IT WAS THE KNIVES

I saw this picture at Daily Time Waster and it brought back a memory of attending the Expeditionary Warfare Conference in Panama City. I was greatly entertained by the Army general from TRADOC who got up and gave his speech while weaving in two or three other threads as he talked about training and doctrine. He babbled on very happily and without any hint of PowerPoint and introduced us to the Chief of Staff Army of the United States, who, after the War Between the States, decided that something had to be done about the multiplicity of knives that the soldiers were forced to carry.

He helpfully listed them: gutting knife, skinning knife, bayonet, hunting knife, hoof knife, oh there were a lot of knives in the Army of 1870, and working with others, he set out to reduce the number to the essential knife.

As a tiny detour he then talked about the wonderful breech loading rifle the Army had just equipped its soldiers with and what a marvel of technology it was. It was new and cool and the Army had perhaps fired as many as 100 rounds out of any of those shiny new rifles when they shipped a load out west to equip General Custer's 7th Cavalry. Everybody was impressed with the shiny new rifle and promptly tossed the old guns.

At this point, he detoured once again and talked about some really smart Germans in 1914 who invented a railroad gun that could shoot up targets over the horizon. The Germans carefully took into account the curvature of the earth, the atmospheric density, the wind and just about every other thing that could turn a ballistic solution into a miss and they even calculated the wear and tear on the bore of the gun and had made precision shells for the gun that would, as the bore wore down, increase in size and so still achieve the precise muzzle velocity that would let them hit targets in France.

Now the general was not anti-technology. That's not TRADOC's job. He just liked history and liked to talk.

The upshot of course is that when Custer and his bit of cavalry got to Wounded Knee and found every single armed indian in the West and started to use those new rifles, they found that the brass shells had a nasty tendency to split which fouled the breech and basically left the cavalrymen with some very expensive clubs. Because, the Army had also come through on the Army Combat Knife which was, as usual, one size fits all and could be used to cook, dig latrines and pick stones out of horse's hoof but which, in the event, was way to big to be used to dig out the little pieces of brass bullet that had been stripped off by the extractor when the guns fired their 101st round and the barrel had heated up and nobody knew the extractor suffered a fatal heat casualty because nobody had test fired the guns until they got that hot because, after all, how many indians could there be?

We were all laughing at this point but, it wasn't really anything to laugh at and those of us who were program managers decided to take another look at what we were building for the fleet or the Army and maybe make sure we weren't repeating an old mistake.

Germany's Prince of somewhere was inspecting the giant gun which was fired twice and he admired how the 1200 men it took to man and fire the gun went about the task with precision. The gun fired two rounds and stopped. The Prince asked the gunnery commander what he hit over the curve of the earth and the German commander was kind of stymied. He had no idea. He knew what they were aiming at but since they could not actually observe the fall of the shot, didn't know if they hit it.

A junior staff officer told the Prince and the general that if he gave him until morning he could tell them where the shells landed. He then got on a bike and cycled a few miles closer to the target city and waited patiently until the French delivered the morning newspapers which went in to some detail about the damage in the city caused by mysterious explosives that appeared to have come out of nowhere.

You know we have now an entire useless class of destroyer. The damned things cost billions of dollars and are practically worthless because they don't do air defense and the amazing scientifical gun they were built to carry costs as much to fire as it costs to open the Stargate. Every round costs as much as an actual Tomahawk missile and so, of course, Congress said it wasn't going to buy any of those things because the Navy would just waste them.

We have an F-35 which is the all-in-one cheapo fighter that was going to replace everything in the air and be cheaper than the ridiculously expensive F-22 which, as you know, actually seems to have come in at about half the fly-away cost of one F-35 but was considered unaffordable at the time.

We really need to take the Department of Defense down to the river and throw in all their current program managers. They can be like our modern version of witches. If any of them float we know they're a witch and we can dry them off and burn them at the metal stakes we'll erect in the Mall.

GIVE ME BACON OR DIE NOW PIG

The simple idiocy of the majority is sometimes off weighed by reality but never in the Socialist's Worker's Paradise where reality is a disfunction of the elite. 

