IF YOU LIKE VERMEER

These are pretty darn good.

I have always liked his paintings because they are compositions that are about the light that falls within. Solar infall....

There was another artist. One who sold priceless Vermeers to the Nazis during World War II. It is a fascinating story about how he beat the charges against him of collaborating with the enemy which was deadly serious in Holland right after the war.

Speaking as one who knows these things, I cannot imagine the patience of both parties to get these staged and photographed. I'm sure lots of favorite things were involved.

There are a number of other works at the first link.

THE WORKERS PARADISE

Cuba as you find it. It's always fascinating that so many people blame America for the communists failure to take off economically and become well fed productive makers of the world's goods rather than consumers. Michael Totten shows the world what progressive politics earns society and those who are born to a world made better by Statists.
The bit with the cows is fascinating. It looks like progressives have put Cuba's few remaining cows on a diet. They are not happy cows.

The way progressive socialists in America carry on about Cuba you would think it is paradise and the only reason it is a little screwed up is because one country out of 192 other countries in the world has refused to trade with it. One. Country. There's one other place that America doesn't trade with. It's another progressive paradise stuffed with virtuous hard working peasants. It's the one you cannot see at night because it's dark there. Very dark.

MR PRESIDENT

Mr President, will you serve as Secretary General of the UN when you leave office?

JUST AROUND THE CORNER

It's sneaking up on you.

Valentine's Day.

NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT

As long as the reactors stay online we have plenty of energy and can continue to make water forever. If for some reason the reactors drop offline we have plenty of coal and can make electricity to power the desalination plants and distilling plants.

What?

San Onofre nuclear power plant is offline and has been dismantled? The California Air Resources Board wants all the coal fired power plants in California to shut down? Really? Well, so not a problem. We still have all the hydro-electric stations not to mention all that hot air.

Say.... do we actually make any water in California at all? It's not like they use any of that electricity to make so much as a single drop of water even using all the waste heat off their current power stations. You might wonder why they can't even manage that and the answer won't surprise you. When desalinating seawater one keeps the fresh water and discards the brine which is just a tiny bit saltier than the sea, back into the sea. Unfortunately, that is the where the vipers known as the California Coastal Commission live and regulate and they won't let anyone pour salt into the sea.

AN INTERESTING SAIL

 
I might opt for a far warmer clime and one without so many giant ice bergs. It would be fun though.

MLK AND A DAY IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM

Driving from Newport, Rhode Island to Philadelphia on my way to fire fighting school back in 1986, I had the radio tuned to a channel of the People's Radio and chanced to hear an excellent program about a man almost nobody ever speaks of anymore; Malcolm X. The station played excerpts from many of his speeches and writings as he grew and developed over his brief time on Earth.  I came to think that he was my kind of rabble-rouser. I could feel the power of the words in his speeches. He was not communicating thoughts he derived from his contemplation of God's words. He was talking like an angry man with much to be angry about. His words contributed directly to his assassination. I never heard his speeches until I was 25 and a brand new graduate of the Navy's Department Head School.

Today is one set aside by the nation to remember another man who was also cut down in his prime by an assassin. The 1960's were a seemingly endless series of assassinations. Diem, shot by friends of Kennedy. JFK killed by a communist 20 days later. Black Nationalist Malcom X, Nazi party leader George Rockwell, Martin Luther King, Jr., and RFK, all assassinated. All of them men who made the decision to enter the arena of ideas, and all but one, coldly agreeable to assassination and murder if that was the price demanded to change the world.

Oddly enough, I have sympathy for just about all of them. They wanted to make it a better world. Each of them wanted to make it over in his own image. One wanted a black nationalist world. You can find that if you like for there are a lot of places where black nationalism has triumphed. Diem who just wanted to survive there at the end. His ambitions there were as doomed as his country. JFK and RFK were going to make a better world for their kind of people. You can see what they meant to achieve in Massachusetts to this day.

Martin Luther King wanted something a little different. "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

I believe in words. Each word means a specific thing. Words without qualification mean what they say and nobody gets to qualify another person's words. That is deceitful and lacks honesty and integrity. When JFK spoke to Congress and said, "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth," nobody tried to dissimulate his words and their clear meaning and parse it to say anything else. Nobody that mattered tried to add, "if we can afford it or if it isn't too dangerous or if it is technically feasible." We accepted it as the goal and worked to accomplish it.

