A Mad Phat Round Old World

I Don't Know, But I've Been Told...

2011-10-30T07:10:00.000-07:00

Recently I received the same request from two friends who don’t know each other. Seeing on Face Book that my religious views are “agnostic but open,“ they asked that I read Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. One added The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel and even brought me a copy. I am glad I have friends of such sincerity, and I read both books. With very different approaches, each author promotes serious thought and offers profound argument for the spiritual and physical reality of Jesus.

I found each book persuasive yet not motivating. All their truths were rules for a sport in which I was not – I am not - a player. I gave some serious thought to what sport I do play in this context, and what truths I have instead of the ones for which Lewis and Stobler argue so well.

Start with the truth that if God wants you to tell you something, you are going to get the message. There was Saul, who set off for to Damascus to kill Christians and arrived as Paul the Apostle. There was the Baptist preacher who showed me where he stood in the middle of US Highway 61, drunk out of his mind one Saturday night, when suddenly he got the message that he needed to start living a very different life. Neither of these men was open, interested or cooperative, but they got their messages.

Next truth: God is infinite and we are not. We tend to think of infinite as “real big” like the national debt. Nope. Big is zero compared to infinite, which means limitless, no boundaries, all things to all people, world without end, amen.

As finite beings we see through a glass darkly. Yahweh, Vishnu, Zeus, the Great Spirit are all attempts to understand an infinite God within our finite limitations. We are like church mice trying to understand hearing the Hallelujah Chorus on Easter Sunday. God extends beyond any of our limited perceptions, and encompasses all of them. As Dirty Harry said, “A man’s got to know his limitations.” Knowing mine I can’t imagine that this infinite God appears to mankind only according to my particular limited way of understanding, and never according to any other limited way of understanding. Of all the imperfect perceptions of God mine is the only one approved by management? No way.

It seems more likely to me that an infinite God gives many different messages to many different people, guiding them toward many different ways of understanding. All limited, all imperfect, all divinely given. Have you have gotten the message that you should accept Jesus as your savior? I think it’s probably arrogant, if not outright dangerous, to do otherwise. Have you been told to witness for Christ? Then God may want to speak to someone through you – maybe by asking them to read a book. An infinite God can tell anybody anything in any way that suits.

I got my message one day when two young Mormons came to my door and I invited them in to talk for a while. One of them had been a submariner in the Navy, where he did a lot of complicated things with valves and switches. He never knew where they were going or why, the captain told him only what he needed to know to do his job. Somewhere in there, one of the three of us uttered the phrase “I’ll tell you what you need to know.”

So: Two strangers came to my house with the express purpose of addressing my religious beliefs. Nobody but me ever saw them or knew they were there. They left and I never saw them again. Out of two hours conversation I remember only a single sentence: “I’ll tell you what you need to know.” A message from God? Anything in any way that suits. I’ve concluded, over years of pondering, that I’ve been told it’s not for me to seek messages or worry about being saved. If at some point I’m supposed to accept Jesus as my savior, I’ll be told that. Maybe I’ll be told to give all my belongings to the poor, like the rich young ruler described by Matthew, Mark and Luke. Until then I only need to worry about doing what I’ve been told up to now, because that is all I need to know.

So what have I been told? This didn’t come to me in a visit from two strangers, or any other single event. It has just taken shape slowly, from uncounted thoughts and experiences that all boil down to “Love one another.” I know, grammatically it should be “Love others” or “Love thy neighbor” but “Love one another” is the phrase that flashes into my awareness daily. Often hourly. Always reminding me to ask , “Am I loving? What would I be doing different if I really were loving?”

More than once in those years, I’ve been down on my knees, saying out loud “If you want to tell me something or come to me in any way then I‘m ready, I’m open. I’m about at my limit, and I need help.” I’ve been half afraid and half hopeful, but it hasn’t mattered. It seems I don’t yet need to be told more, and until I do I’m supposed to act on my own judgment. I hear people speak of their joy and rapport with their perception of God, and I believe they’re sincere. I don’t feel that nor expect to; apparently it’s within my limitations to carry on without it.

Come Be My Light, the published writing of Mother Theresa, reveals that throughout her selfless life in India, she was completely cut off from God. There was no guidance, no joy, no union of spirit, nothing. She believed that God had abandoned her to fulfill the mission toward which she was guided in their last communication. I understood exactly what she was describing, and her experience was very reassuring. I mean, if God went radio silent on Mother Theresa and left her to carry on incommunicado...well it doesn’t seem so bad going down my own much easier road without coaching.

Like my naval Mormon visitor, I can concentrate on the valves and switches, and not worry about where the boat is going or why. I’ve been told “Love One Another” until further instructions. God will do the steering. That’s kind of a relief because most days it takes all my attention and energy just to figure out what loving means right then and there, never mind actually doing whatever it is.

Credits:

1) The image "Infinity" is from www.sgeier.net/fractals, where a very interesting artist shares some incredibly beautiful work.

2) This entire post contains no gender-specific references to God, which I thought deserved some credit.

Can You Identify These Famous Illegal Aliens?

2011-04-30T19:05:00.000-07:00

Answers at bottom.
For extra points, where and when did they alienate?

Somebody needs to say this and it might as well be me. Why? Because I enjoy enraging people by stating a different point of view. From a safe distance, to make sure their second amendment rights don't intrude on my first amendment rights.

Here it is: A huge number of the forefathers of whom we are so proud were illegal aliens when they settled the US for us. Don’t like that? I hate to mess up your opinion with facts, but…

In 1763 European Colonists (not Americans yet) were told by King George (their lawful and acknowledged sovereign for another 13 years) not to settle west of the Allegheny Mountains because there was no arrangement with the Native Americans who owned it. Of course, the European Colonists illegally alienated themselves over the line and shot enough Native Americans to grab Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Indiana and a few other future states.

Meanwhile, Mexicans were fighting and dying to win a free homeland from Spain. Once free, they allowed immigration by Americans who wanted to move to Mexico. Big mistake. As soon as there were enough of them, the former Americans threw the Mexicans out and formed an independent state so they could be Texans instead of Americans.

Ten years later, Americans (real ones; citizens of the USA) took California from the Mexicans. This seemed fair; the Mexicans’ only claim was that, like Texas, they fought and died against Spain to win it as part of a free homeland.

Fifty years later the Americans (now including Texans) decided to cut the Mexicans out of the middle and go directly to war with Spain. That got us Guam, Puerto Rico, the Phillipines and Cuba. I suppose technically the members of an army conquering another country are not illegal aliens, not even when the invaded citizens (!) fight back for three years. Whatever -- they got the job done.

Before this all became an issue, I occasionally hired some Mexican workers for house and yard work. Looking back I suspect they were "undocumented". What I know for sure about them is they worked hard, they worked fast, and they did quality work. By contrast, I have hired quite a few American “craftsmen” who seemed to think the Constitution gave them the right to overcharge for doing everything half-ass.

Sure there are some dirt bags and free loaders in the illegal alien ranks. You think there are no US citizens who are dirt bags and free loaders? I would rather judge a person by what they do, not by where they were born or who their parents were.

Imagine that we renounce all 300 million US citizenships and grant citizenship only to the first 280 million who come forward and pass the test for naturalized citizenship. My guess is that a huge number of illegal aliens would gain citizenship, displacing “citizens” who are really just residents – they haven't gotten off their butts since the doctor spanked them in the delivery room. But by thunder it was an American delivery room!

Our forefathers got citizenship the old-fashioned way. They earned it. And in a great many cases they earned it by doing exactly what a great many illegal aliens are doing today. They valued the opportunity for political and economic freedom, and the welfare of their families as the most important values in the world, and they endured hardship, danger, toil and poverty to achieve what they valued most.

If you don’t acknowledge that there are illegal aliens like that, as well as dirt bags and free loaders, then I suspect that in 1776 you would have chosen to be a Tory burning the homes of those dirt bag colonists who were committing treason against their lawful King.

Answers - 1): Davy Crockett, Texas 1836
2) Daniel Boone, Kaintuck and points west of the Allegheny Mountains, 1763
3) Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant, Mexico, 1846
4) General John J. "Black Jack" Pershing, Phillipines, 1899
5) Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, Cuba, 1898

My Future's So Bright --

2010-12-18T18:53:00.001-08:00

I don’t like this prediction. If anybody can make a realistic case for some rosier outlook, I will receive it eagerly.

Ten to thirty years from now the United States will go broke. There is not the faintest bump on the horizon that holds any hope. Maybe in ten years, maybe in thirty, the Chinese or somebody – probably the Chinese and a lot of somebodies – will give us the same choice that we have offered so many countries that we deemed fiscally irresponsible: Cut out all un-necessary spending or we will cut off your credit.

They, not we, will decide what is necessary. They won’t care about entitlements, about national defense, or anything else that we think we can’t live without. Millions of people who sell goods or services to the government will be out of work. They will stop buying consumer goods and services that keep millions of others employed. Congress will vote a pot of money to save the day, but will be in the same straits as Old Mother Hubbard.

People will default on their mortgages and car notes and credit cards. Millions will be homeless, surrounded by dirt-cheap houses that they can’t afford, and the credit industry will have nothing to loan them anyway.

Illegal immigration will no longer be a problem as the Mexican peasants realize there is nothing in the U.S. better than there is at home. It will be a problem for Canada, as Americans sneak across the border seeking a livelihood.

People will rebel, march on Washington, form radical political movements. Nothing will do any good. Recovery, like prevention, would require sacrifice and commitment to common goals. These virtues are beyond our abilities. We and our children will pass into history full of bitterness, blame, and resentment over the loss of illusory expectations.

Forty to sixty years from now the next generation will come to adulthood in poverty unknown to us since the Great Depression. Many will live like the Somalians of today. Those with jobs will barely generate a livable income and most of that will be extracted in taxes to pay the costs of debt. Roads, airports, power and communication grids, bridges, sewers, and water systems will decay faster than their limited resources can repair them. They will hate us for our legacy.

One hundred years from now that generation's descendants will begin to pay off the interest on the interest on the wealth we borrowed and squandered. People will begin to hope and eventually believe that their labor may yield some benefit in their lives. They will embrace a grim determination to make better lives for their children. They will have regained the ability to sacrifice and commit to common goals.

One hundred to one hundred fifty years from now will be a period of national pride and triumph, as our descendants rebuild a functioning nation from the wreckage. The national memory will lose its resentment, but will retain a scorn for our generation, and its destiny will be guided by a determination never to sink to the depths that we so willingly sought.

Hey, Kids! Make Your Own BP (Backyard Pool) Gusher!

2010-06-25T19:03:00.000-07:00

My granddaughter Alexis, 6 made a functioning model of BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster in our back yard pool. She had a hollow foam “noodle” float, about 3 inches in diameter and 3 feet long. The game was to fill it with water, point it up in the air, and blow the water out the top like a whale spout.

It was hard to get the water started, because she was using her little lung power to lift a column of water about 3 feet high. When she got it moving, a little would trickle out of the top. Now there wasn’t as much water to lift, so it got a little easier. As she kept blowing, there was less and less water and it moved faster and faster until the last cupful or so blew out in a shower of drops with a satisfying “Poof!”

Now imagine the noodle as a couple of miles of pipe with the Deepwater Horizon oil rig at the top. At the bottom, playing the role of Alexis’ lungs, is a big pocket of oil and gas exerting thousands of pounds per square inch of pressure. Just like the noodle, it’s the weight of water in the pipe that keeps the oil and gas down, defeating the huge pressure that wants to escape. That may not be enough, so drillers keep the hole filled with heavy, gooey mud that is much harder to blow out than water alone would be.

But suppose the mud is a little too thin or the pressure below increases a little. Oil and gas move up a little, pushing mud out the top. Now there is less weight of mud holding the oil and gas down, so it moves up a little more, pushing out more mud. Just like the noodle, things move faster once they get started. Which means there is not much time to operate the infamous “blowout preventer,” seal the top of the pipe, and keep everything– mud, oil, gas – down in the hole.

It takes months to drill an oil well, and when you’re finished you slip a plug into the hole and pump in a load of cement to harden below the plug and seal the hole permanently. You want to do this fast, because you have a rig at the top of the pipe costing you hundreds of thousands of dollars every day, and doing nothing but keeping a hole filled with mud. This plug is not like bath tub stopper – it’s a huge chunk of metal that you’re poking around at the bottom of a mile-deep hole. If the plug doesn’t fit well, then concrete can leak past it, mud can settle into the concrete, and you only think your hole is sealed. BP had a lot of trouble getting their plug in place, which took time and put them behind schedule in getting that expensive rig on its way.

To check for leaks they did a “positive pressure test.” They pumped up the pressure and waited to see if it held or dropped. Just like Alexis’ float ring in the pool – if it stays firm, there’s no leak. If it gets floppy, there is. Trouble is, oil and gas flowing up from below can keep the pressure high, so you get fooled. A “negative pressure test” reduces the casing pressure and if any oil and gas is leaking, the pressure will go back up. If the pressure stays low, you know for sure there’s nothing coming through. This test would have proven that oil and gas was leaking. But they didn’t run it..

Based on the deceptive results of the positive pressure test, they started pumping out the mud and replacing it with sea water. The water weighed far less the mud so it exerted less pressure to hold down the oil and gas. Before switching mud to water, they could have put in a second concrete plug as a backup if the first plug leaked. But they didn’t.

So far there wasn’t a clear indication of a problem, just a lack of assurance that everything was OK. But that morning they measured more mud coming out of the hole than there was water coming in. Only way that could happen was if oil and gas was moving up and pushing the mud out. Knowing the physics of foam noodles, it won’t surprise you that the amount coming out was increasing. Even at this late point, there might have been a chance if they had started pumping heavy mud back in to push the oil and gas back down. They didn’t.

A while later they stopped pumping in sea water, and the pressure continued to increase – only way that could happen was if oil and gas was moving up. But no action was taken. A while later the pressure really shot up. It was reported that mud was flowing out of the hole so fast it was going over sides of the rig. Then the oil and gas reached the rig itself, and something ignited it.

This is a long story of assuming things are OK without real evidence, and of ignoring evidence that things are not OK. Before you get too mad at BP for these flaws, consider that this is pretty much the way we run our Federal government.