Not A Pig

WELCOME TO SELF INSURANCE

I kind of enjoy, in a sad way, these articles where progressives and liberals move into my territory and discover just how unpalatable unpalatable is. They had no idea because they enjoyed employer health insurance and didn't know what the public did when they offed the rest of us and forced us to apply for new healthcare plans after canceling ours. Neither did the clinics or doctors care. They care now.

I was once in that market for a time. I remember going to the doctor and spending about 40 times as long with the mediclerk verifying my insurance than I spent with the actual physician. That's not an exaggeration as anybody will tell you. I was once in the chair with the dentist's digits probing a tooth when the insurance fairy came in and demanded to know if I was vested since she and Anthem couldn't settle on a specific day 8 months earlier.

I would visit a given hospital for a procedure my doctor recommended and spend 2 hours with the insurance/billing technician before being allowed to approach the throne. I would cheerfully give them the full details, they would consult with the company over the phone, with their colleagues on either side and with their boss before allowing me to proceed to the procedure.

Some of them later called me and said that my insurance company refused to pay. I got to tell them how sorry I was about that. They suggested I pay them now. My response was always the same. It never changed or varied. "You did your due diligence to the nth degree. Now you follow up and make sure the insurance company coughs it up."

MEMORY

Discrete memory I have. I can remember with blinding clarity certain moments in my past. But, ask me to tell you when I bought a matchbook in Calcutta and I'll draw a blank. Oddly enough, most of the women in my life can recite a day in the life, chapter and verse. It's not that my memory has been gutted by drugs and alcohol, I never could produce an answer to Perry Mason. "Where were you on June 17th!!!!!!! I honestly don't have a clue. I never did. Date and memory took a journal and a calendar.

Life has shown this to be a singular flaw. It's not a place to hide, it really truly is a place where people will ask me, don't you remember and the answer isn't good. If I can put a place to an image in my mind's eye I can remember it just fine. 3D and in color. Now ask me the year and date of that memory. My only saving grace is that I can put memories in a box defined by where I was at that time. God help me if I was always in the same place trying to recall. That would be hopeless.

I have crystal clear memories of things that happened but the date is never part of the memory. I can only estimate based on the images.

I listen to things spoken, such as this, "your grandmother bought this in Denmark in 1936," and I'll be honest, how in the world do you remember buying a matchbook in Denmark before WWII? How can you tell me that 70 years later?

So drat. I enjoyed Memories by Jackie Fisher. I bought the original in Newport long ago and gave it away. I think it needs buying again....oh, and Dave, also the wonderful book by the Polar Admiral, it has a green cover. If you've still got it, I will pay for shipping and also the autobiography of Jackie Fisher.

PISSING AWAY CREDIBILITY

Whenever an Admiral wonders why people don't take them seriously anymore he really doesn't need to look much further than here, whereVice Admiral Joseph Aucoin, the Commander of the US Seventh Fleet, had this to say about the Littoral Combat Ship currently broken down in Singapore:

"I think this is an ideal ship for this area. I like the size, the capability, multi-mission [features], there's also room for growth. And it complements so many navies in this region." 

The ship's cruise had been a great success, Aucoin noted.

"Up until this incident, Fort Worth did very well," he said. "It made all its scheduled events."

The admiral is quite an accomplished fibber. He might almost be a native; his grasp of fibbery is so well developed, comprehensive and steeped with subtle nuances that the layman hardly notices as the Admiral coins new words to describe a warship that, at best, can't do anything but leak oil into the ocean.

The ship the admiral is describing is one of "a" class (this "class" is uniquely made up of two completely different hull types each so foul and awful that when it came time for the Navy to actually select the one to move ahead with and procure for the fleet to use as a warship, the Navy couldn't bring itself to say anything not good about the other which forced them to buy both), of ships that have one very small gun (the smallest gun any escort ship ever put to sea with, no missiles, no air defenses, no sonar, no anti-submarine sensors, almost no crew, no technical expertise or warfighting expertise, no boarding parties and no class.