I think we can all get along if we work at it but there has to be a firm foundation of agreement on what it is that we are working for. If we want an end to discrimination then we should probably stop discriminating. If we want a meritocracy where people are allowed to rise to whatever level of accomplishment they can by merit and luck then we should probably take our thumbs off the scale when parceling out merit and luck. If we believe that we should give it all over and live in a peaceful and harmonious society than surely that is the one that most requires the positive assent of each member to agree to participate in such a society and also it must include a path out for those that do not desire to live in a Society of Friends.

This country used to have a common foundation that was built on a common understanding of the documents of the founding of the country which were taught by the free education that is provided to every child. The educators taught elementary math, reading, writing and the basics of a literate society to everyone. The elite and the devoutly religious sent their children to private schools that employed the same teachers to teach the same subjects. The subjects were identical. The method and nature of the instruction varied widely. Literacy, fluency and mathematical reasoning was the path to a better life. A firm grasp of those subjects lifted all who sought mastery of them.

To everyone's continual amazement, that fundamental baseline is what has been screwed up. Failure to achieve upward mobility in society today can be laid almost exclusively at the feet of a failure to become literate and the inability to reason mathematically. When I look at the enormous number of people that the U.S. Military simply will not recruit because they cannot read or perform simple arithmetic I become angry at how 12 years of free education was shit on. How did we screw that up?

It was there! It was right there! It was shining and sparkly and just within our grasp and we let it get away!

I know what people say about schools and teachers and I don't say any of that. I went to 9 different schools counting kindergarten through high school. They all had one thing in common. They made an extraordinary effort to teach children who came to school and wanted to learn and for the most part they did that very well. My last school was motivated solely by the money and did its best to keep kids in school. It tried hardest to reach the kids that were done learning and it was also the worst of the schools I attended. The other schools looked at the hard-core refuseniks and allowed them to saunter off to whatever pursuits they thought a more fit use of their learning time.

There had to be someone at home that cared about learning if it was going to happen. If nobody successfully communicated the importance of learning and provided the discipline to force it, it was over.

What Martin Luther King, and what we all wish for our children, can now be achieved in the United States by any child that learns to read and write, and learns mathematics and can graduate from school.

I spent my whole life in environments where nobody cared about your background or skin color. The only thing that mattered was if you could do the job. It would be nice if you bathed regularly, were pleasant and had a reasonable sense of humor, but really it boiled down to nothing more than whether or not you were up to the job.

I think Martin Luther King's dream has become a reality. If you can fit yourself into Society, it will make room for you to flourish. Did you know the military simply won't induct 75% of the age eligible applicants because they don't meet the minimum standards expected of members of that society?

If you want a new dream for the new millennium, discover what to do with the millions of people that turned their back on education and learning and declined to take part in society or join the Race.* We mostly lock them up after we tire of them. There has to be a better way and it isn't going to be found in spending more money on schools, teachers, prisons or youth activities. It's going to take something new under the sun.

*The Race of Reason of course.

PRESIDENTIAL ASSASSIN

What is the SS to do with:

I think the Secret Service must be having a good time. This article from the Daily Mail is great!!

For the moment, they are allegedly sleeping in separate bedrooms after Mr Obama’s attempt to ‘mend fences’ backfired so badly on a recent Christmas getaway to Hawaii that he returned to Washington with their two daughters, leaving his wife behind.

The National Enquirer, it must be said, quoted only anonymous insiders in support of these sensational claims, and is hardly the most reliable source of hard news. [says who?]

Obama advisers are certainly not talking as if there is any scandal in the offing. [what scandals? They've never seen any]

Washington’s media has ignored the story. [they've ignored ALL Obama scandals]

But everyone remembers how the Enquirer famously got it right when it claimed the supposedly squeaky clean Democrat presidential contender John Edwards had fathered a love child by a former campaign worker. [But nobody cares about liars and scoundrels]

Kind of makes one wonder if the separate bedrooms are simply the SS telling the two to sleep in neutral corners.

Do you think they've read this wonderful classic?

MARKET STREET BEFORE THE 1906 QUAKE AND FIRE

Seen originally at American Digest.

It looks like the law of gross tonnage is the only law. No stop signs, yield signs or street lights and every man for himself.

MORONS

The man who spent 10 hours in hospital being probed by police and men in white coats has settled his law suit against the lawmen for $1.6 million. He also sued the men in white coats and the hospital that carried out this bit of in-depth law ordered probing. Those suits continue. I wonder if the hospital is a little worried now. They probably think they can eat the cost of the lawsuit but they probably expected to lay it off against the county and city for ordering them to do it. Now they stand alone. So do the men in white coats.

I'd have some little smidgeon of sympathy for the hospital and doctors involved were it not that the stupid morons sent the man they raped a bill for services rendered.

