed out to Frank that his friend had an easy solution. If the dog medicine was truly the exact same thing as the human medicine he could save a lot of money by buying the dog medicine and giving that to his mother instead of the human medicine.

In both cases I was being facetious; but there is a great truth in these incidents that relates to the current debate about health care. One of the things the health care "reform" boosters are arguing, and have argued for a long time, is that pharmaceutical companies often make minor changes to existing drugs and then charge a lot more for the new formulations, which are often only slightly better than the old drugs. This is viewed as somehow exploitative, even though everyone agrees that pharmaceutical companies spend huge amounts of money on research and development precisely in order to refine old drugs and develop new ones.

If it's true that a new drug is only a little bit better than an older drug that is now a generic and available for much less cost, why shouldn't people who can't afford to or don't want to pay the price asked for the new drug simply be satisfied with the older drug?

In every other area of life that's the way things are. I would very much like to drive a nice new Cadillac or Lexus every year; but I drive a Ford until it pretty much craps out because I don't want to pay for a Cadillac or a Lexus, and it would certainly cramp my budget to buy a new car every year. I would like to eat nothing but tenderloin and lobster prepared by great chefs in fine restaurants; but I eat chicken and tilapia prepared at home because I don't want to pay restaurant prices for tenderloin and lobster.

Someone who relies soley on much cheaper generic drugs is, at worst, trusting his life to the very best drugs that existed in the world as of about seven or eight years ago. It's true that doing that means taking a slight but significant risk with your life; but then most people take much more substantial risks with their lives by driving cheaper cars that don't have the super sophisticated safety systems that are installed in the most expensive cars.

Why is health care viewed so much differently than the other necessities of life? Why do people beat up on pharmaceutical companies when it's the pharmaceutical companies that have provided both the generic drugs and the slightly better newer drugs?

Here's an article by Tevi Troy that appeared in the June issue of Commentary Magazine that goes into other aspects of the health care, and specifically the pharmaceutical cost, debate:

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/the-end-of-medical-miracles--15162?search=1

Here are some quotes from it for those too lazy to click the link:

"Americans have, at best, a love-hate relationship with the life-sciences industry—the term for the sector of the economy that produces pharmaceuticals, biologics (like vaccines), and medical devices. These days, the mere mention of a pharmaceutical manufacturer seems to elicit gut-level hostility. Journalists, operating from a bias against industry that goes as far back as the work of Upton Sinclair in the early years of the 20th century, treat companies from AstraZeneca to Wyeth as rapacious factories billowing forth nothing but profit. At the same time, Americans are adamant about the need for access to the newest cures and therapies and expect new cures and therapies to emerge for their every ailment—all of which result from work done primarily by these very same companies whose profits make possible the research that allows for such breakthroughs."

"Liberals and conservatives appear to agree on the need to unleash the possibilities in medical discovery for the benefit of all. But it cannot be ordered up at will. It takes approximately ten years and $1 billion to get a new product approved for use in the United States. Furthermore, only one in every 10,000 newly discovered molecules will lead to a medication that will be viewed favorably by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Only three out of every ten new medications earn back their research-and-development costs. The approval success rates are low, and may even be getting lower—30.2 percent for biotech drugs and 21.5 percent for small-molecule pharmaceuticals."

"It is the very nature of scientific discovery that makes this process so cumbersome. New developments do not appear as straight-line extrapolations. A dollar in research does not lead inexorably to a return of $1.50. Researchers will spend years in a specific area to no avail, while other areas will benefit from a happy concatenation of discoveries in a short period. It is impossible to tell which area will be fruitless; so many factors figure into the equation, including dumb luck. Alexander Fleming did not mean to leave his lab in such disarray that he would discover that an extract from moldy bread killed bacteria, yet that is how it happened. Conversely, if effort and resources were all it took, then we would have an HIV/AIDS vaccine by now; as it stands, the solution to that problem continues to elude the grasp of some of the most talented and heavily funded researchers."

"Scientific discoveries are neither inevitable nor predictable. What is more, they are affected, especially in our time, by forces outside the laboratory—in particular, the actions of politicians and government bureaucracies. The past quarter-century has offered several meaningful object lessons in this regard. For example, in the 1980s, the Reagan administration undertook a number of actions, both general and specific, that had a positive effect on the pace of discovery. On the general front, low taxes and a preference for free trade helped generate a positive economic climate for private investment, including in the rapidly growing health-care sector. More specifically, the Reagan administration engaged in new technology transfer policies to promote joint ventures, encouraged and passed the Orphan Drug Act to encourage work on products with relatively small markets, and accelerated approval and use of certain data from clinical trials in order to hasten the approval of new products. All of these initiatives helped foster discovery."