Who Washes The Walrus?

2010-06-17T21:46:00.001-07:00

Full Disclosure: I worked for Exxon Mobil for 40 years. My Dad worked for Exxon Mobil for 33 Years. For sixty-one years, 1946 - 2007, either he or I went in the gate at the Baton Rouge Refinery every morning. For every dollar I’ve paid in taxes or other wise contributed to the economy, probably ninety-five cents came to me from ExxonMobil.

When the Exxon Valdez hit Bligh Reef in 1989 it cost me and my dad money. He had to defer getting my Mom a new sewing machine. I had to borrow more to put my kids through school. Hell, I had to borrow to get my next divorce! But we deserved the punishment, because we were employees and shareholders and we were sloppy and let that boat get out of the channel. But it sure was a lesson to me – it’s been 21 years and I haven’t driven a single big tanker onto a rock in all that time!

My dad and I resented the Valdez, because we and everybody we knew worked hard to avoid that kind of stupidity. We felt like we were tarnished by other people’s screw-up. We had our own, of course. Over the next few years we had some serious incidents – with fatalities – at Baton Rouge. We hated that, and we looked hard to see where we had screwed up. We found that all the way through, our people had chosen actions not because they cost less, but because we genuinely believed they were the safest way. They probably were the safest way, but you can drive the safest car on the safest road in the world, and you still may get in a wreck. Doing a good job doesn’t guarantee against failure, but it sure does improve your odds.

Exxon (without Mobil then) put in a detailed ongoing review system of every aspect of our operation, which is still in effect. We thought it was going to be a big paper exercise, aimed completely at covering the Big Boy derrieres in case of another bad event. Today, all of us believe that system is the reason Baton Rouge has not had a single major incident since 1994.

That same system applies to the people who drill holes in the ocean floor for ExxonMobil. This week, congressional testimony made clear they have a few holes in their system as well as in the ocean floor. Their disaster plan doubtless had a lot good about it, but it included instructions on how to protect walruses from the oil. In the Gulf of Mexico, those are well-protected already, because they all live in Sea World. Rex Tillerson, ExxonMobil CEO, had the grace to say outright that it was an embarrassment to have that in the plan.

Somebody said “Well that proves he didn’t read the plan.” Of course he didn’t. He can’t read all the documents he’s accountable for; not if he had himself wired into a Cray supercomputer. He has phalanxes of managers and staff people to write and read those documents. Somewhere between the environmental engineer at the keyboard and Rex Tillerson, people stop reading the original document and start reading summaries or PowerPoints that tell them the main points. It’s possible that Tillerson not only didn’t read the plan, but never talked to anybody who had personally read it.

A lot of very big, very good, very safe operations have been carried out this way. It’s a good system – if at every level, people make clear that getting it right is more important than getting it done. As that plan went up the line, somebody gave higher priority to “done” than to “right.” The people above them didn’t know that, and didn’t want it that way. But they accepted the plan or summary without asking the questions to make unmistakably clear that “done” is worthless without “right.”

I know some of the people in that chain. Believe me, they would have preferred root canal without anesthetic to having Tillerson be embarrassed before Congress by a report they passed up the line to him. I am very confident that the next morning they were asking themselves “How in the world did I manage to convey that it was OK to bring me a plan with walruses in it?” I strongly suspect Tillerson is asking himself that question, and he’s asking his subordinates how they think he conveyed that message. And he’s asking “What are you going to change to ensure that you never ever again bring me a plan that has walruses in it?”

What I feel good about is that whatever they change, it won’t be a change for next week or the next plan. It will be a change that holds good for years, long after the people involved in the walrus debacle have moved on and probably retired. For decades, “walruses in the plan” will be a code phrase meaning a dimwitted proposal.

What I feel bad about is that I am not sure those questions are being asked, and those changes are being made, at BP and some of the others. Yesterday somebody sent me the first technical details I’ve seen on what happened. What a read didn’t make me feel any better about BP.

I’ll post a summary of them, after running it through my Engineers Anonymous group to make sure there’s some hope of it being understandable.)

BP is gonna pay, and it's gonna cost you!

2010-06-16T08:25:00.000-07:00

Obama has finally said we’ll make BP Pay! He got mad! The media, and the public, and Congress believe this has major importance in dealing with the crisis. Wow, he might grow up to be President someday!

Making “BP” pay summons up images of fat cat company executives who wear tuxes to work, have multi-million dollar flats in Manhattan, are driven to work in limos, and skin out of paying any taxes. You think THOSE guys are going to pay? If so, then you probably thought Goldman Sachs wouldn’t get their bonuses last year. The payers will be the "stock holders and lenders" who funded all this evil. (Image; fat cat Wall Street executives who wear tuxes to work, have multi-million dollar flats in Manhattan, are driven to work in limos, and skin out of paying any taxes.)

You’re right -- these guys will pay, but wrong image. Actually, the Funders of Evil include your Sunday School teacher who worked at the BP refinery for 30 years, your grandmother whose advisor bought BP stock when energy looked good, and the Neighborhood Watch organizer who invested in an energy bond mutual fund. Also, of course, you if you are connected to BP in any one of a thousand ways, few of which you know about.

So if you support making BP pay just look in the mirror. Then reach right in, grab yourself by the throat, and choke the LIFE out of that greedy, risk-taking, irresponsible bastard. Get it over with now, or you will pay in ways that will hurt longer and worse!

BP will punish a few guys internally. Most of them had little to do with causing the incident. The guys who designed the rig and its blowout preventer mechanism are long gone; they probably worked for an engineering and construction company instead of BP. The BP guys who signed off on the design have since been promoted and are looking down the throats of their replacements, saying “How could you let this happen?” The guys who made risky decisions on the spot will get rated primarily on how good a job they do reacting to the crisis, not their role in creating it. Least hurt of all will be the executives who set the standards for cost-risk decisions, who allowed people to believe it was OK to cut costs as long as there “probably” wouldn’t be disastrous consequences.

The one thing sure about the outcome is that the poor, persecuted CEO of BP will, as he wished, “Get his life back.” A lot of others who did nothing wrong, will not be as lucky.

A Day for a Non-Veteran, Too

2009-11-11T17:52:00.000-08:00

I would like everyone to meet Herman Knose.

Herman is not a veteran because he never left the Army. Near Salerno, Italy his platoon was cut off by two German armored columns supported by heavy artillery and infantry. I have known Herman’s name for years. I have many friends who were with him on that day. Some tried to put together a defense and surrendered when it became hopeless. Some hid in barns, some ran for the woods along the river.

Herman may have done any or all of these, but no one knew then and no one knows now. We do know that after that day, September 11, 1943, the war moved on and left the countryside quiet and nearly deserted. In December, somebody walking in those woods - by now miles behind the front – came across what was left of Herman.

Herman’s 2nd cousin, Susan Knose, took interest in his story and came to reunions of the 2nd Chemical Mortar Battalion – Herman’s unit, and my father’s. She gave me this picture, and suddenly Herman was not a name. He was a cheerful-looking young guy with blond hair that I'm sure he thought was thinning too early. He reminded me very much of a Norwegian engineering student that I knew many years ago and I couldn’t help projecting that young man’s friendly, personable manner onto Herman.

Herman was married. Susan has become a friend of his wife, who was devastated by the long uncertainty of her husband’s fate and the eventual knowledge of his loss. Later she married again and raised a family. Somehow I think Herman would be glad for her – he doesn’t look like a man to resent others for having happiness that was denied to him.

One day I walked along a river in Italy, on the edge of the woods where Herman lay all through the autumn months of 1943. I wondered what he saw, what he thought as he disappeared into those shadows. I wonder still. I wonder about the farm he never tended, the career he never had, the house he never owned. About the children his wife never had the chance to bear him.

Susan found he was buried at first in Italy, and later was brought back to the U.S. and buried in a family grave. From there, wordless, he reminds me every day to be grateful for all that I have.
That is the only way I can give any meaning to the fact that I have so much that he never had.

What's Cap and Trade?

2009-10-28T22:27:00.000-07:00

Somebody asked me, since I was in the oil business for four decades, to explain this cap and trade business for reducing global warming emissions.

As a sensible plan, cap and trade ranks a little worse than the Pope selling dispensations for sin.

Cap and trade says that if you increase your emissions (say, for a new manufacturing investment that will create jobs) then you pay a fine to the government. That's the cap part. OR you can pay money to somebody who has reduced their emissions. For their reductions, they have the right to make an increase without paying a fine, and they sign over this right to you. You show the authorities that the other guy made a reduction that offsets your increase, and you can go ahead with your investment/increase without paying the fine. If you pay less for the offset rights than you would for the fine, then that's to your advantage. That's the trade part -- you're trading their reduction for your increase, and total emissions stay the same.

There will probably be a market for offsets -- for example, you could buy for $100 the right to increase emissions by 10 pounds per year. You wouldn't actually pay any particular person who made reductions, any more than you pay an individual to buy shares in the stock market. And if you reduce by 10 pounds a year, you can sell that in the market for $100. If the government wants to reduce emissions instead of holding even, then they can say that reducing by 1o pounds a year only lets you sell offset rights for 8 pounds a year.

Cap and trades have already been used, for example to reduce smog-related emissions in some cities. The benefits are:

1) An incentive for people to voluntarily make emission reductions that cost the least to achieve, and then make a profit by selling the rights. This is better than "command and control" reductions which require one guy to spend a huge wad for a very small reduction, while the guy down the road, who could get ten times the benefit for that money, spends only a little money and leaves all those cheap reductions unachieved.
2) If are you plan to make an increase, you have an incentive to make reductions for several years in advance to keep your total the same and avoid any fines. This means you will go look for reduction opportunities that you otherwise wouldn't care about.

So what's not to like?

1) All this requires a massive swapping of money which must be carried out by a massive new bureaucracy
2) It requires a massive number of government regulators to make sure that all the massive reductions claimed were actually made.
2) The price of offsets goes up and down, so somebody contemplating spending money to reduce emissions can't be sure of recovering their costs.
3) Most of the reductions would have taken place for some other reason than cap and trade. For example, if you put in a more efficient home heater it will reduce emissions but you did it to reduce your fuel bill , not because you could make money from cap and trade. Imagine all those money losing plants that GM is shutting down. GM would be able to sell those reductions to offset increases, which allows somebody else to increase their emissions and "use up" the offsets that the GM plants are no longer emitting.
4) There are lot of lawsuits about how to interpret the rules. For example, should you be able to sell offsets by comparing the emissions from your new heater to those from your old heater when it was new? Or by comparing the emissions from your new heater to those from your old heater when you replaced the old, rusted, clogged shadow of it's former self that it had become by the time you ditched it. If the latter argument prevails you get to sell two or three times as much offset as the other way. The regulators, on the other hand, see this as allowing two or three times as much increase from somebody else. So there will be a lawsuit to decide how much offset you can sell. Multiply that by approximately one jillion. And for all this cap and trade has not caused any reduction, the whole argument is about how much we can add while pretending we aren't.

So the net effects are:
a) GM gets some money, which probably goes to upper management as bonuses
b) The economy loses the same number of auto workers as it would have anyway.
c) The economy gains (if that's the word) financial bureaucrats and government regulators.
d) Emissions stay the same as they were before.
e) The lawyers make money. Which is the only universal principle in modern American society.

Health Care "Duh" Bait

2009-08-11T19:01:00.000-07:00

It’s interesting that people are showing up at health care discussions with the avowed purpose of disrupting discussion. “Interesting” in the same sense that root canal is interesting: i.e, painful and indicative of a hole in somebody’s head.

Why do they do this? The following possible motives occur to me.

1) Their opponent has valid ideas that they can’t refute so they want to keep people from hearing the ideas.

2) They think their opponent is wrong or is lying and everybody else is too stupid to realize it.

3) They are too ignorant or inarticulate to be able to expose the errors and untruths that their opponent is speaking.

4) They have been spreading lies about what their opponent is saying and they will be exposed as liars if people hear what the opponent is really saying.

5) They themselves are ignorant on the topic or too stupid to understand it, which will be revealed if serious discussion takes place.

6) They hate America and Americans and free speech and they want us to fail.

7) If people agree with their opponent then something will be done that costs them money, power or privilege, and they don’t want that regardless of the benefits to anybody else.

I’m not arguing in favor of anybody’s case here. I’m just saying that I have not figured out why anybody would intentionally prevent discussion of an important topic unless they are devoid of intelligence, honor, knowledge, integrity, objectivity, decency, courtesy and patriotism.

If anybody can come up with a reason for preventing discussion that suggests the preventer has any positive traits, I would sure like to hear them. 'Cause to be honest I am just coming up dry.

Killing Tiger Woods

2009-07-29T22:42:00.000-07:00

Every time I suggest that our current medical care system is not perfect, I get asked "So you like socialized medicine? How will you like it when you're denied treatment because you're too old? Oh, so you want the government to run everything?" This is like saying I don't play golf and getting the reaction "So you want to kill Tiger Woods?"

I'd like to make three points:
A) Our current health care system sucks.
B) The U.S. rations health care worse than any system in any other developed country.
C) Improving our system has more to do with how we change it than with who runs it.
Details follow

A) Our current system sucks. Look up objective data from the Census Bureau, the Centers for Disease Control, or the Statistical Abstracts. (The "liberal media" show some bias on the topic; Fox News and Rush are intentionally deceptive.) You will find we spend more per person than the next 20 countries and have shorter life span, higher infant mortality, and higher fatality from disease because of late diagnosis. The only high-performing measures are profitability of health care providers and pharmaceutical companies. There is a growing trend toward U.S. citizens flying to other countries to get treatment because it's cheaper and has higher success ratio. These include several countries with full government run systems. If you put all these systems in a hat and pull one out at random, you will find it works better than our system.

B) The U.S. rations health care. We hear about somebody in England or Canada who couldn't get an MRI or a kidney transplant or whatever. In the U.S. people are denied simple antibiotics. I was on a jury a trial regarding a man who DIED because he didn't have insurance to cover treatment for a simple stomach ulcer. Other systems may deny you health care but they at least have some logical reason. The U.S. denies you health care solely based solely on your wealth. You can get any treatment you can pay for. If you are not rich and don't have insurance, you can't get any reasonable health care at all.