Nobody has been fired or sanctioned but we never expected that.

PREMATURE DESTRUCTION

Watching the press tear into Governor Christie just because he is a mindlessly vicious political thug of the first water is kind of interesting. It looks like all the adult strategists (both of them) have retired from the Democratic Public Policy War Machine  er, national press corps. I wouldn't be surprised if the Director of Communications for the Hillary campaign isn't telling them what to say and do but she really needs to up her game if she wants to win.

They need to study Obama's play book and double check the rules for political destruction. You wait until it is too late for the other party to find a replacement nominee before you get court records unsealed and turned over to the press and let them destroy your enemy. You want to keep all the dirt you know about your likeliest and least able enemy hidden in your vaults until it is time to spring out of the darkness waving a subpoena and shouting EUREKA! You conspire with that enemy to sabotage all the other people running against him.

What the republicans really need is a toe tapping, wide-stanced, nuanced, ethically challenged man with a housemaid as a mistress to run for president. If he could be a closet gay of the gay bashing variety and a deep cover agent for the KGB that would be nice. It wouldn't hurt his chances if there was video of him in a drug fueled rage or shooting up smack with Janis. That way we could all be shocked, shocked I tell you, on November 1st a few years hence.

STUCK ON STUPID

The Air Force fired their Commanding General for liking women, wine and cigars and now they are investigating all of the nuclear launch crews because narcotics. In their narcotics investigation the investigators naturally decided to look at the crew's text messages because drugs are notorious for turning up in text messages and found that the crews were sharing answers in a cooperative teamwork environment and so the Air Force has sacked 34 of its 190 launch crew personnel.

You know what that means right? That means that the remaining guys left now have to stretch to cover the missed watches and duties of those being punished. ALL MUST SUFFER! Enjoy that week living in a hole in the ground? Have another!

I can see the new Commanding General taking over this nightmare command. Be there as he issues his very first order to the security force guarding the nation's nuclear strategic missiles: "Open fire on any and all investigators. Shoot any survivors."

Do you suppose any of the remaining crews are wondering if they should pull back and nuke the place from orbit? Just to be sure...

What could go wrong?

TWITTERINGS FROM COMMISSAR RADIO

I listened to a bit of the People's Radio today as I drove to the Post Office. It departed from the baselines and actually had a real correspondent on who was permitted to talk a bit before he was ushered off into a shark tank. The real newsman filled us in on some of what the Romney campaign staff found when it vetted New Jersey governor as a potential Vice Presidential running mate.

Governor Christie ordered Romney to refrain from any fundraising in his Domain until he was appropriately blessed and found worthy. Christie showed up at campaign events when he felt like it and was hours late without any excuses. More to the point from: Time.com

The vetters were stunned by the garish controversies lurking in the shadows of his record. There was a 2010 Department of Justice inspector general’s investigation of Christie’s spending patterns in his job prior to the governorship, which criticized him for being “the U.S. attorney who most often exceeded the government [travel expense] rate without adequate justification” and for offering “insufficient, inaccurate, or no justification” for stays at swank hotels like the Four Seasons. There was the fact that Christie worked as a lobbyist on behalf of the Securities Industry Association at a time when Bernie Madoff was a senior SIA official—and sought an exemption from New Jersey’s Consumer Fraud Act. There was Christie’s decision to steer hefty government contracts to donors and political allies like former Attorney General John Ashcroft, which sparked a congressional hearing. There was a defamation lawsuit brought against Christie arising out of his successful 1994 run to oust an incumbent in a local Garden State race.

This is the guy that Republicans are swooning over as a potential presidential candidate? A sleazy lawyer who represented Bernie Madoff in his effort to get an exemption from a Consumer Fraud law is their idea of a good nominee? This dumb guy could have appointed a republican to fill the dead crook's Senate seat but didn't. Could somebody stick a fork in him now.

GOING GALT

I was wondering if the next generation is smart enough and was beginning to worry, what with them voting for the wrong people all the time, but now I have to admit my fears were for naught. It seems they aren't dumb enough to sign up for health insurance ripoffs at hugely inflated prices which offer them little to no benefit.

Now if only the rest of America saw so clearly what is so blindingly obvious we would be a richer and vastly more healthy society. Every time you are swayed by the argument that you should force other people to give their money to the government for the benefit of some undeserving person, think of Detroit.