"That which the government gives, it can also take away. As the 1990s began, a set of ideas began to gain traction about health care and its affordability (it seems hard to believe, but the first election in which health care was a major issue was a Pennsylvania Senate race only eighteen years ago, in 1991). Americans began to fear that their health-care benefits were at risk; policymakers and intellectuals on both sides of the ideological divide began to fear that the health-care system was either too expensive or not comprehensive enough; and the conduct of private businesses in a field that now ate up nearly 14 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product came under intense public scrutiny."

"A leading critic of Big Pharma, Greg Critser, wrote in his 2007 Generation Rx that President Clinton picked up on a public discomfort with drug prices and “began hinting at price controls” during his first term in office. These hints had a real impact. As former FDA official Scott Gottlieb has written, “Shortly after President Bill Clinton unveiled his proposal for nationalizing the health-insurance market in the 1990s (with similar limits on access to medical care as in the [current] Obama plan), biotech venture capital fell by more than a third in a single year, and the value of biotech stocks fell 40 percent. It took three years for the ‘Biocentury’ stock index to recover. Not surprisingly, many companies went out of business.”"

"The conduct of the businesses that had been responsible for almost every medical innovation from which Americans and the world had benefited for decades became intensely controversial in the 1990s. An odd inversion came into play. Since the work they did was life-saving or life-enhancing, it was not deemed by a certain liberal mindset to be of special value, worth the expense. Rather, medical treatment came to be considered a human right to which universal access was required without regard to cost. Because people needed these goods so much, it was unscrupulous or greedy to involve the profit principle in them. What mattered most was equity. Consumers of health care should not have to be subject to market forces."

"And not only that. Since pharmaceuticals and biologics are powerful things that can do great harm if they are misused or misapplied, the companies that made them found themselves under assault for injuries they might have caused. It was little considered that the drugs had been approved for use by a federal agency that imposed the world’s most rigorous standards, and was often criticized for holding up promising treatments (especially for AIDS). Juries were convinced that companies had behaved with reckless disregard for the health of consumers, and hit them with enormous punitive damages claims."

"The late 1990s also coincided with an unpredictable slowdown in the pace of medical discovery, following a fertile period in which new antihistamines, antidepressants, and gastric-acid reducers all came to market and improved the quality of life of millions in inestimable ways. A lull in innovation then set in, and that in turn gave opponents of the pharmaceutical industry a new target of opportunity. An oft-cited 1999 study by the National Institute for Health Care Management (NIHCM) claimed that the newest and costliest products were only offering “modest improvements on earlier therapies at considerably greater expense.”"

"The NIHCM study opened fresh lines of attack. The first came from the managed-care industry, which used it as a means of arguing that drugs had simply grown too expensive. Managed care is extremely price-sensitive, and its business model is built on cutting costs; executives of the industry were well represented on the board of the institute that put out the report. They were, in effect, fighting with the pharmaceutical companies over who should get more of the consumer’s health-care dollars."

"The second came in response to the approval by the FDA in 1997 of direct consumer advertising of pharmaceuticals. The marketing explosion that followed it gave people the sense that these companies were not doing life-saving work but were rather engaged in the sale of relative trivialities, like Viagra and Rogaine, on which they had advertising dollars to burn that would be better spent on lowering the cost of drugs. And the third element of this mix was the rise of the Internet, which gave Americans a level of price transparency that they had not had before regarding cost differentials between drugs sold in the U.S. versus Canada and other Western countries."

"These three factors precipitated a full-bore campaign by public interest groups that bore remarkable fruit over the next several years. By February 2004, Time magazine was publishing a cover story on pharmaceutical pricing, noting that “the clamor for cheap Canadian imports is becoming a big issue.” Marcia Angell, a fierce critic of the pharmaceutical industry and the FDA, wrote in the New York Review of Books in 2004 that, “In the past two years, we have started to see, for the first time, the beginnings of public resistance to rapacious pricing and other dubious practices of the pharmaceutical industry.”"

