Trying to Care. Not Succeeding.

Yes, it’s been nearly a week since I updated this site.

No, I don’t really miss it.

The Internet is starting to **really** get on my nerves lately, quite frankly. In fact I have an essay I’ve been working on about all of that, and it’s 1600 freaking words.

The editor in me says “prune that thing down, moron.” The writer in me says “but there’s a lot of points to make here!”

Tune in tomorrow to see who wins!

Maybe Because Graft Always Follows Free Money?

The Quote of the Week, from Hillbuzz, about the latest sex scandal at Oprah Winfrey’s school for girls in South Africa:

This is what happens when you allow a talk show host with poor judgment who never really knows what she is talking about to set up a school in a foreign country.

This is the second such scandal at the school in just two years!

You’d almost think that corruption is endemic whenever buckets of money are tossed around with no accountability! Who knew?

Here’s a few questions about the baseline assumptions underlying such programs that might be worth asking:

• Hmmm, maybe Oprah isn’t as brilliant as we thought?
• Can you really just hand money to people with no accountability and expect success?
• Her organization employed a woman who sexually abused 15 girls in the prior scandal – just bad luck, or was the leadership a little too “grrrl-friendly”?
• Golly, is it possible, is it conceivable, that having good intentions is not really enough?

So, how long before the Oprah-obsessed bootlickers in the media start to ask these questions?

I’m going with “never”, Alex.

Because, of course, it would embarrass not just Oprah, but Nelson Mandela, and “luminaries ranging from songbirds Mariah Carey and Mary J. Blige to filmmaker Spike Lee and actor Sidney Poitier”. Read all about the sordid story here.

Yeah, I guess those folks will be staying silent about all this for a while. But next time they take a stand, I’m sure it’ll be a smart one!

And finally, let’s see, who else comes up with big expensive plans meant to fix problems, but usually makes them worse, along with added corruption and graft?

(cue Jeopardy theme … dee dee dee dee, dee dee dee … )

And the answer is: Congress!

Blog Post Announcing a Break. Oops. Break’s Over!

So … I guess I took a week-long break last week. Didn’t really plan it, it just sort of happened.

Not sure why.  Maybe it’s because the news is b-o-r-i-n-g these days.  Oh, so a Democratic president is pushing through $800B worth of pork within 3 weeks of taking office?  And the media thinks this is a great idea?  And yet, polling tells us that the more people read about the “stimulus”, the less they like it?

Wow, sure couldn’t see that coming!

Or maybe it’s because I’ve been spending more time chilling in our living room, listening to my middle son Jacob play his new guitar.  We just bought him an Epiphone Les Paul “Special II”.  It’s amazing what you can get for $169 at Sam Ash these days.  I’ll post a pic later.

Now we just need a decent amp; the cheap 12 watt Kustom is not really cutting it.  He’s going to play at school next week, to audition for a talent show, with his friend Ethan; they’re going to play “Wanted Dead or Alive” by Bon Jovi.  Yes, our house sounds a lot like 1985 radio lately.

I’ve been very impressed with Jacob’s commitment to learning how to play.  He picks it up multiple times per day, and also plays our other guitars.   We have four of them now (2 electric, 2 acoustic).  We should start a string band.

Let’s see, what other reasons do I have for not blogging much?  I haven’t been surfing the ‘net as much either, for some of the same reasons.  And since blogging is primarily reactive, I don’t write as much, either.  Although, I have been writing for The Love of Sports, and had three pieces published lately: a lamentation about The Saga of Chief Illinwek, and a piece about Tiger Woods and his Dad, And the Son Becomes a Father, and a silly list of Top Twelve Fun Facts about the IFAF.  Please, click and read. Here’s my author page.

Plus, blogging is getting boring.  Yet again.   Let’s see, going back to the Spring of ‘03, this has to be, what, the 5th or 6th time I’ve gone through something like that?  Yeeesh.  I don’t know how people do it, day after day, year after year.  It’s like having your brains, and your life, sucked out through a Silly Straw.  In fact, this long 3 day weekend, I hardly touched a computer at all.  Didn’t really miss it, either.  That’ll change, though.

