But at least I don't have a moment to spare to reflect on our sad, dangerous, out of touch and corrupt government ,. , ,

Okay, so I've been away from home, and will continue to be so until the end of March. Very little time available to think of anything consequential, midst all of the child care going on. I think child care used to be easier forty years ago -- I don't remember it being this tiring.

As for the rest, well, the first part of February about the most exciting thing we did was watch the snow fall. Now, the most exciting thing I'm doing is watching the snow melt.

I have become quite good at putting a little four month old baby to sleep, thus earning the name, "Mr. Excitement."

The only problem now, is that I cannot either stand or sit without quietly rocking back and forth at the exact best rhythm to put a baby to sleep. Of course, I now resemble one of those poor wretches who sit and rock all day by reason of a brain injury.

I worry about becoming a head banger.

Hooray for Hollywood . . .

my bride and I watched Gone with the Wind a few days ago. It's a great old movie, made, I think, in 1942, maybe 1941. More importantly, compare it to nearly anything coming out from the movie industry in the last few years and I think it's clear that the industry has basically lost its way.

It's a matter of values.

Some people are irony impaired . . .

Some people in North Carolina intend to protest the requirement that voters show photo identification to vote. Showing ID = bad. Might suppress votes.

Of course, that is exactly what the id requirement is intended to do, suppress votes, that is, votes cast by people who are not eligible to be registered to vote, including "duplicate" votes of voters registered in more than one jurisdiction, disenfranchised voters because of felonies, and fraudulently cast voters of dead people, etc.

And that's why requiring I.D. is thought to be bad -- because no one knows what might happen or who might win, if the traditional ways of rigging election returns are eliminated. Why, if you allowed elections to be decided by only those citizens who took the trouble to properly register and vote, and you counted only those votes and reported the total accurately, well, that would be like telling citizens that their vote mattered. And politicians benefit from the cynical conclusion that votes don't matter. A citizen needn't bother to research the issues or character of the candidate, if his vote won't matter anyway. And if he does vote, since his vote probably doesn't matter anyhow he can do so confidently with little thought, because if it turns out his vote was foolish, it doesn't matter anyway, right?

Anyhow, here's the good part. To participate in the march to protest requiring photo identification to vote, protesters have to show photo identification!

You can't make this stuff up. Makes you real likely to think highly of the political thinkers who thunk up this stuff.

In other words, they really thunk up the place.

"The mother of mediocrity is the university." . . .

A plague of ambitious mediocrities -

It's worth reading and thinking about.

The State of the Union cotillion . . .

A little bit ago I heard Ex-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi say in an interview that the Republicans should take their party back from all the extremists who are ruining it for everybody. Said extremists hate government, hate science, and hate Obama. So Republicans should take their party back. She probably should have thrown in "hate women" and it would have improved the rhythm of her rhetoric without in any way blotting the essential silliness of the statement, nor added any element of truthfulness to it. So I'm going to assume she left women out of the hate equation inadvertently, and give her credit for it

And by the way, the "Ex" part of Pelosi's title ought to suggest to her what the mood of the electorate is, seeing as how the Democrats remain the minority party in the House even after President Obama's re-election. But maybe she missed that.

Anyhow, she was being interviewed on the eve of the Presidential State of the Union report. Hey, he could have just put it in writing and had it delivered to Congress, as was done for many years. But if he had done that, he would have deprived all of our political masters of the satisfaction to be gained by assembling the entirety of government, legislative, executive, judicial, together in one large room for them to congratulate themselves and preen before television cameras as the President pranced into room, hyped up in knowledge that these weighty political lords and barons intended to stand and applaud each presidential utterance, burp, and pose.

Maybe Mrs. Pelosi is right in a way. I don't myself consider myself a Republican and haven't done so for easy fifteen years. But I think the Republicans would certainly benefit by taking their party back, as Pelosi suggests. I just don't think the people running the Party are all that wrapped up in hating government, science, women, and Obama.

I know I don't hate government, being of Social Security age, and I don't hate science, and I'm really sure I don't hate women. I've never met anybody who plain hated government in general, even if they hated this particular government in this moment. I've never met anybody who hated science, even if they thought certain scientists were roaring, raging, flaming, gaping assholes. I've met people who hated women but they didn't start out that way. It kinda crept up on them. And I don't think all that many, if any, people hate Obama. Despise him, sure. Loathe him, maybe. Fear him, probably. But not hate. Hey, nobody has even tried to shoot him yet, and remember, Reagan got shot, Kennedy, Jack and Bobbie, got shot. There's precedent, in other words, and when somebody shoots, that's hate.

