Obama on education
Today Obama came out in support of charter schools, merit pay for teachers, and longer school days. Excellent.

Remains to be seen whether he will carry through with action, but all of these moves will actually improve education.

Bush's education agenda was Teddy Kennedy's education agenda. Admittedly, putting a Republican name on Emperor Teddy's program made it unpopular among the teacher unions; nevertheless, the predictable result was bad for education. No surprise. Everything Emperor Teddy did was evil, whether the program was "rebranded" or not.

This crossover phenomenon is also no surprise. If you want to see the Dem agenda implemented, elect a Republican, and vice versa. Most Americans understood this before the idiotic talking-point-heads hijacked our political dialogue. I remember my father discussing it in the early '60s, referring to JFK and Nixon.
  ¶ 12:54 PM

  Cheerful Czechs
Cheerful Czechs driving and singing just before WW2:

1

2

3

Doesn't make a lick of sense, but it's fun.
  ¶ 10:51 AM

  Classic distortion
The cable "news" channels are pulling a classic bit of propagandistic distortion on the stem-cell controversy.

First, the Bush order did not prohibit all embryonic stem-cell research; it only prohibited federal funding for some lines of ESC. In other words, it was a purely symbolic ploy, giving cynical lip service to evangelical and Catholic voting blocs.

The "news" channels are universally and uniformly describing the Bush order as "prohibiting all stem-cell research."

Second, the best argument against ESC is that it's unnecessary. Because ESC research was not prohibited, it has proceeded under private funding and in other countries. And despite all this research, ESC remains only a potential life-saver; the other types of stem-cell therapy (from cord blood or from the patient's own cells) are yielding actual cures.

The "news" channels never mention this fact, not even once. Their sole description of the anti-ESC argument is as follows, verbatim: "Those Neanderthal conservative critics somehow believe, for some weird and incomprehensible reason, that killing embryos is somehow the same thing as killing a human being. Of course we smart people know better, don't we? Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha."

When scientists are mainly concerned with doing science, they put most of their resources into pursuing the best and quickest paths to the desired result, as common sense would dictate. In this case the best and quickest path, regardless of moral questions, is cord blood and adult cells. The fact that American "scientists" are fiercely uninterested in non-embryonic methods tells us all we need to know. American "scientists" are standing on the giant shoulders of their noble forebear and mentor, Dr. Josef Mengele.
  ¶ 7:03 AM

  Read this!
Read this!
  ¶ 9:55 PM

  Signs of insanity
Spokane's city government is always incompetent, but now they have gone totally loony. The council is determined to pass an anti-sign ordinance forbidding those LCD flashing signs that give time, temperature, information, and advertising. As far as I can tell, no actual citizens wanted this ordinance. Hundreds of businesses and citizens have protested against the ordinance. Nevertheless, the council is still moving forward.

At the same time, they have decided to stretch the interpretation of an old ordinance to prohibit ads on bus stop benches. The transit authority gets a significant part of its operating budget from those ads; the benches don't cost any tax money at all; without the support of advertising, the transit authority has to remove the benches.

Yessir, just the right pair of moves while recession deepens. Make it harder to do business, take money and comfort away from public transit, while saving nothing for the taxpayers.

Yes, by all means, let's commit civic suicide. Fun, fun, fun.
  ¶ 11:31 AM

  Kudos to ABC news.....
On tonight's ABC news, Chris Bury did an excellent feature on small-town banks, showing that they are still operating normally, still making loans at a normal rate, still earning good profits, neither wanting nor needing a bailout.

It's highly important to hold this fact in the foreground. The Wall Street Mafia and its pet "government" want us to believe that the entire banking sector is in trouble. Nope, only the criminals are in trouble, and they're not in nearly enough trouble. They should be in jail. They should be jumping from skyscrapers.
  ¶ 8:43 PM

  Box-o-stox


Polistra has been hammering for quite a while on the destructive qualities of the stock market. Companies that participate in stock exchanges lose their bearings; they focus solely on pleasing the shareholders instead of pleasing the customers and employees. Cost-cutting is the only goal, which leads them to use cheap overseas labor and to abandon research and development.

We see the resulting wreckage all around us.

Closely-held companies work better. A business run by its founding family, or owned by a private equity fund, is better able to focus on satisfying its employees and customers.

Polistra wonders if we can somehow broaden or democratize the private-equity holding, restore the basic purpose of selling shares to bring in capital ... but without the insanity of the Wall Street Casino. Preferred stock comes close, but it still has a variable share price which invites speculation.

Putting it simply, how do you make a stock more like a savings account?

Her idea: A fixed-price share that can't be transferred. You can return it to the company for the original price but you can't sell it to anyone else. The only thing you expect from this share is possible dividends. Both the company and the shareholder would then focus solely on the dividend, because insufficient dividends would mean more refunds.

This idea has obvious problems, but it's still closer to sanity and productivity than the current Casino.

Labels: the broken circle

  ¶ 9:01 AM

  What killed localism?
Rod Dreher quotes a Patrick Deneen article which accuses the "new isolationists" of free-riding. Deneen says we are taking advantage of the system that made it possible for us to have the luxurious choice of opting out.

I wrote this comment on Dreher's blog, and want to preserve it here for my own reference if nothing else:

= = = = =

Deneen is, as always, deep and unique. But there's a timeline problem in his accusation of free-riding against the localists. He says we are taking advantage of all the goodies (mobility, communication, occupational choice) provided by modernity, while trying to escape from deracination. He has conflated two different "packages".

Occupational choice has been an American feature from the start. Mobility and communication came in 1860 with the telegraph and railroad. But local institutions and Tocqueville's "mediators" were still perfectly strong and vibrant in 1950. It wasn't mobility and communication that killed the lodge and the church. It was a Leninist Sabotage Weapon called "The Supreme Court" that killed the lodge and the church.

If we want to restore localism, we don't need to eliminate the telegraph, the railroad and the internet. We do need to eliminate the Leninist Sabotage Weapon, or more precisely we need to escape the clutches of its secret police.
(i.e. plaintiff lawyers, social workers, public schools.)

Since both political "parties" are solidly Leninist (as you [Rod] brilliantly pointed
out in your discussion of Rush's CPAC speech) the answer must be either a third party determined to repeal bad laws, or secession.
  ¶ 7:49 AM

  Bucking the trend
Buck Knives, a well-known brand of sporting and utility knives, has been based in Post Falls near Spokane for several years. Until recently Buck ran its manufacturing in Taiwan. The owner (great-grandson of the founder) has decided to bring the work back home, partly for moral reasons and partly for business reasons.

Bravo, Mr Buck!

Story and video here.
  ¶ 9:17 AM

  Sir Edward



Poor Polistra made the mistake of listening to Commissar Gordon Brown's speech this morning.
  ¶ 8:45 AM

  Oh come now.
Listening to some asshole from the SEC interviewed on C-Span. Asshole just said "The investment industry is the most highly regulated in the US, second only to the nuclear power industry."

Pure reagent-quality ratshit.

The American nuclear power industry has shown what happens with strong and competent regulation. When the worst-case accident happened at Three Mile Island, no radioactivity escaped, nobody was killed.

You can't prevent every accident, but NRC regs guaranteed that the containment structure was strong enough to avoid deaths when the accident came.

The SEC operates more like Soviet nuclear power regulators. Bribes and loyalty matter more than rules and engineering. When the worst-case accident happened at Chernobyl, there was nothing to contain it. Tens of thousands died.

If investment banking were really regulated to NRC standards, Bernie Madoff would have been detected and stopped when his first customer reported something suspicious. The (figurative) containment structure would have prevented further losses. And the galactic-scale crimes and robberies committed by AIG would not have been allowed to start. Anyone with the tiniest grasp of arithmetic and common sense could tell that a "credit default swap" was a monstrous fraud. It was called a "swap" to escape state insurance regulations. What more do you need to know, for Christ's sweet sake?????????

If Obama were serious about fixing this mess, he would fire the entire SEC and start over. Replace the staff with randomly chosen unemployed blue-collar workers. Cooks, beauticians, janitors. They won't be fooled by a con-man like Madoff.
  ¶ 6:54 AM

  Even New Yorkers can learn!
Rich Lowry at NRO writes:

Obama's debut is quite different from FDR's. FDR took office in the midst of a total meltdown of the banking system and acted boldly to arrest it. In March 1933, the Dow was at 52. It climbed 75 percent in the first 100 days. By December 1, 1933 it was 99. Obama is temporizing with his financial crisis in favor of moving quickly on his big spending plans, and watching the Dow trip steadily downward by the day. It's as if FDR skipped the bank holiday and focused first on passing the CCC.

Back in September (before the election) Polistra wrote:

The brand-R talking point heads continually define FDR as a socialist who tried to nationalize everything and blew up the Constitution. The same brand-R talking point heads also describe Sultan Bush as a "conservative".

How did FDR handle the banking crisis in 1933? He closed all banks to stop the run, sent out inspectors to check solvency, and immediately re-opened the good banks with a federal guarantee behind them. The guarantee turned into FDIC.