All I can say is, thank God above for Turner Classic Movies.

Oh, and BookTV, where over the weekend, I saw George Friedman, who wrote “America’s Secret War”, talk about his latest book “The Next Hundred Years”.  Which I ordered today, in fact.

All you folks out there who think you know what is going on in the world, because you listen dutifully to NPR or read the Washington Post?  Might want to read Friedman’s “America’s Secret War”.  You may find your world view altered slightly.  I’m just sayin’.

Nice Job, Brave University Bureaucrats

The Internet claims another unfortunate victim.

Iowa football radio announcer Ed Podolak was canned due to some pictures posted on a blog. OK, technically he resigned, but we all know how this works: embarrassing stuff happens, and then the perp “resigns”. Wink, wink.

This is one way the Internet makes us all dumber. Sombody takes a picture, self-publishes it on the Internet, and suddenly it’s a CRISIS that must be managed by brave, anonymous bureaucrats.

And rather than show an ounce of courage or spine, they make the easy choice, under the illusion that it makes them look resolute and firm.

Instead, it looks weak and reactionary.

Congratulations, University of Iowa!

“University administrators: No molehill so small we can’t make a mountain out of it!”

Here are the notorious pictures. Judge for yourself.

Newsflash: fans who travel to bowl games like to party it up at night. Sometimes, flirting and salacious behavior is involved. True fact!

Are we now going to freak out about every time somebody gets caught acting a little wild and crazy on their own time? Really?

That’s an awfully low bar to clear. Everybody has cameras on their phones, and a way to either post the pics, or email them to somebody who will. The editorial process — “is there a compelling public interest here? ” — never really happens. And then the sh*t hits the fan, and people lose jobs.

All because they had both the audacity to live their life, and the misfortune of somebody snapping a pic of it.

We need to buck up a little bit here.

My $.02 anyway.

All-Time Stupid Lyrics: “Ventura Highway”

The early 1970s was a special time in American pop music. And by “special”, of course, I mean “drug-addled”.

One prime example, at least for my money, is the song “Ventura Highway” by America. This was an odd band; on one level, they had quite a few radio hits for a few years, and a pleasant, acoustic guitar oriented, folky/country sound, and could write a decent melody, but on another level, they also wrote some of the stupidest, most drug-induced lyrics of the decade.

And in the 1970s, that, friends, is saying something.

On “Ventura Highway”, the music is actually pretty good, and I generally like the song, but the chorus is … sort of … well, let’s take a look at the refrain:

Ventura highway in the sunshine
Where the days are longer
The nights are stronger than moonshine

The days are longer than … what? Moonshine? That makes no sense whatsoever.

And the nights are … stronger … than moonshine? Are you sure about that?

Those would have to be some pret-ty strong nights. Whatever that means.

You’re gonna go I know
cause the free wind is blowin through your hair

OK, this part is fine. But even a blind squirrel — or a stoned songwriter — finds an acorn once in a while.

And the days surround your daylight there

“The days surround your daylight there”? Um, what?

What does “the days surround your daylight” mean? Is this profound or something?

And the word “there” on the end? What is that? Maybe he just needed a rhyme with “hair”. A good songwriter would say, “OK, I should re-work this line so that the word ‘there’ doesn’t sound so, um, tagged onto the end for a rhyme”. This songwriter, however, opted to leave it tagged onto the end, for a rhyme, sounding stupid.

Seasons crying no despair
Alligator lizards in the air, in the air

Dude, what in the world are you talking about?!

Put. The bong. Down.

Of course, it’s possible America was not a drug-addled band, writing songs in a haze of pot smoke and spent beer cans.

But that would be more embarrassing, not less. And unfortunately, I’m not fascinated enough by this topic to Google it, so let’s just go with “drug-addled”. It’s a pretty good bet for a song from the early 70s, anyway.

Driving a Hard Bargain

Some guy tried to sell his 14 year old daughter into marriage for $16,000, 100 cases of beer, and “several” cases of meat.

What a loser.

I would have held out for $20 grand, minimum.

Add “Picking Up a Phone” to the List of Trash Talking Offenses

I’m sorry, but I just don’t get what the big deal is about Donovan McNabb picking up a phone on the New York Giants’ sideline.

