Robert Gates

I really need a neck brace, such as the one Robert Gates, the former Secretary of Defense, wore as he was being interviewed and denigrating the Obama administration's foreign policy. When I sleep the wrong way, I get a kink in le col which is a great pain in le cul  (as the man in the Bay of Biscay said when asked whether he listens to cable TV.)

Mr. Gates was critical of Mr. Obama on Syria.

It is a tough position to be in.
Remember that when all this started, most of the best and brightest wanted the USA to oppose Assad and back the rebels with might and main. Unfortunately, this ignored the fact that Al Qa'ida was an ally in the rebel opposition.
The best and  brightest believed that we could control the outcomes and sideline Al Qa'ida. They have been easy to control. I believe they are in control of Falluja right now, almost eleven years after the War in Iraq started.

They wanted a clear mandate to bomb Assad's chemical weapons where they stood, ignoring any potential effect of the Syrian population.
Since these weapons are now being dismantled in the middle of the ocean, it seems likely that bombing while they remained on the ground in Syria could have been disastrous. Otherwise we should have brought them to New York and worked on them, just as we tried to put various militants on trial (and failed).

It is a difficult task to create a new foreign policy. You have the great bulk of people brain-washed into the old ways and means of thinking; their first reaction is to bluster and bomb.
Bluster and Bomb have worked in the past, by Gadfrey! Should work just fine now, too! Neville Chamberlain should have sent bombers into the Sudetenland and given a black eye to Herr Hitler!

Worked well on Dresden, too. Burnt the bloody city to the ground. Hiroshima was another gold star. Vietnam worked well.
Cambodia.
Laos.
Iraq.

Ooops! Somewhere in that litany of the gods of war, things began to go wrong.
Somewhere we missed a beat and the triumphal parade took a wrong turn, sort of like a cute Santa Day parade on Thanksgiving taking a left instead of a right and taking the route into a very, very tough neighborhood...
... things still look rosy for a while; Santa's on his sleigh and all's right with the world... then shots ring out!
Christmas Carol maces a group of roustabouts, and Santa is mugged and forced to hand over his surveillance list of Naughty-and-Nice!

When the best and brightest have a motto that we must win Hearts and Minds of some targeted populace, and they go about it with guns and bombs and drones, it is no wonder the President hesitates to pay attention to the best and brightest.
How would you respond to an overture of friendship that involved bombing a relative's wedding party?

Although we seem to not be able to see it, there is a vast difference between being "tough minded" and being "bloody minded".

--

Lifestyles Of The Rich And Frenzied

 A Follower Of Bacchus

I think that what today we are viewing in our society and calling wealth inequity is actually an income bubble.
There is a "bubble" mentality everywhere:  everything is fast and furious and new jack.

It is Alan Greenspan's "irrational exuberance".

The overly energetic ( new jack ) way of life leads to irrational exuberance.
I mean, it's like the Bacchantes  (or Bacchae)  of Euripides, is it not?

...The family is destroyed, with Agave and her sisters sent into exile. Cadmus and his wife Harmonia were actually honored by Dionysus when he turns them into snakes. Tiresias, the old, blind Theban prophet, is the only one not to suffer.

Wikipedia

Sort of sums it up nicely.

--

How To Dodge A Java Update

I would like to start up my computer some day without seeing that another Java the Hutt update is available.
It is almost as annoying as Adobe Air updates.
Java is particularly good, because once it has installed, it immediately informs me again that there is an update available, and let's spend some more time on verifying the version, OK?

Or Firefox updates.
I save a large number of references as complete web pages. Suddenly, sometime since Christmas, I updated yet another Firefox update after putting them off for days, only to have them pester me more and more. Lo and behold! I can no longer save complete web pages.

There is a fix with SavePageURL or some such thing which is an add on used with web pages saved as HTML files. It seems to work well.

It only took an hour to research and search... that's how you do it when you're a tech consumer schlub on the "techie" end of the stick: you research and search.

On my new computer, I am actually staying with Internet Explorer.
Whatever Firefox has to offer just is not worth it.

--

Climate Today

 Rum Runner from Canada Approaches Detroit in the 1920s

While the polar vortex had us within its icy grip, I wrote a post entitled The Day After Tomorrow about things climate change. As I continued my study, it appears that I pulled a Trump, which is, I spouted off about things about which I knew little... and that little might be poorly stated in my mind anyway.

Weather researchers pointed out that such polar vortices were once more common than they are now. These intensely cold masses of air were not a sign of Weather Gone Wild, but were actually an indicator of warming, for in the recent past, winters were colder.

That was food for thought.

So when I made my weekly trek to Mothersville to take out her garbage and perform other homely tasks, we fell to talking about climate change.
Now my mother is a FOX-News-Totaller. She evens quaintly believes that they are not a propaganda machine, but are actually "Fair and Balanced" like they claim to be.
(They claim it, but they are not. What is most baneful about FOX is that its propaganda is exactly the views of Roger Ailes. If his views agree with intelligent conservative thought, everything is in agreement.
However, if his views do not agree with intelligent conservative thought, Mr. Ailes views will carry the day on the on-air propaganda. That is probably not a good thing.)

Thus, we have never agreed much on climate change.
However, when I told her that a researcher had said that the polar vortex was actually a sign that winters were warmer because we used to have many more such polar air masses, and that they used to stay longer, she agreed.

I was stunned!

However, she said that in her opinion it was a true statement, for during the time in January that the very cold air held sway, the St. Clair River in front of her condo was ice covered.
If there is one thing people who live on rivers talk about, it is the river and its ways.
My parents frequently used to reminisce about their childhoods, and in the winter of those days, the river - St. Clair River and the Detroit River - were often frozen solidly over.

People used to drive cars across from Algonac, Michigan to Harsens Island. The Purple Gang used to drive trucks filled with crates of booze from Canada to places up and down the rivers. Most of the fishing was done through the ice. There are ice fishermen nowadays, but they are not expert on the moods of ice anymore. The ice only forms in Anchor Bay, and every year the Coast Guard has to rescue a few who misjudged the ice, and then drifted off on a floe.

 Tug in an Ice Floe

I can honestly say that the last time I saw the St. Clair River South Channel frozen solid was sometime in the 1950's.
This river can frequently become jammed by floe ice in the bottle neck between Algonac and Harsens Island, but that is not a solid piece of ice; one would not drive a car on it, say. Certain bays will freeze solid, too, but the rivers through which the current flows do not. The St Clair River leaves Lake Huron at a pace of 15 knots, and the water flows to Lake St. Clair and on to the Detroit River.

My mother said that they had always wondered why the rivers no longer froze. Sometimes they thought it may be heated industrial waste water or chemicals from Sarnia, Ontario, but no one had ever proven anything.