C) Criteria for a good health care proposal. Health care in other countries, no matter who runs it or how it's paid for, gets better results at lower cost than ours because they meet some of these criteria. The U.S. doesn't meet any of them.

1) Statistically valid risk sharing; people of any age or state of health can obtain insurance at a cost that is not prohibitive. Insurers cannot offer low rates to healthy people and then ditch them when the need treatment.
2) Minimum participation requirements; people cannot stay uninsured while healthy, then scam the system by jumping into it when their health goes bad.
3) Support preventive care as well as curative.
4) Compensation to service providers is based on results, not on the volume of procedures carried out.
5) Sound analysis of the success of various treatments. Information available to both providers and consumers; providers cannot simply recommend the most profitable treatments first.
6) Fast, accurate sharing of medical info; a patient will not have to answer the same questions five times on each hospital visit or get the same test repeated for each of six specialists.
7) A competent medical expert develops treatment plans, using input from a coordinated team of specialists. (In today's system, plans are nothing more than the compiled notes of several specialists who may never talk to each other.)
8) A competent medical expert maintains continuity of treatment regardless of changes in doctors or hospitals.
9) Participants have free choice of providers.
10) Providers compete for business based on quality and cost that is measured objectively with results available to consumers.
11) Useful, objective, audited data on cost and quality must be available on every service provider.
12) Fast, accurate sharing of records prevents patients from obtaining multiple treatments or prescriptions from providers who are unaware of each other.
13) All children are insured, at taxpayer expense if that is the only way. Parents may make poor choices in life, and it is irrational and unChristian to punish the children for them. (Yeah, yeah, the Bible says sins of the fathers are to be visited on the sons. You can go by that, if you want.)

We will never see a proposal meeting these criteria because of my Painfully Drawn Conclusions about democracy:

Both parties have very wise, capable people, and some incredibly brainless yahoos. The public mostly pays attention to the latter; listening to the first group takes too much mental effort.
Both parties judge ideas based on how well they conform to pre-conceived ideology, regardless of whether the ideas are workable or will do any good.
Many on both sides will leave the public worse off rather than let the other party share in the credit for making anything better.
Neither party will propose anything that is not trite and simplistic. Any serious proposal will displease enough voters to keep them out of office, so what's the point?

I want to acknowledge my long-term co-worker and friend Richard Cotton, whose discussion and challenges to my thinking led to the formulation of these ideas. His ability to provide this help to me is no doubt directly related to te fact that he is a graduate of Auburn.

The Audacity of Kindergarten

2009-05-19T18:49:00.000-07:00

Today I attended kindergarten graduation for my granddaughter, Alexis. I left feeling a whole lot better than when I arrived.
There were about sixty kids, and about eighty visitors. Average more than one per kid. When Alexis’ parents were in school, visitors’ night usually saw maybe eight parents talking to a teacher who had thirty students. Where were the other fifty-two?
The kids filed in and sat on bleachers, then sang some songs with enthusiasm and reasonable melody. With some difficulty, I managed to take my eyes off Alexis now and then. I saw black kids, white kids, Hispanic kids, Asian kids. A couple had disabilities of one kind or another. The kids obviously didn’t care about any of these differences. They sang and whispered and giggled with whoever was next to them.
The kids got certificates in every subject in which they had scored well enough. English, arithmetic, Spanish, music, spelling…I lost count of the number of subjects but it was a whole lot more than my kindergarten covered. Or my third grade, for that matter. The certificates were not “gimme”prizes because some kids got a lot and some kids only got a few. Alexis got one in every subject, which didn’t surprise me. She is not only smart, she has intellectual curiosity and so far has preserved a view that learning is fun.
I should have said every academic subject, because Alexis didn’t get one of the little trophies for straight As in conduct. Her sincere desire to behave well is not always synched up with her impulse control.
Unfortunately whoever read out the names bobbled the pronunciation. Just about everybody – me for sure -- thought they called "our Alexis" instead of “the other Alexis” who also has a one-syllable surname. So she popped up, went to the table, picked up a trophy, and went back to her seat. Along came the teacher, sat on the floor beside her, and began a long, earnest conversation. Alexis looked a little pensive, but she handed over the trophy and went back to peering around to see Mommy and Daddy. No big deal – stuff happens. It’s good to know she spent this year in the company of a teacher who can handle that situation so skillfully.
These kids are graduating into a world that is better in some ways than the one I graduated into from kindergarten. For example, nobody was wondering today whether society would disappear in a nuclear fireball before these kids got old enough to join it. My parents wondered about that when I graduated. I wondered about when my kids graduated. Some things are better because a lot of my kindergarten pals have worked very hard, and given up a lot, to make them better.
The world is worse in some ways. For example, we didn’t graduate with $35,000 apiece in national debt that would double before we graduated from high school. Our classmates didn’t bring assault rifles to school and kill a bunch of us. We had good odds that Mommy and Daddy would stay around and stay together. These things are worse because lot of my kindergarten pals never grew out of their greed, and arrogance, and self-indulgence, during kindergarten or after.
Watching these kids today, I understood why in the most dismal and cynical of times there is hope. No matter how badly we screw up, or how badly we get screwed, there is another generation coming who may be able to do better than we did.
These kids accept each other, their families show up, they are learning things and have good odds that there will be a world left for them to use that learning in. It’s not just hope that they will do better. It’s a reasonably good bet.

The Terpitude of Moral Certitude

2009-04-29T22:38:00.000-07:00

In Obama's first 100 days the country has sorted itself neatly into two groups. One group thinks anything he does is wrong and they don't need to know what he did to be sure of that. The other group thinks anything he does is right, and they don't need to know what he did, either.

The latter group is a little more open-minded, in that they concede maybe he's made a minor mistake here and there but either a) it wasn't very important or b) Bush, Bush and Reagan did it first and worst. Like deficit spending, which suddenly became a bad thing to do on January 21 even though Cheney said deficits don't matter. (My bank disagrees with him, unfortunately.)

I was at an outdoor supply store the other day and the owner was really mad about how Obama has screwed everything up for gun owners. There haven't been any changes in gun law; everything is exactly the same as it was under W. Not to mention this guy's business has picked up about 40% as people race to buy new hog legs before Obama gets around to taking them all away. But for this guy Obama is wrong whether he's done something you didn't like, or whether he has not done something you wouldn't like if he did do it.

You have to feel good that everybody is steadfastly committed to their principles, unswayed by any actual events. Who says America has lost its moral compass?

A lot of people thought it was awful that Obama shook hands with Hugo Chavez. Nobody has mentioned that Obama insulted the guy. He said "Como estas?" which means "How are you?" -- but "estas" is the familiar form of the verb. He did NOT say "Como esta?" which is what you say to anybody important. You don't even address your waiter in the familiar form; it is mad phat rude to talk that way to the head of a sovereign nation. It's not quite as bad as if Chavez had greeted Obama with "Hey, boy!" but it's rude. Somewhere between not saying "Sir" to an officer, and meeting a woman and calling her "Honey" or "Cutie Pie."

Maybe this hasn't been brought up because of the inherent paradox. I mean, if you think shaking hands was bad then insulting him would be good, right? But it's impossible for him to do anything good. If shaking hands was OK, then insulting would be bad, and that's impossible. Either way, it's easier if it just never happened at all, and everybody seems to be OK with that.

By the way, "Obama" turns out to be a word commonly used in Southern redneck dialect. I realized this the other day out at LSU when I heard somebody say "Mah bruthern law din come so I drank two sikspack obama self." The six packs were in celebration of this guy getting his Master's degree in English. Or maybe it was his law degree. Either way, you'd think his brother in law would have the decency to show up.

Brain tumor? Take two aspirin and call Congress in them morning.

2009-02-19T22:00:00.000-08:00

In the long run, it doesn’t matter if the stimulus package has pork and earmarks in it. It doesn’t matter if it’s wasteful. It doesn’t matter if it addresses infrastructure. It doesn’t matter if it includes tax cuts or makes us energy independent.

What matters is getting money in the hands of consumers. Then consumers will buy stuff and businesses will hire people to make stuff to sell. The people they hire will get paid, so they’ll buy stuff, too. And soon we’ll be back in the whirlwind of earning, buying, selling, and paying that we called a healthy economy.

Then what?

We got here because people were buying more stuff than their paycheck would pay for. So they borrowed. They borrowed until they were paying so much interest that they couldn’t buy as much as they could have if they hadn’t borrowed. Obviously that has to end sometime, and it turned out that sometime was last fall. Consumers couldn’t borrow more so they bought less, so businesses started firing people who were suddenly getting paid to not make stuff that consumers were not buying.

So we have a recession because consumers lost their buying power because they borrowed until they couldn’t borrow any more. Our solution is to have the government take up the borrowing where the consumers left off. The borrowed money will go to businesses who will hire people to make stuff that people can buy because they have gotten hired with more borrowed money, and the whirlwind gonna whirl again! Somebody say Amen!!

Eventually the government will be paying so much interest that it won’t be able to hand out as much money as it would if it hadn’t borrowed. Obviously that has to end sometime, and when sometime comes around again there will nobody who can borrow money to give to the government to give to…well you get the picture.

We have an economic tumor growing in our economic brains, and we’re taking economic aspirin for it. Sooner or later the tumor will squeeze our brains so tight that we won't be able to avoid surgery. And we’ll find we can’t borrow money to pay for anesthesia.

George is the Only One

2009-02-16T07:48:00.000-08:00

Today is Washington’s Birthday. Did you know that? Probably only because you won’t get mail today. How soon we forget!

The Founding Fathers and all the pillars of our nation who came after them are granite or marble when viewed a reasonable distance. The microscope of history reveals that every pillar has mud and twigs in the mix. All but one. George Washington was, and after 232 years of historical analysis still is, pure alabaster. All the way through

Among the Founding Fathers, Washington was one of maybe a dozen who held the welfare of the nation above that of their State. He was one of even fewer who understood that his own personal advancement was different from the welfare of that nation.

Washington never asked for the command of the Continental Army. His “campaign” consisted of wearing his Colonel’s uniform while attending the Continental Congress. It took no more, if it even took that, for Congress to realize there was only one man for the job. In spite of ceaseless plotting by other generals, Congress never wavered from that belief. In spite of screwing up at almost every other possible opportunity, in that one rare act of constancy they enabled Washington to save the nation repeatedly from others and from itself.

Washington took over an armed crowd of men, not an army. Most of them fought with their personal firearms. The others were militia, the police departments of the frontier colonies called States. Men from one State refused to serve under officers from another State, or any officer from their own State who had not been elected by popular vote. They fought in the heat of the moment and ran in the face of disciplined assault.

By the end of the war officers in Washington’s Continental Army were promoted, and men served under them, because of their ability regardless of origin. Officers and men obeyed orders in the face of death. He used that army, his personal creation, to save the nation countless times on the battlefield.

He saved the nation from that same army when it sought post-war rebellion in the face of abuse from Congress and the States, and was dissuaded only by their respect for Washington personally.

He saved the nation again by favoring a strong central government. The argument back then was not “State’s Rights.” The argument was whether there would be one nation. Washington took a stand opposed by almost every other Virginian, Southerner, and Northerner. Without his influence there would have been at least two nations – North and South – and quite possibly thirteen of them.

He saved the nation again by favoring Alexander Hamilton’s national bank, which Jefferson and almost every other Southerner viewed as Satanic. Without Washington’s support the bank would not have been formed and the nation would have defaulted on its war debts. There would have been no money to build the industry that allowed true independence. There would have been no money for the Louisiana Purchase, no Navy to subdue the Barbary Pirates, and no army to expand and guard the frontiers.

He saved the nation for the last time by surrendering power that no one col dhave taken from him. Jefferson and others feared he would make the nation a monarchy with himself as king, and he eaily could have. Instead he declined to serve a third term and went home. This set the standard for all time that the Constitution protects the people from the power and popularity of its leaders. He let go of power with timeliness and grace. It may have been the only occasion when the welfare of the nation and his personal preference were the same.

Among all the leaders of this or any other nation, George Washington was and is unique. He was not only the Father of His Country, but also its mid-wife.

I Was a Bystander, But I'm Not Innocent

2009-01-19T14:00:00.000-08:00

On Martin Luther King Day I revisit memories that I revisit on every other day.

The first memory is of being four or five years old and going to get a drink of water at Memorial Stadium in Baton Rouge. My mother said “Not that one. Go over here.” I don’t know if I understood why. I don’t know if I was even old enough to read the signs “Colored” and “White.” I do know it’s the earliest memory I have of segregation.

It didn’t bother me. At that age you’re only aware of injustice if it happens to you. I never wondered why all the kids in my school were white. When civil rights protests hit the news I didn’t see the point. I assumed that everybody’s life was pretty much like mine. I didn't think people should be gunned down in Mississippi because they were registering voters, but then a whole lot of people got gunned down for unsatisfactory reasons.

My school was integrated by introducing 12 blacks to my senior class of 510. The next year some seniors and some juniors were moved in, and on down one year at a time until 12 years later integration had been achieved. ("Mission Accomplished!") There was no violence, although I heard a rumor that some white kid had dumped a plate of spaghetti on one of the black kids at lunch. I recall that wherever one of "them" sat in class there were eight empty seats around them. One fore and aft and three on each adjacent row. I went to class and did my homework and left the barrier seats clear. I didn't speak a word to any of those 12 kids all year long.

I came back from college into the middle of work place integration. The government had decided to make Corporate America solve this problem, as they did with so many others. We had racial hiring quotas, and they got filled. We had training in the three R’s for the people who came out of the rancid “separate but equal” schools for blacks.

A black engineer I worked with thanked an older white guy for getting him some information. The white guy said. “Don’t thank me. I gave you that because it’s a job requirement. I don’t think you or anybody else your color should be here.” I told the black engineer I thought that was despicable. “Maybe so,” he said, “But that’s the only guy out here that I know exactly how he feels. You act nice, but I don’t know what you think. It’s not very nice, but at least with him I don’t have to wonder.”