Did he really get an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty for picking up a phone?

Yep.  Sure did.

I thought it was sort of light-hearted and funny, myself. Maybe refs have no sense of humor, or think the Giants don’t have one.

He picked up a phone, pretended to talk into it for just a second, and hung it back up.  Then he jogged back to his huddle, without so much as looking at the Giants players on the sideline.

How this is anything like shoving a ball in an opponent’s face after scoring a touchdown, I’m not real sure.

What I am sure about is that sometimes, sports officials get too caught up in the emotion of a game, and throw their weight around by calling serious infractions for pretty silly reasons.

Lighten up, Francis!

That “One Laptop Per Child” Thing? Yeah … It’s Not Working Out So Good

The hidden costs were a “nightmare”:

“OLPC promised a product, a sub-$100 laptop, it simply can’t deliver based on underlying economics of the computer industry. And it asks governments already unable to provide basic services to not just buy these laptops but pay to ship them from the factory in China, truck them throughout the countryside to the schools and then support and maintain them. The hidden costs were a nightmare.“

Laptops are nice and all, but rich Westerners don’t seem to comprehend the level of challenges that await them in trying to give money and stuff to poor people halfway around the world, who mostly need (a) clean water and (b) economic opportunity and (c) fewer thugs and crooks running their countries.

Is it really possible that the One Laptop Per Child people didn’t realize that parts of the world that struggle with disease, corruption, poverty, and oppression probably aren’t going to have good distribution channels for frivolous consumer goods?   I mean, really?

Have they been watching the news?  The families getting murdered by machetes, or living in refugee camps, or being starved to death by ruthless dictators, or dying of disease caused by lack of basic sanitation, or being oppressed and robbed by corrupt, evil dictators?

And in reaction to all this, the geniuses at OLPC figured “hey, what these folks need is laptops!“

Your SEC: “Massive Fraud? $50,000,000,000? Huh. How Did We Miss That for, Like, TWENTY Years?”

Ever since reading a biography of Joseph Kennedy about 10 years ago, I’ve always wondered just how much protection is actually provided by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

This is because Kennedy, who made his initial fortune on Wall Street via insider trading (which wasn’t yet illegal), was the first Chairman of the SEC. His appointment by FDR was regarded by some as the fox guarding the hen house, but there is also some logic to that, if the fox in question decides to become suddenly scrupulous.

Whatever else we can say about him, Joseph Kennedy was not scrupulous. But contrary to type, at least according to Business Week, he did a very good job at SEC, and cleaned it up, by striking a fine balance between “force and persuasion”.

Well, maybe the SEC could use his help once again.

When a few business journalists can uncover an obvious scam in a day or two, by looking at client statements and checking them against market activity for a given day, one may well ask, what exactly is the SEC doing?  Hanging out on Facebook all day?

Blagojevich Sets New Standard for Corruption

They’re Going to Need a New Word For It, Now

The always-excellent John Kass comments on the Blogojevich indictment here: “He’s the clown, but the joke’s on us”.

But really, how often do you get to read a transcript featuring the governor of a major state saying the F-word a bunch of times?  In reference to a President-Elect?  That’s gold, right there.

Here is the full text of the criminal complaint.

Rumors have been swirling around him for years about being investigated; so, as a rational, intelligent governor, he figures, hey, why not double down and try to sell a U.S. Senate seat for a few hundred grand? What could it hurt?

There’s “corrupt”, and then there’s “corrupt and crazy”, and Blagojevich was apparently the latter.

Oh, well, at least we can take comfort in knowing that Obama is free from any such corruption. After all, the national media spent untold thousands of journalist-hours digging into Obama’s background and possible connections to the cesspool that is politics in Illinois.

What? Oh, right, they didn’t do any of that. They were too busy digging up important stories about Sarah Palin’s clothes.

Never mind.