She said she believed that the winters were definitely warmer.
She did not say she believed in some Climate Change theory, but... well, the rivers don't freeze.
Make the most of it!

--

The Decline And Fall Of Blogger

Every time I post, there are numerous small errors reported. They do not seem to stop things, but they really should not be there is a properly run system.

I get the distinct impression Google does not care too much about Blogger anymore.
I was talking to Baysage ( http://whatpowderfingersaid.blogspot.com/ )   about it, and he noticed the glitches too. They have been going on over a year now, I think.

I guess it is time to get a copy of your blog as backup and be ready for the shut down that will occur with the speed and rapidity of the assassination of Google Reader.

--

Lost Decades

 

CNN has a story about a mother who wishes to treat her son's leukemia with medical marijuana. She believes the cancer went into remission by the treatment using a combination of chemo and marijuana, and she wants to continue maintenance now with only the pot.

The medical establishment is aghast, and threatens some sort of official action.

3-year-old is focus of medical marijuana battle
By Saundra Young, CNN
updated 9:49 AM EST, Wed January 15, 2014

(CNN) -- He's only 3 years old, but Landon Riddle is already the focus of a medical marijuana fight in Colorado.

Landon has acute lymphocytic leukemia, or ALL, a cancer of the blood and bone marrow. It's the most common cancer in children.

His mother says his condition has improved so much following treatment with medical marijuana that chemotherapy isn't needed. But the Children's Hospital of Colorado, she says, disagreed.

[...]

...their research led them to the Stanley brothers in Colorado. The six brothers are one of that state's biggest cannabis growers and dispensary owners...

...But the Stanleys were also growing something quite revolutionary: a plant cross-bred to reduce the THC and increase another compound found in cannabis called cannabidiol, or CBD. Many researchers believe CBD is one of the compounds in marijuana that has medicinal benefits. According to the National Cancer Institute, it's thought to have significant analgesic, anti-inflammatory and anti-tumor activity without the psychoactive effect.

[...]

Six months later, encouraged by Landon's progress, she stopped his chemotherapy treatments completely.

"Once I took the chemo out, I see these amazing results. And no more need for blood transfusion and platelet transfusions," Riddle says. "I think that the chemo in combination with the cannabis did put him into remission and now the cannabis will keep him there."

I underlined what I thought was most important, the fact that a plant has medicinal properties - just like birch bark was the source of aspirin - and modern day medicine is not comfortable with it. But how could they be comfortable with it? For had not 99% of any possible research been obstructed by the wall erected by the United States Controlled Substances Act?

I repeat, the human body manufactures its own cannabinoids, chemicals related to the chemicals of Marijuana. If you want to research these alongside the THC of Cannabis, get ready for a nightmare of DEA bureaucratic paperwork and questioning.

We mentioned a little while ago another case:
Pot For Tots
http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2013/07/pot-for-tots.html

...While New Jersey is one of at least 18 states to authorize medical marijuana use, its rules make it almost impossible for Vivian's mother, Meghan Wilson, 34, of Scotch Plains, to get the type of cannabis medicine that may help her daughter's epilepsy.

"It's beyond frustrating," Wilson, a consultant who runs clinical trials for drugmakers, said by telephone. Vivian gets seizures from a form of epilepsy called Dravet syndrome, she said. In Colorado and California, where it's easier to treat youngsters with pot, afflicted children have improved after receiving cannabis, and some are almost symptom-free, she said...

We have lost a half century of research because we put up incredible obstacles to legitimate research when we  placed Marijuana on Schedule I as a Hallucinogenic or Psychedelic Substance with the Administrative Controlled Substances Code Number of  7360.

The idiocy is manifest. There was no meaningful research done to justify the placement on Schedule I. Everything was based on scraps of science, imagination, stereotypes, fears, and propaganda.

Was this an evil thing to do? Was this another view into the Banality of Evil? The accounting for and classifying all the drugs, putting everything into a nice, neat order in order to run our wasteful and ill-considered war on drugs?

From the viewpoint of the sick who could have been helped by such research, it was an unmitigated catastrophe.

A society which patterns its Morality after the dictates of Propaganda is doomed to see all its idols smashed in an awful twilight.

--

Eternal Truths

... Establishing legumes works best when the grasses have been knocked back by heavy grazing, burning, or dry weather. The timing is right this year.
You can frost-seed legumes with a late winter broadcast, letting the freeze-thaw cycle work the seed into the soil for germination. Kallenbach prefers a no-till drill for seeding legumes.
“It costs more, but the germination success rate can be about 67% with the drill vs. 32% by broadcast,” he says. Be meticulous in setting the drill, because the small legume seeds should be placed only ¼ to ½ inch deep...

http://www.agriculture.com/livestock/cattle/grazing/4-tips-to-rejuvenate-pastures-from_279-ar40810

No matter how scientific farming and agriculture become, they never lose sight of the world, the rising and setting of the sun, the waxing and waning of the moon, the seasons, the cycles of man, animals, and plants.

--

At This Moment...

 

Chest Cold Wiseguy

It is time to go running.
I have recovered from my little chest cold, and it is time to move along.

It has been so long since I have had a chest cold that I have forgotten how they progress. I started off last Tuesday with a scratchy throat, and each day brought a sharpening of the horns of the dilemma: one horn went into the sublimity of my head, the other descended into the Avernus of my lungs.
And each day thereafter, there was a slight tightening, more coughing, and more tidal wave sinus action.

Friday past I told She-who-must-be-obeyed that I was perplexed; I felt as if I were getting better when I went to bed, but when I awoke, the virus seemed to be moving deeper and higher and I was not cured after all!

She said that that's how cold work. They get worse, then they get better. Week, ten days, whatever.

I pondered that for a while.

I mean, I thought that just because I jumped on top of this thing, made up a cauldron of onion soup with chicken broth as well as beef broth, and sacrificed many cloves of garlic as well, I should be - like - bright-eyed and bushy tailed, should I not?
No, the soup averts secondary infections, and does not attack the primary one.

I felt impatience, either that of a young ram or a querulous oldbuck.

But now I want to talk about Epic Poetry and the series Six Feet Under.
She-who-must-be obeyed had viewed Six Feet reruns and highly recommended it, so I bought it for Xmas.
She is a choice augur of good outcomes for such things, and she was most certainly in the case of Six Feet Under. (She had an off-day with Rising Lark To Candleford, but everyone has off-days.)

But this will have to wait. I must run.

--

Critique Of Beliefs

I have been thinking about beliefs a long time.

One thing about beliefs is the fact that a belief may be proven to be incorrect.
This is pretty much how we use the language: beliefs may turn out to be false.

Plato made the distinction between opinion and knowledge and that is pretty much the same as hypothesis and fact.

