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.

Priceless

Democratic Congressman Eugene Green wants to be very sure that only residents of his congressional district attend his town hall meetings. So he has decided to require attendees to present photo ID in order to get in.

That's kind of funny, although not in a ha ha way, because Congressman Green has been a staunch opponent of requiring people to show ID when they go to their polling place to vote.

Apparently Congressman Green is perfectly okay with election fraud; but he's absolutely terrified that someone from outside his district may ask him a question at a town hall meeting.

Somebody ought to whack Congressman Green upside the head with a not too fresh mackerel.

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tom-blumer/2009/08/11/cant-make-it-dem-rep-who-opposes-photo-id-vote-requiring-photo-id-town-h

"This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer." Will Rogers

When she's right, she's right

Here's a fifteen second long video of a proud American forcefully asserting her right to free speech. This woman refuses to be silenced despite Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama saying that it's unamerican to question the decisions of our rulers down in Washington.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJxmpTMGhU0

And here's a one minute long video of a very well spoken fellow who says that President Obama's Cap and Trade plan for energy will cause your electricity rates to skyrocket.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlTxGHn4sH4&feature=related

Here's a 29 second video of another guy, an old guy whose mother should have taught him not to slouch so much, who says that Cap and Trade is a tax.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgUHol_WkDk&feature=channel

I've reported all of these radicals to the special snitch line at the White House. If you want to report something fishy or unamerican to President Obama you should email your suspicions to flag@whitehouse.gov

Nothing is too small to report. If you kids out there hear your parents or anybody saying things that are fishy or disrespectful about President Obama, or about any of his plans to make the seas recede and the world become like totally perfect for you, he wants to know so he can send some people to straighten out their thinking.

Meet the Mob

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and President Obama are very concerned about the far right wing loons who have been intimidating innocent Democratic Party congresscritters by going to the town hall meetings and complaining. Some of these evil protesters are even carrying signs protesting the government takeover of healthcare that the Democrats are trying to do.

This blogger has done a patriotic job of labelling the sorts of wicked right wingers who have been protesting:
http://thedanashow.wordpress.com/2009/08/06/meet-the-mob/

I know it's very annoying when the filthy peasants appear outside the door of the manor house whining about things; but as a helpful reminder to Speaker Pelosi I've quoted the First Amendment to the Constitution below:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Now the nanny state is getting personal

A Tulare, CA policeman shut down this little girl's lemonade stand because she didn't have a business license.

I'm remembering that I sold lemonade to the golfers at Eagleville Country club one summer before I was old enough to go to work at Harry's Potato Market. I forget the number of the hole I set up on, but there was a bench convenient to Trooper Road that was next to a hill on the course. Pop would drop me off on his way to Norristown in mid morning and then pick me up on his way home in mid afternoon.

The golfers were good customers; but if I had tried to charge them $2 a cup for lemonade they would have laughed me off the course. The dollar isn't what it used to be. The next year I started work at Harry's for less than a dollar an hour. For the first couple of summers Harry paid me one dollar less than the number of hours I worked in a day - for instance $9 for a 10 hour day. Of course I also got all the fruit I could eat, and occasionally a basket of spotted peaches or apples to take home to Mom. That was a pretty good deal for Harry because the next day Mom would send me back with a pie or a cobbler for him.

I could write a thousand words and not do justice to Mom's peach and apple pies. . . Suffice it to say that a scoop of ice cream would have defiled those pies.

Because I had better get back to the golfers. Besides lemonade I also sold them golf balls that I retrieved from the rough and the water hazards on the course. I think I charged ten cents apiece for the balls. Occasionally one of them would give me a quarter for an especially good ball and if one of Pop's buddies showed up I might get a half a dollar or even a dollar tip.

And, occasionally one of them who had lost a ball he had just hit up over the hill would inspect my collection of balls pretty carefully; but it wasn't me who had a habit of running across that hill stealing golf balls. It was (redacted) who did that. I didn't rat on (redacted) to the golf course manager back then when he questioned me about the tendency of balls to go missing on that hole, so I'm not going to do so now.

(Redacted) used to try to sell me the balls; but I never bought them. because that would have been foolish. First off, I knew for a fact that Pop knew the golf club manager, just as he seemingly knew everybody else within twenty miles who ever saw me do something of note then and later. Secondly, even then I knew that golfers keep track of what make and number of ball they're playing.

Good times. Lazy summer days, sitting in the shade on my bench with my cooler of lemonade that mom made and which thus cost me nothing, reading science fiction, and raking in a few bucks - with occasionally the excitement of wondering if (redacted) would get caught when he appeared to chat for a while, have a cup of lemonade, and then suddenly light off across the top of the hill to collect the balls the golfers had just hit. Some people are just not suited for honest labor, at least when they're young.

I don't know what became of (redacted); but I'm pretty sure he didn't become a priest even though he later dropped to his knees as though poleaxed when a disrespectful and inquisitive altar boy opened the gold plated door of the sanctuary in the altar on the stage at the Visitation gym on a dare to see what was in there and the door surprised us all by clanking open forcefully after the key was turned.

I pointed out to (redacted) that the sanctuary lamp was not lit and hence the altar was not live, so to speak; but even after that he stayed agitated and on his knees until I got the sanctuary door closed again. The spring on that door was pretty strong. I can still remember how it sprang open as though alive, probably because it took a little while for my heartbeat to settle down.

Fortunately no one was out in the gym beyond the closed drapes of the stage because they would surely have heard that clank and (redacted)'s alarmed and quite loud start of the act of contrition. (Redacted)'s surprisingly intense piety did not prevent him from trying a sip of the altar wine we liberated another time from the cabinet that Father L had surprisingly left unlocked. Father left the key in the lock of the sanctuary door as a matter of course; but he never left the key in the lock of the cabinet that held the vestments, wine, incense and self starting charcoal briquets for the censor.

Terrible stuff that altar wine. Even boosted and savored with friends it didn't taste good. All in all we drank very little, and we carefully refilled the bottle with water before putting it back, so no harm was done. It was probably just as well that Father L took very little water with his wine when he said mass.