Have a Nice Tall Glass of “You Worry Too Much”

Victor Davis Hanson says what I’ve been thinking about the economy, and about panics and pessimism in general:

Get a grip. Much of our current panic is psychological, and hyped by instantaneous electronic communications and second-by-second 24-hour news blasts. There has not been a nationwide plague that felled our workers. No earthquake has destroyed American infrastructure. The material United States before the September 2008 financial panic is largely the same as the one after. Once we tighten our belts and pay off the debts run up by Wall Street speculators and millions of borrowers who walked away from what they owed others — and we can do this in a $13 trillion annual economy — sanity will return.

Gas, now below $2 a gallon, is still falling — saving Americans hundreds of billions of dollars. As housing prices settle, millions of young Americans will buy homes that just recently were said to be out of reach of a new generation.

If it was once considered a sign of economic robustness that homes doubled in value in just a few years, why is it seen as a disaster that they now sell on the way down for what they did recently on the way up? If we were recently terrified that gas would reach $5 a gallon, why do we now just shrug that it might fall to $1.50?

Unemployment is still below 7 percent; it was around 25 percent when Franklin Roosevelt became president. Less than 20 banks have failed, not the 4,000 that went under in the first part of 1933.

There is no known use of the word “recession” that matches economic conditions like unemployment at 7%, gas prices falling more than 50% in 5 months, and Black Friday numbers higher than last year:

CHICAGO – The holiday shopping season got off to a surprisingly solid start, according to data released Saturday by a research firm. But the sales boost during the post-Thanksgiving shopathon came at the expense of profits as the nation’s retailers had to slash prices to attract the crowds in a season that is expected to be the weakest in decades.

Sales during the day after Thanksgiving rose 3 percent to $10.6 billion, according to preliminary figures released Saturday by ShopperTrak RCT Corp., a Chicago-based research firm that tracks sales at more than 50,000 retail outlets. Last year, shoppers spent about $10.3 billion on the day after Thanksgiving, dubbed Black Friday because it was historically the sales-packed day when retailers would become profitable for the year.

But this year, many observers were expecting consumers to spend more time browsing than buying, amid contractions in consumer spending and growing fears about economic uncertainty and trouble in the global financial markets.

Did you catch all that framing and context?

A “surprisingly” solid start. But the higher sales came at the expense of reduced profits, so the news isn’t all that good, really. And if the retailers had left prices high, at the expense of sales, that would have been bad, too. Everything is wrong now, can’t you see?!

Retailers didn’t cut prices, they “slashed” them, because they are desperate. You need to worry more, pal.

And some “observers”, and maybe even some “experts”, claim that the season is expected to be the weakest in decades, due to contractions in consumer spending and growing fears about economic uncertainty and trouble in global financial markets.

Sure. Christmas shoppers at Target and Wal-Mart are always worried about “global financial markets”.

Call me crazy, but I think people pretty much look at their own financial situation, and their own bank balances, and plan accordingly. Which, at least for right now, pretty much means people aren’t all that worried.

Reliably Clueless, Part II

The New York Times takes a story with one source, and spins it as “combat veteran goes psycho”.

Yet again.

You have to admire their tenacity, if not their brains.

Once again, let’s stick with the facts: the idea that combat veterans return as whack jobs is wrong.

In fact, an entire book was written about sloppy, biased, factually unsupported, and libelous media coverage of military veterans: Stolen Valor, by B. G. Burkett. My summary of it is here.

Maybe journalists should crawl out of their shells once in a while, and learn something true and useful, so they could start writing articles about the military that are based on facts, instead of emotions and narratives.

Yeah, that is sooooo going to happen.

Yep, This Sounds Perfect

The Economist notes Changes in countries’ greenhouse-gas emissions since 1990:

Barack Obama said on Tuesday November 18th that his presidency will “mark a new chapter in America’s leadership on climate change”. According to new UN figures on greenhouse-gas emissions much remains to be done. Some 40 industrialised countries (though not China and India, for example) report emissions data to the UN as part of its Convention on Climate Change. Some of these countries, notably in eastern and central Europe, have shown big reductions from 1990 to 2006, driven in part by the collapse of heavy industries. By contrast emissions in Spain, Portugal and Ireland grew enormously as their economies surged ahead. Australia, Canada and America also pumped out more climate-warming gases. Despite a 5% decline since 1990 across the 40 countries, the recent trend is upwards. Since 2000 emissions from the former Soviet Union countries have grown by 7.4%, and those of rich countries by 2%.