For that matter maybe the Democrats should try to take their party back from the redistributers, and the regulators, and the race pimps, and the cronies, and the Marxists, and all the fellow-traveling mouthbreathers infected with excessive self-esteem earned by claiming to care about social issues and sciency stuff, and who demonstrate the same by attending the required demonstrations and sporting caring bumper stickers, many of which nearly make sense but even if they don't, entitle the bearer to a warm, smug feeling of superiority.

On the other hand, why should Republicans, in particular, bother? They're pretty much against most of the stuff President Obama wants to do to the country, good and hard, but it really doesn't matter who is in charge of the party. Why? President Obama has stated that he intends to go it alone, without lawful legislation of Congress, and with or without the approval, advice and consent of Congress. He is going to rule by executive order and doesn't need any stinkin' legal restrictions imposed on him by so-called constitutional limitations. It doesn't matter what the Republicans and Democrats in Congress do, or don't do.

Deadlocked? Who cares? Not President Obama? Doesn't need 'em.

It occurs to me that President Obama's stated intention to institute his agenda by bypassing constitutional procedures makes the votes of Congressmen, Republican and Democrat alike, meaningless, and in turn, makes the votes of the citizens who elected Congressmen to represent them in Congress, likewise, meaningless. We are, essentially, deprived of legislative representation when the executive legislates through executive order.

In that connection, I seem to recall that some years ago a group of upset Americans gathered together one night in Boston to communicate objection to being deprived of effective representation in their legislature of the time -- Parliament.

Just a stray thought, probably means nothing.

State of the Union address . . . Snore! . . .

Blah blah, income equality . . . All Americans . . . War on women . . . The environment . . . Fair share . . . Protecting privacy . . .

Any surprises are sure to be inadvertent and every solution to every problem, real, imagined, or invented, will be at least 75 years stale and a proven failure, at best, and lethal, at worst.

But I'd watch it if there were any chance he'd be heckled. "A consummation devoutly to be wished."

Really? Give me a break . . .

Those who know me know I'm really into golf. So it shouldn't be a surprise that I'm interested in pro golf tournaments. I like to watch the LPGA because the ladies frequently show better fundamentals than the men, and I can learn from that, and I have a better chance of driving the ball as far as the women.

This summer the ladies are having a major event at Pinehurst a week after the PGA will have a tournament on the exact same course. That should really be interesting, to see what the women can do in comparison to the men.

But I heard that some of the ladies are worried that the course will be beat up from the men playing on it just a week before.

Give me a break. It's Pinehurst for heavens sake, and you can bet your grandmother that the course will have pretty much nothing but maintenance for the intervening few days between the tournaments. No golf course is perfect but tournament golf course preparation is a far cry from what most of us see -- even club golfers.

And public courses? The ladies are worried about three and four day old divots? You go to public courses and you'll even find divots on the driving tees where some poor hacker has taken a divot with his driver, four inches behind the ball and two inches deep -- after having done the same thing with a practice swing. Then he does it again, fifteen yards ahead, because that's as far as the ball dribbled after he hacked up the tee box. Then, eventually, he slams his putter into the green leaving a small trench, because he missed his fourth putt that was only eight feet away from the hole.

So what do everyday golfers do in such conditions? Play it as it lies and accept what the course gives you. That's what golf asks.

Give me a break. Top pro golfers are a coddled bunch. Watch one of 'em throw a small tantrum because a camera clicked or a mosquito farted in the next county, as he was making a backswing. Compare that to competitive gymnastics where a little fifteen year old girl will do a cartwheel into a front flip and land in perfect balance with her little feet on a four inch balance beam, all while music is playing elsewhere in the gym for floor exercises while the spectators are cheering and hooting for some other little girl in a different location flying around the uneven parallel bars. And pro golfers want silence as they hit a ball.

No golfer ever risked a concussion or broken collarbone or a shredded knee while competing.

