As I have stated earlier, I don't get many comments on my blogs. I enjoy the ones I do get, however--even if they disagree with me. We all have our own perspective on things and I find it interesting to interact with people with differing viewpoints as long as everyone can maintain a civil dialogue and intelligently represent their position on a given issue.
When I recently wrote The Devils In The Details--Part III, I addressed the media's coverage of gas prices and I touched on the political furor surrounding domestic oil exploration. I have received two anonymous comments on this posting, apparently from the same individual.
The first one read as follows:
"Two things ...First, the numbers being thrown around the web are that it would only take an increase of 1 to 1.5 mpg in our cars to save as much gas as ANWR will provide. We have a saying in engineering that you "go after the low-hanging fruit." I'd say mentioning that to people, and encouraging people in that direction is simple (low-hanging fruit).
Second, you may not complain when you tank up your 10 mpg SUV ... but how do you compare it to James Woolesy's Prius? Here we have a conservative, walking his talk, to reduce dependence on foreign oil. Why are you so special that you should still be driving 10 mpg?"
Seven hours later today I received this:
This news just in:
"DETROIT - Most Americans believe it is "patriotic" to buy a fuel-efficient vehicle to help wean their country off Middle Eastern oil, according to a new poll released on Thursday.
Some 66 percent of participants in the survey said they agreed that driving vehicles that require less fuel to run was patriotic, since it could help reduce the US dependency on Mideast crude."
Good comments and good questions, and here is my response.
Our country became an "automobile culture" shortly after the end of World War II. Rumor has it (I can't find proof in the form of Internet links) that General Motors and Ford financed the politicians that lead the removal of public transportation--things like street cars and trolleys--in the major cities to foster growth of the concept of one or more autos in every driveway. In fact, houses didn't need driveways until the car came along.
By the way...why do Americans drive on the parkway and park on the driveway? Oh, never mind...
I lived through the oil embargo of the early 1970's and the gas price crunch of the late 1970's, so I feel I am well qualified to talk about auto fuel economy. My first car was a 1974 Honda Civic Hatchback. I was only fifteen years old when we bought it and what a great car it was in a day when people thought foreign cars were crap. My family was way ahead of the curve. Little did we know that Honda would become one of the most popular cars in the world within the next ten years.
Our little tin box had a semi-automatic transmission, and AM/FM radio, air conditioning, and cost $2,100 brand damn new. By semi-automatic, I mean that you had to "shift" the transmission from low to high if you were going to go faster than 45 MPH. You also lost about 5 MPH when you turned on the air conditioner, but it got over 20 MPG in town and nearly 40 MPG on REGULAR gasoline on the highway. You could fill it up with $0.60 per gallon gas and not spend $8.00.
Yes I drive a vehicle that gets 10 MPG. No, I did not buy it as a status symbol. You see, being in the industrial construction business, I've owned a so called "sport utility" vehicle since 1984. I bought a S-10 Blazer as a substitute for a pick-up truck back when hardly anyone was building or driving "country Cadillacs." Chevy made the Surburban, the Blazer, and the S-10 Blazer, Ford built a couple of sizes of Broncos, and Jeep and International built a couple of trucks with covered beds, and everyone else drove station wagons.
They didn't really use the term SUV back then, the attraction for me was being to haul passengers and "stuff" in the same vehicle without messing up the girls' hair making them ride in the bed of a pickup truck.
By the time I wanted and could afford to buy a Surburban, I had to stand in line at the Chevorlet dealer behind a bunch of Dunwoody housewives who wanted to drive around with an entire soccer team in tow. I just wanted to drag my boat to the lake every week and haul a few thousand pounds of luggage and construction materials with me around the southeast US.
By April 1995, if I wanted to special order a new three quarter ton four wheel drive Surburban I would have to wait four or five months for it to be manufactured and delivered. Instead, I bought a white 2500 series XLT off of the lot in Roswell, Georgia and paid full sticker price to boot. I didn't purchase any baby seats with my truck, however.
I drove over 30,000 miles each year for the next four years. Most of the time I was by myself, but I couldn't do what I was doing in a Honda or a Toyota. I bought oil and tires and washed and pampered my truck and it never let me down. Only once did I ever break down on the side of the road and even then I didn't have to be towed to a garage because I installed a new alternator myself on the side of Interstate 85 in north Georgia.