How can an actual fleet commander gloss over those little problems of the, not-nearly a warship, that is currently on another extended breakdown in Singapore with a crew unable to repair it? Admiral, what is it about its size, capabilities, and current mission configuration that have you miss it so much? If there is room for growth in the 8 years since the first ship was commissioned, when will it be exploited by adding some sailors, sensors and weapons that would give it some tooth and more than a yip of a bark?

I was amused by the Admiral's concern for at-sea confrontations between ships like his broken down ship and Chinese warships. He failed to note the benefits that accrue to us in this realm from having warships that cannot actually get underway, which is a surprising failing given his ability to put a good spin on nearly everything else about these ships.

ISLAM HOPS OFF THE TRAIN

Hat toss to daily timewaster

As I thought about this while getting a cup of coffee it struck me that more than simply a funny gif that appeals to my sense of humor, this really is a metaphor for Islam in the 20th and 21st centuries. Think of all the islamic countries, places and societies that have decided to hop off the train and refuse civilization. All of them deciding they're not going to stay in the 21st century and leaping off that rascally train to the future.
So yeah, the gif is an excellent metaphor.

Blowups Happen

MOSTLY HARMLESS

Surprising numbers of otherwise almost intelligent people sometimes forget that civilization is only possible because civilized people have agreed to play by the rules. There are uncivilized people and what separates them from us is that they know only one rule. It is the law of the jungle. Might Makes Right.

It's important to understand that the terrorists recently arrived from muslim lands only know the law of the jungle. This girl doesn't believe it. You know another word for 'mostly harmless'?

Prey

FADED GLORY

I couldn't find last night's debate being live streamed anywhere so I missed what could have been a normal debate where massively biased ignorant pissants question men and women who have actually achieved something with the background and real, marketable skills, the very concept of which, eludes the moderators. It looks like even the candidates had had enough of the micro-aggressing little democratic weasels and turned the tables on them. As usual, any novelty of argument confuses a liberal and they got all surly and upset.

I listened a little to the Diane Reims show this morning and she had three of the liberal progressive democratic snowflakes on to tell us how the debate went last night and they, two of the three, agreed that there was just a tiny tinge of bias but that was simply because conservatives are too stupid to recognize the natural superiority and intelligence of people like Quick and whossnames. It only looked like the three CNBC prima-twitterati were asking biased, stupid, inane questions because conservatives are so shallow they don't realize that the real media moves in depths beyond their comprehension.

Of course, they sucked up the late movie, TURDS TRUTH like it was all real with only the tiniest dash of "fake but accurate" media bias. They're reliable and consistent. I'm just amazed that there were people in Boulder, of all places, to come out and watch the actual debate and applaud the likes of Cruz when he body-slammed the moderators and did the happy dance all over Slow, Slower and Halfwit.

I see the GOP machine is all upset that the NBC moderators turned out to be a steaming vile pile of ignorance and Hillary talking points. (but I repeat myself)  I don't understand why anybody would ever give a dime to the GOP. Talk about "stuck on stupid."

I did a google search for news media logos and this came up. I didn't modify it at all.

UPDATE: GOP ditches the NBC debate scheduled for February. Says it may be stupid but it's not that stupid.  (I'll bet the GOP caves within a month and decides to give NBC back a debate.

There's a network logo missing. Soon CNBC will join CBS and vanish

SOME FASCINATING FINANCIAL NEWS

If you are not familiar with IceCap Asset Management, their newsletter for August makes fascinating reading. I was struck by their observation on Greece.

As they go on to note, there is no way on earth that Greece can repay the loans it keeps taking from the EU, IMF and Central Banks. Even if they did raise taxes, cut spending and start paying back the principle it still cannot be done.

For an interesting counterexample, they follow this up with how Iceland handled the 2008 financial devastation by defaulting and throwing bankers in jail. Oddly enough, Iceland is back to within 3% of its GDP before the 2008 collapse while Greece is another 33% in the hole after taking loans from everybody in an attempt to ward off accountability.