The story about the little girl who got stopped by the Tulare police from selling lemonade is here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/73160.html

Hopefully the cop who shut her down will not be smart enough to avoid buying lemonade from her when she gets set up again. Such a cop deserves a bit of extra flavoring in his lemonade.

Making a desert and calling it a stimulus

Congress and President Obama are all excited about putting a couple of billion more dollars into their "Cash for Clunkers" program because the auto industry is all excited about it. And, truth to tell, the "Cash for Clunkers" program is probably less destructive and wasteful than most of the stuff congress and the president have done for us this year, which is really saying something.

"Cash for Clunkers" gives people $4,500 of your tax dollars if they trade in an old American made car that gets poor gas mileage and buy a new (usually) Japanese or Korean made car that gets better mileage. It's a requirement of the program that the dealer where they trade in the old American car has to destroy that car. He can't re-sell the car, and he can't even break it up for parts. He has to destroy it so thoroughly that the only thing that can be done with it is to melt it down for scrap.

So what the government is really doing is paying people to destroy cars that still run and could still be useful to someone who doesn't have a lot of money to pay for a car but still wants to be able to get around.

Which is a pretty profoundly stupid thing to do when you think about it.

But it's not as though President Obama and Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank and Chris Dodd and Arlen Specter are the first imbeciles to think that destroying useful assets is a good idea. It's absolutely certain that back before a fellow named Frederic Bastiat wrote about "broken windows" in 1850 a lot of stupid people were thinking in the same obtuse way President Obama and his ilk think.

Stupid people have probably always thought the same way. For instance, a whole lot of people, all through history, have thought that war stimulates economies because governments spend their time destroying things, and spend a lot of money having people build things that are only useful for destroying other things. The twisted logic behind thinking that war is a good way to "stimulate" the economy is exactly the same twisted logic that lays behind the "Cash for Clunkers" program.

By that logic the Mohammedan fanatics did us a big favor when they crashed planes into the World Trade Center. And the Japanese did us a favor when they attacked Pearl Harbor and destroyed the U.S. Pacific Fleet. And the Germans did us a favor by using submarines to sink thousands of our merchant ships in the Atlantic. And, in our turn, we did the Japanese people a couple of spectacular favors when we nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki, just as we did the German people a favor when we fire bombed Dresden.

And, so it goes. By the logic of "cash for clunkers" Napoleon did the Russian people a favor when he ravaged half their country and burned Moscow in 1812. Similarly, those old timey Romans were actually doing a favor for the Gauls and the Germans when the "made a desert and called it peace" as Tacitus wrote way back in 90 or so A.D.

Heck, by the logic of destroying assets to stimulate the economy President Obama doesn't even need congress to stimulate the hell out of the world economy. He could do that all by himself just by calling in the guy with the briefcase and ordering the launch of a few dozen or a few hundred nuclear missiles. The Chinese and the Russians and the others won't mind if he just calls them first to explain that he's doing it to stimulate their economies. And during the call he could ask them to please launch some nuclear missiles at our cities to stimulate our economy.

You're thinking, of course that doing that would be very dumb; but it would be no dumber than paying people to destroy cars. Destroying drivable cars to stimulate the economy is just plain dumb, so dumb that only a college professor with his head way up his backside or a politician with his backside way up in the air and his feet practically levitating off the ground could possibly think it's smart.

You can read about Bastiat and his answer to the broken windows idea of economic stimulation here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

As for me, I'm going out now to break some windows to stimulate the economy.

Update: It just struck me that the "Cash for Clunkers" program has a major flaw which President Obama and congress should fix. The dealers are being allowed to sell those wrecked cars for scrap. That is causing the economy to fail to get the full benefit of destroying the cars in the first place. Those cars should be thrown into the ocean so that the steel and aluminum and copper in them can never be used again. That way the primary metal producers and the miners would also get a big stimulus since new steel, aluminum and copper would have to be made from scratch.

I have to remember to get rid of my recycling bin. From now on I put the bottles and cans in the regular trash so they can never be used again. Everyone has to do their bit to stimulate the economy.

He's 25 years late; but here comes big brother

Orwell titled his novel 1984; so we were relieved to live through that year without Big Brother watching us and talking to us through the TV in our home.

But it turns out that Orwell only missed on the year. Here it is 25 years after 1984 and Great Britain is installing closed circuit cameras to monitor 20,000 families in their homes around the clock. The British government says it's doing this "for the children."

Besides learning that the government of a supposedly free country has taken upon itself the right to conduct 24 hour surveillance in the homes of people who haven't been convicted of a crime, I also learned that the British government has a "Children's Secretary."

Presumably they needed a Childrens Secretary because none of the fully adult secretaries could figure out how to handle complex childhood matters like enforcing truancy laws without spying on people 24 hours a day in their homes.

http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/115736/Sin-bins-for-worst-families

Hat tip to Mark Steyn, who pointed at this in a post on National Review's blog The Corner.

Health care and government health care

The democrats in congress are falling all over themselves to change our health care system so it will be more like the systems of Canada and Great Britain. They say that doing that would make our health care system "better."

Well. . . there's something funny about that. Every so often you read about Canadians and Europeans coming over here to the U.S. to pay with their own money for health care treatments. Canadians and Europeans do that even though health care in Canada and Europe is supposedly provided "free" by the governments there.

Why would Canadians and Europeans come to the U.S. for health care when they can get it "free" in their own countries under systems set up by government bureaucrats just like President Obama and the Democrats in congress want to set up here?

It turns out The Hoover Institution has been doing some looking into health care "outcomes" in Canada and Europe. And it has found that Canadians and Europeans get a whole lot less of a whole lot of treatments and procedures that have been proven to save and extend lives here in the U.S. And it's not just rich people who get the short end of the stick in Canada and Europe. Middle class and poor people in Canada and Europe don't get health care that matches up to the health care that middle class and poor people get here in the U.S.