By 1999, my beloved Chevy had over 150,000 miles on the odometer and it was still running strong. The loan was paid off in 2000 and today it has a little over 181,000 miles on the original 454 cubic inch cast iron engine. The third seat burned up in the fire that destroyed my house in 2001 and the driver's seat cover is showing a little wear, but, as I said, it's paid for and I will drive it until it won't drive any more.
I really don't mean to gloat about my truck and its low gas mileage. When my girl Pat is in town we use her Ford Mustang for transportation. It gets about 20 MPG on the road and over 15 MPG in town and is fun to drive to boot.
I feel that I have the right to be a bit smug about my choice of vehicle because I have really used it as it was intended to be used and no other form of transportation could do what I have done with my SUV.
The problem with our society is that the "fad" of SUV's has caused a whole bunch of people to buy crappy pseudo-SUV's that really don't have any capability that a car or station wagon doesn't also possess. These vehicles also have poor fuel economy because of their size.
You won't believe how many people I have seen in Jeeps and Toyotas, hopelessly stuck in 2" of snow ten feet off of the pavement. Why pay the extra money to buy and fuel a SUV when the darn thing gets stuck every time mother nature sneezes?
I drive a real SUV for all the right reasons, if there is such a thing as "the right reasons." The thing about living in America is that you have the right to be STUPID with your time and your money and if everyone wants to keep driving at 12 MPG and they are willing to pay $2.25 to do it then more power to them. Just like in the late 1970's, I personally expect to see a mass exidus to vehicles with higher fuel economy, but as for me and my Chevy Surburban, all we have to say is...
Varooooommmmmm, Varoooommmmmmmmm (guzzle guzzle)
Saturday, March 19, 2005
More Hummingbird stuff
Imagine being an animal weighing less than an ounce and having to make an 18 to 20 hour, non-stop trip from South America across the Gulf of Mexico to South Florida. That's what our little Rubythroated Hummingbirds do every winter.
I basically knew nothing about hummingbirds until last summer other than I had seen a few in Jamaica and in the Bahamas. Then we bought our first feeder and visited the web site hummingbirds.net and a whole new world opened up to me. These little birds are truely a joy to watch and associate with.
I spent a good deal of time doing research on the Internet and happened to read an article about hummers getting trapped in garages. Little did I know that within months I would be using the information to save a bird.
You see, Hummingbirds instinctively fly straight up when they are threatened. For some reason, in spite of seeing an opening ahead or below their position, their little brains tell them that the route to safety is up.
Last fall Pat and I were visiting my mother at her farm in south Alabama. I was doing some repair work on her poolhouse and had spent the day with the garage doors open on the garage and coincidentally I had cleaned and refilled her hummingbird feeder located between the pool and the garage. Late in the afternoon, when I was cleaning up from the day's activities, I walked into the garage and was greeted by the sight of a hummingbird bouncing off of the ceiling and flourescent light fixtures in a panic to escape.
What ensued was a ten minute scramble with my mother moving her car out of the garage and Pat jumping around on her tip toes and me scrambling up and down a step stool trying to capture or "herd" the little bird out of the garage. The problem was that with both of the garage doors open the bird kept going over the doors rather than under them.
We finally ended up turning the lights on, closing the garage doors, and I climbed on the step stool and captured the little male Ruby Throat with my bare hands and carried him outside. He was so tiny and fragile, but he survived the incident and hauled butt out of sight as soon as I let him go in the front yard.
We are so happy that "our" birds are back for the season here.
I basically knew nothing about hummingbirds until last summer other than I had seen a few in Jamaica and in the Bahamas. Then we bought our first feeder and visited the web site hummingbirds.net and a whole new world opened up to me. These little birds are truely a joy to watch and associate with.
I spent a good deal of time doing research on the Internet and happened to read an article about hummers getting trapped in garages. Little did I know that within months I would be using the information to save a bird.
You see, Hummingbirds instinctively fly straight up when they are threatened. For some reason, in spite of seeing an opening ahead or below their position, their little brains tell them that the route to safety is up.