People who have knocked Farage et al for their continued doomsaying about the EU gloss over the fact that he is right and that all that has happened since 2008 is a series of frantic efforts to paper over the obvious fact that the EU is broken at a fundamental level. Of course, one can say that about our Congress and government.

When there is no more money the answer is not to spend more money.

GOOD GRIEF

The President without a strategy for coping with or dealing with ISIS has decided to send 450 American troops to Anbar Province, Iraq and have them train Iraqi Army personnel. We had over a 100,000 American troops over there for over a decade and a lot of them were training Iraqi troops who cannot run away fast enough when ISIS attacks and overwhelms them so quickly that they capture all our military vehicles, weapons and ammunition stocks intact and then use them in their follow-on assaults. I'm not sure what Obama thinks will happen now.

We know though, don't we? Green on Blue attacks on our soldiers once again and this time there won't be any Mattis there to explain to one and all that they had best have a plan to kill every man in the room before they enter. Frankly, I'm pretty sure some loony is trying to explain to the guys that they won't be allowed to carry weapons because they're not their to fight and they're not to shoot any Iraqis because there is no Status of Forces Agreement to protect them from being thrown into an Iraqi dungeon forever because they are subject to Iraqi law and not solely the UCMJ.

You might say a prayer for all our men over there and most especially for the 450 who are off to the Hot Gate.

Μολὼν λαβέ

HAWK CARLISLE

What other name would be more appropriate for the Commanding General of Air Combat Command. He just fired his vice commander.

The Air Force has been criticized over the last few months in its handling of the A-10 in its quest to divest the close air support airframe, particularly in how it has previously reported the attack aircraft's role in combat compared to the Air Force's other bombers and attack planes.

Gen. Hawk Carlisle, commander of Air Combat Command where Post was assigned, issued a letter of reprimand and had Post moved from his position as vice commander at the command.

I can't recall. Did the Air Force fire everybody involved in loading nukes on a bomber and sending it away, all oblivious of the fact that they somehow made it into a nuclear weapons magazine and mistakenly loaded nuclear weapons on a bomber? I mean, a good thorough top to bottom scrubbing of all involved in that fiasco?  I think they took the same approach the navy did with this idiot. They recommended that idiot for promotion to admiral despite his idiocy.

In 1987, while flying off the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga, a Lt. j.g. Timothy W. Dorsey fired a missile at an Air Force F-4 reconnaissance jet piloted by then-Lt. Ross. Lt. Ross. He and his backseat officer ejected as the F-4 plunged into the sea. 

A Navy investigation called Lt. Dorsey’s decision an “illogical act” that “raises substantial doubt as to his capacity for good, sound judgment.” 

“The September 22, 1987, destruction of USAF RF-4C was not the result of an accident, but the consequence of a deliberate act,” the investigator wrote. “His subsequent reaction [to the radio command] demonstrated an absolute disregard of the known facts and circumstances.” 

The Navy banned him from flying for life.

....and yet found him suitable for promotion to admiral.

I think Inspector Generals should carry sharp swords when they investigate and have carte blanche to swing them vigorously.

If you have nothing to do on a rainy weekend, read, Once an Eagle by Anton Myrer.

TOTAL COMPLETE ABJECT FAILURE

It looks like this.

Yes ladies and gentleman, it is the US NAVY's newest aircraft carrier. That's about all it can do. The builder will deliver it to the navy on 31 March 2015 and the pathetic beast can neither launch nor recover aircraft. Kind of a dismal failure.

Everybody went bleeding edge during its design and construction. Naysayers and doubters were treated like climate skeptics and brushed aside as seminal losers. Who's the loser now?

Two technical issues will receive the bulk of attention. First is the electromagnetic aircraft launch system, or EMALS, which replaced the steam-powered catapult system. It is "ahead of the curve," Moore said. Two of four catapults are built. The ship will launch dead loads (weighted sleds) into the James River in June. 

And then there is the advanced arresting gear, arguably the source of most headaches during the carrier's construction. The system could manage only 20 arrests between failures – a rate 248 times higher than should be expected, according to an April 2014 Congressional Research Service report. This led to a major redesign of the water-twister, which absorbs about 70 percent of the energy during a landing.