Since I do not conceive of God as an hypothesis, God is not subject to belief in my way of looking at things. God cannot be proven to be false. Hence, I do not believe in God, as I say, but I expect God. I live with the anticipation of divine immediacy... on the edge...
I am not "one with God", but I am on the "verge of falling" into eternity.

We are all on the edge of eternity, in one sense or another. We shall all die, yet that reality does not make us live in terror, just as the immediacy of God need not cause us to act like desert anchorites or medieval mystics.

If you do not believe in God and, thus, cannot use the concept of God to cobble together a "belief system" and philosophy and morality, how does one cope?

I think step 1 is to learn virtue.
This resembles the way our society held that sports were important for children to inculcate loyalty to the team, selfless altruism in playing for the common benefit of the team, perseverance in the face of adversity, etc.
Of course, over the past 40 years (funny how everything seems to go back to about the time Reagan was President...) we have seriously attenuated this learning by subjecting children to the spectacle of parental squabbling and even violence at Little League games, as well as a trampling upon most of the old-timey virtues which has led us up to the present Wolf Of Wall Street type of society we have.

Step 2 is to choose.
At some point we must choose what path we shall follow.
Shall we follow the ways of religious geniuses? Shall we serve Mammon or God? Shall we ignore the visionary world (I am trying to use "visionary" as a replacement for "supernatural", a term I do not cotton to.), or shall we give it one day out of seven, or just throw it into the dustbin?

Shall we follow the spirit of the Sermon On The Mount, or shall we follow the casuistry of the Pharisees, who gave their goods over to a common treasury (no doubt still maintaining some claim upon them) so that they could tell their parents they had no funds to support them?

Once we chose our path, we set out using the orienteering skills of virtue.
We shall continue to learn, and we shall continue to choose.

However, none of this process requires a wordy and verbose philosophy of jibber-jabber about the nature of religion.

Those who talk and write of religion with a serious belief that their words mean something in the ultimate play of Creation are like those who think their fantasies are a replacement for hard work.
They end up legends in their own minds and frustrated in their highest desires.

--

The Last Trump

I unfortunately read things in NewsMax now, just to maintain my hunter's and tracker's acumen at spotting total nonsense at 1,000 yards or more.
Of course, when the spouter of nonsense is Mr. Trump, it is not really fair, because so much of what he says in a political-economic vein is very close to nonsense.

Tags: Massive | wealth | destruction | economy
Economist Caution: Prepare For 'Massive Wealth Destruction'

Wednesday, 08 Jan 2014 01:07 PM

Take immediate steps to protect your wealth . . . NOW!

That’s exactly what many well-respected economists, billionaires, and noted authors are telling you to do — experts such as Marc Faber, Peter Schiff, Donald Trump, and Robert Wiedemer. According to them, we are on the verge of another recession, and this one will be far worse than what we experienced during the last financial crisis.
[...]
Equally critical of the current government and our nation’s economy is real estate mogul and entrepreneur Donald Trump, who is warning that the United States could soon become a large-scale Spain or Greece, teetering on the edge of financial ruin.

Trump doesn’t hesitate to point out America’s unhealthy dependence on China. “When you’re not rich, you have to go out and borrow money. We’re borrowing from the Chinese and others.”

It is this massive debt that worries Trump the most.

“We are going up to $16 trillion [in debt] very soon, and it’s going to be a lot higher than that before he gets finished,” Trump says, referring to President Barack Obama. “When you have [debt] in the $21-$22 trillion [range], you are talking about a [credit] downgrade no matter how you cut it.”

In a recent appearance, Trump went to so far as to say the dollar is “going to hell.”

It is not a good idea to treat an important topic with this type of idiocy.

(1) People and Corporations go out and borrow money when they do not have enough cash for their projects and investments at the present time, but expect enough good revenue flows to be able to pay off the debt in the future.


They do not really do this when they are "not rich". Mr. Trump is obviously getting his stories mixed, and this is his reasoning for why the housing bubble burst: people who were "not rich" forced the banks to give them mortgages.

(2) A certain level of deficit might be necessary, implying that even a rich country needs to borrow at some level. If there were no US Treasury Bills, there would be no zero-risk haven for investors.

(3) A credit downgrade measures risk, not the absolute value of a debt.

(4) The dollar, by most indications, is doing quite well against other currencies, and has been for a while.

Again, there may be troubles ahead, but Mr. Trump cannot seem to tutor anyone in their complexities.

I left the line headed "Tags" on, because NewsMax oddly seems to have a precious enjoyment of destruction themes and memes.
I have always said that forecasting doom and catastrophe is filled with dangers, for I have known a number of people who predicted terrible things for the world or the country, but ended up ironically in having predicted their own troubles and problems.

My own view is that when many predict rain, there will be a silver lining soon. Conversely, when everyone is happy as a lark, troubles lurk around the corner. It is the inherent irony of our situation in the world.

--

Illusions Of Free Markets

Read an excellent article on the fact that even though we talk continually of free markets, we have in place thousands and thousands of schemes and pranks and wheezes by which we subsidize and transfer money to the rich.
Things like baseball stadiums come to mind; how often sports owners ask for (and get) outlays from the entire local population, not just those who are baseball fans. In the old days, sports teams relied upon the paying public, and they were forced to cater to those ticket-buying folks.
Now it is a bit different, for there are numerous others ways to generate revenues, one of which is getting the municipalities to cough up subsidies, either by outlays or tax reductions or bonds.

Is there a Free Market in the Entertainment Industry when one of the members, say the local hockey team, receives public money?

Read the article and think about the numerous ways we do the types of activities described.

"Free Lunch": David Cay Johnston on hidden government subsidies for the very, very rich
http://prairieweather.typepad.com/the_scribe/2008/01/free-lunch-davi.html

... What I’ve done is examine a number of cases to show that government has rewritten the rules to favor the already rich, the politically connected, and the powerful at the expense of everyone else. In effect it’s set up mechanisms that the government itself reaches into your pocket and gives money to rich people; the government allows businesses to reach into your pocket in ways it never did; the government has all sorts of subtle and hidden policies now that funnel from the poor and middle class and upper middle class into the hands of the super-rich.  And that is at the core of what’s happening in our society...

-- 

ps.

I remembered a post on the old days when milk was in bottles and they were returned to be washed and re-used.

The cardboard and plastic cartons were introduced because they saved money for the milk distributing company, as they no longer had to wash and re-cycle glass.

However, the new cartons were trash and had to be placed in land-fills, which the public pays for. If there were no land-fills possible, the milk companies would have to go back to glass (as some already have for ecological reasons).

By my tax money being used for land-fills, I am in essence providing tax support for milk... and Huggies, too!

Es War Ein Alter Bauer...

Considering that "baumgartner" means "tree gardener" or someone who had worked in an orchard, there is a sense of irony here.