Last fall Pat and I were visiting my mother at her farm in south Alabama. I was doing some repair work on her poolhouse and had spent the day with the garage doors open on the garage and coincidentally I had cleaned and refilled her hummingbird feeder located between the pool and the garage. Late in the afternoon, when I was cleaning up from the day's activities, I walked into the garage and was greeted by the sight of a hummingbird bouncing off of the ceiling and flourescent light fixtures in a panic to escape.
What ensued was a ten minute scramble with my mother moving her car out of the garage and Pat jumping around on her tip toes and me scrambling up and down a step stool trying to capture or "herd" the little bird out of the garage. The problem was that with both of the garage doors open the bird kept going over the doors rather than under them.
We finally ended up turning the lights on, closing the garage doors, and I climbed on the step stool and captured the little male Ruby Throat with my bare hands and carried him outside. He was so tiny and fragile, but he survived the incident and hauled butt out of sight as soon as I let him go in the front yard.
We are so happy that "our" birds are back for the season here.
Our Birds Are Back!
When we moved down here to St. Simons Island last March, we reluctantly accepted a rental agreement that had the stipulation of not allowing pets. The condo's white berber carpet has certainly benefited from this stipulation, but it gets a little lonely around here when Pat is out of town.
Our second floor living room has a giant 12' sliding glass door on the balcony that looks out into a nice sugar maple tree and the local squirrels spend a good deal of time entertaining us with their antics in our tree and the adjacent pine trees.
Our other adopted pets are a bunch of Rubythroated Hummingbirds that we started feeding last summer and we were excited today to have our first bird visit our feeder this year. We wishfully put the feeder out on February 20th, but March is really early for them to be seen in Georgia and we hope that it is a sign that spring has truly arrived here in the Golden Isles.
We are pretty sure that the fellow (the males have red throats--thus the name) that stopped by today a few times is one that was here last year because he used the same branch in our tree as a perch when he wasn't eating. They are really territorial and dominant birds will perch adjacent to the feeder and defend the food source from other birds that aren't in their "clan." It's really funny to see little aerial "dogfights" between birds the size of your thumb.
I have a couple of cups of hummingbird food (1/4 cup sugar to 1 cup water) on the stovetop right now and both feeders are going out ASAP.
Hey little birds...come and get it...
Our second floor living room has a giant 12' sliding glass door on the balcony that looks out into a nice sugar maple tree and the local squirrels spend a good deal of time entertaining us with their antics in our tree and the adjacent pine trees.
Our other adopted pets are a bunch of Rubythroated Hummingbirds that we started feeding last summer and we were excited today to have our first bird visit our feeder this year. We wishfully put the feeder out on February 20th, but March is really early for them to be seen in Georgia and we hope that it is a sign that spring has truly arrived here in the Golden Isles.
We are pretty sure that the fellow (the males have red throats--thus the name) that stopped by today a few times is one that was here last year because he used the same branch in our tree as a perch when he wasn't eating. They are really territorial and dominant birds will perch adjacent to the feeder and defend the food source from other birds that aren't in their "clan." It's really funny to see little aerial "dogfights" between birds the size of your thumb.
I have a couple of cups of hummingbird food (1/4 cup sugar to 1 cup water) on the stovetop right now and both feeders are going out ASAP.
Hey little birds...come and get it...
Friday, March 18, 2005
U.N. Not In Mood
The headline reads: UN ‘not in mood’ for more change. Here is the intro to this story...
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
From the World section
NEW YORK --The senior aide to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said he does not expect additional firings of key personnel as the organization struggles to defend itself from multiple scandals.
"We're not in the mood for more wholesale change," said Mark Malloch Brown, who became Mr. Annan's chief of staff and primary adviser three months ago.
"Senior appointments will not stop, but there is no wholesale change," he told The Washington Times in an interview earlier this week.
I wish someone would take a big stick and deliver an old fashioned "come to Jesus" lecture to Kofi Annan that he will remember for the rest of his miserable life. Then, since the UN is "not in the mood" for "change" I wish that the US would keep all of our "change" in the bank instead of continuing to fund this sorry excuse for an international organization.
Is it just me?