Was this constitutional? Yes. The Federal gov't is given power "To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof..." Since the banking crisis was destroying the Value of Money, the gov't clearly had the authority to intervene.

How does Sultan Bush handle this banking crisis? He nationalizes the insolvent companies.

Now tell me again, who's the socialist?

Polistra is pleased to see that even New York Metrosexuals are capable of understanding reality, given a little extra time.

A normal and sane ruler -- like FDR -- knows that you need to catch criminals and take them out of circulation before you can start to restore the trust and confidence of the victims. And FDR did catch and remove the bad operators before he started to add new programs. Bush and Obama are rewarding the criminals, not catching them. This is totally insane unless the criminals have you trapped in a blackmail threat.
  ¶ 6:42 PM

  Mark Steyn and Judy's father
Mark Steyn's column about lo-brow vs hi-brow conservatism has raised hackles. He certainly has a point, and it's similar to Polistra's main theme. But Steyn doesn't hit the whole target.

It's not just within conservatism, and it's not just the forehead altitude of commentary.

The basic problem covers all realms of art, science and politics. Why don't we have hi-brow commentary? Because there is no hi-brow subject matter available to discuss.

I realized this, oddly enough, while listening to a 1946 episode of A Date with Judy. In this episode Judy wants to attend an evening lecture by an intellectual, and she wants her father to take her. Father gets pompous, saying: "It is true, Judy, that I try to keep abreast of the times; literature, art, politics..." Since this is a comedy, we know that Father's pomposity will be duly punished later, and we're not disappointed.

Consider: Keeping abreast of the times in literature, art, music and politics was a hi-brow pursuit, because there were hi-brow developments in literature, art, music and politics.

What do we have now? Sure, we have literature, art, music and politics, but the only parts available for Father to discuss are lo-brow. The formal or serious segments of the arts have destroyed themselves by total devotion to incestuous avant-garde ugliness, advancing the Soviet cause. If Judy's father wanted to learn something about these monstrosities, he couldn't penetrate the nonsensical jargon of the inner priesthood.

Science has split in a different way: plenty of important work is still proceeding, but the public face of science is nothing more than primitive, vicious and anti-logical bigotry against religion and Western civilization. If Judy's father wanted to read about the new developments, he would have to wade through a minefield of abuse and hatred against everything he holds dear.

Most importantly, politics has gone down the same road, though without the help of the academics. There is some rational thought, but it doesn't reach any medium that Judy's father could watch or hear. Dozens of important questions beg to be discussed, but the only thing we hear on TV and radio is mindless repetition of today's talking points.

Asshole General Holder and his minions at CNN endlessly repeat "We need more discussion of race." (By which Holder really means "C'mon you motherfucking ofay punks, make my Leninist day!")

And Rush leads the opposite charge with a wider variety of subjects, such as (1) Zero zip nada taxes for me and my fellow millionaires! (2) Zero zip nada taxes for me and my fellow millionaires! (3) Zero zip nada taxes for me and my fellow millionaires! (4) Zero zip nada taxes for me and my fellow millionaires!

Neither side ever asks whether we should restore American industry, though Obama tosses an occasional symbolic bone in that direction. Neither side ever asks whether school integration was good for black kids. Neither side ever wonders why it's no longer possible for an ordinary man to support a family with one income. Neither side ever proposes limiting lawsuits. Neither side can find the obvious answer to our health-care problem, though it's already available in France. Neither side can find the obvious answer to our energy problem, though it's already available in France.

If we were able to discuss these topics, we'd have more of a middle-brow political culture. But these topics are not allowed. Anyone who tries to discuss them is covered with Hazmat labels and surrounded with crime-scene tape.



  ¶ 6:51 AM

  Paul Harvey RIP


The last of the great ones. Gone.

Harvey was a serious anti-Communist, and an important part of the Mainstream Media, yet for some reason he was ignored by modern conservatives, never listed among the mentors and founders of the movement. This has always puzzled me ... possibly it was because he turned against the Vietnam war and thus turned a large segment of popular opinion against it. Well, he was right, and in fact he was consistently anti-Communist in opposing the war. The Vietnam war was a gift to the Soviets, and Comrade Nixon was our most left-wing president until Sultan Bush came along and outdid him.
  ¶ 6:30 PM

  Dying newspapers
Newspapers are blaming the Web for their demise. Only partly true.

When movie newsreels started in 1915, newspapers were supposed to die. They didn't. When radio came of age in 1935, newspapers were supposed to die. Nope. And when TV news developed in 1955, newspapers were supposed to die. They didn't.

Each of those technical jumps "should" have replaced newspapers, but papers found new ways to serve their public.

So the current problem is not the new technology, but a total lack of imagination and service on the part of the papers.

Some commentators say that serious reporting will disappear when papers are gone. Nonsense. It's already gone from the papers. Here in Spokane, I check the websites of local TV stations and the newspaper each day. The TV stations do a much better job on the daily basics like murders, car accidents, power outages and traffic blockages. I rarely see anything on the paper's website that strikes me as important.

Well, how about the traditional "crusading journalist", supposedly an exclusive property of papers? Exposing corrupt city officials, letting the chips fall where they may.... Neither the paper nor the TV stations will touch those stories, and in fact the Spokesman-Review is owned by the same family who owns the city government. Brave reporting comes only from small "alternative weeklies", which will continue to exist because they serve a select and loyal audience. A good recent example is the exposure of Portland's gayor enjoying his youngboy intern.

There is precisely one exception to this rule: Dorothy Rabinowitz at the Wall Street Journal. She has covered stories that nobody else would touch, told the truth that nobody else would speak. All other reporters at major papers are gutless Leninist scribes.

Same with classified ads, a major source of revenue. Papers enthusiastically enforce Communist "equal-opportunity" censorship of classified ads. You can't advertise for a female secretary, you can't describe a house's neighborhood. The free ads-only papers (Shopper's Edge, Nickel Nik, etc) and the web ad services like Craigslist don't enforce these rules. If you want to write a useful and specific ad, you're not going to run it through the Communist censors at the newspapers when you have a better option.

In short, papers are not dying because their function has been duplicated by the Web; papers are dying because they stopped performing their function.

= = = = =

Can I imagine a newspaper-like service that I would pay for? Yes, but it would probably be more like a radio program, perhaps like the pre-Rush form of talk radio. Arthur Godfrey's early work gives the flavor if not necessarily the content of such a service. It would be a mix of local news, local advertising, and a warm invitation to community.
  ¶ 10:26 AM

  Goofy Bobby
Obama's SOTU was (unsurprisingly by now) an excellent speech. He allowed some of the usual circus atmosphere, but kept pushing ahead to make his points.

The SOTU was originally meant as a simple annual progress report to Congress, and Obama did speak directly to Congress much of the time. He wasn't just quoting a calculated list of talking points for the benefit of the calculated list of special interests; he was telling Congress to get its ass in gear, and to serve the country.

Polistra especially appreciates the service message, and will return to this point soon.

As for the stated goal of telling Americans why we have a crisis and why we need to throw money at banks, Obama missed. If the message was there, I didn't catch it. He promised to hold the banks more accountable from now on, but that ain't gonna happen.

Jindal's response: just awful. He talks like Misterogers. Republicans still haven't learned the most basic lesson from Bush Junior: Leaders must speak in a way that isn't physically painful to hear.
  ¶ 7:25 PM

  Locke
I notice that Gary Locke is the next nominee for Obama's Commerce Dept. He served two terms as Wash Gov, and served competently enough. He was somewhat puzzling ... around the start of his second term, he obviously lost interest in the job for reasons that were never made public. He carried on through the term, more or less "phoning it in", which was good enough for an undramatic state like Washington with reliable tax sources and fairly clean politics. There was no indication of scandal. I always wondered if he was simply too sane to be a politician, or if something external (like family trouble) was distracting him.
  ¶ 3:35 PM

  Still unanswered

Author: Finally.

Polistra: Huh?


Author: Yaaaaaayyyy! Yaaaaaayyyyy! Yaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyy!

Polistra: Good heavens! Meeeerrrrryyy Christmas to you too! Did you just pull Clarence Oddbody out of the river?

Author: No, no, no, not that big. I just got word that my courseware product passed all the beta tests. A year of work and suspense, and it's all done, all good.

Polistra: Wonderful! That's worth a few Yaaaayyys for sure.


Author: Yes indeed. It means we can count on an income for the next three years or so. After that, Social Security should kick in.

Polistra: If the government hasn't collapsed by then.

Author: Yeah. Nothing we can do about that. Well, at least I've done what I can do.


Polistra: Thanks.

Author: You know, I've always been out of phase with The Economy. I was making good money in the late '70s and early '90s, the last two recessions. And I'm doing better than usual this year, in my peculiar minimalist way. By contrast my two down-for-the-count times, around '72 and '96, coincided with boom times for The Economy.