[From How to be a Retronaut] – The East Side Public Library, Detroit, Michigan. “Detroit in Ruins,” a selection of photographs of Detroit by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre

The city politicians and the city librarians raised millions of dollars and told the residents of the East Side that they were going to use every penny to fix the roof of the library and then the money all vanished and the city decided that it was too dangerous to enter the library even to salvage the books.

You know how the money for Obama care was being raised for the last 3 years. The government started collecting Obamacare taxes back in 2010 to pay for this monstrosity. Naturally, they started stealing from the young and young at heart.

TOP SECRET SILENCERS AINT CHEAP

 I see we just had the Under Secretary of the Navy get fired, allegedly for having an affair. His affair came to light during a routine investigation into the scandal known as Government Procurement. His firing is unrelated to the procurement fraud but one of the officers being investigated in the fraud testified that the Under Secretary gave verbal approval for the purchase of silencers for a Top Secret program.

Verbal authority? In this day and age? Only in the White House and maybe HHS. Everybody else gets the autopen at the very least. Still, the  Washington Post gets the story out and manages to slide in the sacking of 2 admirals, 2 captains and 2 commanders in an unrelated but similar scandal.

I'm a little disturbed by the security classification nonsense being bandied around though by just about everybody. Why is an 'acquisition' of silencers for the navy "TOP SECRET?" Why is it a security violation of ANY kind to tell the Husbanding Agent under contract to the United States Navy the dates and times when USN ships and US warships are expected to arrive and depart from foreign parts where that Husbanding Agent is expected to meet them with all their logistical requirements lined up and ready to load?

Nothing unrelated to National Security should have any kind of classification on it except FOUO and that only as it relates to the Privacy Act. Every other use of classification markings is nothing but an effort to hide the truth, hide the data and hide from being held accountable.

Agencies like the NSA have a great deal to hide and always have had. They let the fact that they could hide all the things they did from public scrutiny and accountability lead them to believe that they had a right to do all the things they do.

NOSE FOR GEOGRAPHY

These are really very funny. The first map is the U.S. map filled in by someone living in the UK. The second map is of Europe filled in by some otherbody living in the the US.

t 

We weren't allowed to get away with this when I was in school. That and there was $5 from my father for the first one of us that could take one of these blank maps and sit down at the table after dinner and put the right name in the right spot. We also had to get the capitals in roughly the right spot too. He believed in making us work for his money. :)

It's funny how most all the mappers can get Texas and California. The rest are just wonderful starting with Middle Earth and No Fucking Clue. I'll have to try this with a 5th grader I know and see how she's doing at making things up these days.

There are a bunch of these at Twisted Sifter.  I ripped them off via Gunsmoke and Knitting. 

LIGHTS IN THE DARK

There has always been some controversy about the world's ocean resources but the only place they routinely get stressed is in the south China Sea and Far Pacific Ocean, where an extraordinary number of sovereign nations own a bit of beachfront property and are entitled to exclusive economic exploitation of the resources lying directly off their shore. We can discuss claimed waters, baselines, recognized baselines, UNCLOS, etc but the real essence of the problem is that the world isn't flat. It has bumps.

The claims vary according to the mood of whichever power is feeling feisty. Those little islands, rocks and reefs that nobody ever heard of and on which nobody ever lived, are vital in staking a claim to exclusive economic control over even more seawater. The fish don't mind. Here is what the claims look like these days.

There is more than fish out there in the dark offshore. There is oil and there are minerals and all kinds of exciting things.

This is a picture from a little further north. All those lights you see out in the water to the east and west of Korea are fishing fleets who are out there every night fishing with lights to lure the fish in to where they can be caught. When you fly over that area at night from say, Tokyo to Seoul, you fly over boats so clustered together you almost think you could walk from Japan to Korea.

China declares that it is regulating the fishing fleets in order to ensure that the commons are not despoiled by over-predation. That's a mighty generous gesture and so reasonable from most points of view. There are well over a billion Chinese that like a bit of fish now and then so you could say they have a vested interest in preserving the sea-commons.

On the other hand, so to do the various countries that make up the EU and they actually fight over fishing rights with guns and bullets.

My advice to the unfriends of ours who share waterfront with China's sea; you better arm yourselves. I'm hoping that 'non-aligned nations' crap you were peddling a decade or two ago is matched with your very own Juche in so far as defending your fish and your oil. I wouldn't want to be the one that had to explain to the lynch mobs that you were counting on John Kerry and President Obama to look after your vital interests and keep them safe.

Of course there's always the UN if you're feeling lucky.