Twenty years later the company held “diversity” sessions where mixed race groups talked about their experiences. I sat next to a black woman who had come to my high school as a senior the year after I left. From her I found out what it was like to pick any seat you wanted and know that nobody would sit next to you. She had been on the Homecoming Court the year before and would probably have been Queen. She would have had a role in the Senior Play. Instead she spent her senior year as a nobody that nobody wanted.

This lady was an acting supervisor – not bad when you consider that when she came to work nobody of her race held anything above a common labor job. “I know that if I had come to work ten years later I would have been promoted farther and faster. But I was one of the first ones. I had to face all the resistance and make a path for others. I’m proud of that, but I paid a price.” A white guy at the table said “I was there, and I believe what you’re saying but I’ve got a story too. I never made supervisor. I saw blacks promoted over me that everybody knew weren’t as good as me. I knew it and they knew it. So you got held back, but so did I.” It wasn’t a heated exchange, it was a simple recognition of fact that both of them acknowledged.

I go to restaurants today and see black people eating. I see them checking into hotels. I hear them called “sir” instead of “boy.” The mayor of my town is black. When I was a kid those black people would have been beat up thoroughly for trying to get into those restaurants. The mayor would have been sweeping city hall. As an integrated society we’re not what we should be, or want to be, or what we will become. But we sure as hell are not what we used to be. I was privileged to live through the change and see it happen.

And living through it was all that I did. I was nice to the blacks I knew, and treated the ones who worked for me fairly. But the waters of history rushed by me, and I never so much as put out a hand to affect their flow. Some of the worst injustices in the history of mankind were set right during my lifetime, and I played no part at all.

That's what I remember on Martin Luther King day, and on every other day.

Three Score and Seven Years Ago....

2008-12-07T11:06:00.000-08:00

Ask a parent or grandparent where they were 67 years ago today. If they’re around 85 or older, they’ll remember easily. Everybody remembers where they were when they heard about the attack on Peal Harbor. They probably had no idea where it was before that day. Today it’s on Page 21 of my local newspaper.

There have been a lot of comparisons between Pearl Harbor and the attacks of September 11, 2001. About 2400 Americans died in the Pearl Harbor attacks. The number is uncertain because of missing persons, possible duplicate names and discrepancies in the reasons for some deaths in the months following. About 3,000 died on September 11. The number is uncertain because of missing persons, possible duplicate names, and discrepancies in the reasons for some deaths in the years following.
In the Pearl Harbor attack Americans killed 55 Japanese. In the September 11 attacks19 terrorists killed themselves.

In the week after Pearl Harbor, news stories and personal memories agree that there were lines around the block at military recruiting stations, coast to coast. Through November 1941 the Marines enlisted 2,000 per month. In December that jumped to 8,500. They would have had 8,501 but when my friend Pete Gustaitis got to the head of the line they told him they were out of forms and come back in a week. He didn’t because two days later he got a draft notice from the Army. In January 1942 the Marines had 13,000.
If you look at Statistical Abstracts of the United States, you can figure out that between 1941 and 1945 80% of males aged 20-24 served in the military. I remember that when my dad met people of his age, nobody ever asked “Are you a veteran?” The question was “Where did you serve?”

Modern military recruitment statistics are incredibly hard to find on the internet. I may be paranoid, but I had the impression nobody in an official position wants to make it easy for you to get the data. You can go back through news reports year by year, but I didn’t have time to do that, or to order any of several books that cover the subject. So let’s go with what I found.
In the days after 9/11 the Marine recruiting office in New York was getting 20 calls a day. The national Army recruiting website went from 400 to 742 visitors per day and from 200 to 500 emails per day. Those numbers would form a line around the block -- if you borrowed the block from a nearby daycare nursery. In September 2001 there were lines around the block to buy little flags to put on your car or in your yard. There were lines to buy CDs of soupy songs with lines like “America, where eagles fly.” Eagles also fly in places like the former Soviet Union, not to mention in Afghanistan. They also fly in France where their diet is not known to include cheese-eating surrender monkeys.

The day after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war on Japan, saying “No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.” Germany declared war on the U.S. the next day. (Bet you thought we went first, didn’t you?)
On September 20, 2001, George W. Bush said “We will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail.” He also said, “What is expected of us? I ask you to live your lives, and hug your children… uphold the values of America, and remember why so many have come here.” That’s not much sacrifice to ask of a population going into a global war.
Roosevelt asked for no sacrifices at all. He had the mechanisms to force people to sacrifice. He had the draft, which had passed Congress by one vote. He had rationing boards. He had taxes – 15 milion people filed in 1940, and 50 million filed in 1945. Revenues went from $7 billion to $50 billion. He had war bonds. Did you know that during World War II the Federal debt quintupled from $40 billion to $200 million? Reagan and Bush together only managed to quadruple it, proving again what spendthrifts the Democrats are.

In that same speech Bush said, “No one should be singled out for unfair treatment or unkind words because of their ethnic background or religious faith…” One of the things Bush got right was not blaming, and not allowing others to blame, the innocent wholesale for the sins of people with whom they happened to share some common element. In February 1942 Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 which provided for internment of people with German, Italian or Japanese family origins. Woodrow Wilson, the paragon of human love and virtue, did the same thing with German families in World War I. You know when Executive Order 9066 was rescinded? In 1976, by Gerald Ford.

In his 1940 campaign Roosevelt told the public, “…I shall say it again and again and again: your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” He absolutely knew this was a lie because he was doing his level best to get us into the war, if he could only get somebody else to shoot first. (That doesn’t mean he wanted Pearl Harbor to happen, or in any way made it happen. But it did achieve a goal that he was trying to achieve by other less catastrophic means.)
In his 2000 campaign George Bush said “We are not going to get into nation building.” This was not a lie; it was almost certainly his sincere intent at the time. At present, it looks like his biggest mistake was not breaking that campaign pledge enough. We should have gone into Afghanistan and Iraq both with the intent of nation building instead of military whup-ass.

After World War II we went nation-building big time, for enemies as well as allies. That spawned among other things “The Mouse That Roared,” a Peter Sellers movie about a small nation that declares war on the U.S. so it can lose and get all its economic problems fixed by a post-war aid plan.
May we should offer an incentive plan to Al Queda. We haven’t caught Obama after seven years – twelve if you count the time Clinton spent looking for him. Maybe it’s time to switch from the stick to the carrot. We could lure him out with promises of luxury, bring him to the U.S. and feed him fast food until he dies of a heart attack.

Bailng out the Big Dog (Lovers)

2008-11-19T08:22:00.000-08:00

For the third time in living memory (at least while I’m still alive) “Detroit” has screwed the pooch. Detroit meaning U.S. car makers, not Motown sound which has generated consistent profits while the auto companies dallied with the doggie.

First time was in 1973 when OPEC held an embargo and nobody came until Congress used it as an excuse to cause real economic damage, and the price of crude tripled. Link Oh, what the heck, let’s throw in the 1979 Iranian revolution when the price tripled again. That’s fair because six years was not enough for the carmakers to get smart and then get stupid again, they just stayed stupid all the way through. The point is they were making huge gas guzzlers – the fins on Cadillacs back then weighed more than most cars do today – and suddenly the public wanted little, gas-sipping cars that Detroit had no clue how to make.

The second pooch-o-phile incident was in the 1980s, when Detroit was suddenly faced with the surprising news that people liked cars that did not break down every 1000 miles. Detroit could not believe that people wanted to buy those little toy Japanese things. We beat the Japs! How the hell could red-blooded Americans buy cars from Misubishi, who also made the Zero that these same guys flew Hellcats against? Actually the war worked against Detroit in the long run. Japanese and German industry was all bombed to slag and rubble. They replaced it with industry that was 20 years ahead in technology compared to the stuff we had used to win the war. They also did not share the attitude that America was a population of geniuses who could do anything except make mistakes. The Japanese in particular listened to a guy named Deming, who showed them how to make cars that would run for 100,000 miles instead of 20,000. Two jokes come to mind: “Toyotas – they’re like cockroaches. You can’t kill ‘em.” And “FORD – either Fix or Repair Daily, or Found on Road Deserted.”

By the 1990’s Detroit had figured out how to make little cars that ran forever. Well, half of forever compared to Japanese cars, but good enough for them to whine that you were a freakin’ commie traitor if you didn’t buy American. By that time, gasoline prices had been going down for ten years, which by Detroit’s careful planning methods indicated the price would stay the same until Gabriel blew his trumpet for Judgement Day. Detroit went back to making big vehicles. They ran fancy computer-generated ads to convince the buying public that if your personal around-town vehicle had less than three hundred horsepower then you were clueless (if female) and sphereless (if male.)

This led to the third instance of canine cuddling. Detroit committed themselves to these land-based aircraft carriers with the passion of Romeo stabbing himself in Juliet’s tomb. And with pretty much the same result. World oil demand was going up, U.S. production was getting smaller, and in the Middle East people were blowing up oil wells and pipelines in order to kill people for obscure religious reasons. Gasoline was inevitably going to get more expensive. A lot more expensive, and it was when and how much, not if. So you would expect that Detroit would have plans on the shelf to switch and start cranking out little, long-running cars, right? If your answer is yes, would you please give me one logical reason why you would think so? The overwhelming evidence is that “long-term planning” in Detroit means calling ahead for a dinner reservation.

Who suffers if we don’t bail out Detroit? Who suffers is hundreds of thousands of workers who make parts and put them together to produce cars. Some of them have been doing this for thirty or forty years. Yes, their unions have gotten them super-good wages and yes, their unions have gotten them super-good medical coverage. This adds a couple of grand to the cost of every Detroit car. I know you resent this like crazy, because you wish you had that kind of a deal. It would make sense for Detroit to whine about those costs if it drove up the price of their cars. The trouble is that the Japanese make cars cheaper and sell them for more because they make cars that people want to buy. If Detroit made cars that people wanted to buy, then they could easily charge enough to cover the high labor and medical costs.

The culprits in Detroit are not the working guys who get paid ridiculously well for doing their jobs. The culprits are managers and planners – probably less than a thousand total among all the Detroit car makers – who got paid ridiculously well for not doing their jobs, but instead committing peterasty three separate times in as many decades. Here’s my remedy:

1) Bail out the car companies. $25 billion is cheap to keep several hundred thousand people at work. It’s about one year's pay and benefits for 250,000 workers.
2) Find those thousand or so managers and planners and
a) Take ‘em out back and beat the snot out of ‘em
b) Leave ‘em on the roadside with a vehicle of their own manufacture and $5 gas money for transport to the emergency room
c) Fine them collectively to recoup the $25 billion. It averages out to $25 million a head.There’s no doubt they’ve got that much; and they can figure out on their own how to distribute the wealth.

You might think it would be hard to identify who should be punished and who should not. But that shouldn't be a problem as long as we get it done before Bush leaves office.

Veterans Day follow up

2008-11-12T07:55:00.001-08:00

I follow a blog called Army of Dude kept by a soldier returned from Iraq. His Veterans Day post asked for thoughts and stories. I provided this one, then decided it might be worth repeating here.

I have spent a lot of time with WWII and Korean vets from my dad's battalion; my second book about them will come out by year end. At a reunion I asked a crusty old guy how he reacted when he got news the war was over. (These guys had been in Europe for 25 months and were certain they were slated to invade Japan.) He said there was a lot of jumping and shouting, but mostly the days went on like they had.

At the reunion a year later, he took me aside on the first night. He said he had been thinking about me all year, because I had asked him a question and he didn't like the answer he gave me. He went on to say that he did a little jumping and shouting, too but in the evening he found himself sitting on the steps of a house doing nothing, and suddenly he began to cry. His lieutenant (a good, respected guy) stopped by and said "Something get to you, Hawver?" and my friend answered "Just the word 'home' Lieutenant. Just the word 'home.'"

A couple of years later he told me he felt responsible for the deaths of two men because he gave them permission to bed down on a terrace that was a little more exposed than he liked. A mortar hit some women doing laundry, they ran to help, and the next round got both of them. "I knew I didn't cause it, but I knew I had allowed them to take an extra risk." His guilt made him extra cautious, and a few months later he made his squad dig in when rest of the platoon didn't. They took shells right in their position that night, and he knew some of them would have been killed if they hadn't been in holes.

His family didn't know these things. He was honest with me, a non-veteran, because I took the time to understand as best I could even though I knew I would fall short. His trust was one of the great rewards of my life. Later I gave him a WWII-era DI crest of the battalion as a gift. When his wife told me he had been buried with it on his lapel, it was my turn to cry.

What's so special about veterans?

2008-11-11T18:49:00.000-08:00

Did you vote last Tuesday? Do you vote regularly? Do you overcome obstacles and rearrange your day as much as it takes to get down there and vote on every Election Day?
If you answered “no” to any of those questions, I have another one for you. You do realize don’t you, that you are spurning the gift that has been offered to you by every veteran who ever wore a uniform? All that they have endured to preserve that privilege for you, and you are rejecting it unused?
Failure to vote is to reject and degrade veterans and all they represent. I don’t care if you’re the only Republican in a whole state full of Democrats, or vice versa, and you know for an absolute fact your vote won’t make a bit of difference. You vote! Because the physical and mental effort of voting expresses gratitude and respect for veterans.

Only a small fraction of veterans die, are wounded or even hear weapons fired in anger. It’s more common for them to endure physical discomfort, boredom, and frustration. Many of them postpone personal goals while they wear the uniform. But the military has accountants, lawyers, purchasing agents, and other positions that people make careers of choice. If you can put up with the military’s quirks, it’s a pretty good career. You can say the same thing about IBM, ExxonMobil, or Wal-Mart.
Veterans are not angels. I was interviewing soldiers at Fort Hood for a book, and two guys didn’t show up. I was told later that instead of talking to me, one of them was assigned to escort the other one to his court martial proceedings. For child molestation. And I really wanted to talk to that guy because he was hit by mortar fire near Tikrit, just a mile or so from Saddam’s secluded little hideaway.

So what's so special about veterans?

Every veteran has signed an I.O.U. that our leaders can call whenever they want. The face amount is “As much as you want, including my life.” I have a friend who was in the Air Force Band during Viet Nam. I kid him about defending the country armed with a clarinet. But we both know that for a thousand reasons or for no reason at all, he could have been sent out in the rice paddies to call in air missions under fire. Or sent to load ordnance on F-105’s and lost a leg when a 500-pound bomb rolled off a cart. He signed that I.O.U. and if it was called he had no recourse.