Well, one thing. Pro golfers, men and women, don't get paid for just showing up. Sure, they live a coddled life compared to most of us, but their comfort is nothing to pro basketball players, who get a million or two for dogging it up and down the court, whether the team wins or loses, after having been exempted from all the normal expectations and rules of civilized human social behavior from the age of fourteen on, because they reached the height of six foot three in the eighth grade.

Give me a break.

Profiles in Courage, updated . . .

Senator Diane Feinstein complains that while there was a protest going on around her house, there was a drone, spying on her through her window. Turns out that it wasn't a drone; it was a little $50.00 pink toy helicopter.

This woman is on the Senate Intelligence Committee, so, of course, she knows all about drones. She is also just as smart about guns.


California has a lot to answer for.

Christie's bridge . . .

I guess Christie's boys figured that if it's okay to shut down federal parks and monuments in political retaliation for the federal budget sequester, it should be okay to shut down a bridge for political repairs. Haven't they been paying attention to the media for the last twenty years?

Portland, the well-planned, model . . .

I've lived in Portland, now, for a little over twenty years. When I go "back east" to visit friends and family and generally socialize in the area, I frequently encounter a bewildering admiration for the wonderful way Portland manages city life for its inmates citizens. Portland is a model for desired solutions to modern urban issues.

So I'm told.

Well, I guess if you tilt your head to the left and look at it "this way," Portland is a model -- that is, it's a model if your model is meant as a teaching device for how blithering elected officials can blissfully spend public funds in great gobs and handfuls on personally much loved projects, without even asking for voter approval, all because they have in unerring belief in their ability to know what is the right thing. When you know what is right you need not test your notions, or consider possible adverse consequences, or compare cost to benefit, or even check your arithmetic. And our politicians are the kind of politicians who just know.

Of course, if you tilt your head to the other side, and look at it "this way," well, you'll just get dizzy.

For example, our water bureau just agreed to sell a house for a little under $400,000. It was probably a good idea to get rid of the house, and the money is going to good use, to offset a bunch of expenses. Where did they get the house? Well, a few years back some elected disaster decided that the water bureau should build a demonstration house, to show how modern methods could save water, 'n stuff. The budgeted cost to build the house was predicted to be about $250,000. So, they did it. Hey, showing people how to save water is a righteous thing to do!

The house they built was relatively modest, three bedrooms and two baths, and a little over 2000 square feet in living area. No biggie, right?

Except, they didn't get the needed approval of the City Council. They just went ahead. And, ratepayer funds were spent to build the house, in spite of the fact that the law says that ratepayer receipts are to be spent to supply water, only, not houses. Oh, and they spent a little more than $900,000 to build the damn thing. For those of you who recently graduated with a liberal arts degree, the arithmetic is $900,000 cost, less $400,000 sales price, equals $500,000, (that's a half a million dollars if zeros confuse you) flushed down the drain, for an unauthorized project paid for illegally, at a cost three times what is should have been, if the numbers they used to justify the thing was more than mere mumblings in their ears by dream unicorns.

Was anybody indicted? Well, some people in less enlightened cities might be a little perturbed off if their elected officials behaved in this way, but this is Portland and we expect this sort of thing from our political betters because we are a model for how other cities could and should do things. Portland is the city that works. It says so on city properties.

What's the proof of that bold statement? Well, for one thing, we have a tram. It goes from down there, to up there, despite complaints of homeowners who were concerned about the tram, a gondola on wires, pulled over their house. And then, a big pedestrian bridge was built, so as to enable pedestrians to get to the tram from up here so they could go down there, to get on the tram to go up there. Evidently insufficient pedestrians were using the tram because they didn't want to dodge traffic to get to the tram. But the tram is a pleasant way to go and take a ride from down there to up there if you need something to do with the family some afternoon, because, hey, we have a tram.

For another instance, we have bicycles. On the whole, bicyclists and bicycles are great. Oh, there's a few bicyclists around for whom bicycling is a divine calling, and a few more who bike in protest of capitalism, but mostly, bicycles are great. Who wouldn't enjoy seeing cyclists in elastic pants peddling their legs like crazy just to give their ass a ride, said ass being above the level of their ears? Yeah, mostly, bikes are great.