For instance, "Breast cancer mortality is 52 percent higher in Germany than in the United States and 88 percent higher in the United Kingdom. Prostate cancer mortality is 604 percent higher in the United Kingdom and 457 percent higher in Norway. The mortality rate for colorectal cancer among British men and women is about 40 percent higher."

So why do President Obama and the Democratic congress want to destroy our current health care system and replace it with a "single payer" system like they have in Canada and Europe? They're certainly not going to improve anyone's health care by doing that.

You can read the whole list of things at which the U.S. health care system does better than that in Canada and Europe by going to this link. It's a one page article and it's very straightforward.

I think it's worth your time, unless you don't care whether some government bureaucrat "improves" your health care and makes you twice as likely to die of breast cancer, or six times as likely to die of prostate cancer, or more than four times as likely to die of colorectal cancer.

http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/49525427.html

Hat tip to Jonah Goldberg of National Review whose post on The Corner led me to this Hoover Institution article.

Pie in the sky

Wishful thinking is not confined to those who think they can change human nature and make a perfect world. Wishful thinking is also engaged in by those who think that getting to the moon will be easy anytime soon.

The other week I was blindsided by Sam (I think it was Sam) mentioning that a new form of rocket had been invented which would make getting to the moon faster and easier. I didn't have my ducks in a row for a ready reply beyond expressing skepticism, since I hadn't read anything along those lines and something that would make getting to the moon much faster would be big news.

Anyway, today I came across this article in NewScientist about a new kind of ion engine that's being researched. I suspect it was an article about this engine research that started the meme that Sam saw about getting to the moon faster than the Apollo astronauts did.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17476-ion-engine-could-one-day-power-39day-trips-to-mars.html

It's an interesting article; and it actually is about a pretty large potential improvement in a type of space mission engine that is actually being used today for a scientific probe that's going to the asteroids. But, but, but. . . the ion engine being used today generates a tiny amount of thrust that is accelerating a very small space probe to a very fast velocity by pushing it for a very long time using solar power.

If you skim through the comments to the article you will find much trash but also some very well reasoned responses that point up the considerable problems associated with using this sort of engine for a Mars mission. And the article is talking about a Mars mission, which needs an engine that provides relatively low thrust for a relatively long time - an engine much like the ion engine described. A mission to the moon needs a very different kind of engine, one that provides a lot of thrust for a relatively short time.

Trying to use an ion engine needed to push a manned space mission to the moon faster than the Apollo mission would require a very large inon engine indeed, or a very large assembly of small engines. And it would not be possible to power those engines with solar power. Such a mission would need a heavy nuclear reactor for power, plus a lot of heavy shielding to protect the astronauts from the reactor's radiation.

It's child's play to shield nuclear reactors here on earth because it's no big deal to surround them with thick shields of cheap concrete or plain dirt (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_Power_Generation).

The problem with putting a heavy nuclear reactor (even the little 25 megawatt Hyperion reactor weighs 20 tons) plus a long of heavy radiation shielding into a spacecraft is that it costs a lot (a very lot) to put payload into space in the first place. The space shuttle takes about 25 tons to low earth orbit at a cost of about $1.5 Billion per launch, so putting each ton of payload into orbit costs about $60 Million.

Sending men to the moon was an exciting stunt in the 1960's. And sending men to the moon, or to Mars, would still be a mere exciting stunt today. We can do the stunt at very great expense if we want to; but it's a lot more cost effective to send relatively lightweight expendable automated space probes to learn about the moon and the planets until our children or our grandchildren develop technology a lot more powerful than we have today.

As a start we need a truly cheap way to get lots of mass into orbit. Since it's very likely there will some environmental concerns expressed (hah, probably a revolution!) if anyone tries to build Ted Taylor's very potentially workable but very certainly insane Project Orion type booster, that probably means we need Arthur C. Clarke's space elevator.

Orion booster: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)

Space elevator: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator

Manned space flight beyond low Earth orbit will be nothing but a clever stunt until there is a space elevator or some other practical way of getting lots of mass into low Earth orbit. I suspect that if a space elevator is impossible that mass will be brought to Earth orbit from an asteroid by relatively cheap robots. Or else the robots will move a small asteroid to Earth orbit.

When she's right, she's right

I can well understand why many people dismiss Ann Coulter a cojone busting harpy. Even I sometimes wince at her shrillness when she gets going on TV, even as I mentally replace her outfit with a fetchingly studded leather one and imagine her with a little whip in her hand; despite the fact that I almost always agree with her main points.

But when she's right, she's very right; as she was yesterday in her column about health care.

http://www.anncoulter.com/

As always she gets off some perfect gems of logic. Such as:

"All the problems with the American health care system come from government intervention, so naturally the Democrats' idea for fixing it is more government intervention. This is like trying to sober up by having another drink."

"The reason seeing a doctor is already more like going to the DMV, and less like going to the Apple "Genius Bar," is that the government decided health care was too important to be left to the free market. Yes -- the same free market that has produced such a cornucopia of inexpensive goods and services that, today, even poor people have cell phones and flat-screen TVs."

"As a result, it's easier to get your computer fixed than your health. Thanks, government!"

We already have near-universal health coverage in the form of Medicare, Medicaid, veterans' hospitals, emergency rooms and tax-deductible employer-provided health care -- all government creations."

"So now, everyone expects doctors to be free. People who pay $200 for a haircut are indignant if it costs more than a $20 co-pay to see a doctor."

"The government also "helped" us by mandating that insurance companies cover all sorts of medical services, both ordinary -- which you ought to pay for yourself -- and exotic, such as shrinks, in vitro fertilization and child-development assessments -- which no normal person would voluntarily pay to insure against."

"This would be like requiring all car insurance to cover the cost of gasoline, oil and tire changes -- as well as professional car detailing, iPod docks, leather seats and those neon chaser lights I have all along the underbody of my chopped, lowrider '57 Chevy."