..

Belief Systems

 

A Sailboat Will Sail Whether It

Believes In The Ocean Or Not

The sailboat follows the ways of the Ocean.

It's keel is a foundation deep within the Ocean.

It may deny the Ocean, but it cannot sail without it.

The belief yes and the belief no are superfluous luxuries of thought and logic that have nothing to do with the price of fish at the dock.

--

My New Computer

 Welcome to Windows 8 !

I have a new HP laptop.
It runs on Windows 8.

I was going to stay with Windows 7, but I found that Windows 7 units cost more for what you were getting than new Windows 8 units.
That should have tipped me off.

I have devoted a good deal of time to both the hardware and software, and I'll talk about software.

Windows 8: I do not get it.
I fail to see how radically changing the way things are done enhances my computer experience.

I see almost no utility in the Start screen, other than pointing to the Desktop mode I am used to. I have tried to find some benefit in the Start screen, but I do not see how it would increase the utility of the computer for me.

The "charms" on the right are not charming. It is just a different place to stick a logo and click it.

And as with every new version, Microsoft finds a way to hide things you have grown used to using.

As is usual, some sort of Security crap came with it. I was busy after I bought it, and did not even open it until a week after purchase. By that time, the trial period of the Security stuff was nearing an end.
When it expired yesterday, I had to locate Windows Defender, only to discover I could not start it.
So I had to search on-line as to why this was the case, finding that certain Security packages disable Defender... which was not mentioned anywhere in my materials.

Uninstall the security stuff, and start up Defender. Defender needed an update and to do a scan, which took 5 hours for a full scan. I wonder how long it will take when I actually have put data on the computer?

I will briefly summarize my experience by saying (1) no more HP computers, and (2) next computer -hopefully - will be a Mac.
Therefore, I shall have a Mac in 3 years. Three years is the time an HP computer lasts, like many other brands. Three years almost exactly.

--

Goofy Climate

I have been reading comments on weather stories, and I guess it is pretty sad commentary on not enough basic education in science, lack of trust in leadership (much of it well deserved), and credulousness.

I know the following:

1) the changes to our way of life caused by climate change (by whatever cause, whether normal or man-made) will be staggering,

2) we shall not be ready for it,

3) to cope with it will damage our democracy even further than it has been damaged by our War on Terror.


--

An Adventure In Art (50)

Preparing Tea

Carol Marine

Carol Marine's Painting A Day (or almost)

http://carolmarine.blogspot.com/

--

Cow Dynasty

Daily Yonder
http://www.dailyyonder.com/reality-tv-seeks-uninhibited-cowboy-family/2014/01/08/7104

Reality TV Seeks "Uninhibited" Cowboys
Reality television continues to push its way into rural America like urban sprawl.

A television production company has put out a casting call for “authentic and colorful cowboys and their families” to appear in a “docu-reality” television program.

The announcement apparently went to the Montana Cattleman’s Association in early November. A more recent notice of the announcement appears here, in the AgricultureProud blog.

Orion Entertainment says it’s looking for a family with at least three kids “that are all great looking cowboys and cowgirls” who work in “stunning ranches with diverse terrain and challenges.” Those challenges might include “chasing grizzlies and wolves away from cattle.”

Finding handsome rancher families may not be too difficult, but other requirements may be harder to meet. Cast members will need to be versatile and perform more than just chores.

“Members of the family and staff should have fun hobbies and skills like [the ability to sing], play the guitar or harmonica, write and recite poetry, cook the best BBQ in the county, make their own clothes, raise bees or have wild animals as pets, raise bulls, or be an aspiring bull rider or rodeo participant.”

Multi-generational families, feel free to apply. "Grandparents are a plus," the announcement says...

--

The Day After Tomorrow

When I wrote of the film The Day After Tomorrow, I did not mean to imply that the science in the film has any sound scientific basis. I was merely emphasizing the speed at which things may change.

It was a license on my part, but I remember not so long ago - and even at present - when it was widely believed that climate changes occur over long periods of time. There was sort of a notion of geological epochs required.

Not true.
Quick-like, fast-fast.

--

First Recipient Of The Climate Denial Penalty Tax

I first read this as a sudden realization by Mr. Trump that there is indeed Climate Change, and we had best do something about it. However, it seems probable that Mr. Trump is focusing on the word "Warming" and very logically sees an immense contradiction between that word and the reality of the polar vortex which brought my family temperatures of -30 degrees Fahrenheit Monday night, Tuesday morning.

Thanks, Mr. Trump. That one went over my head. Thank you for pointing it out.

And actually the contradiction did become apparent to me at sometime in the past, and I would say it was the late 1980's or the early 1990's. At the time, we had been experiencing cold winters in various parts of the globe, and there was indeed a hypothesis among some meteorological scientists that the climate was growing colder.
This view was quickly usurped by the hypothesis that there was Global Warming and that much of it was induced by the actions of mankind. It was further indicated that the Climate Change could cause more extreme weather events, be they hot or cold, dry or wet.

Mr. Trump is focused on "warming" and ignores "weather variability".
An overall increase of, say, 4 degrees Centigrade (or Celsius) is an average, and that indicates not necessarily that every place in the world is uniformly and homeostatically 4 degrees warmer than before, but that when we add together the hot and the cold... and the extremely hot and the extremely cold, we will get an average that is 4 degrees higher than days of yore.
And a moment's reflection will give us an idea of how hot it must be to average out a period of -34 degrees Celsius (equivalent to -30 degrees Fahrenheit) and come up with an average of +4 degrees Celsius, indicating a spell of very hot weather for an equal period or a spell of Hadean hot weather for a briefer period.
(Or a merely hot weather period for a long, long time.)

Mr. Trump and his enterprises should be among the first to receive the Ignorance Of Climate Change tax penalty of 30%  (or more) on all expenditures funding fundamental ignorance of the task we all soon face.

--

Merry Christmas!

Yesterday and Today to the Orthodox Christian communities of the world!

From the small

Child At Kazan Cathedral, Volgograd

to the Powerful

Vladimir Putin At Holy Face of Christ The Savior Church, Sochi

A mighty feast!

--

Old Detroit In Photos

Dave Jordano's pictures

September 4, 1973  Four carny workers at what looks like the Michigan State Fair grounds.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/behold/2014/01/06/dave_jordano_a_photographer_s_look_back_at_life_in_detroit_during_the_1970s.html


Wikipedia:

The first official Michigan State Fair was held in 1849, which is claimed by the state of Michigan to be the oldest state fair in the United States. The first fair was held in Detroit, Michigan. Subsequent fairs were held in other cities until it received its permanent home in 1905 at the Michigan State Fairgrounds in Detroit.