It's politics that suck. Portland politicians worship and revere bicycles, so much so that they are now converting four lane direct routes into two lane direct routes, so as to give bikes an easier commute. Because a ratio of seventy-five cars for every two bikes means -- we need more bikes. Oh, and because cars are an anachronism, anyhow, in a hip city like Portland.

Why would anachronistic cars be required, when we have a splendid transit system, including choo choos? Because there is nothing anachronistic about trains, a 19th century gamechanger, here, now in the 21st century. We like trains; we can ride for free, if we don't get caught. And our political masters like trains, so much so that they are spending public funds to build light rail into places which have emphatically said they don't want Portland light rail. Not that those places know what's good for them, being merely voters. Of course, adding trains to places where they are unwanted is not an easy task. Bridges must be built, roads must the closed and re-routed, and properties must be confiscated, because that's what us modern, progressive, hip cities like us, do.

Nevertheless, Portland traffic is generally managed creatively.

I remember an old three stooges movie where the stooges were plumbers. One of 'em was was trying to fix a leak, and kept making pipe connection after pipe connection, chasing the leak around, until he was completely and creatively caged in his own pipes. It's that's kind of creativity I mean. For example, the northbound exit on I-5 to the Ross Island bridge cannot be described accurately to anybody who hasn't been there. It's mighty stooge-worthy.

Something else that Portland is good at is managing urban sprawl, using an "urban growth boundary." The idea is to forbid building any more city beyond arbitrary boundaries under penalty of law, thus preventing the city from becoming "too big, and too spread out, like L.A." Of course, L.A. has more people in it than the entire state of Oregon, which has lots of unused space, but Portlanders want that unused space to remain unused, so that they can "enjoy nature," which means they like to go look at it from time to time. Accordingly, the city is increasing the population density, shrinking building lot size and discouraging yards and garages which take up space where people could and should be living, so as to preserve us from urban sprawl. Why would somebody need a car in a garage when you have public transportation, like light rail and a tram?

Why do we like urban population density? Probably because it reminds some city planner of the time when he still had hair, the summer he spent in Amsterdam between junior and senior year, with it's little streets, small apartments, bicycles, pot, and prostitutes with charming accents.

I can see a possible vision of the future of Portland, now. There we all are, wearing our well-planned proletarian grey-blue clothing, all trudging in single file on our well-planned way to the transit stations to report to our allotted tasks to earn our right to a 6 by 9 cubby and three bowls of food a day at the community center, because from each according to his ability and to each according to his needs.

So, yeah. Take a look at how we do things here. Portland is a model city.

As was a not so well-planned Detroit. Once.

Ah, the wonders of corporate phone services for we, the little people . . .

Automated answering systems -- what moron thought these were a good idea?

Your call is important to us and we look forward to helping you. Please stay on the line for the next available representative. Current wait time -- forty minutes.

What that means is they don't want to hire enough people to answer the phone when it rings, because they may be paying for representatives to sit around doing nothing while waiting for the phone to ring. They are managing time efficiently, right?

I'm sure some business school moron thought this was a good idea. And I'm sure another one thought that as long as we were keeping people on the line, they might as well be listening to commercials praising the company for all the wonderful things they are doing for you.

Meanwhile, the customers' time is spent waiting around on hold when their time is just as valuable to them. is not a matter of any great importance to the company.

We, the customers, hear the message loud and clear. The words, "customer service," is code for something quite contrary.

Wonder if any of those business school morons ever thought to ask the customer, when they finally got a chance to talk to a representative, if they approved of the phone systems. Betcha they'd got a lot of no votes. And wonder if any of those business school morons thought to get a count of the number of hang-ups they get from people put on hold? Those are hell, no votes.

Not that anyone cares.

I can't wait to see what happens next . . .

Happy New Year. We go into 2014 wondering what is going to go wrong next with Obamacare.

Did you know, by the way, that the Affordable Care Act -- Obamacare -- levies a 2% tax on all health care policies? So, supposedly you gotta buy health care insurance and if you don't, you pay a penalty for being uninsured, to be collected by the IRS, and if you do buy the insurance, you pay a tax on top of the premiums you have to pay, under penalty of law.

And your friendly neighbor from IRS is gonna see to it that you pay.

Gah!

A New Year's looming on the horizon . . .

Remember? This time last year you were saying to yourself that 2012 really blew backwards, and you looked forward to 2013 because you knew that 2013 just had to be your year, because . . .