"But politicians are more interested in pleasing lobbyists for acupuncturists, midwives and marriage counselors than they are in pleasing recent college graduates who only want to insure against the possibility that they'll be hit by a truck. So politicians at both the state and federal level keep passing boatloads of insurance mandates requiring that all insurance plans cover a raft of non-emergency conditions that are expensive to treat -- but whose practitioners have high-priced lobbyists."

"As a result, a young, healthy person has a choice of buying artificially expensive health insurance that, by law, covers a smorgasbord of medical services of no interest to him ... or going uninsured. People who aren't planning on giving birth to a slew of children with restless leg syndrome in the near future forgo insurance -- and then politicians tell us we have a national emergency because some people don't have health insurance."

"The whole idea of insurance is to insure against catastrophes: You buy insurance in case your house burns down -- not so you can force other people in your plan to pay for your maid. You buy car insurance in case you're in a major accident, not so everyone in the plan shares the cost of gas."

"Just as people use vastly different amounts of gasoline, they also use vastly different amounts of medical care -- especially when an appointment with a highly trained physician costs less than a manicure."

"Insurance plans that force everyone in the plan to pay for everyone else's Viagra and anti-anxiety pills are already completely unfair to people who rarely go to the doctor. It's like being forced to share gas bills with a long-haul trucker or a restaurant bill with Michael Moore.
On the other hand, it's a great deal for any lonely hypochondriacs in the plan."

"Now the Democrats want to force us all into one gigantic national health insurance plan that will cover every real and mythical ailment that has a powerful lobby. But if you have a rare medical condition without a lobbying arm, you'll be out of luck."

"Even two decades after the collapse of liberals' beloved Soviet Union, they can't grasp that it's easier and cheaper to obtain any service provided by capitalism than any service provided under socialism."

"You don't have to conjure up fantastic visions of how health care would be delivered in this country if we bought it ourselves. Just go to a grocery store or get a manicure. Or think back to when you bought your last muffler, personal trainer, computer and every other product and service available in inexpensive abundance in this capitalist paradise."

"Third-party payer schemes are always a disaster -- less service for twice the price!
If you want good service at a good price, be sure to be the one holding the credit card. Under "universal health care," no one but government bureaucrats will be allowed to hold the credit card."

"Isn't food important? Why not "universal food coverage"? If politicians and employers had guaranteed us "free" food 50 years ago, today Democrats would be wailing about the "food crisis" in America, and you'd be on the phone with your food care provider arguing about whether or not a Reuben sandwich with fries was covered under your plan."

"Instead of making health care more like the DMV, how about we make it more like grocery stores? Give the poor and tough cases health stamps and let the rest of us buy health care -- and health insurance -- on the free market."

That was Ann. This is me again. And I find that I've quoted all of her paragraphs. Every one of them is a gem.

The woman is a national treasure, even without the fetchingly studded leather outfit I can so easily imagine on her lanky frame. . . hmmm. . . perhaps she would be even more of a national treasure without the fetchingly studded leather outfit. I'll have to ponder on that question. . .

Meanwhile, may she bust liberal cojones for a very long time.

When IPods attack

It was bad enough when vultures were swooping down on walkers in England, and rabid foxes were attacking old ladies in Massachusetts, and mountain lions were dragging down bikers in California; but now even cute little IPods can't be trusted. This one tried to immolate its soccer mom mistress in Washington State.

http://www.kirotv.com/money/20089894/detail.html

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

I especially liked the part where she said that all her kids have IPods, some of them multiple Ipods, and that they listen to them in bed. Turns out her kids might have been safer if she had been letting them take Michael Jackson to bed with them.

In related news: The government just released the results of the latest visa lottery. The visa lottery is a special federal government homeland security program that randomly admits 50,000 potential terrorists into the country each year because its a well known fact that we don't have enough potential killers already living here. Your federal government at work, building a better, safer, more prosperous, America.

http://cis.org/Vaughan/VisaLottery2010

"Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." - Mark Twain, a Biography

I visited Dolores M in the hospital on Sunday

Linda and I went to Matt K's graduation party on Saturday and met up with Anna M, Jackie J, Bobbie M and other. Matt K is Candy (Jacqueline) K's son. Candy is Jackie J's daughter. I wrote a bit about this a few weeks ago because the invitation to the graduation had me stumped for w while since I had never known Candy as Jacqueline and I never knew her married name.

Anyway, at the party we learned that Dolores M went into Lansdale Hospital on Tuesday or so with shortness of breath. So I visited her on Sunday morning. By now she should have been transferred to Doylestown Hospital for some tests on her heart, since her lungs don't seem to be the problem. We went to Dolores' 70th birthday party a month or so ago, so she's a bit young for that sort of problem; but then she has had a pretty hard life. Her brother Jackie J is also in not such good shape due to neuropathy in his feet. Grandmom L was quite right when she told us, "Don't get old."

At the party Jackie reminded me that Louie Hop, the loan shark who lived two doors down from us on Penn Street, and about whom I've written before, was "differently abled," He was called Louie Hop because he had a club foot. Louie was Medio M's father, and he had three other older sons, Jackie said, which answered a question Don A (usually down in Florida) asked me about in an email a couple of weeks ago.

I liked Louie Hop because he used to walk me down to Babe's for ice cream and lemonade; but what I remember most about him is the image of his wife Florence chasing him around their car trying to shoot him until Pop got her to calm down and give him the pistol. I guess Louie could hop pretty fast with his big built up shoe, because Florence missed with all her shots from the little silver pistol. Pop used to say she wasn't really trying to hit him, just trying to give him a message. It was apparently a pretty effective message since Mom always said that Florence never "sang" anymore after the shooting incident. I imagine Louie slept with one eye open after that.

Meanwhile, I've recently been re-reading the middle volume of William Manchester's The Last Lion, his biography of Winston Churchhill. The book, a medium detailed history Churchill's years as a back bencher in Parliament during the 1930's, is oddly soothing because it reminds one of the fact that the British government in that period was even more obtuse than our current softheaded administration is. Of course, the book is also soothing because I know how the story turns out. I know that the utter disaster Baldwin and Chamberlain and their associated cabinet members did their incompetent best to make possible did not befall. World War II ended up short of utter disaster even if it did result in something like 40 or 60 million deaths. It could have ended lots worse.