Polistra: Yup, the media always miss that part. Well, they miss everything, but they especially miss that The Economy isn't one uniform blob. Manufacturing has been dropping for twenty years as the Bush and Clinton dynasties handed our production to China. Wasn't the Story, so it didn't count. When high gas prices were the Story, the media told us that everyone was suffering from Pain At The Pump. Well, Oklahoma and Texas loved it. No pain there, just prosperity.

Author: The Story is always told from the viewpoint of the Wall Street Casino. Then they assume, as a Euclidean axiom, that everyone in the country feels the same as the Bettors in the Casino. When the Bettors are coked up, the rest of the country must be coked up. When the Bettors are crashing, the rest of the country must be crashing.

Polistra: It's egalitarianism. Our elites, both the alleged liberals and the alleged conservatives, always start from a leftist mindset. Their deepest and most unshakeable instinct is that all humans are identical. When you start there, you have to conclude that everyone is identical to ME, because otherwise I'm not human. So if I'm living on imaginary money, ready to fall into bankruptcy when the interest rate on my credit cards rises one basis point, then by egalitarian logic I "know" that everyone in the country is living that way, so the most important thing is to keep interest rates negative and keep inflation high.

Author: If we had a real free press, if we had a functioning representative government, the other half of the country would have a voice. The half that understands basic economics, the half that saves and earns interest, the half that would benefit from deflation, the half that wants security more than the thrill of tossing an infinite number of dice into an infinitely deep pile of cocaine.

Polistra: I don't know ... I think something more complicated is going on now, not just the same old broken system. Back in September when this alleged "crisis" started, we were discussing the strange suddenness of Shotgun Paulson's theft. The real-estate stuff, the mortgage frauds that were supposedly the basic problem, had been running for several years, and they didn't really affect most people. Nobody told us why these monstrous sums of imaginary dollars HAD to change hands RIGHT NOW.

Author: Now, five months later, they still haven't told us.

Polistra: Right. It has all the marks of an extortion. In September I wondered if perhaps Russia was the blackmailer. Now I'm not so sure. A simpler hypothesis would be: Sheikh Osama made a deal with Sultan Bush after showing his power on 9/11. Sheikh Osama allowed Sultan Bush to survive, provided he would accomplish the Sheikh's goal of destroying America's economy, industry, culture and armed forces, turning America into a decaying third-rate power like Russia. Sultan Bush carried out this task with perfect efficiency. Just before the end of Sultan Bush's Demolition Derby, the Sheikh demanded a huge amount of cash (laundered through the Wall Street Mafia) to keep the deal secret. And now Obama is paying another ransom through the same channel to continue the deal.

Author: Scary, but I can't poke any holes in it. Sheikh Osama certainly got exactly what he wanted from Bush, which made further attacks unnecessary. And I'm sure he could find a convincing way to tell the whole story if we stop payment.
  ¶ 10:32 AM

  Rare bit of truth
On CNN just now, Evan Thomas said: "California is locked-up and ungovernable."

The host tried to dismiss him with a chuckle, but it's the plain truth. Same for our federal government. Frozen in place, incapable of taking the obvious steps to fix the problem, only able to spend more more more more more more more more more more more imaginary "money".

Most of the states are still functioning, but Calif and USA have already collapsed.

= = = = =

Washington state is an outstanding example of a still-functioning state. We're looking at a small deficit; small because Gov Gregoire has been cautious and frugal while maintaining a fairly liberal set of social programs and a tolerable level of taxation. Yesterday Gregoire gave a speech defining what the state and the people must do now, to minimize the deficit and survive the mess.

Video here.

A few highlights:

"What we're doing today is a representation of this Washington. And this Washington has passed these bills in a bipartisan way. ... We're determined that we're going to end up in the black. We still have a rainy day fund, that we've not touched, that's got about $430 million in it. That's very good news. Most states that are struggling don't have any additional resource to tap. We do."

California, Kansas, and other states with incompetent or insane governors really need to study Christine Gregoire. This is how a perfectly competent governor works.
  ¶ 9:37 AM

  Monkey, Meteor, Mafia
Three of today's top news stories share a common quality.

1. The monkey who killed a woman. "Everyone thinks monkeys are cute; it's surprising and shocking to see a monkey turn violent!" No, anyone who has watched monkeys in a zoo knows they're not cute. They're vicious, noisy, capable of sudden violence.

2. The mysterious UFO in Texas. "What could this be? The government says it's probably a meteor, but it looks like an alien craft." No, anyone who has watched a meteor shower recognizes this instantly as a meteor. Some UFOs are truly mysterious, truly look and behave like strange rockets or aircraft. Not this one.

3. The response of Wall Street to the final signing of Obama's stimulus package. "Wall Street doesn't like it, so we're starting to doubt whether it will work." No, anyone who has watched Wall Street knows that it's just a criminal syndicate. If a Mafia dislikes what you're doing, you must be doing something right. Doesn't matter if it's the Italian Mafia, the Russian Mafia, or the Jewish Mafia.

= = = = =

In a more serious vein, the stimulus package does contain some genuinely good and long-overdue elements. Especially: Assistance for railroads and mass transit, and the switch to computerized medical records.
  ¶ 3:54 PM

  Math the universal language? Nope
An article in the latest New Superstitionist puts forth an old idea, common in science fact and science fiction for decades.

If we ever establish contact with intelligent aliens living on a planet around a distant star, we would expect some problems communicating with them. As we are many light years away, our signals would take many years to reach them, so there would be no scope for snappy repartee. There could be an IQ gap and the aliens might be built from quite different chemistry.

Yet there would be much common ground too. They would be made of similar atoms to us. They could trace their origins back to the big bang 13.7 billion years ago, and they would share with us the universe's future. However, the surest common culture would be mathematics.

The article goes on to discuss which formulas and theories would be good candidates for interplanetary chit-chat.


Polistra begs to differ. The supposed "universality" of math is a myth.

Our new Facebook Friends on Alpha Centauri could have the technology to text us, while knowing very little math. Let's look at the start of electrical communication on Earth. Sam Morse was an artist, not a mathematician, and his telegraph was built by trial and error. Alex Bell was a speech teacher with a deep visual comprehension of wave action. Early radio sets (spark-gap transmitters, cat-whisker detectors) were also built without fancy math, though a certain amount of measurement was important for meaningful testing. You'd need to remember, for instance, that a 50-foot antenna worked better than a 51-foot antenna.

Even without trying to imagine an alien mind, it's easy to see how we Earthlings could have developed a communication system able to reach distant planets, all without any math beyond measurement. It would have required vastly more work by a huge number of workers; it would require ant-like organization, but we could have done it.



= = = = =

An even dumber assumption in the same paragraph:

"They could trace their origins back to the big bang 13.7 billion years ago"

Only a few physicists on Earth claim with certainty that our origin traces back to the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. The vast majority of Earthlings believe we were created by some form of God. So the Big Bang is hardly universal among Earthlings let alone ET's; and it's no more scientific than Genesis, since neither theory can be verified or falsified by experiment. Most of us muddle along through life, even doing all sorts of higher science and mathematics, without thinking about the whole question. The Big Bang is just an irrelevant and unnecessary bit of mental masturbation which apparently gives a Bang to those few physicists.

Labels: Experiential education

  ¶ 10:45 AM

  Repeal redux
A couple days ago I observed that we no longer repeal laws, at least at the Federal level. Every policy, agency and program is eternal.

The only major exception to this rule in the last 30 years was Newt and Clinton's welfare reform which repealed LBJ's welfare entitlement policy. I thought about amending the original entry to include this exception, but the Feds got ahead of me. As part of this week's monster Stimulus Package, Newt & Bill's reform has been completely undone, returning to LBJ's original welfare entitlement policy.

So the only important repeal in living memory has now been un-repealed, making my observation perfect.

I wish it were otherwise. After all, the only real advantage of representative government is that a legislature can change its mind; if something doesn't work right, or if public sentiment changes, the law can be eliminated or revised. Our founders were Steam Age thinkers who understood the idea of a self-regulating machine. They intended the House to be the main path for feedback, steering to the left when the government was skidding to the right or vice versa. The Senate was meant to be a damper on the House, adding some friction to prevent overcorrection. It was a wonderful machine, but it no longer operates. Policy is mostly generated by unelected judges implementing Lenin's long-term plan to weaken and destroy the country, and neither branch of Congress dares to question the black-robed saboteurs.
  ¶ 3:23 PM

  Uncle Wallace Willis
For several months I've been noticing a large number of hits on the August 2008 "archive" of this blog. Many of those hits were coming from public school systems, which puzzled me. I finally traced it down, at least partly. It appears that Google is leading searches for "Uncle Wallace Willis" to one picture and then to the archive, which contains many posts on many subjects.... so the search is basically fruitless.

Polistra does discuss Mr Willis, and the picture in question happens to be in the same episode of Polistra's Dream. But the Googled picture comes later in the episode, and is unconnected to the discussion of Uncle Wallace.

If you read from the start of Episode 6, you'll hit the mention of Uncle Wallace Willis before you reach the picture that Google linked to.