A THOUSAND LITTLE FLESH WOUNDS

The titting and tatting is just beginning as India and the United States begin to slice into each other over the fair compensation of a maid. As you recall, last month, the Malice in New York took time out of their busy day catching real criminals, to seize India's Consul-General in New York City as she dropped her children off at school. They then bundled her into a paddy wagon and strip searched her, booked her and tossed her into jail because a New York prosecutor had convinced a Grand Jury that this needed doing in the name of all New Yorkers.

The Indians, not surprisingly, are not impressed. They have ordered an exceptionally stupid American diplomat out of India. They have also ordered a club run by the Embassy in Delhi closed because it violates the Treaty of Vienna. The American diplomats in India are now going to pay. India has already taken down the barriers the Embassy had installed around the embassy after 9/11. They were installed overnight without permission and allowed to remain all those years in the spirit of good will and cooperation, which fools in New York and fools in the State Department have wrecked in less than a month.

The State Department had a chance weeks ago to weigh in on this and fix it but they did what they are famous for: nothing at all. It took them a couple of weeks until they allowed as how the naked Indian diplomat jailed in New York City might have diplomatic immunity.  The consequences were easily foreseeable and are beginning to mount up.

If you want to see just how perilously low our nation's diplomatic staff have brought us, you must read this article from the Daily Mail. Our idiots decided to smuggle the runaway maid's husband and children out of India and into the US. It makes me wonder if they had passports or if somebody in our Embassy just faked up American passports for them to travel on and get out of India.

Insiders say that eventually the pressure worked, the final deal was cleared by the White House with US Secretary of State John Kerry meeting the US President Barack Obama who is believed to have authorised the State to go ahead with a crisis breaker.

The head Idiot at the Department of State had to get clearance from Obama himself on how to handle the sewage left behind by the New York prosecutor over the compensation packet for an Indian maid.

Remember who that idiot is? He was the nominee of one of our two political parties for President of the United States. He couldn't resolve an issue like this without taking it to the White House and the President, personally. This is our point man in the Middle East. This is the Man who is in charge of our world-wide diplomatic efforts. This moron is negotiating American treaties every single day with people Putin appointed, people Karzai appointed, people Maliki appointed. He is negotiating transit passage through Pakistan so we can retrieve the United States Army and its combat equipment as we wind down the war in Afghanistan.

Honestly, what did we ever do to deserve this bunch? Haven't we suffered enough?

DIMNESS IN THE MURK

Obama has never been asked to explain why he ordered the National Park Service and national police to bar the citizens from their parks during his last budget debate with Congress. The press has never once asked him why he closed all traffic lanes and pedestrian paths into Yellowstone, Yosemite, Mount Vernon or a 401 other parks.

Isn't it odd that all the press wants to hear from Christie is how one of his aids tied up traffic on one bridge in New Jersey for a couple of days? Do you care about that? I don't either.

I think the most egregious aspect of the professional news class in this country is their transparent lack of shame at being tools of deception wielded by the most mediocre people in society.

A U.S. Park Police officer watches at left as a National Park Service employee posts a sign on a barricade closing access to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday.

Kenneth Brower

National Geographic

Published October 2, 2013

Yesterday, as the U.S. government shut down, all 401 of our national parks closed their gates. The campers and visitors inside were given two days to leave. It was no great surprise.

If one were to read Ken's little piece one would walk away consumed with wonder at how the Federal Government saved any money by closing the parks (which generate actual revenue) while at the same time mobilizing thousands of guards to patrol them and keep the citizens out.

The whole press frenzy about the bridge in New Jersey is beyond farce.

ARIEL SHARON

Another good man has stepped into the clearing at the end of the path. In truth he arrived there some years ago but he lingered in the shade for a little while.

Ariel Sharon 1928 - 2014

He truly was, present at the creation. He fought in every war of modern Israel from the 1948 War until he retired victorious, after the Yom Kippur War. He served as Defense Minister and then as Prime Minister. He orchestrated the unilateral Israseli withdrawal from Gaza and in 7 days evacuated every Israeli from the Gaza Strip and turned the land over to the PLO.

He formed his own political party and it looked like he was on the verge of doing something incredible when he was struck down by a stroke. The last image I have was a murky picture of him sitting in the back of the ambulance taking him to the hospital immediately after the stroke. There are strong indications that he planned to withdraw from the more vicious areas all along the West Bank and leave the Palestinians to form their own state unilaterally from all that Israsel was willing to give. It would have been fascinating to see Palestinian Statehood played out amidst the intransigent and internecine feuding arabs who almost personify the phrases, snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, or, too stupid to stoop to conquer.