Before The Last Lion I read Jack London's Martin Eden, a surprising novel. I'm too lazy to do the research; but I suspect Ayn Rand read Martin Eden pretty closely. Her plot for The Fountainhead is a near ripoff of it, although Fountainhead doesn't end quite so tragically. I'm guessing Jack London was not quite an objectivist, but he was pretty darn close, which didn't stop the lefty writer who did the introduction to the paperback edition I have from trying to present him as a socialist, of all things.

What bosch. Martin Eden flirts with socialism; but he rejects it quite forcefully; and, in fact, some of his internal philosophizing could have come right out of Ayn Rand. I suspect the book influenced Rand and may even have given her the idea for Atlas Shrugged although in the end Martin Eden shrugs with somewhat more finality than John Galt.

Oh, I forgot, in between Martin Eden and The Last Lion I took a little break and re-read John Grisham's Playing for Pizza. What a pleasant little novel. Grisham is such a natural writer. Nowhere near as good or deep a writer as Jack London, but so natural and easy on the eyes.

It's been a while since I wrote about books. Come to think of it I've re-read a half dozen Faye Kellerman novels since I last wrote about books. Faye is a lot better writer, qua writer, than her husband.

Do Marianne, Dave and the girls know what. . .

Do Marianne, Dave and the girls know what their kittens are doing when they're alone?

http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2003/12/about_our_masco.html#more

Update 7/18 - Perhaps it's good that the kittens are armed. Buzzards are attacking joggers in England.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/5858407/Joggers-hurt-in-buzzard-attacks.html

Sam may be in a position to be THE guru on the economy

Sam may be in a better position to know the real state of the economy than the government's economists. This article in the Wall Street Journal says that waste disposal volume is a better measure of consumption, and therefore economic activity, than the government's statistics.

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2009/07/17/using-garbage-to-measure-consumption/

And, in other news, congress and President Obama want to have the government take over the whole health care system. They're going to recruit really competent career bureaucrats to decide what doctor you go to, and what drugs he's allowed to prescribe for you, and whether you are worthy of getting a new hip, and what drugs the pharmaceutical companies are allowed to produce and what research into drugs is permitted and how many nurses to hire for each ward of each hospitals all over the country, and how many minutes of break time those nurses get. . . and, and, and. . . everything to do with health care, including who lives and who is unworthy to live.

Perhaps President Obama and his pals will be able to find bureaucrats as smart as the government rocket scientists who taped over the original pictures of the first landing on the moon.

http://webmail.aol.com/43792/aol/en-us/Suite.aspx

Windmills as far as the eye can see. . . and then much farther

What with congress and President Obama trying to pass the cap and trade legislation that will add over $1,000 per year in energy cost to your household budget there is again a lot of hot air being generated about wind power.

So I got to thinking about what our everyday world would look like if powered by the wind. It would take about 1,500 big windmills to replace the power generated by the Limerick nuclear plant. When I say big windmills I mean that each of them would be about 600 feet tall, about as tall as the 60 story buildings down in Philadelphia. Those windmills would have droning rotors 400 feet in diameter; and to be efficient they would need to be spaced about a half mile apart (6 times the diameter of the rotors).

So, just to replace one large power plant, we're talking about a line of windmills 750 miles long, or else a square grid of colossal windmills almost 28 miles on a side - 750 square miles of windmills.

If the windmills were built in a single line heading south down the median strip of I-95 you could drive all the way to Florida without being more than 1,200 feet from one of them.

If the windmills were built in a grid pattern they would cover all of Montgomery County, and there would still be about 300 square miles of windmills slopping over the edges into Chester, Berks, Delaware, Bucks, Lancaster and Philadelphia counties. The luckiest people in this area would live in the middle of a grid square, 1,700 feet in each direction from four constantly whooshing windmills, each one mounted on a tower twice as tall as the Statue of Liberty's torch. Most people would get to live much closer to a windmill. Some would get to live right under the whirling blades; but not to worry, even a major league pitcher probably wouldn't be able to throw a baseball high enough to hit the tip of a blade as it whizzed through the air overhead at 200 miles per hour.

On the plus side, I imagine there would be some really neat graffiti on the towers after a while.

whoosh. . . whoosh. . . whoosh. . . whoosh. . . whoosh

You cannot make this sort of stuff up

There is now a retail store in the Washington, DC train station that sells nothing but Obama merchandise. I wonder if they sell vegetables from the White House garden that Michele and the girls planted a couple of months ago?

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2009/05/17/cultwatch-union-station-new-york-times/

Meanwhile, in other news: We went to dinner on Friday evening with Mark and Linda L and happened to run into the first night of the Blobfest, which is a cult event in commemoration of the filming of The Blob in Phoenixville. The event has gotten so popular that they now set up bleachers so spectators can watch the running of the blobbers as they flee the theater in panic at the climactic scene where the giant blob emerges through the movie screen.

Very appropriately, there was a fellow across from the theater trying to get people to sign a petition in favor of President Obama's health care plan, which is a cleverly disguised medium sized blob intended to grow to monstrous proportions and devour everything. No one was running from the Obama cultist in panic; but they should have been.

Checking further into the My Obama Store I found that it's a venture of a Jamaican fellow who calls himself Yehmon (http://www.yehmon.com/id31.html). This fellow Yehmon is somewhat of a poet. I found one of his poems right on point (http://www.yehmon.com/id28.html). I may print it out to give to the Obama health care cultist the next time we go to Phoenixville. Or I may bring a CO2 fire extinguisher in hopes of stopping his monstrous project the way Steve McQueen stopped The Blob.

In still other news: Here's a coincidence that may or may not be related to what President Obama, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Representative Barney Frank and their ilk are likely to do to the economy if they pass their plans into law.