I'm hoping this entry, including this more directly related picture:



will provide a more direct Google connection for people who really want to read about Mr Willis, because he truly was an interesting character!
  ¶ 1:42 PM

  Tradition vs Law


The radio comedy shows of the '30s and '40s generally avoided obvious preaching, except during the war when they were required to carry weekly reminders from the Office of War Information. The point of comedy, after all, is to give the audience a break from the constraints of real life. But occasionally a moral message would slip in ... maybe it came from the writers, maybe from the star. One such message popped up in a 1940 episode of Fibber and Molly.

Here's a one-minute snippet including the message.

= = = = =

Transcribed for non-listeners:

Molly: Couldn't you get City Hall [on the phone?]

Fibber: Nope, Myrt says them politicians down at City Hall are so rushed now that you can't get a call through.

Molly: Well, why are they so rushed?

Fibber: It's all on account of Izzy.

Molly: Izzy who?

Fibber: Oh, you know. Izzy gonna run for a third term? Izzy gonna announce it soon? Izzy playing possum? [Note: referring to FDR, who was being coy about his intentions to run again in '40.]

Molly: I see. By the way, is there any law against a third term?

Fibber: Nope. Just tradition.

Molly: Oh, just tradition...

Fibber: You know what that means. A tradition is an unwritten law that nobody dares to bust. On account of if they do, it'll be made into a written law, and then somebody's liable to repeal it. And then the fat's in the fire. But you can't repeal a tradition! ... Say, that ain't bad. Remind me to write that down.

Molly: It is written down.

Fibber: Where'd I write it?

Molly: You didn't write it, you read it.

Fibber: Oh.

= = = = = end transcription

Seems to me that Fibber (Jim Jordan) had a personal stake in this little sermon, even though he tossed it off as just a piece of the script. Was this meant as a caution to his son? To a friend? We'll never know.

Is the message still true? No, it's obsolete. The first part (don't break traditions) is still valid advice for sane people in a sane society, but since 1968 our Leninist masters have trained us that breaking traditions (Questioning Authority, Speaking Truth To Power) is the most heroic way to proceed.

Wellllll, only if you know which traditions to break. Any tradition that advances Christianity, assists marriage, increases civilization, helps real science or real logic: Break'em now! Rip'em to shreds! Any tradition that belongs to Mohammed, Feminism, Gaian pseudoscience: Enforce them with Glorious Proletarian Vigor. Crush anyone who twitches an eyebrow in the wrong direction when Mohammed, Feminism, and The Planet are being "debated".

How about the rest of Fibber's Rule? The middle part still holds. A broken tradition will be replaced by a law, and the law will be enforced by the police instead of by social pressure. In fact, this is the entire justification for the Leninist requirement to break traditions. The Party is universal, and no authority outside the Party may exist.

But the last clause is false, because WE NO LONGER REPEAL LAWS. Anything that gets written into Federal law remains forever. We may cease to enforce it broadly, but the Feds will still use it when they need an excuse to kill a Christian.

In short, Fibber's Rule has been inverted. The nearest we can get in Newspeak is something like this: "Repeal all Christian traditions. Abolish social pressure toward civilized behavior. People will then run wild, which will require new laws, far more rigid and intolerant than the original traditions. These laws shall be eternal."

= = = = =

Later thought here.

Another footnote: Modern TV situation "comedies" do plenty of preaching. In fact the preach-to-humor ratio is reversed: roughly 90% preaching (verbatim recitation of feminist and homosexualist doctrine) and 10% humor. The humor consists of exactly two situations: (1) You thought that was a man? No, it was a woman! Gotcha! Gotcha! Gotcha! Ha! Ha! Ha! (2) You thought that was a woman? No, it was a man! Gotcha! Gotcha! Gotcha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
  ¶ 9:58 AM

  Obama's Okie connection
Interesting article in Sunday's Ponca City paper. The Dunhams, Barack's grandparents, lived in Ponca from 1948 to 1951. Mr Dunham was a salesman at Paris Furniture, and Barack's mother started elementary school in Ponca. Apparently the Dunhams didn't leave a big impression on the city, because the connection has just now surfaced more or less accidentally.

My parents were married in Ponca in 1947, but moved elsewhere for college shortly thereafter, returning in '52; so they wouldn't have encountered the Dunhams. I'd speculate that my uncle Bob might have known Mr Dunham, because Bob was an active leftist at that time (voting for Henry Wallace)... and there weren't a lot of active leftists in Ponca.

Rambling a bit: Bob was something of a tragic character. He was sophisticated and intelligent, had big dreams that could have been achieved. But he never quite had the gumption to break out of expectations, and ended up doing the same dull job his father had done. A classic case of "the perfect as the enemy of the good." Alcohol took over, and he died fairly young. It was Bob's death in 1973 that spurred me to break out of my own expected pattern, to skip perfection and fulfill my own modest dreams. I did just that, and I don't regret it.

Bob's wife, equally sophisticated and intelligent, is the basis for the character of Fran in Polistra's Dream; I needed to "free her spirit" in literary form, to see what she might have done in a slightly different universe.
  ¶ 2:35 PM

  Kudos to MSNBC
Kudos to MSNBC for solid coverage of today's Oklahoma tornado. Special kudos to Melissa Rehberger, a former Okie, for breaking out of the idiotic alleged tornado syndrome that has infested TV news lately. Rehberger saw a tornado that was obviously on the ground, and she called it a tornado, not an alleged or possible tornado.

= = = = =

Later: No kudos to CNN. Their weather reporter just said "There are no basements in Oklahoma. At all." This is phenomenally stupid. He may be thinking of a swampy place like Louisiana where the water table is so high that basements are impossible, but that's completely unrelated to Oklahoma. There are plenty of basements in every part of Oklahoma. As elsewhere, cheaply built tract houses generally lack basements, but that's not a geographical distinction.
  ¶ 2:10 PM

  A Svensmark thought
The disastrous weather of the last couple years, including two horrible winters here and the current Australian tragedy, has one basic cause. The problem is not too much heat or too much cold; rather it's too little movement. Each system stays locked in place for weeks or months, continuously dumping the same weather on the same area. Months of snow and ice here, months of dry heat there.

Okay, as a general rule, when do things move more? When they get more energy input. When do they move less? When they get less energy input. And what are we getting from the sun now? Less energy.

The Svensmark theory wouldn't put it quite so simply; what we're getting is not less input from the sun itself, but more overall cloud cover which means less solar energy reaching the surface. Result is the same. Less maximum heat means shallower gradients between max and min, thus less "push and pull" to move big systems around.

So the systems tend to stay in one place longer, which gives disastrous consequences in some places.



Polistra noted this problem several years ago (before the Svensmark theory was published) and begged NASA to work on a fix, to find some way of shoving a system out of a dangerous rut. Needless to say, NASA won't do it, because they are zealous fanatical wild-eyed supplicants of the Planet Goddess Gaia. They are too stupefied by Gaia to perceive facts or recognize valid theories. The only cure they can imagine is destroying the human species to eliminate CO2.
  ¶ 6:38 PM

  Still the same stupidity.
Reprinting an item Polistra wrote in late September:

= = = = =

It appears that the Great Nation Robbery, now that it has been worked out in the form of legislation, has acquired the acronym EESA.

Uniquely appropriate, since this bit of suicidal idiocy follows the exact same philosophy as the plain ESA. In other words, it tries to break the laws of nature.

The regular Endangered Species Act tries to break the laws of nature by preventing a species from dying off. It never works and always creates great harm. Evolution is nothing more than the dying of species and the increase of other species, in each specific location. One species is fading out in this location because it's no longer making the best use of the available resources. When you try to keep this fading species alive, you're not doing it any favors; you're only preventing other species from taking its place and making better use of the resources. And at the same time you're stealing property from humans, which is the real reason for the ESA.

Same with this new EESA (Economic Endangered Species Act). The giant reptile called Bankerosaurus Fraudulenti is dying off because he has eaten up all the available resources. If we were obeying the laws of economic nature, we would let B. Fraudulenti fade and die to leave more room for other critters, some of which may be more honest and less wildly all-consuming.

No, no, no, we can't do that. Must keep B. Fraudulenti alive, and must preserve every aspect of its weird habitat: dishonestly high house prices, forced low interest rates, impossibly high stock prices. And at the same time we must also steal property from honest people via the tax of inflation, since we'll never pay this monstrous amount in direct taxes.

We will reap what we sow. History will remember this pack of thieves and gangsters, and history will spit on their graves.

= = = = = end reprint

Now in February, after a supposed change of administration, nothing has changed. We're still arguing about how to keep the unsustainable bubble inflated, and how much to spend to keep the unsustainable bubble inflated. A few major commentators do seem to recognize reality, but nobody in power is willing to allow normal evolution.

We should be arguing about how to soften the effects of a return to reality; instead we're still arguing about how to maintain the fantasy.