Some have their I.O.U. called to achieve something that seems worth the price or is at least memorable. Crossing the Delaware. Facing down the Barbary Pirates. Strafing the front lines at Gaudalcanal. Going in to cover a downed Blackhawk pilot in Mogadishu.
Others have their I.O.U called for nothing. They are killed or maimed in training. They charge up a hill that turns out to be the wrong one. “Friendly” aircraft bomb them by mistake. They die of disease. And it doesn’t achieve a thing and it's forgotten.
Dinsmore Ely, a World War I pilot, wrote to his (and my) fraternity brothers “It is not a sacrifice but an investment, when a young man dies for his country.” Sometimes it’s neither one, Dinny. Sometimes it’s a pointless unnecessary waste.
I often think about Dinny, 22 years old a week after that letter, when he rode his flaming wingless fuselage into the good earth of France. I wonder if his last thoughts were about the dividends his investment would yield for the rest of us. I wonder if he was hit blind out of the sun, never saw his enemy, and would have been better invested if he had stayed down and changed his engine oil that day.

Whatever lot they draw in their service, every veteran has spent a long time not knowing when their I.O.U. might be called without warning or explanation. Not knowing if it would be called for a meaningful purpose. Anybody who has endured that uncertainty so that We the People can choose who governs us “…deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.” Link

That is what's so special about veterans.

There's a hole in my genes!

2008-11-10T10:16:00.000-08:00

I have a genetic defect that makes me indifferent to sports. It’s like color blindness only a lot more embarrassing, especially if you live in Baton Rouge. People here think the LSU sports program was created by the gods on Olympus, who then bestowed it on mankind as a gift ranking somewhere between fire and sex in value.
About a hundred times a year somebody asks me “Gonna watch the game?” Not only do I not know who the opponent is, I'm not sure what sport they’re referring to. So I just say something like, “I hope so, if my Mom’s funeral gets over in time.” Or “No, I’ve missed my last two chemo treatments and if I don’t make this one it’s all over.” Any adequate excuse for missing a game involves death or some equally serious commitment.
I knew a major sports fan who moved to Baton Rouge for a new job. Any sport, any team, he knew the standings, the players, the team’s strengths and weaknesses. One August morning he came in waving a newspaper with the two-inch headline “Tigers Work Out With Pads!” “I thought I’d been in some football towns,” my friend allowed. “But I’ve never been anyplace where practice is headline news!”

When I was thirteen my parents got season tickets for LSU football. This gave me my first opportunity to observe human beings dissolving in alcohol. There was a row of fans behind us who were amiable conversationalists pre-game, progressed from thick-tongued to unintelligible to unconscious, and if they saw anything at all in the fourth quarter there’s no way they remembered it. Yes, of course alcohol was banned in Tiger stadium ha ha excuse me officer, I can’t quite fit my rolling cooler past between you and that “Alcoholic Beverages Prohibited” sign. Oh, yeah, it does takes up a whole seat but I have a ticket for it. See? One for me, one for my wife and one for the cooler. So long, Officer, have a nice game. Geaux, Tigers!
One night our back row neighbors insisted that my Dad and I take a look through their huge night vision binoculars. I couldn't figure out how to focus them. The view was amber in color and severely distorted. My Dad told me after the game that the binocs were full of whiskey and what they were really doing was offering us a drink.
I still recall the merriness of their cheer, “Hot Boudin! Cold Cous Cous! Come On Tigers, Push Push Push!” For those of you who do not have webs between your toes, boudin is a spicy white pork sausage. Cous cous is a semolina mush used as a base for many kinds of Cajun food, usually deceased. It’s pronounced “coos coos,” meaning of course the tigers have to “poos poos poos.”
This is a marvelous triple entendrez for a team with live feline mascot.

Email me if you can only figure out two entendrez, or if you don't know what entendrez means, and your life is so empty that you care. I figure the odds are better than average since you take time to read my blog. I mean, no offense. I'm just saying, you know?

I recall that some team had an end named James Self. After each pass the stadium announcer would solemnly intone “Pass by So-and-so, complete to Self.” J.C. Politz was the radio announcer. He is considered a great announcer by many but he did commit frequent bloopers. The one I remember is “It’s a long, high pass, way down field, so-and-so jumps for it, going way, way up, now he’s coming down...NO! HE’S NOT! That was the one game I wish I had seen. Imagine an LSU end levitating to the goal line six feet above the turf, with the bad guys grabbing fruitlessly at his ankles.
Politz achieved near immortality on Halloween night of 1958 when Billy Cannon scored with an 89-yard punt return against Ole Miss. The recording of J.C. calling that runback was played endlessly in the week before every Ole Miss game for more than thirty years. The last time I recall hearing it was in 1990. By that time Cannon was in his sixth year of federal prison for counterfeiting. To his credit he had obtained a degree in dentistry, and I guess he figured his skill in crafting dentures could be leveraged into other fields.
Some years later LSU beat Ole Miss while it was quarterbacked by the famous Archie Manning (the first one.) LSU fans were delirious with victory, and for weeks they celebrated stopping the invincible Manning. Never mind that the guy broke his arm the week before and played in a cast. We shut that sucker down, man!
It was known that the winner of that game would go on to play Nebraska in the Orange Bowl. So LSU fans, with their usual graciousness and good sportsmanship, brought bags of oranges to throw on the field. Three or four times the refs had to stop the game to clean up the fruit salad. Ole Miss had just lined up for one play when their center took a huge naval orange right to the side of the helmet. He wasn’t hurt, but it proved that at least one LSU fan had more arms than brain cells.

LSU does not forgive coaches easily. A new one has less than a full season to establish the right mind set among the fans, or he's gone. Just gone. Some of them surface later, coaching for some bush league team. Some who had inconveniently binding contracts were just never heard from again. One guy (I’m not naming any names here because some people know where I live) stayed coach for years and years. His games were mindless, boring, “Hi diddle diddle, straight up the middle” but he won. He became as permanent as the goal posts, only instead of a fresh coat of paint he got another couple of hundred grand every year.
Another guy had been an LSU player, went on to the pros, and came back to LSU as head coach. It was a magical story, with this guy as the rescuing White Knight With Purple and Gold Banner. He was going to be the hero, pick up the wreckage from a predecessor who had failed miserably at recruiting and was passing on a pretty fair high school football team. The White Knight's name was a solid gold magnet and he attracted new blood that became a classic team within a couple of years. But not under him. He lost five games his first season, and never got a second.
The fans were furious when Nick Saban left his job at LSU to coach for Alabama. No such betrayal had taken place in the history of mankind. Compared to him, Judas Iscariot was a saint and Benjamin Arnold was a patriot.
Last weekend LSU played Alabama with Saban as coach. Every fan ate raw meat before the game and drank Bloody Marys made with real blood. Score: 27-21 Alabama and Saban was still breathing. The Sunday paper carried the headline “Bitter Defeat.” Not the sports section, the front page. If you browsed through the rest of the paper you saw the minor stuff like auto companies announcing thousands of layoffs, the financial meltdown providing increased opportunities for terrorists to gain funding, and Obama’s plans to restructure government agencies. One thing about this town, it has the priorities straight!

I don’t know where people find the time to watch all those games. I can’t find time to do my tax returns, cut my grass, or even sleep at night. If I committed three hours in a row every weekend to watching TV, I would already have extended my To Do list into the next reincarnation. Oh, wait – I already have!

McCain is not Shane -- He came back!

2008-11-04T21:06:00.000-08:00

I was moved and delighted to see John McCain come back tonight. The speech he gave acknowledging Obama's victory absolutely glowed with love of country over love of self and love of power.

Some of his supporters didn't like this. They booed when he said he had called Obama to congratulate him. But the inherent character and nobility of John McCain was so irresistible that a few minutes later he had them applauding the idea of working together.

In the end, he was the John McCain who rose above parties, politics, pork, policies and pettiness to remind us not who we are, but who we could be. And finally, after 40 years, I can say I have had the opportunity to vote for a candidate I really wanted to be President. If that man had stayed around during the campaign, I think he would have won.

McCain said some gracious, laudatory, and accurate things about Obama tonight. In the next four years, we'll find out that true or not, they won't translate into all the hopes and wishes and dreams associated with him. For those of you thinking the nation will fall because of Obama's misguided policies, you can take comfort in the same thing. Reality always prevents a President's best and protects us from his worst.

If you're freaking out about Obama wrecking the nation would you please get a grip? What is it about this guy that you think he will be able to destroy what none of his 43 predecessors has been able to destroy in 225 years? And mind you some of them were train wreckers the likes of which the world has not seen since Robert Redford told Butch Cassidy not to put too much dynamite in the bank car. If Obama is all that effective, at least he might be able to catch bin Laden!

Obama didn't thank the guy who really won this election for him. John Kerry. If Kerry had won in 2004, then Bush wouldn't have had another four years to work his rating down into the LaBrea Tar Pits and then roll himself and the whole Republican party in feathers. Kerry would have been blamed (unjustly) for all the sour fruit borne of the seeds sown in prior years and fertilized so fervently with such pungent substances by U.U. Bush and company over the last four years. Kerry would have been blamed (justly) for his confused, inept, responses to all those crises. By now we would have been SO not interested in articulate, unproven, hope-and-change-mongering Democrats! Obama and Hillary would have been polling right down there with Ralph Nadir.

Amber Alert for John McCain! Amber Alert!

2008-11-02T17:32:00.000-08:00

I’ve never had the opportunity to vote for anybody that I really wanted to be President. In fact my reaction every four years has been “If these two bozos are the best we can come up with for President, then something is terribly wrong with our system.” After decades of analyzing this, I have concluded that something is terribly wrong with our system.

For a long time I have wanted to vote for John McCain. I wanted McCain over Gore or Bush in 2000. I wanted him over Bush or Kerry in 2004. (Of course, I would have preferred most pipe fitters I’ve known over Bush or Kerry.) I was very happy when his campaign came back from the dead in 2006. Or 2007. Or both.

But McCain has gone missing. Somebody is running using his name, but it’s not him. That’s become so evident that I think of the guy I’m seeing now as McCain^?.

McCain talked to the media. He talked to ME through the media. He figured if he phrased something funny or made a mis-step, then I had sense enough to know that everybody misses a few, and he would trust me to figure out what he really meant. And I could do that, because he said it over and over again, different terms for different audiences, but basically the same message.

McCain didn’t lie and he wasn’t sleazy. He was in charge and he made all the professional campaign pukes meet his standards of honor and integrity. McCain peeped out for about ten seconds with that idiot woman who thought Obama was an Arab. He said “No Ma’am. He is a good, decent citizen, a family man, with whom I have some fundamental disagreements.” That my friends, was John McCain. But he was gone before I could get downtown and cast my early vote.

McCain^? has dominated the Republican campaign. He picked Sarah Palin. (See Hades Behind a Palin Horse.) He said that Obama voted for comprehensive sex education for little kids which he didn't by any stretch of the imagination. (I’ve read the bill.) Oh, I mis-spoke. It’s within the imagination of several writers for National Review and, apparently, that of McCain^?.

McCain^? accuses Obama of voting against funding for troops in Iraq knowing that he (or McCain, whichever one was in the Senate) did exactly the same thing.
Link
Link
The truth is, everybody in Congress has voted for and against almost everything. You take a bill supporting motherhood and apple pie, and some jackass will tack on an amendment that the President must always wear a pink tutu for inauguration. I don’t care how you vote on that one, you’re going to hear about it in the next campaign.

One point that really bothers me: Obama said several times that if he knows where bin Laden is and Pakistan won’t do the deed, he will give the order to put bin Laden topside with his 99 virgins. McCain^? calls this “attacking Pakistan.” Does that mean he would let bin Laden off the hook in those circumstances? I sure hope not! But the only other explanation is that McCain^? wants me to think Obama said something that he didn’t say. McCain^? wants me to vote against Obama not because I disagree with Obama, but because I disagree with something Obama never said, but that McCain^? said that he said. McCain wanted me to vote for him because I knew who he was and what he stood for, and because I agreed with it. That's why I wanted to vote for him, even though I didn't agree with a lot of it.

If you go to their websites and look at the proposals, the numbers don’t add up for either party’s candidate. They never do for any candidate, any year. Who cares? Those proposals have to go through the Congressional Get Some machine, and they will emerge unrecognizable. What matters to me is whether the guy has been consistent with himself or with his website. The Republican candidate, whoever he is, has been all over the map. Maybe McCain handles some public appearances and McCain^? shows up for the others. That would explain the inconsistency, and also explain how a guy of 72 manages to seem so energetic.

My confusion is which one of these guys would be President? Or would we be electing a tag team? I’m not sure the Constitution allows for inaugurating two guys at once. On the other hand, it would put Sarah Palin two heartbeats instead of one away from the Oval Office, and I’m all for putting more obstacles in that path.

So I’m hoping that sometime in the next 48 hours, John McCain will reappear, declare his candidacy, and talk to me. If not, then at least before January 20.

Redistributing Wealth One Voter at a Time

2008-11-01T09:51:00.000-07:00

Be sure and read ALL of this before you react.

I've gotten this story in several emails lately:
Today on my way to lunch I passed a homeless guy with a sign that read "Vote Obama, I need the money." In the restaurant my server had "Obama 08" on his tie. So I didn't tip the server; I told him I was going to "redistribute" his tip to the homeless guy outside. I went outside, gave the homeless guy $5 and told him to thank the server. He was grateful for the money he didn't earn. The waiter was pretty mad that I gave away the money he did earn even though the other guy needed money more. Apparently redistribution of wealth is only a good thing when it's someone ELSE'S money being redistributed to YOU!

There's no doubt that involuntary redistribution of wealth is dangerous ground. But here's another take on this.

The server might very well respond, "Doesn't matter to me, sir. By the time I share my tips with the rest of the staff, I don't get much of it anyway. I rely on my hourly wage. " Then the manager comes by and says "Hi, we're going to comp your meal down to half price. We cover it by paying the servers a miserable wage and charging the other customers more. What they don't know won't hurt 'em, right?"