On July 10th a lady in Virginia bought my copy of the Foxfire Book, and on July 11th a fellow in Oregon bought my copy of Foxfire 4; so two widely divergent people are suddenly interested in hog dressing, log cabin building, fiddle making, horse trading, berry buckets and other affairs of plain living.

Perhaps I should remove my remaining five Foxfire books from the "for sale" list on Amazon. Within 96 months when all of us peasants are living the simple life Al Gore and Prince Charles want us to live those books may become very valuable.

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/just-96-months-to-save-world-says-charles-1738049.html

Meanwhile, in case you haven't noticed, Al Gore's so called global warming has provided unbelievably good weather in Collegeville so far this summer. Here it is July 13th and we still haven't needed to use our air conditioner. The very mild high seventies daytime and high fifties nightime temperatures don't quite qualify for calling this a year without a summer that the sunspot people told us was possible; but if this is the global warming Al and his fellow CO2 fanatic buddies have been harping about for the past ten years I want more of it.

I'm baaaack!

It's been a while since I posted a blog because my laptop computer has been acting funny. For some reason it won't let me log into the blogger software.

Here are a few things I've wanted to share.

1. In the You just can't win department: This fellow and his wife installed a nice environmentally friendly windmill on their property, and now the neighbors are whining and the local government made them shut the thing down because it makes a bit of noise. I did find it suspicious that the couple located the windmill 230 feet from their own house, but only 164 feet from the neighbor's house. It's also interesting that the windmill cost them 20,000 pounds but it only saved them 500 pounds a year in energy cost - so it would take forty years to pay for itself, even leaving aside the interest they could have earned on the money they used to buy it.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1187936/Green-homeowner-hit-noise-abatement-order-40ft-wind-turbine-driving-neighbours-mad.html

2. In the You can't win unless you're a government employee department: California has started to pay some of it's bills with IOUs because the state is running out of money due to a spending binge worthy of a sailor loose in Olongapo after 60 days at sea. But here's a funny thing - the state is not paying any of its hundreds of thousands of government workers and government pension benefit recipients with IOUs. The government folks get cash; all others get IOUs. You might be tempted to think that this is because the state is concerned about the government workers because they depend on their salaries to eat; but it turns out that the state is giving IOUs to a whole bunch of other folks who depend on their government check to eat. Fat cat college professors and judges get cash; the blind and the disabled get IOUs.

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/07/01/california-the-haves-and-have-nots/

3. In the None of us humans can win in the long run department: It turns out that we're all doomed after these Argentinian ants consolidate their position globally. The Orkin man had better get ready for battle on a global basis.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8127000/8127519.stm

4. In the Even if you can't win you can live in a certain style before you are eaten by ants: Sometimes a house comes on the market that has an extra nice garden or a very nicely outfitted kitchen. And then sometimes a house comes on the market that has a really special feature. The owner of this house automatically becomes a Count, and his wife becomes a Countess. The house also comes with extra thick walls that won't let in the whoosh, whoosh, whoosh sound of any nearby windmills.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204621904574248540382556988.html

88, 79, 96, 86, 95, 86

All in all, Thursday the 25th was a pretty darn fine day here in the Norristown area, and not just because the daily number in the Times Herald was the highly soothing one recorded in the title of this piece. It was also a good day for smelling the last of the Great Northern Catalpa blossoms, and a good day for appreciating the annual display of the Tiger Lilies, which the stupid books insist on calling Tawny Day Lilies.

What we've always called Tiger Lilies are, of course, day lilies, even though it's hard to believe each one of the thousands (tens of thousands?) of flowers stretching down both banks of the creek is a one day wonder that will wither in the night and be replaced next morning by a new blossom. It's not a one for one replacement, actually. It's more like a chain reaction that builds from a few to an uncountable proliferation of flowers each day, and then tails off slowly over the course of a few days.

But I was talking about Thursday, and how it was a good day; I was not meaning to dwell on the short lives and deaths of a multitude of day lilies. Thursday was also a good day for pondering why one of our cousins seemed to want to talk about nothing except his unconcern about aging when he came by for coffee with me and Jas a couple of Saturdays ago. And it was a good day for thinking over the fact that another one of our cousins made a point of mentioning his purchase of a burial plot when Jas and I called him last Saturday morning.

A burial plot! Burial plots are surely sold to old people, very old people. They're sold to people so old they need a magnifying glass and not just a pair of drug store reading glasses to check the ages of the folks enjoying (in a manner of speaking) their fifteen minutes of fame in The Norristown Times Herald obits. We have some older cousins. We even have a cousin in her mid seventies. But until last Saturday I would have thought we didn't have any cousins of an age appropriate for the buying of a burial plot.

During the conversation with the new burial plot owner we learned that the single plot is meant as a final resting place for two, which necessitated a conversation about the likelihood of ending up in the bottom bunk, so to speak, men being severely discriminated against in the life expectancy tables. We also learned that a crematorium will not simply wrap one in a sheet and shove one into its incinerator - a box is required. Which means that one must choose the box, two boxes actually - one big box and one little box. It was heartening that our cousin found a certain amount of humor in his discussions with the undertaker. He finally settled on the cardboard, excuse me, corrugated box.

Is it 1973, 2001 or 1931?

Here's a chart from reason.com of the recent movement of the stock market that's either scary or heartening, depending on how you look at it.

So far the market's performance over the past 20 months has been about as bad as it was during the 1973/1974 oil crisis and the 2000/2002 tech stock crash; but it's nowhere near as bad as the stock market did leading into the great depression.

We're either doomed, or else we're poised for another spin on the good times merry go round.

http://www.reason.com/blog/show/134405.html

I was born under a waning gibbous moon, Pop was at a Phillies game

I was born 22,303 days ago under a waning gibbous moon. Pop was at a Phillies game, watching the Phillies beat the Pirates 2 to 1. Mercury and Uranus were in Taurus, Venus was in Gemini, Mars was in Leo, Jupiter was in Sagittarius, Saturn was in Cancer and Neptune was in Virgo. The Dow Jones Industrial Average stood at 190. The Dow has done pretty well since the world was graced with my presence.