As mentioned before, infrastructure and public works are actually a valid part of softening the impact, especially short-term projects (i.e. "pork"). Ideally these projects would keep many people occupied and fed while the criminal syndicate called "Wall Street" is utterly eliminated, leaving honest businesses more room to operate and grow without criminal competition from fraudsters. That's not what we're doing. We're doing some public works, but mainly we're rewarding and re-energizing the criminal syndicate.

Can we spell Yeltsin?


= = = = =

Update 2/10:

Geithner just said "We will restart the securitization system."

Yessir, that's how you fix a problem. Just like Alcoholics Anonymous gives the drunk as much whiskey as he can swallow, just like Sully Sullenberger saved the plane by steering it straight into the ground. What's that you say? AA tries to get the drunk to stop drinking? Sully tried to land the plane smoothly? Well then, they're not nearly as smart as Tim Geithner!

Dropping the bad parody and getting deadly serious: We desperately need a return to sober banking. We need to let interest rates rise to their natural level, probably around 15%. Then bank savings accounts will become irresistible investments, and banks will have a good reason to sell loans. Each bank would have to function on its own, without using the Madoff Mafia for nonexistent "money"; and each competent bank would make a good profit on its own.
  ¶ 11:01 AM

  Brief update
I've been ill this week, and also occupied with final beta testing of the courseware project, so blogging has been off the radar for now.

But looking back at the archive, it's clear that Jan and Feb are always my slow blog months regardless of health or work, so the above is probably irrelevant!
  ¶ 3:23 PM

  Good idea
Students at a Spokane middle school have been working with a local homeless shelter as part of a community-service experience. The students invented a coat that turns into a sleeping bag. They actually built three of the coats and donated them to the House of Charity.

Even if the coat works well, it probably won't make much difference in reality, because many of the homeless are mentally incompetent, unwilling or unable to adopt a new idea ... but it's excellent for the students.

This is exactly how education should work: start with a real-world problem, develop your skills while solving it.

Story here.
  ¶ 3:59 PM

  Tip for Old-time-radio (OTR) fanciers
For several years a local radio station was playing OTR programs overnight. I got into the habit of leaving the radio on, since OTR is an excellent background for falling asleep happily. It's interesting enough to distract the mind from unpleasant thoughts, and serves to mask out those "suspicious" noises that aren't really suspicious! (As in "What? What the hell was that clunk-scrape-thump sound? Mouse? Burglar? Oh, it's just the damn refrigerator's defrost cycle.")

When the station stopped running OTR in the wee hours, I switched over to using my computer as a "radio". GOM player, the best of the available media players, has a playlist feature, so I just line up about 16 half-hour programs each night and let'er rip. I don't need to change the list every day, because most of the shows run while I'm asleep. I simply change the starting point so the first half-hour is relatively fresh.

One problem with this method: OTR clips were transcribed and recorded in many different ways by many different people. Some went straight from a carefully preserved original transcription disk to MP3; others were recorded in someone's kitchen from a portable radio tuned to a distant station and then copied through many stages of reel-to-reel and cassette tapes before the era of digitization. Thus their level and quality varies tremendously. And when my playlist began with a low-level clip, I was getting awakened suddenly at 3:30 by a high-level clip.

So I went looking for a solution, trying to find either a free-standing MP3 player or a program with some kind of automatic gain control.

It turns out that GOM player already has such a feature, though somewhat hidden, and it works perfectly. In the Preferences menu, pick Audio, then Normalizer.


  ¶ 7:59 AM

  Bubbles inside bubbles
Our "news" media exist in an amazingly isolated bubble. The news of today -- or rather the few stories that advance the Leninist cause -- passes through the membrane, but there is never any context, never any application of general knowledge, never any checking of numbers or facts. It appears that the inhabitants of the news bubble are Huxley's retarded Gamma types, with every minute a brand-new discovery.

Latest example: Obama's decision to allow California to make its own pollution regulations, reversing a Sultan Bush decision. The brand-R talking point heads say "Oh no! This will eliminate our freedom! If this goes through, we'll lose the right to choose any car we want! How in the world can Detroit manage this?" and the brand-D talking point heads say "About time. We need to start regulating emissions!"

Fact 1: Federal rules have limited the range of available cars since 1934. First New Deal limits on price and quantity, then WW2 limits on materials and prices, which continued through 1957, then safety and pollution rules starting in 1962 and growing stricter each year since then. We've never been able to "choose any car we want."

Fact 2: California has been setting its own emissions rules since 1967. Detroit has been adapting to this difference for 40 years. Cars have been manufactured in special California versions for 40 years. Anyone who has ever worked on cars or dealt with car specifications, has known this for 40 years.
  ¶ 3:04 PM

  Confidence and Plumbing aren't the same thing.
Both parties are missing the point of "stimulus". Both sides seem to agree with nonsensical statements like "Government can't create jobs" and "government
can't create wealth."

On a deeper level, the politicians are thinking solely within the narrow bounds of economics, thinking only of the flow of dollars, treating humans as nothing more than plumbing. If you pump enough liquid into the taxpaying-unit pipes, some of it will overflow into the retail pipes, and then to China. The only permissible subject of argument is how many gallons of liquid are needed to reach China.

This is phenomenally stupid and counterproductive. This is absolutely insane.

How to regain sanity? Start here: Humans have minds and souls and beliefs.

If the goal is to restore confidence, we should work to restore confidence instead of blindly pumping monetary units through the system and waiting for it to hit China.

One way to restore confidence is to provide jobs. Yes, government jobs.

Polistra has focused repeatedly on WPA/CCC, but during the Depression government jobs of all sorts, local, state and federal, formed the foundation of renewed confidence.

Example: my Okie grandfather ran out of mechanic jobs in 1932, so he signed on as a school janitor. Less pay than mechanic work, but the city school system wasn't going to disappear. This gave him confidence, which freed him to be a good father and a good citizen. And just incidentally freed him to spend money on necessities instead of hoarding it.

= = = = =

The Obama infrastructure package actually does the right thing, adding a lot of gummint jobs. Every one of those "pork projects" will give secure jobs to at least a few people for at least a year.

In the short run it doesn't matter if the projects create wealth, as long as they create confidence among American families. So why can't the Dems defend it on this deeply human basis, instead of playing the numbers game? The numbers game is exactly how we got into this mess.

In the long run, well-chosen public works projects do create wealth. Most of all they create the platform, the necessary conditions, for private generation of wealth. A smoothly functioning railroad system would be a national treasure. A modern electrical grid, invulnerable to icestorms and invulnerable to accidental or intentional "failure avalanches", would be a national treasure. In the '20s and '30s we appreciated the national wealth value of all these systems and grids: the Post Office, railroads, telegraph, telephone, radio, and electrical power. We used both regulation and nationalization to maintain and strengthen those treasures. In the modern era of deregulation, from Jimmy Carter to Phil Gramm, we have broken up those treasures and handed them to disjointed and often fraudulent businesses. Instead of designing and maintaining these national networks for national benefit, we have allowed them to be distorted and destroyed for the benefit of a few well-connected millionaires.

So yes, government can create jobs and government can create wealth. We must relearn this basic fact before we can grow and thrive again.
  ¶ 11:27 PM

  Now I get it.
Okay, now I understand the basic problem with Republican thinking.

Jon Kyl, on CNN just now:

We appreciate Obama's outreach efforts, but too often we are met by a response that says 'We won, so we get to do it our way.'

Yes, Jon, that's how a two-party system works. Each party attempts to gain a majority in Parliament, and the party with the majority gets to implement its agenda.

Your problem is that you didn't try to implement your agenda when you had the majority in both houses. You simply followed Sultan Bush in lockstep, though many of you knew his agenda was a bizarre mix of Leftism and Idiotism. Sultan Bush followed Teddy Kennedy on most domestic questions and followed Woodrow Wilson on most foreign matters. The perfectly predictable result of steering in those directions was a total catastrophe.

If the brand-R side of Congress had figured out how a two-party system works ... ... if you had tried to push an understandable agenda instead of mindlessly following an insane man ... you wouldn't be in this position now. Since you didn't perform your duty, you aren't entitled to criticize the other brand for performing its duty.
  ¶ 11:23 AM

  Infrastructure
You really have to wonder why the Republican "party" is so determined to eliminate itself completely. First it votes enthusiastically for Shotgun Paulson's monstrous Hanukkah gift to his Jewish friends; then it votes against the smaller auto company bailout; now it votes 100% against the large and admittedly messy infrastructure package.

At least they're consistent. They want to give the entire economy to people who are already obscenely rich, and they want to get absolutely nothing in return for the gift. The Dems are less consistent. They voted for the original Hanukkah gift, but they have also voted (less than 100%) for the other two bailouts.

The Dems and Obama are somewhat closer to common sense.

Basic rule: If you must go into debt, use it for something meaningful and permanent, something that will improve life for your family and descendants. Buy a house for a reasonable price, buy an education. Don't use it to buy Hanukkah gifts, don't use it to impress your neighbors, don't spend it at the casino. The latest infrastructure package satisfies the basic rule. This money is mainly going toward permanent improvements in our national "house". And the brand-D politicians are on the common-sense side by supporting it. Brand-R is on the side of waste, dissipation and collapse.