I see. So the ideal CO2 plan, then, is to:

• be a nation named “China” or “India” (this is really the key, right here); or
• lose whatever heavy industry you have left that hasn’t already moved to China or India.

Sounds awesome!

Or, if you are into “economic growth” and other Evil Capitalist concepts — so your people can, I don’t know, have jobs and food and houses and other bourgeois b.s. like that — then you could follow the lead of countries like Spain, Australia, and America. Sure, you could do that, too.

What-EVER.

DuPage County Government: “Be Careful, Winter Can Be Cold”

Is there anybody who lives in the Chicago area that does not know about winter, already? How does that happen, exactly?

Just never you mind all that. It’s Weather Awareness Week! And so our intrepid county bureaucratic government is warning us to wear mittens and scarves because it’s gonna be cold for a couple of months. Of course, it does that every year, since like … ever.

But we’re too thick-headed to have figured all that out.  So to protect us, some bureaucrat in Washington or Springfield put up some cash to promote a Weather Awareness Week, so they could issue a Captain Obvious press release. Which our local paper then printed, word for word, as a news story.

What would we ever do without them?

A False Dichotomy

I heard on the radio yesterday that a new poll says most people are confident that Obama will fix the economy.

Then, this: only one in three wanted tax cuts, yet 8 of 10 want to prioritize on fixing the economy and creating jobs.

Ironically, tax cuts are more likely to accomplish both of those other goals than to prevent them.

Raising taxes reduces tax revenue and slows economic growth and makes jobs go away. If this seems counter-intuitive, then instead of questioning the concept, it might be time to question the underlying assumptions, which are not backed by history.

The economics of a free market is one thing that everybody who votes should really try to understand better. I’m no expert, but I do know that when it comes to the economy, government doesn’t fix anything — it can’t, because it doesn’t produce anything other people want to pay for. It just gets in the way. And the evidence is pretty clear that higher taxes are bad for everybody, not just the people paying them. Yet every election cycle, we hear all about “tax cuts for the rich”, which is code for “the wealthy are screwing the rest of us”. It doesn’t really work that way, but we hear it anyway, and lots of people buy it. Don’t fall for it.

I’m a relative newcomer to the power of the free market, just in the last few years, after having read various free-market economists like Thomas Sowell. A book by Virginia Postrel, The Future and Its Enemies, was also very influential in changing my thinking about the power of markets (a website for it is  here). And anything by P.J. O’Rourke, but especially All the Trouble in the World, which is an instant classic, and caused me to think “wow” on nearly every page just for the quality of writing therein.

The truth of the matter — which is why politicians never mention it — is that tax policies advocating higher taxes are really about class warfare. They want you to think of the economy as a big pie that has finite size, and more pie for others means less pie for me. But free market economies grow, and shrink, and they do so because of things like tax rates, and interest rates, and other factors that affect investment decisions. And when free market economies grow, or shrink, they do so for nearly everybody, not just rich people.

So — even if your main objective is to help poor people — the sensible thing to do is to advocate for policies that encourage investment. Choosing instead to raise taxes in order to spite rich people, AND inevitably hurt the poor and middle-class, is not just mean-spirited, it’s dumb.

But enough of my pitiful attempts to explain this, read the experts (and excellent writers, to boot) like Sowell and Postrel and O’Rourke.

Just for fun, a bonus chart of the highest marginal tax rates during the Great Depression, which increased from 25% just before to 79% in 1939. How’d that work out?

Meanwhile, Back in Realitytown

Bravely Facing Climate Change Without Government Grants!

From the WGN Weather Center Blog:

City shivers with earliest wintry spell in 13 years

Not since 1995 have three consecutive days failed to produce a 40-degree high at
Midway Airport this early in the season. Highs at the Southwest Side site struggled
Saturday, Sunday and Monday to reach 39, 38 and 39 degrees at a time of the year when
low 50s are considered the norm. Monday no doubt had many Chicagoans reflecting on
the near-record 73-degree high only a week earlier.