Mom always said that Pop was at a Phillies game when I was born, which means I was born in the morning of May 28th since the Phillies played the Pittsburgh Pirates at home on the evening of May 27th. If Pop wasn't available to take her to the hospital she had to have gone there on the 27th. Pop would have been home to take Mom to the hospital on the 28th, because the Phillies were away that day playing the New York Giants.

Here's a great website where you can put in your birth date and find out what phase of the moon you were born under. If you put in "planets" and then your birth date it will tell you what signs of the zodiac they were in on that date. Same thing if you put in "Dow Jones Average" and then your birthdate.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/

The website will also do all sorts of math stuff. For instance, if you put in "x cubed + y cubed = 17" it will solve the equation for x and y, graph it, and tell you the implicit derivatives, which you may vaguely remember from near the end of the year in algebra class if you weren't daydreaming. More usefully, it will tell you the probability of drawing a full house in a five card poker hand is 1 chance in 693. Or it will tell you that the probability of drawing specifically three jacks and two aces in a five card poker hand is 1 in 108,900, although I can't imagine why you would want to know that.

Talk about neat! It will also translate Roman Numerals into regular numbers, for those pesky situations when you see a long string of Roman Numerals engraved on the cornerstone of a building and can't remember your M's and D's and X's. Additionally, if you should ever be in a position to supply the cornerstone for a building the website will translate the date into Babylonian or Mayan notation so you can carve the date in a way that will really make people nuts.

http://www17.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2021+to+Babylonian

And, talk about something that was invented too late. If you're like me you can remember Mom and Aunt Mary getting into a who's who discussion about relatives. One of them would say something like "She's your second cousin. She's Sia Gigette's sister's granddaughter," and you would be totally clueless. This site will draw you a picture of how you're related to someone if you put in things like "grandfather's sister's second cousin."

http://www17.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=grandmother%27s+brother%27s+second+cousin

Update: Alex called today to wish me a happy father's day, probably because Christina reminded him to do so, since he called on Friday evening and talked to me and Linda. Today he reported that yesterday's Tea Party up in Worcester had some interesting speeches but was a bit of a disappointment because it only drew a crowd of a couple of hundred people.

I find it amazing that there should be two hundred people in the most liberal state in the union, a state nicknamed Taxachussetts, who care about the fact that the federal government is on a spending spree that would make ten thousand drunken sailors blush. George Bush was a big disappointment in the government spending and waste department, just like his father; but Barack Obama is throwing around cash in a way not seen since the last time a ten ship carrier battle group of the Seventh Fleet pulled into Subic Bay after 65 days at sea.

The path to enlightenment

A week or so ago we got an invitation to "Matt's graduation" in Langhorne. A nice handwritten invitation. Sounded great, except that we couldn't figure out who Matt was.

When John and Kathy showed up for bridge on Tuesday we learned that the envelope for their invitation included a return address sticker with the name J. K----. Still no joy. Jas and Kathy knew no K----, and neither did Sam and Deb, with whom they had already checked. Jas was an advocate of a conspiracy theory, namely that the invitations were sent out randomly on the assumption that some would return gifts. Thus I learned that I have a brother even more cynical than I am.

So. . . yesterday I called Marianne, who didn't receive an invitation, not surprising because many in the wide extended family don't know her last name, a thought you should keep in mind since we get back to it later.

Marianne also had no idea as to who a Matt K---- could be; but she suggested that I call Angie out in California on the thought that Matt was probably connected via the R----s. No joy, Angie confirmed what I had suspected, there are no K----s connected with the R----s.

So I went out on the net and found on Facebook a Matt K---- who is graduating this year from a high school up near Langhorne. I sent him a facebook message asking if he's related to the A--------s, the L---s or the R----s, to which he hasn't responded. I also put a message on my facebook page asking if anybody knows a Matt K----. No responses.

So, this morning I left a message on the rsvp phone number, saying that we would be glad to come to the graduation party, if only we could figure out who Matt is.

Then I got looking at that phone number, and I put it into Microsoft's new search engine Bing which came back with the name Jacquelin K---- at the same address specified for the party. I then put that name in Bing and it came back with references to a half dozen Jacquelin K----s, one of which was on LinkedIn in the Philadelphia area. Jackie K----'s profile on LinkedIn told me she works for BMC which finally gave me an Aha moment since I talked with someone who works for BMC at Dolores's 70th birthday party last week.

I just got off the phone with Jackie J--------, who confirmed that his daughter Candy's real name is Jacquelin and she indeed does have an 18 year old son whose name is Matt and who is graduating from high school this year.

Inspector Clouseau couldn't have done the investigation better. And Siddhartha Gautama couldn't have felt much more enlightened after he discovered the middle way than I do at this moment.

It's a pity we didn't bring my frog to Death Valley

The Devil's Hole Pupfish is holding up all sorts of solar and wind power projects.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124510519321116631.html#articleTabs%3Darticle

Jas and I tried to visit the pupfish when we drove around the Southwest a few years back; but we never got to see the little fellow because the National Park Service has his hole fenced off like a maximum security prison and you can only get a glimpse of the water is way down in the crack in the rock.

If my frog had been with us he would have leaped right through that chain link fence. Then he would have done an octuple somersault with fifteen or twenty twists on the way down to the water for lunch. Survival of the fittest would have taken care of the rest. By now there wouldn't be any need for the environmentalists to worry about the cute little pupfish and his relatives.

Clipping coupons, eating feline pate', buying diapers

Every so often you run across the phrase "clipping coupons" as in "His widow lived out her remaining years clipping coupons." I've known what the phrase meant; but until today I've never seen a picture of an actual bond with coupons to be clipped.

Here's a picture of a ten year One Million dollar U.S. Treasury bearer bond with some of the coupons still on it. As each interest coupon comes due it becomes just like cash since anyone can take it to a Federal Reserve Bank to redeem it for cash. Then at the end of the term the owner (or anyone who has the bond) can return it to the treasury for the million bucks that the bond itself is worth.