= = = = =

Polistra has been pushing for infrastructure funding from the start.

Here's a reprint of an April 2007 thought:

Maybe we'd do better to bring bureaucracy backward and away from technocracy. It would do a better job of serving the poor and elderly with a more human approach, and just might be more efficient in the ways that really matter.

Example: Until 1950 the Post Office delivered twice a day, and until 1970 it could find an address without any Zip Codes at all. You could send a letter to "March of Dimes, c/o Postmaster", and the local post office would know where to put it. Now we have to put 9-digit Zip Codes on letters; if I were to send a letter to my next-door neighbor, it would have to go to Seattle for sorting and return to Spokane. This is high-tech but it is NOT EFFICIENT. My home-town paper sometimes takes 18 days to reach me from Oklahoma, which is literally horse-and-buggy speed.

The overall point is this: Much of the technocracy was planned on the basis of ever-increasing population. Malthusian theories, implanted by the Left, led government to get ready for exponential increases. We haven't had exponential increases. America now has twice as many people as in 1940, not six times as many. Thus we could be delivering mail once a day with the same lo-tech and efficient system that delivered twice a day in 1940.

When our population starts to decrease, as many Euro countries are already seeing, we'll be stuck with a lot of systems planned for a non-existent future. Technology can help, but perhaps government can find a different niche, a more personalized way of doing things.

Another helpful backward move that requires considerable government action, though not strictly a gov't matter: Rejuvenate the railroads. We have allowed them to decline dangerously. Trains are hugely superior to trucks in energy usage, especially because trains can be switched to electric power. Even in America many railroads are already electrified, and the standard diesel locomotive would be easy to convert. There's no way to electrify long-distance trucks.

Rails are somewhat more secure than highways; though nothing is purely terrorist-proof, tracks have limited access by definition, and you can't steer a bomb-carrying train into a destination that isn't on the tracks. Also, building more trains - and building more nuclear reactors to power them - would be an excellent use for the dozens of automobile plants and thousands of workers now abandoned by Ford and GM. A competent wartime government would have started this process on 9/12/2001.

= = = = = end reprint

  ¶ 8:53 AM

  The end of stupidity
The media are missing the most important thing about Obama's interview with al-Arabiya. They focus on his accommodating tone, but this isn't drastically different from Sultan Bush's words. What is different: Obama didn't mention democracy or freedom even once. He talked instead about real human needs: survival, "prosperity and security", and the expectation of a normal and decent life.

Every time Sultan Bush spoke about the BroaderMiddleEast, he extolled freedom and pushed the delusional Wilsonian view that "Democracies Don't War." This is utter nonsense, as Polistra and many other commentators have pointed out. In fact, America's founders knew it was nonsense. Federalist Paper #6 was devoted to a lengthy historical debunking of the idea, and a still useful disquisition on why nations are driven to make war.

This change of direction has been further verified by today's announcement from Defense Sec Gates: "Afghanistan is the fourth or fifth poorest country in the world, and if we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of Central Asian Valhalla over there, we will lose."

Bravo. We still aren't going to win, but with the removal of the Wilsonian idiocy, we stand a chance of losing with some degree of honor.
  ¶ 6:02 PM

  More language notes


While Professor Polistra is on duty ... she's been wanting to document a few small changes in American speech that happened around 1950. Some of these are interesting because two forms coexisted comfortably.

First, the pronunciation of Los Angeles. Before 1950, most people said something like Low-Zanglis. This wasn't an outsider's mispronunciation like Spokain or Missouree; even the mayor of LA called it Low-Zanglis. The modern version, Loss Anjeles, began in the '30s and took over by 1950. Here are two sound samples, only a minute apart, from the very same 1937 episode of Calling All Cars. CAC is sometimes called the father of Dragnet, but it was an entirely different and more artful show.

Low Zanglis
Loss Anjeles

Second and harder to explain, two pronunciations of sacrifice. The first, 'sacrifiss', disappeared after 1950. I'm not sure it was ever a common pronunciation in everyday speech, but it was common among actors. These two sound bytes are from a 1947 episode of Casey Crime Photographer, a lively and well-written gumshoe drama.

Sacrifisses
Sacrifice

Finally, a grammatical switch involving 'star' as a verb. The word originates from the practice of placing an asterisk or star by the name of the leading player on a printed playbill. Literally his name was starred on the program; metaphorically he was starred in the play. Around 1950 the verb turned around from passive to active intransitive, and we now say that he starred (or co-starred) in the show.

Here's just one example of the old usage from a 1950 episode of Philip Marlowe, which was the last radio show to follow the old style.

"And now, with Gerald Mohr starred as Philip Marlowe..."

The modern form of the sentence would be "And now, with Gerald Mohr starring as Philip Marlowe..."

Labels: Language update

  ¶ 7:46 PM

  Portland's gayor in trouble
Sam Adams was recently elected gayor of Portland; supposedly this was an Advance for Diversity because he's openly and brazenly homosexual in the mold of Barney Frank. Unfortunately a Portland 'gadfly' newspaper found that Adams, while in the state legislature, had been diddling one of the interns who was not yet 18 at the time. (The intern is named Beau Breedlove! Sounds like a perfect porn-flick stage name, but apparently his real name.)

What makes this story unusual is that the Portland homosexual community is calling loudly for Adams to resign. I think this is a first: normally the political advocates for a privileged group work hardest to keep one of their members in office regardless of scandal. The homosexual community is quite properly angry because Adams betrayed them ... in previous years they had defended him against quiet rumors, and now they find he was lying to keep them working on his side.

What isn't unusual: the national media haven't touched the story yet, and probably won't touch it. The cable channels love scandal, but when the scandal involves a solid leftist politician, it's not a story. Didn't happen. Nothing to see here, move along.

[Later: No, I take it back. Rick Sanchez at CNN is covering the story fairly and evenly.]

A few years ago Spokane had an almost identical problem with a gayor diddling youngboy interns, and the national media gave it considerable airtime because this particular gayor was a Republican.

More story here.  ¶ 9:03 AM

  "If I knew then what I knew then...."
During this snowed-in month I've spent some time pondering the past, which is probably unhealthy. It's certainly unhealthy to review past decisions on the basis of hindsight. "If I knew then what I know now" is absolutely pointless. I did write about one such regret here: marrying the wrong type of woman, which simply couldn't have been avoided given the advice and information available at the time.

There is still one decision I should have made differently based on what I knew then: I should have enlisted in the Navy after high school instead of going to college. Before graduation I was in fact planning to enlist; I don't remember now why the decision faded away.

The Navy would have given me discipline and a sense of purpose and usefulness, which I needed badly, and it would have given me hands-on training in electronics, leading eventually to a solid career.

College gave me the opposite of both: it took away discipline, and pulled me away from the obvious career path into more abstract areas that didn't do me any good.

From available facts I could predict that I would likely fit into the Navy because my father, with very similar temperament and tastes, had enjoyed his WW2 Navy service.

And if the Navy had rejected me for physical inadequacy (which was definitely possible) I still would have been better off. The pressure of the draft would have disappeared, and thus the need for a college deferment and the attraction of hippie/leftist culture would also have disappeared. From that point I could have pursued a non-college career path.
  ¶ 4:30 PM

  Where are they now?
Shotgun Paulson has been technically out of power for two days now, and he's already disappeared from the news. That's appropriate, but I hope some reporter, or some investigative agency, is watching Shotgun carefully. His goal, after all, was to abscond with a large part of the American economy. He couldn't finish the job while he was constantly in the public eye. Now that he's placed the American economy in the hands of his friends, he can safely transfer his own cut to a nice non-extraditable country.
  ¶ 11:42 AM

  "Restoring the place of science"
The worst part of Obama's agenda is the bit about "restoring the proper place of science", which means that all arguments against the Earth Goddess Gaia, and all questions about evolution, are absolutely forbidden starting now.

In other words, science will be forbidden from now on.

Unfortunately we had no choice about this, because McCain's agenda was nearly identical. If anything, McCain was more solidly pro-Gaia than Obama. We Soviet citizens not only have the unique privilege of witnessing a "peaceful transfer of power", which happens nowhere else in the world [except for a hundred other countries]; we have the grand responsibility of choosing Coke or Pepsi!

= = = = =

The consequences of "restoring the proper place of science" are showing up immediately. Today the Texas state school board decided to "restore the proper place of science" by forbidding all scientific discussion about evolution. This has wide consequences, because (unlike most states) the Texas board chooses all books, thus effectively forcing the hand of publishers for other states.

Dallas Morning News says: "The anti-evolutionists lost. The scientists prevailed. The State Board of Education voted this afternoon to drop a requirement that high school science classes discuss the so-called weaknesses in the theory of evolution."

So I guess the scientists agree on the most basic points of evolution, eh?

Well, an article published just yesterday in New Scientist says otherwise. In fact the deepest part of Darwin is being destroyed by new factual discoveries.