He was the last of the uncompromisable founders of the State who could tack into whatever breeze blew over the land of Israel and take the country down a new course without a soul to step into the street and question his motives or integrity. Yes, yes, we know. They poured into the street nonetheless, but we must always keep in mind that fully half the people are stupider than the other half.

I would provide links but he was a nuanced man and the institutions that write about men like this have agendas and a bias that I detest.

SHOCK TROOPERS OF THE UNTRUTH

National Geographic used to have some credibility but they have squandered the last remaining shred of honesty and integrity with their broadside of untruth about the new lights.  If one didn't know any better, one would swear that they are the official mouthpiece and spokesmen for the Government. I'll take each of their points in turn and infuse some confusion.

1. The energy-saving replacements are too expensive.  ... It is true that CFLS are often several times as expensive as old-style incandescent bulbs and...—remain more than 10 times as expensive. But sticking with old bulbs actually would cost consumers far more money over the long run. Noah Horowitz, an environmental engineer and director of the center for energy efficiency at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in an email that because CFLs use far less electricity and last longer, someone who switches will save $30 to $50 on their electric bill over the bulb’s six- to ten-year lifespan. (See related: “Light Bulb Savings Calculator.”)

There is not just some question about the longevity of the new bulbs, there is outright empirical evidence that they don't last any longer than ordinary incandescent bulbs. In other words, the new lights we're permitted to have, cost 10 - 20 times as much as the old bulbs and burn for about the same duration.

2. CFL bulbs are dangerous because of their mercury content. ... But research indicates that while CFL bulbs do require more careful handling and disposal, the hazard may be blown out of proportion.  According to a 2008 article on the issue in the scientific journal Environmental Health Perspectives, CFLs typically contain from three to five milligrams of mercury—about one hundredth of the mercury content of the older thermostats that may still be found in some homes.  Researchers have found that only a tiny fraction of that is actually released when bulbs break. For example, in a study published in 2011 in the journal Environmental Engineering Science, Jackson State University researchers Yadong Li and Li Jin reported that even if left unattended for 24 hours, a broken bulb will release from 0.04 to 0.7 milligrams of mercury.  The researchers found that it would take weeks for the amount of mercury vapor in the room to reach levels that would be hazardous to a child. That can be avoided by quickly following the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s simple procedure for safe cleanup.  Additionally, Horowitz suggests: “When your CFL stops working put it in a Ziploc bag and take it to Home Depot or Lowe’s, who will recycle it for you for free.”  Another way to look at the mercury content of CFLs: reducing electricity consumption by using more efficient lights might help reduce the amount of mercury emitted into the atmosphere by coal-burning power plants, the biggest single source of mercury pollution in the air. (See related story: “Pro-Environment Light Bulb Labeling Turns Off Conservative Buyers, Study Finds.”)

Environmentalists and alarmists have been blowing hazards way out of proportion for decades now so why is it OK this time to permit a little toxicity in the name of making money for the new light bulb manufacturers? What is the liability for the makers of these toxic light bulbs? Are these fools the new Dow Chemical, W. R. Grace and smoking lobby all rolled up and ready for delivery to the same courts that gutted Grace?
Some old houses contain mercury? Call the Police! Is this like some houses contain lead based paint that was banned almost 45 years ago so all paint is suspect?
You would knowingly introduce a toxic into homes with small children; the same children that suffer from diseases nearly eliminated in the United States by vaccines, because a quack doctor in Britain published a totally fraudulent study in the Lancet that claimed the tiny bit of mercury in thimerosol caused autism in children? Are you serious?
If the Government legislates a perfectly acceptable and safe light bulb out of existence and tells me I have to spend far more money to buy replacement bulbs and then tries to tell me it's safe for me and safe for my child and that I must therefore dispose of it very carefully as Toxic Waste, who do they think they're fooling? That sucker is just going in the trash.

3. CFL bulbs are dangerous because of ultraviolet radiation leakage.  Miriam Rafailovich, told National Geographic News that she believes the defects occur during manufacturing or shipping. “This is something that could be remedied,” she said.

How would any consumer know if their bulbs were leaking radiation like Chernobyl?* How many of us have radiation detectors in our homes? That UL Seal on your microwave in the kitchen used to be guarantee enough that it wasn't spewing radiation into you but with light bulbs made by scores of manufacturers, who would ever know if they were dangerous?

4. The new bulbs either can’t be used with dimmer switches, or don’t work efficiently with them.That is true of the regular CFL bulbs sold in stores, but most of the LED bulbs on the market today are, in fact, dimmable, according to Horowitz. He advised consumers to look for LEDs whose
packaging indicates that they work with dimmer switches.
Progress sure takes some odd turns when it is legislated and has no relationship to science.