This is a pretty good analogy to many provisions of current tax law.

Example 1: You know all those Wall Street CEOS getting paid hundreds of millions to run their companies broke? That money is taxed at 15% as capital gains, not at 35% as income. Link
It meets every part of the definition of ordinary income and none of the definition for capital gains. But those guys redistribute a lot of wealth to congressmen, who have expressed outrage while declining to tax their benefactors at the same rate you pay. Are you happy that your Representative is standing firm against the involuntary redistribution of these guys' wealth?

Example 2: Companies with hundreds of millions in revenue, with operations entirely in the U.S., can file about 500 bucks worth of paper and register themselves in the Bahamas. They pay no U.S. income tax at all. For the logic behind this, refer to Example 1. Link
One of these outfits, by the way, is the most profitable consulting firm in the world. I read an article by their CEO about the challenge of staying profitable and the importance of maintaining a government environment with good business incentives. There was a picture of him, but it didn't look like his tongue had fallen out.

So if you're consistent in opposing redistribution of wealth, should you support these guys continuing to eat our golden geese with their silver spoons? Is it ethically wrong to take their money and reduce your taxes? One thing for sure, it's the law of the land, and it was lawed on the land by people we voted for. Lawed have Mercy!

But in the overall scope of things, it's no biggie. The restaurant manager is losing money hand over fist, He's been borrowing from China to to pay the waiter and to cover your discount. His restaurant will go belly up whenever Zhang Dejiang wants it to. If We the People are going to sell the United States to the Chinese, then the homeless might as well get their share. Those who are already homeless, I mean.

Gas Attack Advertising

2008-10-28T19:49:00.000-07:00

In my last post I referred to the fact that oil companies get two minutes of your undivided attention every time you fill up your tank. It would make SO much sense to put a few basic cable channels up there and divert your attention from the price. If they put on an adult channel, they could charge five bucks a gallon with no complaints. Everybody would run gas out on the pavement trying to stretch their viewing pleasure just a half gallon longer.

Shell used to run ads with two identical cars fitted with little glass tubes to prove they both had the same amount of gas – but one car had Shell platformate in its gas and the other didn’t. From a side-by-side standing start the car with platformate always went farther before running out of gas. They didn’t mention that every decent gasoline had platformate, so naturally a car without it didn't do as well. My father use to fume over those ads and their implied criticism of other gasolines. “It’s like lining up two Fords and taking four spark plugs out of one of them. The one with spark plugs is going to run better, but you can’t conclude from that that Fords are better than Buicks!” He was perfectly right, of course, and nobody cared.

Exxon's advertising approach has always appealed to the engineering side of our customers. Exxon and its predecessors were always known as the engineers among Big Oil firms. By profession, by preference, and by personality. When other oil companies passed out little brochures showing hot chicks in sports cars, we passed out little charts showing that engines clogged slower on Exxon Supreme.

Once we tried image advertising with placards on top of the pumps. The one that sticks in my mind showed this pasty faced pudgy forty-ish dude with the kind of beard a seventeen year old would shave in shame. He’s driving along in a cream-colored convertible and the caption talks about how he’s in love with his car. We’re not speaking figuratively, here – he's named the damn car Lucille! But Lucille has a Secret Love. Her heart is set on – yep -- Exxon Supreme! For two minutes, every customer got to consider that buying Exxon gas would classify them with this scrungy geek who is so weird he’s emotionally involved with his car and such a loser that the car has dumped him for twenty gallons of flammable liquid! Exxon's answer to the Marlboro Man!

I do remember one really cool ad in the ‘70’s. This black dude with a big ‘fro was sitting cross-legged on the hood of a car, and he raised his head and his hands up like a guru greeting the sunrise. The hidden headlights on the car came up in perfect synch with his movements. It was a great visual image; energizing, uplifting, eye-catching! I think it ran twice on national TV before one of our managers pointed out that it contained no information about our products. They replaced it with something about the viscosity of our lube oils being uniform at high temperatures.

BP is making great headway now as the “green" oil company. They even publish lists of the projects they’re putting in. Furnace air preheat, cleaning heat exchangers; all these things that are in fact very good steps for conserving energy and reducing greenhouse gasses.
You know else what all those things are? They’re my work list from thirty years ago! Exxon did all that stuff when crude was twenty-five dollars a barrel. Then crude went down to ten bucks a barrel, and we still have people looking under old office furniture trying to find any return on those projects. Did we ever brag about the environmental impact? No way. We let BP wait thirty years, put in the projects when they actually make a profit, and get credit for loving the planet.

Once we had a big ad campaign about changing to a new gasoline additive that would (what else?) keep your engine cleaner. We set the date for the Big Change. Come to your friendly Exxon dealer MONDAY MORNING and we Will! Clean! Up! Your! Engine!
The new additive went into the into the tanks, then into the pipes, and the tank trucks, and the filling station pumps. And everything it went into filled up up with goopy brown Jell-O. It turned out the stuff reacted with tiny amounts of water and it plugged all our systems with this nasty slop that we had just told the world was our new wonder cleaning additive.
By superhuman effort, at least one part of every system was cleaned out and super-dried so that come Monday, the new additive in its non-goop form was in at least one pump in every filling station. And just outside New York Harbor, floating face down in the wake of an Exxon tanker, was the body of the guy who had recommended we should advertise this big change in advance.

From then on, anything new was fully tested and put into effect FIRST. After we were sure it was OK we would quietly change the charts in our little brochures. Nobody cared; they were interested in whether the hot chick in Shell’s brochure was really Miss October. Shell would start rumors like that but they never revealed if she had platformate or not.

GAS

2008-10-25T20:14:00.000-07:00

Today I saw a news item about gasoline going down by a nickel. Used to be you didn't see those. In 1980, gasoline was $1.38 a gallon. The day after his inauguration, Reagan removed the U.S. Government price controls, and gasoline promptly dropped to less than a dollar. It never hit $1.38 again until 2000. How do you think McDonald's would have made out if a Big Mac had cost the same in 2000 as it did in 1980?

All through those years the media noted faithfully when the price went up, but ignored any price reductions. If you had estimated the price of gas based on the ups and downs on TV you would have figured it went for about the same as Chanel No. 5.

Back when crude tripled in price the first time (from $3 in 1973 to $10 in 1974) the U.S. auto market cratered in favor of smaller imported cars. Detroit had no small cars, so they tried to sell the concept of "range." The marketers figured "range" made people think of jet aircraft, and compared to an F-14 an American car used hardly any fuel at all. I remember a Buick Century had a range of 240 miles in 1974. The next year it had a range of 300 miles, because they gave it a 20 gallon tank instead of 16.

But the public went to little cars and the American car makers went to Congress. For money, of course; the one form of government intervention that seems to remain popular with business persons.

When I say"public" I am excluding Real Men. Real Men drive two kinds of vehicles, both defined by TV advertising. One is a truck that can drive through two feet of mud while 1200 pounds of concrete or steel beams drop out of the sky into its bed. The other kind is a car that can do a hundred miles an hour on an animated road that twists around like a giant gutshot cobra. For Real Men who live on the East Coast (undoubtedly for reasons beyond their control) an acceptable alternative is a car that can drive 90 miles an hour through 20 blocks of downtown Manhattan without encountering another vehicle.

Real Men have always met their responsibilities and gas prices be damned. Their families never go from Winn Dixie to the soccer field without the security of a 300 horsepower V-8, four wheel drive, and all terrain tires. Real Men know that the purpose of countries with funny names is to make us mad so we can start wars, not to be selling us little bitty cars. For Real Real Men, selling us little cars is a reason to start a war. For a while there in the '80s they were getting ready to go over and take the Japs down again. Remember how the Japanese stayed clear of the Coalition of the Willing? Debt of Honor. They owed Saddam big time for distracting us into Kuwait ten years before.

You can tell a Real Man because about midnight when his wife is asleep you'll see his bathroom light come on. He's locked himself in there with the Hummer catalog he keeps rolled up and stuck down in one of his muddy boots. The people who buy little wimpy cars to save on gas are not Real Men. They're mostly Democrats. They probably own less than one gun per family member. For sure, a lot of them are Short People.

The U.S. car companies have had 35 years since the last time. You'd think they would at least have put together a plan for switching to smaller cars when the same thing happened again. Instead they're sitting around wondering why having their market crater for the same reasons as last time produces such a sensation of deja vu. Sometimes I imagine Detroit executives at their morning meetings saying "Hey! Who's carrying the brain cell today?"

Unfortunately it will be the middle class dude -- Joe the car guy -- losing jobs and pay while the execs get paid off and go around again. It's kind of like Wall Street -- the rich guys jump out of windows, and the rest of us get splattered all over the sidewalk. But Joe will be able to handle it. He's a Real Man.

what's it more or less expensive than

The Standard

2008-10-13T20:44:00.000-07:00

October 14. My father's birthday. He has been gone 12 years, but for those who knew him the plaque on his headstone is still vibrant in their lives: "His Patient Wisdom Was of Great Benefit to All."

I knew Paul Judson Eldredge in ways that few sons are able to know their fathers. We were both engineers. We both worked at Exxon's Baton Rouge Refinery. I took over the big crude units at Baton Rouge 31 years after he held that job. We philosophized together about the work, the men, what motivated them, and what motivated us. Six men worked for me who had worked for him in his time and they shared their opinions of each of us with the other. Through my own work experience I understood the full dimensions of his actions and the respect they had earned him. Being "Paul's Boy" made me widely known, which was an advantage only if I earned it. It could be a short trip from "The acorn doesn't fall far from the tree" to "He's just not the man his father was." Over the years I came to command respect of my own, and he understood its full dimensions. In the end we both knew that we had enhanced each other's reputations. I can never measure which of us was prouder to be counted with the other.

It was memorable, and funny, the first time somebody referred to him as "Walt's Dad" instead of me as "Paul's Boy." I remember the day I realized I had worked at the refinery longer than he had. It felt like I had committed sacrilege.

He was a mortar company commander in Italy in World War II. In adopting his battalion as a foster family, and writing a book about them, I came to see him through the eyes of the officers and men who fought with him. Through them I found the early signs of the qualities our co-workers saw in him decades later. Comparing my experiences with his in the workplace, I could sense the tumult in the young engineer, the uncertainty in the young supervisor, behind the calm and wise exterior he projected. I could sense the scared young lieutenant desperately maintaining calm and wisdom as the shells came in around him, because he knew that others depended on it.

When he left the battalion, one of his men exclaimed, "Damn! Our good lieutenant is leaving!?" He told me he was proud of that reaction. I wish he had lived long enough to know how fully I came to understand how he earned it.

He called his father "Pop." He once said "I wish you could have known your grandfather. He was the most emotionally stable man I ever knew." I don't know how long my mouth hung open, because my father was by far the most emotionally stable man I ever knew. I once characterized him as "quick to teach and slow to anger." He said and lived that "the only acceptable reason for raising your voice is distance." Ventilation of anger was beyond him. He told me once that anger is what tells you there is something wrong, so that you can make it right.

When my boys came along, my grandmother slipped me the word that he would be delighted if they called him "Pop." They did, and he was. When our grand daughter came along, Peggy asked me if I wanted to be called "Pop." It scared me. I think the life I have lived allows me to hold up my head with honor as his son, and I know he admired much about me. I know he would be the first to tell me that he fell short in many ways, and my head tells me that must be true. But I didn't see his failures; and in my heart he left an unbroken string of successes that set the standard for me. I have always aspired to that standard, and my own life and others have been better for my efforts. To allow myself to be called by his name would suggest I have met his standard, and I'll never be able to believe that.

I hope that as "Dad," as "Mister Walt" and as "Grand-Daddy" I can instill that same commitment to building the community of man, without leaving the incorrect perception of the unmatchable example.

Numbers, Nausea, and a Nod to Anne Coulter

2008-10-11T11:55:00.000-07:00

My last post was about numbers not being the world.

I am trying to understand the world behind one number, and that is poll results saying that 80% of Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction. That means that 20% of Americans think we're headed in the right direction. To quote Paul Newman and the Sundance Kid: "Who ARE those guys?!"

If we're headed in the right direction, where in the observable universe is the destination they hope to to reach? Did they not understand the question? Did they think they were answering "yes" to "Do you think the country is headed for vivisection?"

Every one acts rationally within their own frame of reference. If somebody seems irrational to you, then they don't share your frame of reference. This is why the FBI uses profilers. They try to figure out a serial killer's frame of reference so they can figure out what he thinks is rational, figure out what he'll do next, and nail him. I would like to understand the frame of reference of somebody who thinks the country is headed in the right direction. I'm sure that Osama bin Laden thinks so. I think his failing kidneys keep him alive only because they're flooded with the endorphins of sheer joy about us. But that's no help because he doesn't get polled. I guess. I mean, for all we know he's working as a Walmart greeter in Milwaukee and is worried about his 401(k) going down.

Do 20% of us think the country is so shot to hell that the only hope is to start over? Addicts have to hit bottom before they can start back up, and there's no doubt we are addicts. We're addicted to debt, cheap fuel, no responsibilities, and earmarks. If heading for the bottom is a necessary but unpleasant step in recovery from our addictions, then that frame of reference would say we're headed in the right direction.

Is it because as Anne Coulter states, "All liberals hate America and love pedophiles?" No, that can't be right because fewer than 80% of us are pedophiles. Although according to Anne about 40% of us, being registered Democrats, are lurking in the bushes at the school bus stop.
That is a quote, by the way, from her book Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right. I read it because I wanted to be objective; I thought maybe she had something to say of higher quality than her vocal statements. I had planned to read Treason: Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the War on Terrorism. After surgery for the hernia I got from constant dry heaves during the first book, I was so far behind I never got around to it.

Anne did help me get perspective, though. Until I read Slander I had forgotten how I used to feel on Sunday mornings after a seriously high-proof fraternity party. Now that she has put me in touch with that memory, it's much easier to take today's problems in stride. Hmmm. If 20% of Americans polled went to frat parties in the sixties....

We Are the World, We're Not The Numbers

2008-10-09T11:55:00.000-07:00

"It seems to me," my father told me one day in 1970, "that a lot of the nation's ills could be cured by a ten-year cessation in the production of MBAs."