The most basic part of Darwin's scheme is the "tree of life", whereby each new species gradually deviates or branches off from existing critters through random small mutations in its own genes. Natural selection then favors the variants that are better suited for a particular situation, or those that reproduce best.

But it turns out the tree is only half of the story, maybe less. Recent massive examination of DNA and RNA has led to the conclusion that roughly half of all changes come from transfer of genes through viruses and bacteria. In other words, half of our genes were imported from other animals or plants at various times, and half were inherited from our ancestors.

Sounds like a pretty damn basic disagreement to me.

But schoolkids are hereby forbidden to read about this basic and serious debate because it points to a "weakness in the theory."

= = = = =

Ironically, [I try to avoid that word but it truly fits here] the newer findings will strengthen the logical foundation of evolution, not weaken it.

The "consensus" view of random mutations makes the whole theory impossible.

Let's say a group of frogs is hit by radiation. And let's say that some of the male sperm cells are altered enough that their progeny would be a new species. Well, those sperm cells would have to meet up with an egg that had also undergone the exact same change, otherwise they will simply be rejected. Because radiation hits different genes in unpredictable ways, the chance of this scenario happening even once is almost exactly zero ... and then you really need to have many frogs changing in the same way at the same time in order to stand the pressures of selection.

But if the new genes are brought in by a virus or fungus, we have the same gene appearing suddenly and simultaneously in most of a local population, both male and female. Both sperm and egg cells will carry the new gene, and the change will be propagated to some of their offspring. If the change is great enough to make a new species, there will now be a good number of males and females belonging to this new species, all at once, ready and able to reproduce.

= = = = =

In science education we desperately need to look at all rational theories. We must encourage kids to examine reality directly and develop their own theories.

The right question is not "what's the current consensus?" but rather "what will increase our understanding?" ... or better, "what will generate the most interest in the students?" And if one of the answers to the latter question is Intelligent Design -- if ID makes evolution more interesting and palatable to students -- then we should teach ID. This will never happen, of course, because the American "scientific" establishment doesn't give a flying fuck about increasing understanding or generating interest. The American "scientific" establishment has only three priorities: Exterminate, Exterminate, Exterminate.

Labels: Experiential education

  ¶ 8:16 PM

  Bush, Obama, Cage, Corelli
If Bush were a composer, he'd be John Cage. Most of his acts were random, dissonant and meaningless; listening to him was physically painful. He spent long periods doing nothing at all. His acolytes and defenders try to find and celebrate the hidden meanings of his accidental lurches and squawks, and praise his long silence as an ingenious gambit. Cage's academic sycophants defended him similarly, but his reality was just as painful, pointless and empty.

At this early stage I'll tentatively compare Obama to Arcangelo Corelli. A Corelli concerto starts steadily and decisively, then forges through to the end with a constant forward drive. His melody lines are often complex, but you don't need a code book to figure out where he's going. His meaning is transparent; you can follow and appreciate without the need for intermediaries, talking points or aspirin.
  ¶ 12:18 PM

  The oath moment
The contretemps when swearing in Obama forms a perfect little symbol for the transition. Performing the very last official action of Sultan Bush's administration, Chief Roberts was incompetent and late. A fitting end to an administration that specialized in unbelievable incompetence and lateness. In contrast, Obama was competent, eager to get under way, and nimble enough to adapt to the changed text.
  ¶ 6:43 AM

  Language Bulletin and inauguration notes


Professor Polistra has noted a brand-new speech affectation.

Ita soundsa somethinga like a stereotypicala Italiana accenta, or perhapsa like Lawrencea Welka. Professora P thinksa this one started at CNN with Wolfa Blitzera, which is somewhata unusuala since mosta language peculiaritiesa start at Foxa Newsa. Unfortunately thisa one is spreadinga with amazing speeda to other networksa and evena to locala newscastersa.

= = = = =

Later: CNN's pre-inauguration and inauguration coverage is grossly annoying. They have said at least 936 times that a peaceful transition of power happens "only in America", which is wildly and ferociously untrue; and they've said at least 37,321 times that it's miraculous to see a black man as President since only 150 years ago a black man was "worth only 3/5 of a person", which is also wildly untrue. For CNN, absolutely everything is seen through the prism of race, everything reminds them of Bull Connor, Selma, Comrade King. It's like the old Rohrschach joke.

If you want to come closer to a valid "only in America" comment, how about the fact that Obama's father came from a country where slavery is still practiced actively. By moving to a Christian country that abolished slavery a long time ago, Barack Sr insured that his son would have the opportunity to succeed and lead. Barack Senior's children in Kenya are still living in base poverty.

= = = = =

Later still: the musical bits of the inauguration were atrocious. Aretha Franklin was supposed to sing 'My Country Tis of Thee', but instead suffered some kind of Tourette seizure, repeating words over and over without any melody or rhythm. The John Williams piece was performed well, but it was an unnecessary and derivative composition. If you want to use a formal piece based on 'Simple Gifts', Aaron Copland already did the job beautifully in Appalachian Spring. Unfortunately the tepid Williams copy of Copland only serves to illustrate the complete bankruptcy of classical music in modern America.

Obama redeemed the whole thing with a PERFECT and classical speech. I might disagree with some of the agenda points, but the spirit and soul of the speech were better than any of FDR's speeches, nearly up to Churchill's best.

Polistra detects a flavor of Louis L'Amour in the speech: "Rather, it has been the risk takers, the doers, the makers of things — some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom." ... and ... "To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society's ills on the West — know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy."

No American politician has ever defined the basis of Western civilization so completely and correctly.

Unfortunately an alleged female "poet" then ruined the show with her pedestrian and clumsy prose. "The figuring it out at kitchen tables?" Shit.

Labels: Language update

  ¶ 7:35 PM

  Sometimes you wonder.....
Excellent idea from Deroy Murdock in today's NRO.

Fannie and Freddie’s assets should be pooled and alphabetized by the surname of each mortgage holder. Thus, Abramson and Acosta top the list. Marlowe and Moskowitz occupy its middle. Zoro and Zucker will bring up the rear. These assets then would be segmented alphabetically into 26 units.

These 26 companies would be auctioned to the highest bidders in transparent, public ceremonies. Revenues would go to the Treasury. This income should be reserved to offset the massive debts that are the domestic legacy Bush has bequeathed America’s unborn after his relentless, eight-year spendathon.

Because the alphabet does not distinguish between rich and poor, creditworthy and delinquent, nor east and west, each of these 26 companies would include mortgages on mansions and shotgun shacks, from Savannah to Seattle.

Well, part of the idea is excellent. Splitting and selling is good, but splitting by alphabet is really dumb.

The alphabet is emphatically not random. For example, C, J, M, S would be large chunks with broad distribution, but Q, X, Y, Z would be tiny and far off balance. X would consist of a few Greeks, "Black Muslims", and some recent Chinese immigrants.

I have to wonder how a wise and well-informed man like Murdock could have missed this obvious fact, and how his editors could also have missed it. Maybe it only seems obvious to me because I've always been interested in linguistics and cryptology? No, anyone who ever used a phone book or an encyclopedia should have noticed it.

In the end it doesn't really matter, because computers could run a truly random split. Most of all, it doesn't matter because the basic idea makes sense, and the Feds will never, never, never, never, no never at all, consider an idea that makes sense.
  ¶ 8:20 AM

  Aristocracy
Listening to Sultan Bush's "farewell" press conf. One question was: Why do you think your opponents are so ferocious? Why does "Bush Derangement Syndrome" prevail?

Bush's answer was typically useless and moronic, something like "I don't pay attention to them."

The real answer is more interesting. American leftists hate Bush for the exact same reason they hate Nixon: aristocracy, plus a bit of cognitive dissonance.

Nixon continued and expanded on LBJ's policies, and continued LBJ's political tactics. Watergate was nothing new. The Left hated Nixon because he did not possess the divine right to carry out the policies and tactics of the Left.

Bush's domestic agenda is Teddy Kennedy's domestic agenda. His war policy is a direct continuation of Clinton war policy. The Left hates Bush because he does not possess the divine right to implement Emperor Teddy's policies.

American Leftists talk about ideology, but they are exclusively and solely aristocrats. If they paid even a tiny bit of attention to policy and results, they would love Nixon and Bush, and they would hate JFK.
  ¶ 6:36 AM

  "against cold" 3


Polistra is thanking Saint Maurus again.

Spokane was spared from the worst possible meltdown. The Weather Bureau** forecast a chinook with 3 inches of rain. We got the chinook (two days of scary but not quite dangerous warm wind) ... and no rain at all. So the roofs are now dry, the streets are clean and the snowbanks are receding, but we didn't get disastrous floods.

The Author is still jangled and thoroughly exhausted. During the month of ever-increasing snow, he jumped at every drip and creak, and spent hours on a precarious ladder trying to remove snow and break ice dams. Now he's still jumping at every noise. Needs a vacation.

More to the point, the Author needs to move back to Oklahoma. As the earth rapidly enters the next Little Ice Age, Spokane winters will become ever more dangerous.