Once the thing is signed for by the navy all the problems become Navy problems and the builder is off the hook. This is where they make the big money, fixing problems that should have prevented the Navy from signing for the ship in the first place.

No wonder all of us believe in the Sequester. Let these morons (NAVSEA/NAVAIR) have more money and they'd just waste it on drink, drugs and fast women.

CONUNDRUMS

I'm not sure how they do the scam. They have a membership program that entitles members to a 10% discount if they pay $ upfront and remember to bring their card in when they go to buy a book or product but at the same time, they fill my inbox with things like this, almost every day.

I don't get it. Why would you pay $25.00/year to get 10% off when the rest of us get invited to take up to 30% off?  I'm not sure they actually grasp 'membership rewards programs.'

AN INFORMED ELECTORATE

This spells the end of America. These were simple easy questions but if one looks at the national results it suggests that 66% of the country don't care about the things that any thinking person would become familiar with simply through reading the news. The numbers below are a tragedy.

A STATE OF THE WORLD

Roger Kimball has an interesting article about the EU vs Apple. He mentions that Apple has parked $137 billion offshore to avoid US corporate taxes and the EU has decided that maybe it can get some of that. In many ways I side with Apple as it fights against the confiscatory tax regimes who seek to profit from their business acumen. What Apple sells in the United States is fully taxed by the United States. What it sells in Europe is governed entirely by the incredible regulatory state that is the EU. Being the EU, that regulatory state is 100% based on preserving the money and power of the ancient oligarchs which, necessarily, requires the rules to be written in such a manner as to protect the nouveau rich oligarchs like Apple, Starbucks, etc.

It occurs to me though that Apple could BUY a country outright for a fraction of that profit it is accumulating offshore and then write the tax policies that it finds convenient.  Oops. Wait, I think that's what the EU thinks happened in Ireland.

I read a book a long time ago with that kind of premise. It involved the Swiss and their banking system which had for so long refused to cough up the money the rest of the world insisted was theirs. So the rest of the world nuked the recalcitrant Swiss until they glowed. Being the Swiss, they were all quite safe in their armored underground bunkers and redoubts and being Swiss were the most heavily armed country in Europe. Neutral doesn't mean impotent.

On the other hand, we're talking in this case about the Palestinians of Europe and you know what they say about Palestinians, they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. It is also said that an honest politician is one who stays 'bought'. We shall see what the Dáil trots out as the EU destroys every freedom their forefathers won through war and revolution over 600 years.

TEXTING WHILE SLEEPING

This tragic story from the BBC has an interesting twist which leads me to believe that she didn't bother to read the text she had written for this article or she was asleep when she wrote it. I think in the old days news and wire services struggled mightily to be accurate. Nowadays, they struggle mightily to remain relevant and akracy can go to the devil.

1 September 2014 Last updated at 14:17 BST 

A lorry driver who killed two charity cyclists in Cornwall has been jailed for eight and a half years. 

Truro Crown Court heard that delivery driver Palmer, 32, of Bude, in Cornwall had almost definitely fallen asleep at the wheel when he hit Andrew McMenigall and Toby Wallace on the A30 in 2013. 

He had had no proper sleep for 24 hours and was texting at the time the accident occurred. 

Leigh Rundle reports.

It's one or the other Leigh but you aren't allowed to say both.

PARADISE BANKRUPTED BY DEMOCRATS

It's no surprise to me that democratic policies can bankrupt paradise. In Puerto Rico's case the democratic machine took a hundred years and constant infusions of American dollars to do what Castro did in just 10 years. Eventually though, other people's money dries up and the people are left holding the bag. When they refuse to pay anymore, nobody pays and the little people who invested in mutual funds, bonds, and stocks are wiped out when the misgovernment of the day opts to avoid paying and simply defaults on all the money it borrowed from its creditors.

Read the article and look at the numbers. Those numbers are the underlying facts staring us in the face as politicians and the people who elect them continue to believe passionately in spending money they don't have and never will. Sometimes that ends in anarchy but mostly it ends in the worst form of tyranny this planet has ever seen.