 5. CFLs won’t light up, or are too dim, in cold temperatures. Horowitz says this is a legitimate criticism of CFL, which have a hard time starting up in extremely cold climates. “If your bulb is located outdoors, say in your porch light, and you want an energy saving bulb, go with LEDs,” he advised.
 In other words, it doesn't work in the same conditions and environment as the light bulbs you used to be able to buy at any store.

To be honest, I'm not worried about the new light bulbs or afraid of them and when they burn out I don't hesitate to approach them, unscrew them and toss them into the trash. I simply dislike the shameless dishonesty of National Geographic which lies about nearly everything these days.
National Geographic News:

Photo: Most Polar Bears Gone By 2050, Studies Say

Two-thirds of the world's polar bears will vanish as melting sea ice causes the animals to starve, according to a new series of reports from the U.S. Geological Survey. The bears prey on marine mammals from the ice, and so will have diminished access to food as warmer climates reduce their hunting grounds.  The new studies are meant to inform the U.S. government in its decision whether to list the bears as an endangered species.

Does it say something about American universities that the people that National Geographic hires to write and edit its stuff are so lost to science and journalism that they don't question authority and are ignorant of science? Do all students who study geophysics and meteorology walk into the job market with the credulous ignorance of the kids in the Heaven's Gate Cult?

Honestly, the millennium they were so afraid of has been here for 14 years now and it's still going strong. It's time for all the "End Of The World" and Millennial Doomsday Cults to fold their tents and go away. They can go count polar bears by hand for all of me.

* yes yes I know it's just UV radiation but we are debunking scary, and a little over-the-top hyperbole in the name of science is what they do so I thought I'd have a lash at it too.

CIVIL WAR LETTER HOME PELHAM TENNESSEE

This letter is quite legible so I'm going to try posting it as is.

It's an interesting letter home from a young man who is finding out what so many do after they have joined the military and campaigned with it for awhile.

I am sometimes struck by how Luther writes his parents and sister and tells them which Post Office he is, or will be, nearest to, so they can send him mail there. It took the Great War to institutionalize the Armed Forces Post Offices. One of the constant refrains that came up at various planning conferences I attended over the last 20 years, was who was going to deliver the mail to the front. The Army doesn't want to, the Marines refuse and the Air Force and Navy are not at the front and therefore not inclined to be at all helpful in the matter. The question remains though and is right up there with just who is going to provide the massive manpower to confine all the enemy prisoners of war we expect to capture and the millions of refugees we expect to see. Oddly enough, the Army refuses, the Marines won't and the Air Force and Navy don't take prisoners.

THIS IS SO LAST YEAR

Our judges, and thus our courts, are getting a little far afield from what defines law. When that happens, the law loses its meaning because it is no longer based on commonly understood and agreed/accepted foundations. That said, this bit is a little disturbing:

U.S. District Judge Robert J. Shelby issued a 53-page ruling Friday saying Utah's law passed by voters in 2004 violates gay and lesbian couples' rights to due process and equal protection under the 14th Amendment.

Judge Shelby said the state failed to show that allowing same-sex marriages would affect opposite-sex marriages in any way.

"In the absence of such evidence, the State's unsupported fears and speculations are insufficient to justify the State's refusal to dignify the family relationships of its gay and lesbian citizens," Judge Shelby wrote.

The judge declared the State had failed to show the negative impact of gay marriage on marriage and used that as the sole basis for overturning and tossing out the law. We'll, we have an awful lot of laws that have no impact on marriage that WE CAN ALL IGNORE NOW. That Shelby guy gets my vote!

I see today, that all of Shelby's supervisors have agreed to proscribe any more gay marriages in Utah until they can wrap their heads around the idea that laws that don't have any impact on marriage, are laws that do not have to be obeyed.

I honestly don't care where you stand on the whole issue. From this point of view it doesn't matter. Getting the judges to write their own laws is a terrible mistake because if you can buy one today, somebody else can buy that same judge tomorrow.

DESPERATE SHIPS SEARCH FOR CANAL

The Spanish Canal Thieves Group have announced that they will stop work if Panama doesn't pay them $1.3 billion to finish the work on widening the canal. They low-balled the hell out of their bid and then claimed, in a remarkably deceitful way, that, "there were unexpected mudslides and other unplanned contingencies that drove the cost up." That's pretty funny given what happened to the first company that went bankrupt trying to build a canal through Panama:

The technical difficulties of operating in the wet tropics dogged the project. Particularly disastrous were recurrent landslides into the excavations from the bordering water-saturated hills, and the death toll from malaria and yellow fever. In the end, insufficient capital and financial corruption ended the project. The Panama Canal Company declared itself bankrupt in December 1888 and entered liquidation in February 1889.