= = = = =

** For the record, I should add that exactly one of the local weathercasters was close to correct... not just on the meltdown, but during the whole emergency. Brian Albrecht at KHQ was right most of the time, while all the others followed the Weather Bureau's bad predictions.
  ¶ 6:26 PM

  Opening comments for a while
Appears that one entry on this blog is actually being read. Most of the time Sitemeter shows only a few random-looking clicks per day, roughly what you'd expect from sites running an automatic sweep of certain keywords, no real human readers. But in recent weeks, one entry is clearly getting referred and read often.

Unfortunately the Sitemeter service doesn't pin it down specifically; just shows that the readers are hitting the August 2008 archive. I'm turning on comments for a while, hoping to find out which entry is so popular!

= = = = =

Update 1/22/09: I tweaked Sitemeter and found out which post was the popular one, so I'm closing comments again.
  ¶ 5:56 PM

  Slow going
Been 'under the weather' in a literal sense. Trudging through snow to the grocery store, shoveling walks, raking the roof, and trying to break up ice dams, have sapped my physical and mental energy. No spare neurons available. Good old cabin fever!

One interesting item: It appears that Wash Gov Gregoire is being vetted for an Obama cabinet appointment. Polistra has observed before that Gregoire has a unique talent for handling emergencies, and would be a great FEMA director. News conference expected tomorrow, so we shall see.

= = = = =

Later: Apparently the Gregoire rumors were unfounded. She's staying on as Governor. This is good for the state, though it would be interesting to see her in a national position.
  ¶ 10:28 AM

  Bravo Nickels
The original purpose of declaring a State of Emergency was to break through the red tape, take firm control, and do whatever is needed. In recent years this idea has disappeared. When mayors or governors declare an emergency, they continue to follow all suicidal environmental rules, continue to kill people unnecessarily, and then ask the Feds for more money money money money money to assist the slaughter.

Amazingly, the mayor of Seattle has remembered the original purpose of an Emergency! Greg Nickels has decided to break the rules and protect his people. He ordered the Street Dept to use salt on the streets of Seattle, because SALT WORKS.

For the last ten years, Seattle has been leading the Glorious Marxist-Leninist-MauriceStrongist Revolution, diligently applying and re-applying and re-applying totally useless but Clean de-icing chemicals, in order to keep the Waters Holy And Pure, and above all to Protect The Salmon Goddess. Mere humans have died like flies, which is of course the Final Solution Of The Glorious Marxist-Leninist-MauriceStrongist Revolution.

Bravo to Nickels for breaking out of the Revolution and deciding, however briefly, to protect the lives of mere humans.

Story here, including some interviews with Glorious Marxist-Leninist-MauriceStrongist Revolutionaries who are predictably Saddened And Disappointed by the mayor's pro-human decision. These revolutionaries want to hasten the Final Solution.

= = = = =

Meanwhile, predictably enough, the alleged so-called fucking "government" of Spokane is showing consistent fucking idiocy, predictably refusing to understand the meaning of an emergency.

Many citizens with good snow-blowing equipment have been clearing sidewalks and driveways for neighbors who can't do it; some have even been plowing streets because the city has failed to do it. Yesterday one such Samaritan was ARRESTED AND FINED for throwing snow into the street, which is technically illegal. Yes sir, that's how you encourage good citizenship. Enforce ALL the rules, ESPECIALLY the rules that make life impossible for good people. Arrest good citizens and reward evil!!!!!!! Stalin loves you, alleged so-called fucking "government" of Spokane!!!!!
  ¶ 7:22 AM

  "against cold" 2


Polistra is thanking Saint Maurus for sufficient relief.
  ¶ 1:57 PM

  Adverse possession
Half-formed thought ...

In effect, Obama is already serving as President in most of the ways that matter.

Theoretically the Pres has three main tasks: head of the executive branch, head of the military, and final decider on legislation. Bush never even started to perform the first job. The executive branch has been running rogue without supervision since 2001. He did start on the second, but got bored. The military has been running without supervision from 2003 through 2006. He ignored the third as well, never vetoing bills even when he claimed to oppose them.

In short, and in direct contradiction to the standard leftist paranoia, Bush is not a tyrant but a lazy rich boy who spent 6 of his 8 years doing nothing at all.

Old common law includes the 'Doctrine of Adverse Possession', rarely enforced now but still valid. If you own a piece of property but don't occupy it, maintain it, or use it for several years, you've effectively lost your title. A squatter who occupies and maintains the property may gain the title.

Obama is the Adverse Possessor or disseisor. Bush has lost title to the Presidency by failing to occupy and maintain it. Obama, though in theory only the Prezlek, has already started clearing the sidewalks, planting the crops and telling young dickheads to get off the damned grass. He thus owns the office.
  ¶ 9:16 AM

  Smart business
A Spokane metal fabricating company was laying off workers, planning to close by the end of the year, when a single smart idea saved it. Tipke's Manufacturing started making roof rakes, a simple gadget that's easy to build from aluminum tubes and sheet stock. And there's an unquestionable demand: we have 36 inches of snow accum, and some flat roofs are already collapsing. Tipke will start selling the rakes directly on Friday, and I'll bet this will keep them going.



I bought a roof rake several years ago (obviously not from Tipke) and it comes in mighty handy down here, bub. Not a lot of fun, but safer than standing on the roof with a shovel.

= = = = =

Update: Tipke sold out their first production run almost immediately on Friday, and they're building another batch. It's nice to see a small manufacturing business showing real innovation and adaptability. This is, of course, the standard American myth, but it doesn't happen often now. Service businesses can still be innovative, but unfair competition from China (along with litigation, regulation, and the WalMart monopoly) makes it much harder for a producer to survive let alone innovate.

= = = = =

Speaking of service, it occurs to me that a septic tank company could make money by literally sucking snow off roofs. Their hose and pump are built to handle sludge, which has about the same consistency as snow. They could use a pole to manipulate the end of the hose, and keep the tank warm so the snow would quickly melt into a reasonable volume of water.
  ¶ 10:51 AM

  "against cold"


Polistra is praying desperately to Saint Maurus.
  ¶ 9:27 PM

  Perfect point
Mark Steyn notes the BBC's continual refusal to name the enemy, especially in Europe.

"Immigrant-dominated", eh? Is that a way of saying it's the most heavily Muslim neighborhood of Sweden's most Muslim city? Ah, well, let's not go that far. All the BBC is prepared to say is that the otherwise non-specific youths' riotous activities were "linked to the closure of an Islamic centre". ...

In my "free speech" crusade up in Canada, I'm frequently lectured by lazy cliche-recyclers that there's no freedom to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theatre. But in a burning city feel free to shout "Nothing to see here!" for another decade or three.

It's a perfect point, but it could be expressed more sharply and forcefully:

... I'm frequently lectured by lazy cliche-recyclers that there's no freedom to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theatre. But the Left has removed our freedom to shout "Fire!" in a BURNING theatre.

= = = = =

And while we're talking about embracing the enemy ... if you want to get really, really, really pissed off, watch THIS SHIT.

It's the official meeting of the 'electors' for President here in Wash state. One of the 'electors' is a Mohammedan female who takes advantage of the situation to denounce America for making war on Allah. The other 'electors', presumably including some 'Republicans', GIVE HER A STANDING OVATION.

Actually, what pisses me off is not the Mohammedan traitor; she's being honest. No, what makes me ferociously angry is the standing ovation. Sultan Bush has brought us down to the point where we can't identify friends and foes. A completely misplaced and mispurposed war, combined with a scorched-earth destruction of our economic base, leaves us in a confused mess. We can't bring ourselves to declare straightforwardly that Sultan Bush belongs to the enemy, yet 100% of the evidence points that way.
  ¶ 6:17 AM

  Oh, stop.
Local and national newscasters have been repeating this bit of "amazing irony" over and over and over: "What's going on here? We've got all this winter weather happening, and winter won't start until Dec 21! This is weird!"

No, this is stupid. Any normal human understands that the Winter Solstice has very little to do with weather. It's just an astronomical marker. In the northern half of the US, winter runs from mid-November to mid-April. In the south, there simply isn't a season you could properly call winter. (Will Rogers described Oklahoma's winter as "leftover bits and pieces of the other seasons.")
  ¶ 6:03 AM

  Big snow
Spokane got slammed on Thursday with two feet of snow in one day. Half of our typical annual snow total. It's not unusual to have two feet of snow on the ground through part of the winter, but this is the first time we've received it all at once.



The city is basically at a standstill.

At least the electricity is still on, because the snow is light and powdery, didn't stick to wires and tree branches.

Ah, yes, global warming. Ten below zero, two feet of snow.

The city gov't has wasted a considerable amount of money on the warming hoax (redoing buildings for low CO2 emissions, advertising fluorescent bulbs, etc). If they had been paying attention to the ACTUAL FACTS of climate instead of the Al Gore scam, they could have spent money on new snowplows instead.  ¶ 2:15 PM