--Democrat Governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla told Bloomberg News last year that Puerto Rico had a constitutional and moral obligation to not default on the island’s $73 billion of debt.  But he just passed a law giving local court proceedings the power to cancel much, or all, of the island’s bond debt.

--Puerto Rico's economy is shrinking at a 6% annual pace.

--"Of their $73 billion of debt, $56 billion is in the form of municipal bonds and a quarter of that is held by unsuspecting investors in their tax-free mutual funds.  On a per capita basis, that debt burden works out to $14,000 per resident; 10 times the average of the 50 states and higher than every state except California and New York."

-- "In addition to debt, Puerto Rico also has a public employee pension plan that is only 11.2% funded.  The current $30 billion in unfunded pension liabilities would add another $6,000 in per capita liability to each Puerto Rican resident."

The original article is pitched in such a way as to lay the blame for Puerto Rico's problems on an inability to speak and read English and claims 90% of the population cannot do either. I don't think that has anything to do with the problem they find themselves faced with today. The problem as I see it, is that we have people trading in bond markets that suffer no penalties at all for lying or failing to do their fiduciary duty to the people and institutions they sell them to. The people that bought and traded all those worthless bonds should be sliced up and used to chum for sharks in Long Island Sound.

The numbers are bad for Puerto Rico. One might almost say that the situation is hopeless. On the other hand, this is what it looks like for the United States in comparison with other leaders in the shameful national debt category:

You could read more about it at The Atlantic and oddly, another article in another Atlantic.

Can you imagine the day when everybody repudiates their debts as unpayable? If Europe goes over the edge it will make everybody follow. I think the last time that happened was 1929. This sort of charade is only viable as long as the major powers say that it is. The first to collapse will take down all the rest. That is why, even the utterly insolvent United States Government, raced to send trillions of dollars to prop up the EU banks that were going under as the Euro failed in all the countries to the left of US.

SPECIAL VICTIMS

As we come through a holiday dedicated to remembering those who sacrificed their lives in defense of the United States it will probably only hurt a little bit to reflect on the special victims funds. These were created by the government to reward the families of the ordinary men and women who were going about their daily lives when muslims attacked on 9/11. These people hadn't joined the military, hadn't been drafted, weren't serving the nation or mankind in any exceptional way but they were killed in an attack on the United States by terrorists.

From wikipedia here is their story:

The September 11th Victim Compensation Fund was created by an Act of Congress, the Air Transportation Safety and System Stabilization Act (49 USC 40101),[1] shortly after 9/11 to compensate the victims of the attack (or their families) in exchange for their agreement not to sue the airline corporations involved. Kenneth Feinberg was appointed by Attorney General John Ashcroft to be Special Master of the fund. He worked for 33 months pro bono. He developed the regulations governing the administration of the fund and administered all aspects of the program.

Feinberg was responsible for making the decisions on how much each family of a victim would receive. Feinberg had to estimate how much each victim would have earned in a full lifetime. If a family accepted the offer, it was not possible to appeal. Families unhappy with the offer were able to appeal in a nonadversarial,Official Fund website (archived) informal hearing to present their case however they wanted. Feinberg personally presided over more than 900 of the 1,600 hearings. At the end of the process $7 billion was awarded to 97% of the families; the average payout was $1.8 million. A non-negotiable clause in the acceptance papers for the settlements was that the families were to never file suit against the airlines for any lack of security or otherwise unsafe procedures.

The United States has never even dreamed of compensating the families of American servicemen on such a lavish scale. It's hard to argue that it would be ruinously expensive either since the dead and wounded from our post 9/11 wars would barely rise to the level of Congressional awareness. More, it would impart some sense of urgency from the political masters of the nation's Armed Forces to preserve American soldier's lives at virtually any expense and we would see very different  Rules of Engagement. I don't expect to see anything like this. It's not why people serve their country. Such thinking never was.