This intrigued me, since I had aspired to be one. I was accepted at MIT's Sloan School of Management, but my draft number was 54. My draft board was taking everyone through 60 who didn't have a deferment. If I had gone to grad school, I would have majored in M-16s and rice paddies. So I asked him what was wrong with MBAs.

"MBAs are trained to work with numbers," he said. "They assume that the numbers describe the real world accurately. They do things that make the numbers better and they can't tell the difference between that and making the world better."

That was just a few years after Robert McNamara, the ultimate MBA, told David Halberstam "Every quantitative indicator we have tells us we're winning this war." (For those a little rusty on history, "this war" in 1970 meant Viet Nam.)

A couple of years later, a crusty old engineer told me, "Son, never make the mistake of confusing data with facts."

A lady who had worked at the World Bank told me about a program to combat the devastating effect of rats on harvested crops in Argentina. The government put a bounty on rats -- bring in a rat body, get a dime. The rats poured in. The dimes poured out. The rats played pinochle on your snout...
Oh, sorry. The rhythm got to me there. The loss of crops continued unabated. Some smart bureaucrat (probably an engineer and not an MBA) figured out that the rats pouring in were getting smaller. Investigation showed that the campones were raising thousands of little rats to turn in for the bounty.

The numbers are not the world.

Except for 54, my draft number, which was my world, and which is also the wrong answer to the question "How much is six times nine?" (That joke is for Thomas and other "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" fans. If you didn't get it, then be grateful. Be very, very grateful.)

Financial Instant Gratification

2008-10-07T18:59:00.000-07:00

George U.U. Bush made a comment today that when people make mistakes they should bear the consequences and it’s unfortunate that isn’t happening.

He was talking about the CEOs getting rich while the working stiff gets clobbered in the financial crisis. But just for a second, I harbored the hope that his next line would be “Therefore, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and I will spend the next year driving around Iraq in an unarmored HumVee eating MREs. Should we be injured we will be treated only at VA hospitals.”

I get an average of fifteen offers of new credit cards every week, and at least a third of those have blank checks in them. “Just fill it in and get the cash you need. The cash you deserve!”

Somewhere in these things there is always a summary of what it’s going to cost in the long run. It’s actually fairly clearly stated. To me at least, but then I have an engineering degree from MIT. How well do you think your average high school drop-out can figure out what the “Cash they deserve!” is going to cost them? That group is about 34 million Americans, by the way, and we’re adding about 400 thousand a year.

Not that finishing high school, or MIT for that matter, is any insurance against making bad decisions. Especially under stress. Stress like missing a couple of payments, or your spouse needing medical treatment, or a tree falling on your house and the insurance company telling you that for a “named storm” your deductible is $18,000. The temptation to sign that check is overwhelming. Even if you know what it’s going to cost in the long run. That’s the long run; this is now.

The Congressional contribution to all this, of course has been to make it harder to declare bankruptcy. The equivalent of giving candy to children and jacking up the price of toothpaste. A few years later when they say their teeth hurt, call them “whiners.”

I know several people who are in the financial business. Some are bankers, some are financial advisers. They would all like to get rich, and some of them have. What they have in common is their belief that wealth for them comes from doing a good job of building wealth for others. Successful for them was to get some clients and do the best they could for them over a period of years. They got a little share of everybody’s good fortune, and it added it up to a lot. They want their clients to do well.

The financial crisis is built on instant gratification. The financial Masters of the Universe started better-dealing the idea of getting wealthy over time by helping others get wealthy. They wanted to get rich now, and if that destroyed somebody else’s chance of creating wealth, they didn’t care.

Presidential "DUH!" Bait.

2008-09-29T22:24:00.000-07:00

I wonder if anybody else noticed these things in the First Presidential Duh Bait?

McCain said one reason it's important to stay in Iraq is that Osama Bin Laden said it's the central battleground. I have no reason to think Osama would lie; I've never met the man. But I don't recall Eisenhower mentioning that the reason he chose to fight in France and not the Balkans was because Hitler said that was where the action was.

Is anybody else tired of hearing from Obama that it was a mistake to invade Iraq? About 80% of us have that straight now. Some of us think that Obama voting against the war was gutsy, and some of us think that being right when everybody else is wrong amounts to treason or at least cowardice. Anyway, I wish he'd get over it.

Who said it department: "If we have Bin Laden and his lieutenants in our sights, and Pakistan is unwilling or unable to take action, we should take him out." I believe this attitude is referred to as the Bush Doctrine. Republicans scourge Clinton because he didn't do it. When those words fell from Obama's lips, the Thin Red Line of Republican approval did not go up a single millimeter. I guess it's not whether it's right or wrong, it's whether the right guy says it that matters.

Did I miss where McCain said how he is going to get the troops to fight in both Iraq and Afghanistan? Ya got three options, dude:

1) Pull 'em out of Iraq to go to Afghanistan (Oh sorry, that's B.O's plan!)

2) Leave Afghanistan too weak (well, that does fit with "muddling through" as a strategy.)

3) Get more troops (Oh I forgot! We've been trying and can't. That's why McCain voted against the improved veterans benefits -- too many people would leave the service.)

Was it a slip of the tongue when McCain said on Wall Street people are rewarded for greed, corruption and failure to carry out responsibility? I thought he was talking about Congress.

A Liter of Leadership

2008-09-27T19:43:00.000-07:00

Three quotes come to mind about the financial crisis:

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” – Franklin Roosevelt

“This sucker could go down!” – George U.U. Bush

“The sky is falling!” – Chicken Little

Congress is working SO hard to forestall the financial crisis, in the finest traditions of saving the nation. Let me tell you what tradition that is.

Democracy as practiced in the U.S. is based on three fundamental principles:
1) No problem will be addressed until it is a crisis almost beyond salvation.
2) After enough lower-and-middle-class lemmings have gone over the cliff, Congress will take some action designed to look like they are saving the nation.
3) The voters will notice the crisis until they change channels during the next commercial.

Only in one crisis have I been forced to accept the United States Congress as my personal savior. In 1973 the Arabs lost a war with Israel and got mad. They declared an embargo, meaning that if anybody sailed a boatload of crude oil from one of their ports to a U.S. port, they would get REAL mad. The Tooth Fairy was a bigger threat to the U.S. economy. The international oil companies could easily send crude boats to non-U.S. ports and sell the cargoes to third parties, fourth, and so on. Eventually a purchaser would decide to send the boat with its crude oil to a U.S. port. The crude would never leave the boat but the Arab embargo would be respected. Net reduction in crude supply to the U.S.: Zero.

Unfortunately, Congress saw a chance to save the nation. They decided the sky would fall and leave us with about 70% as much crude as we used in 1972. They passed a law that said in 1974 no oil company could sell anybody more than 70% of what they had sold them in 1972. They called it allocation. Sure to ensure fair distribution for sure, right? Sure.

Congress didn’t realize that gasoline was (still is) carried to consumers by thousands of small distributors across the country. These outfits constantly go out of business, expand by purchasing somebody else’s distributorship, or sell out to somebody else. So consider what happened with the Big International Thievin’ Evil Bastards Oil Company (known as BITEBOIL.) When the embargo came, BITEBOIL swapped crude cargos around so they could produce just as much gasoline in the U.S. as they did before.

In the year before the embargo BITEBOIL sold 1 million gallons of gasoline to Petroleum Oil Transport (POT) a distribution firm owned by John and Mary Middleclass of Dry Prong, Louisiana. Under the allocation law, BITEBOIL could sell POT 70% of a million, or 700,000 gallons, in 1974. Only POT wasn’t there. John and Mary had sold out to their son, who owned Small Oil Limited (SOL.) BITEBOIL could not sell those 700,000 gallons to anybody else without violating the 70% allocation for Anybody Else.
Since SOL was a start-up and didn’t buy any gasoline the year before, NOBODY could sell them any gasoline in 1974. By Easter SOL was broke. The owner had to move back in with John and Mary, who were in line at the gas pumps cursing BITEBOIL for cutting off the gasoline. And BITEBOIL had 700,000 gallons of gasoline in its tanks that Congress had legally prohibited them from selling to anybody.

Soon BITEBOIL had filled up their product tanks with gasoline that they weren’t allowed to sell and they had to start cutting back on their crude runs. Thus did Congress, by allocation, made the embargo come true. It was like having the Tooth Fairy bite your nose off. Escalate this from POT’s 1 million gallons to 600 million gallons every day across the country, and you’ll begin understand the true depths of Congressional wisdom. The whole country was SOL.

But the nation wasn't saved enough yet. The major companies like BITEBOIL were still importing crude and Congress had to make sure the little refiners, who didn’t have international sources, got some. So Congress made a list of Big Oil companies who were required to sell a portion of all the crude they imported to a refinery that was not on the list, at a set price. A very LOW set price. They called it the Entitlement Program.

Congress didn't say you had to already have a refinery in order to qualify for entitlements. The law allowed you to build a new refinery, then call up BITEBOIL and tell them to deliver your entitlement of very very cheap crude oil. The Good Hope refinery between Baton Rouge and New Orleans was built at a cost of $240 million dollars. Industry scuttlebutt had it that the entire amount was recovered in two years. Would you like to invest your 401(K) in something that would pay you back your total investment every two years? Anybody with a hundred million or so could get in the game, and the number of refineries in the U.S. rose from about 150 in 1973 to about 300 in 1980.

Some of those refineries were awful. They consumed gross amounts of energy. They were, to be polite, environmentally unfriendly. They treated their employees like --- well like employees get treated today. Being new sellers, they weren’t subject to allocations so they ran maxed out on feed rate with their inefficient, polluting little refineries. The big, efficient refineries with the environmental protections built in were cut back to minimal runs and were even shutting down. The best deals for the nation at large were the guys like Fuels Universal (known as FU) who built their refineries but never started them up. They called BITEBOIL to claim their entitlement, but offered to sell it back to them without taking delivery. The oil never left BITEBOIL’s tanks, but they had to pay FU a HFW (Huge Financial Wad.) FU could have built their refinery out of popsicle sticks and pipe cleaners.

In Summary: By their own action Congress made the embargo effective when it otherwise would not have been, and created an incentive for investors to make the nation less energy efficient and more polluted. When you hear that Congress is working late into the night to save us from the financial crisis, remember that is the tradition they are trying to uphold.

Am I for real, you ask? Yes. I made up individuals and companies above, but the impact of Congressional action was exactly what I have described. I personally saw it in action, and did many of the calculations required to comply with these laws. After 35 years I can laugh about it, but I know that tonight the dreams will come.

Democracy: Painfully Drawn Conclusions

2008-09-23T20:35:00.000-07:00

My senior year in high school I participated in my first national-level political activity.
Several of us went out in the dead of night and planted rye grass seed on a new expressway embankment. We made the newspaper a few weeks later when it sprouted as "VOTE GOP."

The GOP candidate was that arrogant warmonger Goldwater, who lost to that humble champion of world peace, Lyndon Johnson.

Since that time I have drawn the following conclusions about national party politics. A disturbing number of people have agreed with these, regardless of how they vote. As you complete reading each item, I suggest before going on to the next you repeat at least once Winston Churchill's statement (one of the truthiest of all time) :

"Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others."

Both parties are sincerely convinced that the most important thing for the welfare of the country is that they be running it.
Each party accuses the other of interfering in citizens' lives. In truth both of them interfere, they just interfere in different things.
Contrary to popular belief, few on either side intentionally lie. Some are genuinely ignorant about the topic on which they speak. Others, like Captain Queeg in the Caine Mutiny, “revise reality in their own minds” until it conforms to what they say.
Likewise, few politicians “flip-flop.” They sometimes address the shades of gray that characterize all important issues. If one admits that light gray exists, the other side trumpets that they have advocated pure white. Admission that dark gray exists is trumpeted as advocating pure black. The public finds this as entertaining as the WWF, and for pretty much the same reasons.
Both parties have very wise, capable people, and some incredibly brainless yahoos. The public mostly pays attention to the latter; listening to the first group takes too much mental effort.
Both parties want to solve the same problems, but they want to use different methods.
Both parties judge ideas based on how well they conform to pre-conceived ideology, regardless of whether the ideas are workable or will do any good.
Many on both sides will leave the public worse off rather than let the other party share in the credit for making anything better.
Neither party will propose anything that is not trite and simplistic. Any serious proposal will displease enough voters to keep them out of office, so what's the point?
Each party accuses the other of fiscal irresponsibility. The only real difference is the Democrats want to tax-and-spend, while the Republicans want to borrow-from-China-and-spend and let our grandchildren pay the taxes.

Following and Subscribing

2008-09-20T14:00:00.001-07:00

I wrote recently that I had only one subscriber, and about five people said they were "it."

I should have said I had one follower, which is a Google thing. You can follow by going down to the bottom of this blog page (waaayyyy down) and finding where it says "Followers." Click on "Follow this blog." It will ask you to log in or create an account with Google. It will then tell your Google home page or Google Reader when there is something new here.

"Subscribing" is more generic; it doesn't require Google. Use the buttons on the right above my picture and you will be told when there is something new here, on your home page with Google, Yahoo, or some other options. If you pick "RSS" or ATOM" then the little "Feeds" thing-a-ma-jig will turn orange when there is something new.

Whats the difference between subscribing and following? If you follow anonymously or subscribe, nobody knows but you. If you follow publicly then people can see below that you are doing so. My two followers so far are of a caliber FAR above the audience I ever hoped to attract. No offense to the rest of you; feel free to bring up the average.

I don't want to go all serious and informative on you, so here are some greetings to try on people.

Passing two friends chatting in the hallway: "One of you guys is keeping a lot better company than the other one."

On approaching one person; especially if you haven't seen them in a while: "You remind me a lot of [person's name here] but you're a LOT better-looking." For variation use "smarter" in place of better looking.

On seeing a person you have known for years who recently retired or moved to another location: "OH...Oh...wait, it'll come to me in a minute...don't tell me, now...you used to work here, didn't you?" This works best if accompanied by a hand to the temple or other "it's on the tip of my tongue" gestures.