In 1904, Joseph L. Hudson, together with three of his associates, decided to give the State Fair its permanent home. They formed the State Fair Land Company, which acquired 135 acres between 7½ and 8 Mile Roads, east of Woodward Avenue. Because Hudson had no interest in running the fair, he sold the land to the Michigan State Agricultural Society for one dollar on April 18, 1905. The Agricultural Society accepted the land then purchased an additional 32 acres, extending the fairgrounds to 167 acres. Throughout the following years, additional land was purchased and sold. The present size of the fairgrounds is 164 acres

On October 30, 2009, Governor Jennifer Granholm cut all funding to the Michigan State fair.Attendance peaked at 1.2 million in 1966. In 2009 the fair attracted 217,000 visitors. The state fair was not held in 2010 and 2011.

On April 9, 2012, Governor Rick Snyder signed Senate Bill 515 and House Bill 4803, which would authorize the transfer of the fairgrounds land to the Land Bank Fast Track Authority, which would oversee the land for future development, including plans for a station for the proposed commuter rail service...

That's the way the world ends; not with a bang, but a whimper.
--

The Day After Tomorrow

The Day After Tomorrow

I liked the film The Day After Tomorrow. It was about catastrophic climate change.t
I seem to remember that most reviews panned some of the science, saying that some eminent scientists said such climate changes could not happen so quickly.
A random example,
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/05/28/1085641700583.html

... Some eminent climatologists have said the science is dodgy and that changes would be much slower, but the effects could be worse than the film envisages. A colder comfort would be hard to imagine.

I have often said that these things do happen quickly.
You should say it, too. It should be clear to every one by now.

In the summer of 2003, a heat wave swept Europe:
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/weather/news/2003-09-25-france-heat_x.htm

France heat wave death toll set at 14,802
PARIS (AP) — The death toll in France from August's blistering heat wave has reached nearly 15,000, according to a government-commissioned report released Thursday, surpassing a prior tally by more than 3,000.

Scientists at INSERM, the National Institute of Health and Medical Research, deduced the toll by determining that France had experienced 14,802 more deaths than expected for the month of August...

When the final report was issued by the group of scientists investigating what happened to Europe in the summer of 2003, I remember one scientist (I think it may have been the spokeswoman for the group) said that what truly surprised them was the speed at which these climate changes had occurred.
The scientists had expected such climate events, but not as early as 2003.

That was 10 years ago.
The thing that stood out to scientific minds was the SPEED of change.

So now we are in a polar vortex.
I watched the approach since New Year's Day on Weather Unferground, using their Model Maps, and in particular the GFS maps for forecasted  temperatures at 850 millibars pressure, which corresponds to a height of just under 4,800 feet or 1,500 meters.
It would be the elevation of Denver approximately, and I used that as my temperature predictor, for the GFS runs out to about 3 weeks of forecasted data.

When I saw the great sagging udders of cold air...

I unfortunately have viewed arctic weather as a massive Ice Cow, for the cold air masses sort of "hang down" or extend towards the lower latitudes from the North Pole, and they take the shape roughly of a sock or sagging bag... or an udder pendulously hanging down from the Arctic Circle and brushing across the continent... mooing lamentably like cattle trapped by snow on the Great Plains...

... when I saw the forecast cold air, I yelped out loud, and my wife asked me what was going on.

Today it has arrived.
At first the weather news said that such weather had not been seen in 5 years, then 20 years, and now it has not been seen in decades. Notice how fast they change things?
I think I would have some sort of memory of -14 degrees at night 5 years ago.

I woke up last night around 2:00 AM. It was a bit windy, nothing too much. As I sat in the library, my reading light flickered once, then again a few minutes later. Even though we have underground cables here, not every cable supplying the area is buried.

So I imagined the scenario of the power going out, just as it did in Lansing, Michigan during the ice storm at Christmas time; I imagined the power going out when the temperature was maybe 10 degrees Fahrenheit and a wind chill of -14.

I thought back on all the years and all the fears, all the predictions and all the warnings about our power grid. I thought back to when Spencer Abraham was Secretary of Energy, and he warned about the grid and he was there during the great power outage of 2003.
He retired in 2007.

ROBERT KENNEDY, JR.
Well, under Spencer Abraham’s leadership, the Department of Energy seemed to be more interested in serving big energy contributors from the oil and coal industry specifically and from the nuclear energy industry than serving the public interest.

Maybe, maybe not. I would have to go back and study it.

Even so, the infrastructure of the country continues to be neglected. When disaster strikes, will the electricity flow? Will communications be interrupted? Will the roads suffice for evacuation?  (hardly... around here, the road system could barely handle the numbers of people shopping to get ready for this big winter storm Ion.)

This is what our leaders need to do.

Give me a political platform that shows me how it will spend money to restore the infrastructure and protect the well-being of the people.
And I do not care if the level of the deficit is increased within reasonable limits.
The deficit is not our biggest problem.
We think it is because we have watched too many digital clocks counting the dollars spent by the government every second of every day, and we have become lemmings in full flight response.

We have put ourselves in a State of Perfect Irony, in that our power and wealth have delivered us to a position where we cannot spend to avert or repair disasters, and we loathe to spend to protect our allies militarily.
We cannot help ourselves.
We are in a time of Quick and Vast change everywhere, and we shall not be able to help ourselves.

We need a new political vision.
(We need to see a lot of things in new ways, but we'll start here.)

We also need to enact a punitive tax upon all climate deniers who have hobbled our efforts to moderate climate change. From Exxon to the Koch Brothers and well beyond, a 10% tax on income or profits before taxes would help fund what is needed.

Perhaps a 30% tax on the monies spent on climate denier efforts would be a just tax to impose.

Ian Holm  The Day After Tomorrow

--

What's Up With That?

Solution to Cloud Riddle Reveals Hotter Future: Global Temperatures to Rise at Least 4 Degrees C by 2100
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131231094442.htm

Dec. 31, 2013 — Global average temperatures will rise at least 4°C by 2100 and potentially more than 8°C by 2200 if carbon dioxide emissions are not reduced according to new research published in Nature. Scientists found global climate is more sensitive to carbon dioxide than most previous estimates.

The research also appears to solve one of the great unknowns of climate sensitivity, the role of cloud formation and whether this will have a positive or negative effect on global warming.

"Our research has shown climate models indicating a low temperature response to a doubling of carbon dioxide from pre-industrial times are not reproducing the correct processes that lead to cloud formation," said lead author from the University of New South Wales' Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science Prof Steven Sherwood.

"When the processes are correct in the climate models the level of climate sensitivity is far higher. Previously, estimates of the sensitivity of global temperature to a doubling of carbon dioxide ranged from 1.5°C to 5°C. This new research takes away the lower end of climate sensitivity estimates, meaning that global average temperatures will increase by 3°C to 5°C with a doubling of carbon dioxide." ...