Autumn 2008 — well over two-thirds complete — has produced temperatures near the
long-term average, but 2.6-degrees cooler than the same period a year ago.

Man, this climate change stuff sure is crazy! It’s warm, it’s cold, who can predict?

Kinda reminds me of … you know … the weather.

It was easier to understand it when they told us we were killing the planet with our CO2. Now we’re, what … contributing to the weather being a little more different than it already was? Um, excuse me? What does that mean?

Apparently, the Entire World Has Officially Lost It’s Mind

OK, now this is just stupid:

BARACK OBAMA is poised to win at least one election by a landslide. Voters in The Economist’s Global Electoral College favour the Democratic candidate over his Republican rival, John McCain, by a hefty margin of more than four to one. Some 50,000 readers around the world are expected to have cast a vote by the close of polls at the end of the day on November 1st, with more than 40,000 votes going to Mr Obama. As candidates collect delegates according to the countries won (just as America’s electoral-college system allocates delegates by state), Mr Obama’s victory will be all the more comprehensive: he will claim over 9,000 delegates, compared with a paltry few hundred for Mr McCain.

Wow. 50,000 votes? Why that’s almost equal to the population of the suburb I live in!

Various patterns have become clear during the course of voting. Candidates did best when they picked up backing from heavily populated countries with large tallies of delegates. Mr Obama quickly scooped support from readers in China, India, most of Europe, as well as from the United States itself. In many cases Mr Obama won the support of an overwhelming share of voters: in more than 40 countries he claims the support of 90% (or more) of those who voted.

I thought they hired smart people at The Economist. First of all, the fact that foreigners support a candidate for U.S. president just might be a reliable indicator that Americans — you know, the people who can actually vote in the election — should stay as far away from that candidate as possible.

Nations have competing interests, and voters are supposed to take that into account.  But maybe after decades of being lectured about U.N. supremacy and how we’re “citizens of the world”, too many people have bought into that silliness.

Americans should vote for who they want to lead their country in a world filled with other nations who are actively trying to grab the power that we’ve had for decades.  Even if it means annoying some Europeans, Chinese, or whoever else.  That’s kind of the point:  for an American citizen to care about the opinions of foreigners re: who leads our country, whose interests are you putting first?  Or, is just about being that naive?  Because it seems like it’s one or the other.  Maybe both.

Imagine in the past a similar news story on FDR, or JFK, or Lincoln, Washington, Reagan, or anybody else.  The entire concept is ridiculous, but there are now enough people in the media who buy into the ridiculous that we get stories like this day after day, in media outlet after media outlet.

And call me crazy, but there is no way that McCain loses by a 4-1 margin in the popular vote. News flash: the readership of The Economist is a bit on the liberal side. Seriously! So their poll is both biased and  self-sampling.  Good work!

This election is causing too many people to get all goofy and sideways. Especially in the media.

Hey, whatever floats your boat.  But credibility is earned over a long time. How exactly do you attempt to reclaim that credibility when this is all over?

Gosh, This Could Be Embarrassing

But It Won’t Be, Because The Press Will Ignore It

Obama actually said on the public airwaves in 2001 that he was disappointed the Warren Court didn’t go far enough, in deciding not to include redistribution of wealth in (I assume) the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education civil rights case.

Something about “constraints” in the Constitution. And he was, at the time, a Professor of Constitutional Law.

And so now we have it: Obama wants to rewrite the Constitution to exponentially increase goverment power over the individual.  No big deal.

Yeah, that’s “change” all right. Change I don’t believe in.

No Other Choice, Really

Tigerhawk, commenting on the release of 17 Al-Qaeda types from Gitmo into the United States:

The incentives here are insane: If our soldiers take prisoners on the battlefield without collecting evidence against them sufficient to win a conviction in a criminal court, and if those prisoners come from countries that might mistreat them (that is, virtually every country we would fight in a war), we risk having to release them into the United States.

Obviously, we should just stop taking prisoners.

Yes, that would solve all kinds of sticky legal problems. Plus, it would leave big piles of dead terrorists.

Win/win!

More at Belmont Club, NRO, Long War Journal.

A Subprime Primer

Because You Can’t Beat Funny AND True

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