What concerns me a little bit though is that Congress established a precedent for rewarding the victims of muslim terrorism in New York City, but failed to follow the same path when it came to dealing with the aftermath of the Fort Hood mass murders carried out by a muslim terrorist. That might be due to an urgent desire on their part to extinguish the idea that the people of the United States owe anything to the victims of terrorism on our shores. After all, the Supreme Court has found that the police have "no duty" to protect citizens against violent criminals even if police officers are right there at the scene of the crime and afraid to come to an unarmed citizen's defense.

I wonder what will happen when the terrorists lay their hands on a weapon of mass destruction and use it against New York City or Washington DC.  A competent attack carried out with working weapons of mass destruction will kill on the order of 100 times as many civilians as were killed on 9/11. Will those killed by muslim terrorists on 9/11 remain special victims or does every American victim of muslim terrorism deserve a payout from US?

Were one to look back at the fortunes of those who signed the Declaration of Independence one would find that we were terribly pragmatic in the early days of the Republic. They were orders of magnitude smarter and more honest than our present ruling class who have given up on even trying to pay off the national debts. The new bunch have bought into the idea that owing trillions isn't a problem for them; their failure to pay is a problem for others. At the current rate of debt payment, your great great grandchildren still won't be paying off the national debt, they'll only be paying interest on it.

History is stuffed to bursting with the fate of nations that failed to pay their debts. It's a transitory problem if you count in centuries.

THE MENACE POSED BY PHRASE BOOKS

My family used to gather once a year in Colorado and ski for a week. We always snagged copies of the New York Times to keep up with the events of the world and to broaden our minds. Our reunion in 1994 was memorable chiefly because we can still make ourselves laugh at what we found in the paper one morning:

Language primers and phrase books for travelers can be an odd introduction to a foreign country. Blithely insensitive to the subtleties of polite conversation, these tiny manuals re-enforce the xenophobic notion that all foreign travel is rife with unpleasure and mishap. Sometimes the source of this unpleasure and mishap is unspecified -- the reader of "Teach Yourself Catalan," for instance, can only wonder what dire circumstances will require the use of the phrase

I am prepared to raffle the goat.

 Over the years we have used the phrase among ourselves whenever we spend time together. It could have been written by P.J. O'Rourke but it wasn't.

I was always leery of using phrasebooks on any of my foreign travels. I knew I could spit out the phrase as written and maybe even manage the pronunciation well enough but I always knew what came next would be a burst of unintelligible gibberish and it's not like I speak gibberish. That's a totally foreign language and there is no phrasebook.

There's a universal language though. On a long ago cruise to Cabo, my captain used to row ashore and wheedle gasoline and water out of stones. I couldn't do it even though I tried. Some things take a woman's touch, on a beach, under a blazing sun, in front of God and everybody. Oh, she would stand there with that phrasebook clutched in her hands and mangle the Spanish until the men were forced to let her have 10 gallons of gas and 50 gallons of potable water. I could see again how Cortez won a continent... Just saying.

Still and all, they wouldn't have given it to me and they charged nothing at all for it.

A RICH FANTASY LAND OF DREAMERS

There have been any number of attempts to make a negotiable currency. All but one of them have been created by governments who started from the same premise. The currency they created was based on the value of the currency itself. In other words, it started out as gold and silver and slowly went downhill from there. The gold led to silver which led to debased valueless metals which led to paper backed by gold, then paper backed by silver, then paper backed by the full faith and credit of government which led to paper backed by nothing at all.

A consortium of governments got together and created currency out of shared principles and a little bit of arm twisting and coercion. The ones that spring right to mind are the dollar and the euro. As these freely negotiable currencies are backed only by the faith and credit of massive continental regimes which are on the brink of economic collapse, an optimist of extraordinary caliber created a cyber currency that traded among like minded believers. It's not actually backed by anything but governments everywhere desperately want to get control and ownership of it because it competes with the debased currencies they preside over and has value outside the system they created.

Who would have thought that in this day and age some guy could just come up with his own currency and get it adopted around the world almost overnight? Oh well, some people persist in believing that there is some detectable difference between the two dollars shown above.