This is one of those moments.
Do we say , "Told ya!", or do we run for the hills, and let the devil take the hindmost?

I seem to recall reading that 4 degrees Centigrade will radically change life as we know, and right quick-like.
4 degrees seem to be the point at which we dusted off terms like "catastrophic", and "extinction events".

Now that that seems to be the road we have chosen, perhaps scientists no longer deem it necessary to introject those negative avoidance words to try and deter our folly.

--

The Bells Of New Year's

Once again the gunshots fired into the air at midnight awakened me to New Year's Day.
It seems to have taken a while, for when I looked at the clock, it was 12:15 AM, so there had been 15 minutes of gun fire required to ease me from my slumber. Must have been a pretty sound slumber. I supposed that even Armageddon would need at least 5 minutes to wake me.

You can hear gun shots from quite a distance, and the pop-pop-popping went on for a couple of hours.

The sound was guns. It always has been. This is not Chinese New Year, so it was not firecrackers.

She-who-must-be-obeyed told me that some officious do-gooder was urging the locals to ring bells instead of shooting guns. Ring in the New Year with a joyous tintinnabulation! Ring with bells gold and silver, brass and iron; make a cheerful noise unto the Lord with a tolling of bells!!!!!!!!!

I snorted in derision.

"Where does one buy a bell?" I asked.

"I don't think WalMart has a bell section. There are no local Mom and Pop bell stores downtown. Even if there were a school supply store nearby, they would only have bells if they also carried slates and hick'ry sticks. Maybe the teacher needs one, that is, if they still call her the School Marm,"  I continued.

She nodded in agreement.

"I'll bet you it is 10 times easier to buy a gun than it is to buy a bell!"

Ring in the New Year, indeed!

Snort!

--

The Christmas Carol, Pre-Restoration Poets משׁ-משׁ

 The Twelve Days of Christmas Schematic

First, I write "mish-mosh" as משׁ-משׁ
That is my yiddish, my homage to Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Springer, and if someone does not like it, too bad. I never said I was a learned man. I can't even remember the name for the hyphen between words in Hebrew. Mappiq comes to mind, but I think that's a dot that doubles a consonant.

Mish-Mosh is "mixed up" or "mixed together", maybe an anagram, maybe a Mad-Libs of unrelated sentences and words.
It can be a soup or stew into which a cook throws everything but the kitchen sink.
It could also be pronounced "mosh-mish", and is a good example of its own meaning, sort of a self-referential expression.

For example, thus far, this post is a mish-mosh, and nobody knows what I am talking about.

OK.
Reading the Signs (http://readingthesigns.blogspot.com/) sent a comment along about Christmastide and mentioned the 12 drummers drumming of the carol "The Twelve Days Of Christmas".

This immediately reminded me of a year when Christmastide seemed a little too hum-drum and boring. Things were beginning to drag. I called myself Ishmael... quite a few times, mumbling at the bathroom mirror as I brushed my teeth, leading She-who-must-be-obeyed to begin to get references for neurologists.

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off—then, I account it high time that the nephews should be arriving upon me doorstep.

At last my three nephews, Ayden, Austin, and Aloysius (pronounced a-LOY-shus for all you who are not Sons of Hibernia) blew into town on the wings of Borealis (the north wind) and over tea we discussed not the Christmas goose, but ways to "goose" the Christmas feast... as it were.

My Three Nephews

Later over other beverages we decided to take the plunge into the dark arts of combining Christmas carols and the poetry of the Pre-Restoration English poets.
It soon morphed into the inclusion of all English poets; no point in restricting it.
I started with sort of a Mad-Libs scenario: a poem of Byron wherein I would excise portions and ask about for a line from Ginsberg or Bukowski... or even Donald Gaines.... or Danielle Steele, not even restricting it to poetry.

Then it underwent a change, and we generated things like

"And therefore never send to know for whom the 12 drummers drum;
they drum for thee."

and this went on for the entire set of verses,

"And therefore never send to know for whom the 10 lords leap;
they leap for thee."
 [...]
"And therefore never send to know for whom the 8 maids milk;
they milk for thee."

all the way down to,

"And therefore never send to know for whom the partridge perches;
it perches for thee."

Since we happily included Post-Restoration poets, we could do things like

Here thou, great Anna! whom three realms obey;
And merry gentlemen, let nothing you dismay!

There are few rules, and you make them up on the fly.
All that is needed is that there must be enough of the poem to allow the glögg befuddled and rum-spiked egg nog inebriated minds of even the densest dancing Fezziwig and Fan to easily place the poetry and carol.

Now I think you will agree that this is a true, blue Christmas miracle, as well as a good משׁ-משׁ


--

Balaam Speaks

I had a discussion of religion over the holidays, and it was with a person who had many, many beliefs. They had an enormous belief system. It sort of reminded me of Howl's Moving Castle (2004 by Miyazaki; see below), tall, wide, clunky, creaky, leaking steam from the joints, dripping hydraulic fluid, and all kept together by fervently wishful thinking.

I told them about my lack of "belief systems".
I actually went further and critiqued the word "belief".
Of course, I was accused of making it all a matter of semantics, which was sort of a tautology, since we were, indeed, fencing not with dull wooden children's swords, but with the "meaning" of words; it was, indeed, all a matter of "meaning".

It was tedious. Since I do not drink alcohol, I have no idea why I was involved in this. It was the type of discussion one gets into at a bar when there are no good-looking dolls to flirt with.

Anyway, I ended it by saying that I was metaphorically Balaam.

My opponent looked at me oddly, and asked if I were admitting finally that I was a bad prophet of deviously evil advice (as they had already been sneakily thinking to themselves). 
They may not have heard the word "metaphorically", or they may have thought it was all semantics.

Nope, I said. There's another take on it. (I love the word "take" meaning "understanding" or "interpretation". I think the expression "hermeneutics" should be changed to "take speak" or something equally looney that is appropriate for the present age. I also like "on tap" heard so often on cable news, and meaning "scheduled to be presented". I like comparing world events to various beers.)

I resisted the urge to explain, something I could not have withstood 20 years ago.

Someday it will dawn on my friendly debate partner that I meant that I had been talking to an ass.

--

Dodging An Ice Bullet

I'm off to my mother's to get her some food-stuffs.

There will be light snow starting at midnight Saturday - today - and the heavy snow begins Sunday PM, so I have to get there shop, do some other things I would have done Monday... because I wont be there Monday. It is going to be 14 below zero Monday night, and I have to take care of my own place with its own ice and snow.

My mother's place is very warm and tight. There are almost no drafts.
I will tell her to not go out an grab the mail by the front door; there will probably be no mail until Tuesday anyway.