How ya feelin' about 2014?

Faithfully doing the business of government . . .

It was reported the UPS could not get all the package deliveries for Christmas done on time, by Christmas eve. Oh, and UPS drivers frequently can be seen running , not walking, from the truck to the door, to drop a package. Evidently, they were just overwhelmed despite planning for the season well ahead of time. Weather probably made things worse. Just another failure and we're used to failures by now, right?

What hasn't been so widely reported was that UPS drivers were out and making deliveries on Christmas day, when I'm sure they would have preferred being with their families.

Good job, guys. And I hope you were paid something extra for working on Christmas day, when I'm sure the customers didn't expect it. Best wishes.

By comparison, emergency unemployment benefits are due to run out at the end of this year. Not a surprise, the deadline has been notorious. Congress has been expected to take up the question of whether or not to extend the emergency benefits into next year. Congress can either decide to do it, or decide to not do it. So, what was the decision?

The decision was to go home without considering the matter one way or the other, and maybe decide what to do about it when Congress returns next year. Or maybe not.

UPS to customers: We'll get it to you as soon as we possibly can, even if we have to work on Christmas.
Congress to citizens: We'll get around to it when we get around to it, not a minute sooner, because shut up.

Merry Christmas to all . . .

As usual, I'm having a great holiday and I'll enjoy my children and grandchildren, with my wife. We're warm and dry and have more than enough to eat, with health and security. Life is good.

I know that my good fortune is not universal and for some, the season presents just that much more continuing struggle. I wish all of us, and especially those less fortunate, good things in the coming year ahead.

Where'd all the money go? . . .

When you save, you park some unneeded money somewhere -- bank, bond, stock, mattress -- in hopes that when you want to turn that money into something needed, like food or rent, it will be there. If you put the money into a bank you are thought to be prudent. If you put the money into the stock market you are thought to be a genius when the market goes up, and an unfortunate victim when the market falls, as it inevitably but unpredictably does.

When you put your money into any financial institution, bank or corporation, wonder of wonders, they don't actually keep it for you. The institution either spends it frivolously or loans it to some moron who can dress well enough to impress a lending officer. If you go to get your money out, the dollars you get are likely the result of somebody else who gave the institution some money. It's not your money; it's just money the bank owes you.

The financial institution frequently makes some money in spite of itself, in consequence of having a good lobby going in Washington. Sometimes it distributes some of the profits to you, the investor -- always first assuring that its officers get big bonuses at year end.

You, of course, would frequently not approve of how your money gets spent by the institution. And you are betting that both the money and the institution you put it into will be there when you need it to be, despite observing one institution after another bite the big one over your lifetime.

It requires a great deal of blind, unreasoning faith to make this bet, and this faith used to be called patriotism.

Nowadays, we have a new economic system. It seems a mere handful of exploited foreigners can manufacture all the products that are actually needed, and a great deal more besides. So we've turned ourselves into developers and marketers of unneeded goods and services -- just kinda to keep our hand in. Alternatively, many of us, finding there is nothing that even pretends to be productive that we can do, turn to work for the very government that pretty much screwed the system up in the first place. But most of us cannot muster sufficient cynicism or self-deception required to work for government, so we try to get jobs in the private sector, that is, laboring in some manner which hopefully makes a profit for a few years until it eventually sinks under the burden of supporting the self same governments, state, federal, and local, which we were too ashamed to work for in the first place.

Many of us basically get paid for peddling something unnecessary or possibly harmful, but if it doesn't sell we don't eat, so we keep at it anyway.

Many more of us, not wishing to peddle garbage, have become what is called -- with a straight face, mind you -- knowledge workers. We collect data and reassemble bits and pieces of it into new and exciting configurations so as to support the making of predominately inconsequential decisions, which in turn mostly have to do with how to sell more shoddy goods and unneeded services. Finally, if we are good at peddling garbage or mining data, we get to supervise others in the same sad trades, whether or not we are good at supervising.

But each and every worthless trinket that gets bought and pitched into a landfill ( a whole 'nother issue ) contributes even if only slightly to keeping some poor desperate drone alive and secure in the knowledge that somehow he matters. That drone may be you or it may be me, so spend while you can and don't be stingy. It all counts.