On approaching a person wearing a garment of bright green, blue, or any other noticeable color: "Wow you always look SO good in [name any color other than the one they have on.]" Be aware that 67.4 per cent of males will have no idea what color they are wearing. If you work at an engineering firm, that will be 98.65472 per cent.

On seeing an acquaintance at a restaurant or other public spot: "I love this place! You always meet the nicest people here, don't you think?"

On seeing a person who is not normally in your building: "Hey there! I heard the average IQ in the building had gone up, but I didn't know it was you." If you want to pick a fight, say "down" instead of "up."

Hades Behind a Palin Horse

2008-09-18T23:20:00.001-07:00

What you're about to read is very serious. Seriously. You be the judge.

First, for those of you trying to recall the “pale horse” reference in the title, it’s from Revelations 6:8. I heartily recommend http://www.biblegateway.com as a resource to verify scriptural references and wording.

John McCain has demonstrated courage, integrity and patriotism beyond the ability of any human being to question. If he were a Democrat, Karl Rove himself would not dare to challenge him on those traits. (That could be funny for several reasons, but I’m still serious.) No other presidential candidate except George Washington has demonstrated these traits so indisputably, and he is the only candidate I admire more that McCain for such demonstration. Obama will never demonstrate these traits to the degree McCain has. Whatever you think of Obama he simply will never have the opportunity to achieve the nobility that McCain lived out on the filthy floor of the Hanoi Hilton.

Courage, integrity, and patriotism demand that you choose a vice presidential candidate who, to the best of your judgment, will be an excellent president should you become unavailable. Of course, every candidate since the 12th Amendment made it a choice has chosen, instead, whatever VP candidate will bring the most votes to the ticket. Their courage, integrity and patriotism demand getting elected. It’s OK to risk sticking the nation with a question mark as president, just as long as he or she is a popular question mark. Obama is a fortunate exception. His ability is challenged so extensively that choosing a VP with presidential abilities and getting more votes are one and the same. (No, still not joking.)

Whatever you, I or anybody else thinks of Sarah Palin, there is one thing that nobody can think of her. She is not, out of all the choices available to McCain, the person likely above all others to be an outstanding president in his absence. There is no doubt whatsoever that he handed the nation a question mark because he thought it would get him more votes.

I don’t know how to reconcile the John McCain who chose Sarah Palin with the John McCain I consider second only to George Washington in his demonstration of courage, integrity and patriotism. People do change. If the McCain running for president is no longer the McCain of the Hanoi Hilton, that scares me worse than anything you can tell me about Sarah Palin.

OK, the seriousness warning is now suspended. It might scare me worse if Palin were, to paraphrase a former governor of Louisiana, “…caught in bed with a live girl or a dead boy.” Perhaps you saw the recent headline “Edwards admits affair, denies paternity.”
Do you know that my first reaction was “Incredible! The guy is in prison and 81 years old. How does he have the opportunity or the energy?” Then I realized they were talking about John, not Edwin.
Some of you didn’t live in Louisiana in the last thirty years of the 20th century, and therefore missed out on the ultimate unification of politics and entertainment in the person of Edwin Edwards. I recommend “The Last Hayride” by John Maginnis

With apologies to Matt Damon, the actuarial odds don’t seem to be 1 in 3 that McCain will kick the bucket (or hand it to Sarah) before the end of one term. I’ve seen estimates all the way from 9% to 33% that an average guy of his age will die of natural causes by then. It all depends on the assumptions you make, but who cares? Whatever he is he is NOT an average guy.

Eight presidents have died in office, by the way; four or five of them by assassination. (There’s some dispute about Harding.) The three who definitely died of natural causes were all 63-68 years of age. Since MCain is older than 68, a simple experience-based estimate yields a zero probability of him dying in office, excluding foul play. Oddly, this is unaffected if he loses the election – there will still be a zero probability of his dying in office.

A note to the women of our country: all great ideas have their time. Be grateful that Bill Clinton didn’t choose a young, good looking woman as his running mate.

Frogs, Rice, Sarah Palin and Shoeboxes

2008-09-16T18:19:00.000-07:00

Get a ten-pound bag of rice. Find a frog. Dump the rice on top of the frog. Imagine you are the frog and each grain of rice is a news item about Sarah Palin. Be comforted as the frog shares your pain. Misery loves company, even if the best you can do is a frog buried in rice

One grain of rice that stuck in my eye was a Newsweek column by a definite liberal who says she really likes Palin. She almost swoons over this vision: "Palin, BlackBerry in one hand, Red Bull in the other, checked her messages as she crossed the street, seemingly oblivious to her youngest daughter, Piper, who trailed along behind her, jumping rope in the crosswalk." She continues, "Now that's my kind of working mom..."
Link

I don't feel good about the conservative family values demonstrated by ignoring your (then) five year old daughter while crossing the street. I also have an urge to take a big dose of liberal laxative and purge myself of any agreement with somebody who thinks that is their ideal working mom. Any paparazzi could have caught me in moments like this with my kids, but Newsweek wouldn't have run the picture as any body's ideal working dad.
The whole thing is meaningless; it just left me feeling kind of yucky. As if I found out Karl Rove is a Boy Scout leader or something.

You have to be really smart to figure out why McCain picked Palin as a running partner. It boils down to this: on Inauguration Day 2009 McCain will be 26,442 days old which added to Palin's 16,145 days will make a total of 42,857. Now let's go back and look at June 15, 1906 which was 42,191 days before their prospective inauguration.

First: On that day a species of foreign parasite insect was found on some tea flowers in Massachusetts; even then a hotbed of liberalism. This little pioneer of illegal aliens was described as "posterior metatarsi very broad...genitalia prominent...length, 2.5 mm. Disturbing? I thought so, too.
Link

Second: That day was the earliest recorded Pentecostal religious experience in Los Angeles. Mr. Frank Bartleman wrote that the event "...seemed to still criticism and opposition, and was hard for even wicked men to gainsay or ridicule." Powerful! Especially realizing that "Brother Seymour generally sat behind two empty shoe boxes, one on top of the other. He usually kept his head inside the top one during the meeting, in prayer. There was no pride there."
Link

So on Inauguration Day -- exactly 42,191 days after these two symbolic events -- McCain and Palin will have accumulated 42,857 combined days of life experience. If you subtract 42,191 from 42,857, you know what you get?

666, that's what you get!

Coincidence? Go find Osama Bin Laden and try to convince him that's coincidence! Just realize it's going to take you seven years, and it won't matter at all. Not if you believe me and the President. So stay proud! Hold your head high whether it's in a shoebox or any other dark place!

The really yucky thing is realizing that Sarah Palin was born in my senior year of high school. That's like finding out that Karl Rove is a Girl Scout leader.

Accrued Knowledge of Economics

2008-09-15T13:16:00.000-07:00

McCain is getting beat up for saying he doesn't understand economics. Another case of punishment for telling the truth?

Apparently Obama wants to demonstrate his ignorance. He plans to windfall-tax the oil companies and give the public $1,000 bucks per head to help buy gasoline. which will continue to cost more as petroleum demand overwhelms supply. This tax will 2) reduce dividends to shareholders so he can give some of their money back and 3) take money away from drilling holes to get more oil. So he wants to take money away from increasing supply and use it to increase demand. This is as dumb as McCain's support of the "gas tax holiday." Approximately.

What, you were thinking if we raise oil company taxes it will 1) reduce excessive CEO salaries? Has the Tooth Fairy been to your place lately?

Both McCain and Obama want to curb salaries of CEOs who get rich while screwing up. I wonder how? These are publicly owned corporations, structured under the laws of the United States and whatever state they are chartered in. Their directors are elected by shareholders under a legally monitored process and are legally charged with certain duties, including setting the pay package for the CEO.
If a CEO screws up, do we take back his pay? Will the directors of the company be punished? If so does that mean the voters should be punished if a politician screws up? All of them, or just the ones who voted for him or her? How about the ones who didn't vote? Maybe they should be rewarded; say by splitting the politician's left over campaign funds.
Who gets to define "screwing up?" After all, thirty per cent of the country thinks W is a successful president.

Both candidates are demonizing "speculators," also known as "investors." Either term means a person who buys something hoping to sell it for more than they paid. This happens for GM stock, crude oil, corn, pork bellies and U.S. Treasury bonds. People who do this include you, me, our retirement fund managers, and every seller on eBay. If somebody wants to bid $15 for GM stock thinking it will go up to $20, exactly how are we going to make that against the rules?

"Speculators" are bad, it seems, because they just buy and sell. They buy and sell crude oil, for example, without refining it. Does every GM stock holder make cars? Are we going to change the rules so that only refiners can buy crude oil and only farmers can buy corn?

Beats me. Just drive safe. And far -- remember I'm retired from the petrochemical industry.

Blogging, Bashing, and Talking Points

2008-09-14T11:20:00.001-07:00

I've gotten a gratifying number of emails from people telling me how much they look forward to reading my posts. One person has subscribed. Draw your own conclusions.

I'm working off backlog right now; this daily posting business won't continue.

I get a a constant stream of funny and/or fictitious emails bashing the Democrats and Obama, and almost none bashing the Republicans and McCain. I can only conclude that liberals are such sourpusses that they can't see the humor in things, and so unimaginative that they can't make up any interesting lies. Do you want people like that running the country?

Which reminds me; below is a set of talking points for a presidential candidate. Guess which one.

TALKING POINTS

I am a candidate for the Presidency of the United States.
I was born to very poor parents and was raised by only one of them. My achievements today are my own, and I believe that the experiences of my childhood and youth give me insight to the needs and beliefs of the people of our nation.
Our nation has serious problems. We are as divided against each other as I have ever seen us.
Our military is consumed in a war against a foe that wears no uniform, recruits from diverse regions, and is perfectly willing to attack non-military targets wherever they can. This foe believes that our whole way of life is hostile to theirs, and if they could they would drive us out of existence.
I believe that the current administration has done a poor job of executing this war.
I did not agree with our country’s decision to invade another country. I believe that the underlying motive was our president’s “quest for glory” and that the war was initiated for false reasons. My position made me very unpopular, although many have since come over to my point of view.
A significant portion of our population consists of under skilled and illiterate people who came here in violation of the laws of one or more countries. Unlike many, I believe that these people should be provided an opportunity to obtain citizenship.
Many people, especially in the South, find my candidacy troubling because of racial issues.
I acknowledge that my experience is limited. Much of it is in state government; my time as a national legislator is less than one full Senate term. It is true that I never created legislation of any significance.
It is also true that I have never served in our nation’s military, nor have I held any executive position other than a not-for profit organization formed to benefit my state and my community. None the less I am proud of that service.
Many of you are concerned that my policies will severely damage the economic health of our nation.
I have corresponded with, worked with, and befriended many people who are very angry at our nation and vehemently criticize our government. I do not necessarily agree with their statements or their proposals, but I do acknowledge that their grievances have some merit.
Despite the controversy and limitations, I ask you to vote for me in the belief that my personal abilities can bring our nation to a new level of achievement and unity. I ask that you vote for me on faith, in the hope I can do this.
In closing......

My name is Abraham Lincoln and I am asking you to vote for me as your President in this Year of Our Lord 1860.

Alicia, Ike and Bobby

2008-09-13T10:58:00.000-07:00

Hurricane Ike is being compared to Hurricane Alicia in 1983. During Alicia I sat on my condo balcony near the Astrodome, watching the roof peel off of buildings across the courtyard. Around sunset I was wading up to my chest to get to Aruba, my boat at Clear Lake. The photo at left shows Alicia's effect on the Corinthian Yacht Club.

I saw an interview this morning with a lady who stayed in Galveston and was rescued by cooperation between a National Guard helicopter and a firefighter team working on the ground.

Most of us react to that by thinking, "Wow, was she stupid!" I think "Wow, was she criminal!" She committed reckless endangerment just as much as a drunk driver. A rescuer had to go down the wire from that chopper; several others had to wade into water filled with unknown holes and jagged objects. Sure, they're trained for this, but every time they go there's a risk. This fool made them go through it one extra unnecessary time. If one of them died trying to get to her, would she be guilty of manslaughter?

Bobby Jindal, Governor of Louisiana, is showing real leadership. He's visible, sounds like he knows what is going on, is actively in charge, and is striking a good balance between caution and optimism. There were two problems with the Gustav evacuation: no portable showers for three days at the shelters in Monroe, and mix-ups in food stamp distribution in New Orleans. Jindal's comment: "When Ike is past there will be time to find out who failed to follow the plan, and there will be consequences for the agencies and the individuals involved." There is a narrow line between genuine investigation and a witch hunt to look good politically. Either one, though introduces the concept of accountability which has been woefully absent in government for a long time.

Jindal has a lot of political viewpoints and proposals that I don't like, and that brings up the question: "Would you rather have a leader who is competent that you disagree with, or a leader who is incompetent that you agree with?" I come down for the former. I am not so confident in my views that I think it will do all that much damage if somebody does a good job of implementing something else. On the other hand, incompetent peopld can do major damage even if they don't implement anything.

To begin with...

2008-09-12T20:13:00.000-07:00

Several people have told me I should do this, and if I don't do it now the next item on my list is to go out and saw up wood from Gustav. So I'll give it a whirl if you will. I'm exhausted from all the decisions about how this page should look, whether you can delete expletives in your view of the posts, etc. So I'll just kick this off with a list of pithy sayings (no, I do not write with a lisp) that have intrigued me at times. Maybe you'll find one that intrigues you.

The greatest obstacle to communication is the illusion that it has been achieved.
-- Paul Eldredge
Ignorance is bliss for the ignorant. For the rest of us it’s a pain in the neck.
-- Thomas Eldredge
The only acceptable reason for raising your voice is distance.
-- Paul Eldredge
We cannot ensure success, but we can deserve it.
-- Cato
The only thing you get is the present. If you want to pollute it with unpleasantness
from the past or future, you may do so.
-- Chuck Wood
We are all travelers in this world. From the sweet grass to the packing house, from birth until death, we travel between the eternities.
-- Robert Duvall, as
Prentiss Ritter in
Broken Trail
Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.
-- John Lennon
The question is, what have you traded a day of your life for.
-- Clyde Sandifer
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit.
-- Harry Truman