I called her last night. She watches Cable news, so the weather news is slow getting to her.
I look at the Weather Underground or Unisys weather model maps, so I can get 10 days ahead.

Her first response was that everyone should go up to her place for however long the bad weather lasted, which I figured to be 2 to 3 days.
Well, she has no internet, and too much togetherness will undoubtedly drive us crazy. We've tried it, we know.

I said why did not she come down here? I could pick her up.
No, that was out of the question. All her stuff was there. I guess she figures we ain't got no stuff; we do not have favorite cozy beds and special coffees and teas for the morning and afternoon; we must also prefer mustards and condiments that have the date "2005" emblazoned on the bottles, as do hers.

"Hasn't killed me," she says.

Condiments from pre-barcode days are commonplace. I remember once there was something from the days before ingredients and nutritional info were listed. She still has a jar of powdered nutmeg we used for Christmas that is from her old house, so it is at least 17 years old. If you know what fresh nutmeg smells like, this smells like nutmeg, dust bunnies, and rust.

So I'll go, check and see if my brother needs anything, too. I might boogie before midnight. They say there will be a slow 3 inches by morning, and 3 inches - if there is any attempt at snow removal - is not bad. On New Year's Day there was 2 to 3 slow inches, but the municipalities weren't taking any responsibility seriously other than hangovers and football.
There was some effort, although I did not see any snow plows/salt truck trucks until later in the day. It was a slow drive, but do-able.
Last February there was a similar snow and the municipalities made NO effort until the snow was done. Maybe by February they had run low on funds. It was not enjoyable. From Oakland County into Detroit the I-75 was 6 lanes of cars going 5 mph. The ramps were iced. The surface streets were awful.
No road crews were anywhere on pavement.

I thought these were the workers and managers for the municipalities that were supposed to be getting cushy pensions... so, get it done!


All I ask is that you warn us.

There is that little band of news that runs along the bottom of the cable screen, telling us all the schools and academies that are closed on snow days. Add a notice:  All Municipalities Refuse To Get Off Their Duffs For Snow Control Until Further Notice! Drive At Your Own Risk!


--

ps.
I know driving in weather.
I drove 110 miles a day minimum on business days for 37 years, summer and winter. And our business was weather-sensitive.
You get to know weather conditions.

In Which Some Folks Ask The Magic Eight Ball About Jesus

I was shocked by how this story worked out.

1) Jesus the Magician? Archaeological Find Unlikely As Earliest Reference to Jesus Christ
http://ezinearticles.com/?Jesus-the-Magician?-Archaeological-Find-Unlikely-As-Earliest-Reference-to-Jesus-Christ&id=1593610

A bowl newly discovered in Alexandria, Egypt, and dated to the period from the late second century BCE to the early first century CE bears an engraving that may be the world's earliest known reference to Jesus Christ. The engraving reads dia chrstou ogoistais, translated by the excavation team as "through Christ the magician." According to French marine archaeologist Franck Goddio, co-founder of the Oxford Center of Maritime Archaeology, and Egyptologist David Fabre, the phrase could very well be a reference to Jesus Christ, since he was one known as a primary exponent of white magic.

The team found the bowl during their underwater excavation of the ancient harbor of Alexandria. They speculate that a first-century magus may have used the bowl to tell fortunes. They note that the bowl is very similar to one depicted on two early Egyptian statuettes that are thought to show a soothsaying ritual. Ancient soothsaying manuals describe a technique in which the fortune teller poured oil into water and then entered an ecstatic state while studying the whirling mix. In the hallucinatory state, the fortune-teller hoped to meet mystical beings that could field questions about the future. The inscription, the archaeologists theorize, may have served to legitimize the soothsaying by invoking the name of Christ, acknowledged to be a wonder-worker.

[...]


How weighty is the evidence?
o Is it "Christ" or "Good"? - The archaeologists may have mistaken one Greek word for another in their interpretation. A glance at the photograph of the cup reveals a letter between the rho ("P") and the sigma ("C"). The letter, though poorly formed, seems unmistakably the letter eta ("H"). If this identification is correct, then the lexical form of the Greek word inscribed is not christos, but chrestos, meaning "kind, loving, good, merciful."

The prepositional phrase, then, probably indicates that the bowl was a gift, given "through kindness" from some benefactor. It seems obvious that chrestou is much more likely than christou for the engraved word. Rather than referring to the power of Christ, the word chrestou might be a reference to the person who gave the cup as a gift-as we might write on a gift "from Donald with best wishes." This explanation seems as plausible as its alternative is unlikely.

I had read about the cup in another place, and being familiar with some of the literature of Jesus as a magician, right along with Simon Magus, I was fascinated.

I did not read about the evidence, however, at first, nor did I read the inscription myself.

2)
I ended up at http://gwynraven.livejournal.com/1063796.html 
who seems to be a young lady who does not even read Greek, but I needed her to point out that there is a Greek letter "Eta" in the phrase dia chrstou, so the proper reading is dia chrēstou.
This is immediately obvious, and the letter actually does not seem "poorly formed". I tried scratching an "eta" onto some sheetrock, and one cannot make the rounded edges; it comes out exactly like that upon the cup.

There is absolutely no basis for believing this refers to Jesus Christ based upon the inscription.
It can only be done if one totally ignores the "eta".

3)
The incorrect transcription has "the magician" and "chrestos/christos" in different grammatical cases.
If it said,  "Through Christ, the Magician", the words Christ and Magician would both be in the genitive case. As it is, the word Magician is nominal and "chrestos/christos" is genitival.

Words in apposition:  "Christ, the Magician"    would be in the same case, not in two different cases.
Something like   dia christou tou ogoistou  .

4)
Chrestos interestingly enough is used in fortune telling, and means a good augury or a happy outcome.

There is a use of  " dia "  with the verb " to be "  which translates "being in a state of..."
So "dia chestou" could be "in the state of a happy telling of future fortune" or something like that.

Furthermore, the verb "to be" is often not expressed, but the reader assumes it is there. We do the same thing at times.


If indeed this is a fortune teller's cup or bowl, I would do a first draft as:

The Magician or Fortune Teller  (is) (in the state of) (having received) a happy fortune (for you).

There may have been a fellow bowl which displayed the unhappy outcome, and together they formed an ancient Magic Eight-Ball.

The question remains as to how this nonsense could be perpetrated on the public!

--

The Laws Of Guns

 

Originally, people thought of guns as guaranteeing our freedoms. That is the entire spirit of the Second Amendment.

However, it seems as if our society sees them and uses them as instruments of various forms of anarchy and subversion of the social peace.

I cannot believe that if the Framers of the Constitution were confronted with these absurdly repetitive killings by fire arms they would have phrased the Second Amendment the way they do, for they would have realized that the guns were being subverted out of the context of political freedom and its guarantees into some terrible punctuated and occasional social self-genocide.