Of course, when times get tough, lots of us lose our worthless jobs, so we can't spend. Generally, the cause of such tough times is direct, government policies. This is known as capitalistic injustice, and is blamed on large corporations and "fat cats."

In such times, government steps in and gives money to those who are no longer getting paid for doing the stupid stuff they used to get paid for. The theory is that those people will thereby be able to continue to spend and will, in due course, continue to support this financial merry go round. But since we don't actually have a government that is quite right bright, those exalted government managers are unable to understand that every dollar they give to somebody to stimulate spending, comes from taxing somebody who now no longer has that dollar to spend because government took it. So, in fact, the effect of "stimulating" the economy which depends on spending, is really merely shifting the same spending from one sector to another, with no real actual gain. In other words, if you earned money and paid taxes, the government plan is to take money you earned and wanted to spend on something, and to give it to somebody else who didn't work and pay taxes, so he can spend it on something. Because government cares about people enough to spend your money on them. On penalty of criminal prosecution.

So hang on as long as you can, because our government leaders think that they have to keep the action going. So they are energetically whirling around in circles, because that's what big wheels do. And the fact that the economic system is slowly spinning around in one spot makes it screw itself in deeper and deeper.

In other words, we are so screwed.

'Tis the season . . .

It is now the Christmas season, and once again we can see poor little Ralphie, longing for a BB gun. I remember it well, myself. When I was about nine years old, I, like Ralphie, wanted a BB gun. More than anything.

I made sure that everyone with any capability, authority or influence around me knew that a BB gun was necessary to fulfill my destiny. And, having been raised that way, I prayed to the all knowing and all powerful Big Guy upstairs, to please see to it that the grownups would furnish me with a BB gun. And, had the opportunity presented itself at the time, I would have happily traded away all future chances of salvation in the afterlife, if the devil below would just get me a damn BB gun.

There was no BB gun under the tree that year.

However, years later, when I was sixteen and had long, long before lost hope and lost interest in BB guns, guess what? I got a BB gun for Christmas.

Thanks Dad.

Now if either the Man above or the Devil below had anything to do Dad getting me a BB gun for Christmas when I was sixteen, I can't say, but if either of them did I am obliged to observe that there is something lacking in the reliability and efficiency, and timeliness, with which wishes are granted.

By the time I got the BB gun I had discovered girls, and with all the adolescent hormones sloshing around in my body, my perpetual wish from then and for very many years later had damn little to do with BB guns. At sixteen, I was certain that BB guns wouldn't work with girls. Maybe a new red, Ford convertible . . . but not a BB gun.

So, once again, I prayed, although I was a little more circumspect in the prayerful language used to describe who, I mean what, I needed.

So did I get laid that year? I did not.

Now, years later, experiences like the foregoing and others similar have taught me that it is the wanting that is the problem. If you don't want anything in particular, you certainly won't be disappointed.

And you just might get a BB gun.

Told by Someone's German Grossfather

Und whirren goon der potterish wheel
Gespinnen mit hummen of der potter
In machen der stuff of human life
Which might den call der potter Pater

Mit der muscle here und der bonisher there
Und ein great gross lump fer der belly
Der potter bin workin und sweaten blood
To mach perfect der humanish jelly

But der wheel ist untrue und der potter ist drunk
Und der clay ist gespoilen mach schnell
Cause der huffen und puffen mit der boozener breath
Has mach humans das stupidish hell

Und so it goon from morgan to nacht
Der potter bin constantly shtinkin
Und he botches each tag der humanish slag
Und das explains a lot Ich bin thinkin.

And things that are hard . . .

Things that are hard, and things that are easy:

... The Manhattan Project, less than three and a half years,
... The Apollo moon project, less than three and a half years,
... Rebuilding the fleet after Pearl Harbor, less than three and a half years,
... Whipping Japan into submission after Pearl Harbor, less than three and a half years,

The so-called Affordable Care Act website . . . not completely working yet, after three and a half years.

Yeah, well, they didn't have computers back in those days. Computers are hard. All those floppy disks and stuff.

Equation: Failure plus Bluster equals Joyous Success. . . .

The various and sundry Obamacare proponents and pundits for the government have declared that the Obamacare website, known by some as the "Temple of Fail," has in fact met all their objectives by the end of November, just as they said it would.

We now get to see a working example of the oft-used phrase, "Close enough for government work."