The U.S. Embassy in Panama had an interesting cable on the subject back when the project was kicked off. You can read it here. It has classification markings.  One of the items mentioned in the cable was funny. It mentions a quote from a Bechtel employee who said they couldn't pour the concrete required for the job for under $4 billion. Oddly, one of the "contingencies" mentioned above had to do with the extra-shoddy concrete that the SCTG tried to pawn off on the project. Alas, gone are the days when you could get good concrete like the Romans used 2000 years ago.  Read that article about lime and volcanic ash in Roman concrete. It's brilliant chemical engineering from 2000 years ago.

Ship searching for wider Panama Canal

This kind of lowball estimating always peaks my interest because it is so predictable. How anybody can actually write a contract with a European consortium for major work, without requiring it to post a substantial performance bond, is beyond me. 

Maersk Lines stopped using the Panama canal effective April last year. Transit fees for a ship with 4,500 containers had tripled in the previous 5 years to $450,000 per transit. They figure it's more cost effective to use larger ships and send them through the Suez Canal to get goods from China to the east coast of the U.S..

Isn't it also amazing that they are talking about a one-way trade in goods? There's no talk anywhere of containers filling up with goods made in America and passing through any canals enroute to China or Russia or Europe or Japan.

I hope that my buddy Chuck (R) will keep this sort of thing in mind as he arranges for the most economical cut-throat return shipment of all our combat gear from Afghanistan. That is presuming he can wheedle it passed our very good friends in Pakistan. Somebody in the Cinque Follies should also keep this old story in mind.

Ending a naval wrangle that highlighted the logistical weakness of the Canadian military, Canadian troops swung down from a helicopter today to board an American merchant ship that for almost three weeks had held three Canadian soldiers and 10 percent of Canada's armored might hostage on the high seas over nonpayment of a shipping bill.

Without any sea-lift capacity of its own, Canada moves its personnel and materiel either by private freighter or by arranging rides to wars and peacekeeping assignments aboard the ships of other NATO countries. This afternoon, with the money owed by a Montreal shipping company still unpaid, Canada's defense minister, Art Eggleton, ordered soldiers from a Canadian naval vessel, the Athabaskan, to board the merchant ship, the Katie, which had been anchored in international waters off the southeast coast of Newfoundland.

History has a funny way of repeating itself. I can see very clearly right now, in my mind's eye, a USN SEAL team fast-roping their way onto some private ship carrying parts of the 1st Infantry Division home from Pakistan. A private ship belonging to a company one of Chuck's (R) buddies just stiffed after services were rendered. You know, maybe a Disadvantaged Veteran Owned businessman's company.

HIGHER HONOR

If the Secretary of Defense jumped out from behind a bush tomorrow and offered me a job as an actual U.S. Air Force General, I'd decline on the spot. I realize that I am not suited for such a dismal and horrific honor. I chanced upon this article in Popular Mechanics about a disgraced Air Force General's last interview. I read both the article and this report below which was linked there:

which somehow has found its way into the innertubes. The general, it appears, drinks, likes women, and smokes cigars. THAT BASTARD!!!

In addition to that trifecta of immorality, the Ms. claimed that the general was late and drunk and rude, possibly while engaged in drinking 25 toasts at one dinner at which the Russian Federation was NOT pushing alcohol.  In my experience, the General was always where he was supposed to be when he was supposed to be there and wearing the appropriate uniform. If it sometimes appeared otherwise to outside observers that was only because they didn't understand the rules. Only the Air Force would goon that up and proclaim that the general was late or indisposed.

I did JAGMANs as a younger man and the reports never ventured into such hysterical paroxysms of outrage as what the Investigator did as when it learned that even though the Colonel had told the General's aide that he might need up to 3 hours for the deposition, the General had to stop after an hour to reschedule an appointment. That dirty rotten BASTARD!!!

I have a theory. The USAF has been so sissified that a single sip of beer lays them flat out under the table. They have no resistance to alcohol, smoke or good looking women since they never experience any of that on the job. And should you wonder at the intemperance of my language, try reading the Air Force Inspector General's report. It reads like Kim Jong Un's investigator's report on Kim's late uncle. You know; the one that was recently torn to pieces and eaten by 120 starving dogs.

Seriously, Chuck. You can take that job and shove it.