"Harvard’s Robert Blendon released a Kaiser Family Foundation poll in 2005 in which 70 percent of Americans reported feeling that “drug companies put profits ahead of people” and 59 percent saying that “prescription drugs increase overall medical costs because they are so expensive.” Overall, noted the foundation’s president, Drew Altman, “Rightly or wrongly, drug companies are now the number one villain in the public’s eye when it comes to rising health-care costs.” "

Fortunately he was polite and they were slow to go to the nightsticks

This story, if true, proves just how old you are if you're over 50.

"What is your name, sir?" the officer asked.
"Bob Dylan," Dylan said.
"OK, what are you doing here?" the officer asked.
"I'm on tour," the singer replied.

You're Bob Dylan? NJ police want to see some ID
Aug 14, 11:57 PM (ET)By WAYNE PARRY

Rock legend Bob Dylan was treated like a complete unknown by police in a New Jersey shore community when a resident called to report someone wandering around the neighborhood.
Dylan was in Long Branch, about a two-hour drive south of New York City, on July 23 as part of a tour with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp that was to play at a baseball stadium in nearby Lakewood.

A 24-year-old police officer apparently was unaware of who Dylan is and asked him for identification, Long Branch business administrator Howard Woolley said Friday.
"I don't think she was familiar with his entire body of work," Woolley said.

The incident began at 5 p.m. when a resident said a man was wandering around a low-income, predominantly minority neighborhood several blocks from the oceanfront looking at houses.
The police officer drove up to Dylan, who was wearing a blue jacket, and asked him his name.

According to Woolley, the following exchange ensued:
"What is your name, sir?" the officer asked.
"Bob Dylan," Dylan said.
"OK, what are you doing here?" the officer asked.
"I'm on tour," the singer replied.

A second officer, also in his 20s, responded to assist the first officer. He, too, apparently was unfamiliar with Dylan, Woolley said.

The officers asked Dylan for identification. The singer of such classics as "Like a Rolling Stone" and "Blowin' in the Wind" said that he didn't have any ID with him, that he was just walking around looking at houses to pass some time before that night's show.

The officers asked Dylan, 68, to accompany them back to the Ocean Place Resort and Spa, where the performers were staying. Once there, tour staff vouched for Dylan.

The officers thanked him for his cooperation.

"He couldn't have been any nicer to them," Woolley added.

How did it feel? A Dylan publicist did not immediately return a telephone call seeking comment Friday. "


The story is from My Way News - http://apnews.myway.com//article/20090815/D9A334601.html

Dentist's face ruin due to Obama policies

The Wall Street Journal reported alarming news today:

"Some of America's biggest food companies say the U.S. could "virtually run out of sugar" if the Obama administration doesn't ease import restrictions amid soaring prices for the key commodity.

In a letter to Agriculture Secretary Thomas Vilsack, the big brands -- including Kraft Foods Inc., General Mills Inc., Hershey Co. and Mars Inc. -- bluntly raised the prospect of a severe shortage of sugar used in chocolate bars, breakfast cereal, cookies, chewing gum and thousands of other products.

The companies threatened to jack up consumer prices and lay off workers if the Agriculture Department doesn't allow them to import ..."

Oh, the humanity!!! Crazed chocoholics running wild in the streets because they can't get their fix. Dentists selling apples on the streets because of lack of teeth to drill and fill.

Actually I have to apologize here. The sugar import quotas are not just President Obama's fault. They're the fault of every president and every congress since the 1930's. Sugar farmers here in the U.S. have effectively been on welfare since then. Sugar import quotas are a nifty little hidden tax on everybody who eats or drinks junk food and beverages. The rich sugar growers live high on the hog as a result of that hidden tax, and they naturally share some of their wealth with the politicians who make sure the trough stays full. In this case Uncle Sam really is Uncle Sugar.

A neat new technology, especially for Star Trek fans

This two and half minute video illustrates how a Japanese researcher has made it possible to "touch" and "feel" and otherwise interact with a hologram. He's still a bit of a ways from building the equivalent of a Star Trek holodeck; but he's demonstrated one way in which doing such a thing is theoretically possible. Very neat! The video doesn't seem to have sound, so it is safe to open at work.

Scroll down once after going to the link below to find the video:

http://www.physorg.com/news168797748.html

Hat tip to Jonah Goldberg of National Review, who posted this on The Corner where he periodically presents a list of weird and interesting links.