The Second would have been vastly different.

--

"Conservative" Media Pile On

 Shag Carpet

That is "pile" as in the pile of a carpet.

I do not like carpeting. I like rugs, particularly from the Middle East. I like to see them on hardwood floors. But carpeting is not to my liking. It holds the dirt, grime, dander, and dust mites forever. Carpeting is more like a zone of habitation than it is decor for my domicile.

Your can take rugs out and throw them over the clothes line and beat the dirt out with a rug beater. It will poof! into the air, and then fall to the ground.
With carpeting, you really just push the powdery dust around, creating newly cut deep furrows and harrowing the old. Discing is what you do; we let the carpet set, then turn up the dirt, discing it with vacuum plowshare.

Did you ever see a home where there's is sadness? Did you ever see it when the sun streams in through windows that have not been washed for a while, then through white curtains that look and feel indisposed, and then they hurl what's left of the masticated and undigested sunlight upon a faded carpet?
Does it not look like Harry Hope's bar in The Iceman Cometh, like the bottom of the sea rathskeller?
And are we not very sure that Harry has not cleaned the carpeting in his front room, nor has he washed the windows that front the street in the last 20 years since his wife, Bess, passed away?

Conservative media is like shag carpeting: it holds the dirt forever.
For example, even though the New York Times has published an investigation into Benghazi destroying most conservative points, they will not be expunged from the conservative collective.
That shag carpet, deep, rough, and miserly of the dust and the minute life that lives on it, will hold everything deep within its pile.

There is a point when one is no longer questioning, but is actively spreading despair.

We have passed it.

Watch what happens.


--

Today

Today is Childermas, by the way; the Feast of the Holy Innocents murdered by King Herod.

God bless the children.

--

Turing Tests For Bloggers

I have just encountered the most difficult "Please prove you're not a robot" test I have ever seen !

One of the many variations I saw was the word  "Geâts"  with a bloody circumflex on the "a"!
Since this was Beowulf's clan, I thought it grossly unfair to be coupled with a undecipherable second word.
(furthermore, I had purchased the cheap computer whose keyboard did not have the European accented vowels! My next laptop will even have a qamets-hey on it.)

I think http://thetrouserpress.blogspot.com/ makes up his own Turing tests. I think I shall start to do my own.

--

No Country For Old Men

Tommy Lee Jones's Sheriff in the film No Country For Old Men is an observer, not a solver of crimes, not a hero to right wrongs. His sole purpose is to watch silently as the "country" passes from a state that was intelligible to him and made "common sense" into a vast wasteland of destruction.

The inverse rites of passage from the Quick to the Dead are reflected in his weary face, and in his decision to retire. They are reflected in the seemingly endless passage of money from hands to hands, from hiding place to hiding place, and the movement in its wake as it draws all the lives of those it has touched into a whirlpool of death.

I think of the forests that once covered our country from coast to coast. They are all gone.
I look at and dream of the prairie flowers and grasses which carpeted the Great Plains. They are islands and museums now.
The Native Americans passed away from east of the Mississippi to the West, where their fate was no more benign.

Now they say that if America draws down its troops in Afghanistan, the Taliban is back in power by 2017.
I could have told you that back in 2003, when Afghanistan went on the back-burner.

The only thing we did was to pay a trillion simoleons so that the Taliban could vacation in the mountains for five or six years, then come back refreshed.

We shall perish in the wake of a trillion simoleons there, four trillion dollars in Iraq, and a terminal inability to focus on real issues.
Ain't no country for old men no more.

--

Republican Nightmare Cinema 1

--

Positive Polarity

If you have read the post on Negative Polarity today, http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2013/12/negative-polarity.html, then .... spoiler alert? Anyway, go read and return after a while.

OK. If you have read post, then it may have dawned on you that there must be Positive Polarity Items, too.

I think "oodles" is one such PPI.
Compare "I think your dog is oodles of fun" versus "I do not think your dog is oodles of fun." Although I may say the first (in some alternative universe), I would never say the second, especially after stepping into oodles of dog feces left in the summer cottage backyard on Fathers' Day, 2013.

--

The Rise In Health Care Costs

 

Adam Smith   by Michael Hogue

Some people - myself being one - tend to view the rapid increase in health care costs to be very much akin to a financial bubble.

The problem with that is that it implies that nothing can effectively be done to avert the bursting of the bubble. Since the very fast rise in price is driven by irrational expectations of those in the market, we know that the bubble will grow, all cautions will be thrown to the wind, and when there is trouble, panic may ensue, causing the bursting of the bubble.

There really is no way to stop the crowd of financial lemmings headed for their cliff of choice. Sermons, cautions, tales of wise old men, none of these can hold a candle next to the brilliance of the false promises of Ponzi rewards for every investor.

The only way to control such things are the institution of Regulators, who perform the function of Governors on steam engines, allowing steam pressure to be controlled and preventing the catastrophe of a run-away increase of steam pressure. Or, more to our time, they act as the graphite rods inserted into a nuclear reactor to control the chain reaction.

This day and age does not like Regulators. Our faith is on Free Markets and Invisible Hands.

However, even Adam Smith did not believe in free markets like we do. Read a review of his Theory Of Moral Sentiments at The American Conservative,
 http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/adam-smith-communitarian/

--

Negative Polarity

 

Scissors Grinder, by Karl Malevich

(I could not find a picture of a Tinker)

Negative Polarity Items on All Things Linguistic:
http://allthingslinguistic.com/post/61793502009/giving-a-shit-about-negative-polarity-items

NPI stands for Negative Polarity Item, and they’re called that because they tend to be found in the scope of negation and serve to emphasize that negation. Classic examples are any, ever, and even, which sound great in negative sentences like (1-4) but pretty weird in the positive equivalents in (5-8).*

(1) I don’t love anyone.
(2) We are never, ever, getting back together.
(3) I don’t even know myself.
(4) I don’t want to go to sleep either.

(5) *I love anyone.
(6) *We are ever getting back together.
(7) *I even know myself.
(8) *I want to go to sleep either...

 I came up with "a tinker's dam"  (or "damn", if you must)  as in "I don't give a tinker's dam" versus "I do give a tinker's dam." Obviously a negative polarity item.

--

First Amendment Rights

Having thought about the First Amendment which prohibits the making of any law abridging the right of freedom of speech, I have concluded at this time that if I deprive someone of a TV show on which to state their views, I have not abridged their right of freedom of speech - for they are free to speak whatever they wish - but I have merely abridged their propagation of speech.

There is no amendment that guarantees the right to wide and loud propagation of speech, Citizens' United notwithstanding.

The amendment does not guarantee the right to the wide broadcast of any idea. It guarantees the freedom to express the idea, but not necessarily to spend money to spread it.


--