It's called a "bearer bond" because the treasury will pay out the interest and the principal to whoever comes in bearing the coupons and the bond when they're mature.

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYPhrEVoUFhuuCAmL2rVtv6aQ5XxF3-lQ4u6bJFwAGeHSWS3ye_uqlbor83zrafS70SvXcVIw5KetjWd8RdZ5t0G51oAZo6G_QyXHPuzbwdO63_u2BsRHAI9JzFHshKWb4phPbpnY7zns/s1600-h/bond1small.jpg

On a related note, yesterday I had reason to check out the rate of inflation over the past thirty years and also over a variety of prior thirty years periods. Inflation ran at a 4.4% rate from 1975 to 2005. There is a useful mental tool called the Rule of 72. If you divide the interest rate into 72 the answer tells you how fast money doubles if invested at a certain percentage interest rate or how fast its value is cut in half at a certain inflation rate. The Rule of 72 says a dollar lost approximately half of its value every 16 years from 1975 to 2005. A 1975 dollar is worth a bit less than 25 cents in real purchasing power today since it's been 34 years since then. Put another way, if your house was worth $50,000 in 1975 and it's worth $200,000 today its real value hasn't changed.

The worst thirty year period in the recent past for inflation was the period from 1965 to 1995 when inflation ran at an average rate of 5.4%. During that period a dollar lost half of its value every 13.3 years. It's purchasing power was reduced by 75% in about 27 years during that time period.

I think what's been happening down in Washington is setting the country up for an inflation rate even higher than the 5.4% average rate that prevailed from 1965 to 1995.

If I'm right that means a lunchtime can of catfood that costs an old lady $2 today will cost her daughter more than $8 twenty six years years from now in 2035, perhaps much more, and it will cost her granddaughter $32 in 2051. The same thing goes for Depends, Fixodent, Prunes and all the other necessities of old age.

Just so you know, I found the inflation rates I used at the site link below. Other sites give different and somewhat lower inflati0on rates. I was looking for a worst case estimate, so I purposely looked for the inflation calculator that showed the worst picture of what's happened on the inflation front over the last 100 years.
http://www.measuringworth.com/inflation/?redirurl=calculators/inflation/

We grew up gourmets and never knew it

The yuppies have discovered weeds as gourmet fare. Nine bucks a pound for dandelion! By that measure there's at least ten thousand bucks worth of valuable gourmet salad out there in the lawn right now.

It's hard to believe the author of this article in The Wall Street Journal missed Chima de Rabe. I remedied that with a comment to the article. As I write this I still have two containers of this Spring's rabes in the freezer. And, I happen to be eating a sandwich of boiled ham, rabes that I thawed the other day and a little mayonnaise on slices of Corropolese split loaf. I generally prefer this particular sandwich on a seeded football roll; but we're out of them right now. It used to make Pop crazy when he would see me putting mayonnaise on a sandwich of rabes and ham; but that's not why I still invariably do it.

Also, she specifies two changes of water for boiling Pokes. I can't imagine that Mom or Aunt Mary R did two changes of water, and I certainly never have; which may explain why there have been incidents of rapid necessary movement to the necessaries room related to the consumption of Poke Salad over the years. It's very difficult to resist the temptation to pick larger and larger and leafier and leafier shoots as one gets tired when picking Polks, which also may explain the incidents.

And, she mentions Burdock but doesn't mention that the leaves are poisonous, or at least that's what Mom believed, although the internet seems not to think so. Mom and Grandmom L only used the thick stems of the leaves which they called Cardunes and prepared by battering and deep frying. Next Spring I'm going to pick Cardunes and try to recreate that recipe. As I recall they had a unique flavor somewhat like, but only somewhat like, the battered and fried celery we do at Christmas.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124338226000356493.html#articleTabs%3Darticle

And, since I'm on the subject of food, I should mention that Linda and I ate our first Swiss Chard from the garden on Tuesday, probably the earliest that it's ever been ready for picking. We've been eating lettuce for a couple of weeks; but slugs are multiplying and ravaging it now, probably due to the very rainy weather we've been having for the past week or so.

Finally, if you are one of the few people who still actually, you know, like, read, like, books, you may find this article by Ann Kirshner in The Chronicle Review interesting. She tried out all the current modes of reading and listening to Charles Dickens' novel Little Dorrit to see which she liked better. I can only wish she had gone further into the issue of the differences between sight reading and audio since I find them such distinctly different experiences.

Most interesting paragraph - "Readers are passionate and opinionated advocates for their preferred formats. Flip announced that she reads only hardcovers; end of conversation. "I get it," said Bill, watching me read on the iPhone: "You like your books little." Bob is no Luddite, but he insists that Steve Jobs has bribed me, since the Kindle is so obviously superior. Just wait for the Apple tablet," advises techno-sage Joe. And Judith derides my affection for audiobooks as "not really reading.""

For the record I will only read a hardback if I can't get a paperback. Something about a hardback book intimidates me and causes me to treat it too carefully. I can dog-ear the pages to mark my place or break the binding of a paperback by bending it back to hold in one hand; but I can rarely bring myself to treat a hardback book so cavalierly no matter how cheaply I bought it. And, I find listening to an audio book so different from reading the same book that I will often read an especially good novel immediately after listening to it and vice versa. Also, she doesn't mention the obvious next step, which is to combine audio with a video formatted somewhat like the succession of still pictures that Ken Burns used in his Civil War series on PBS. Soon technology should allow relatively easy mating of period pictures with text. So you could see a street scene related to a passage of audio or a picture of an animal mentioned in an audio passage as you listened, for instance.

http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i39/39b01601.htm

And, really, really, finally, since I've been on the subjects of yuppies, books, reading and cooking; here's an interesting article by Jennifer Reese on Slate about a book about a whole different way to think about cooking. One suspects that Linda will come home to find something really new and different on the table one of these days; but not 'til after she has endured Lobscouse, which I still haven't gotten around to making even though Alex tried it and praised it pretty highly.

http://www.slate.com/id/2219243/pagenum/all