Thursday, March 17, 2005
The Devil's In The Details--Part III
Continuing along the path of dissecting the ineptitude and bias of the liberal mainstream media, it is with great pleasure (and limited fanfare) that I offer my third, brief installment of “The Devil’s In The Details.”
This reoccurring theme in my writings is a result of my constant amazement at the level of stupidity exhibited in the news products delivered to the American public by so-called professional journalists. Direct lies and misrepresentation of truth by omission of relevant facts and data are the rule rather than the exception. I am personally insulted by much of what is represented as “news” and wonder why more people don’t demand fundamental changes in our nation’s print and broadcast media.
Since many people are not as proficient in mathematical concepts as I am, I like to look at news stories that involve financial and statistical concepts and try to relate background information that might help put the story into an understandable context. Take gas prices, for instance.
I’ll admit that gasoline prices are high right now. If you listen to the media, you probably won't be suprised to learn that we have record gas prices.
“NEW YORK (Reuters) - Record pump prices won't cool America's love affair with the open road, although drivers are starting to fuel their passion with smaller, more efficient vehicles, an auto group says.
"Our historical experience tells us Americans will not give up their travel plans due to high prices of fuel," said Geoff Sundstrom, spokesman for U.S. auto group AAA. "But we think we're already starting to see consumer backlash against high fuel prices in car sales, and that trend may continue."
Average U.S. regular gasoline prices have spiked more than 15 cents in one month to $2.05 a gallon, matching last spring's record, and are expected to keep climbing in the coming days due to soaring costs for crude, AAA said. “
The only problem with this story is, we really don’t have record gas prices.
As I stated in The Devil’s In The Details—Part II, in 1980, during the socialist dictator loving President Jimmy Carter’s reign, the national average price for regular unleaded gasoline reached the equivalent of $2.85 per gallon when adjusted for inflation (2004 dollars.) For some reason (maybe because Carter was a Democrat) you don’t hear this little tidbit of info in the newspaper headlines and on the evening national TV news.
If you look at the chart in this record gas price link, you will see that gasoline cost the equivalent of between $2.00 and $3.00 per gallon all the way up until after World War II when production was increased and gas was made available to the expanding post war middle class whom were all buying new cars for the first time to park in the new garages of their new tract houses.
The liberal media and tree hugging eco-fascists that lament high gas prices and the US dependence on foreign oil are the very same people that loose their minds when the Senate approves oil drilling in ANWR. They can’t have it both ways. Either we explore for, produce, and refine oil domestically or we buy the raw crude and refine it. American’s are dependent on oil regardless and things aren’t changing any time soon.
It’s a fact that much of our domestic oil supplies lie in the ground untapped because it is cheaper to import oil than it is to pump our own oil out of the ground. The breaking point is about $45 per barrel, so expect to see a few new wells pumping out in Texas and Oklahoma this year although the quantity of crude produced is a drop in the bucket compared to the 20,000,000 barrel per year thirst Americans have for petroleum products.
And other thing—there hasn’t been a new oil refinery built since the mid 1970’s. A number of refineries have been shut down due to age and obsolescence. The existing refineries have been modified and improved, but their capacity is strained due to having to produce specific blends of gasoline for specific regions of the country during the summer months. If the environmental morons don’t get off of their butts and let the oil companies build a few new refineries on a regional basis, we are going to really be in a bind in about ten years.
You do realize that you can’t just order a new oil refinery out of a catalogue and have it delivered next week? It takes two or three years to design and construct a new refinery, not counting the two or three years of lawsuits and government permit evaluations that the owners will have to go through to get permission to start construction.
On a personal note, it costs me nearly $90.00 to fill up my Chevy Suburban’s 42 gallon fuel tank. The difference between me and most people is that I don’t blame the government for my ten year old decision to drive a vehicle that gets less than 10 MPG in the city.
I just drive down the road and enjoy the sound of that big 454 cubic inch V-8 engine as it makes the tree hugger’s heads spin around and around.
I love it...
This reoccurring theme in my writings is a result of my constant amazement at the level of stupidity exhibited in the news products delivered to the American public by so-called professional journalists. Direct lies and misrepresentation of truth by omission of relevant facts and data are the rule rather than the exception. I am personally insulted by much of what is represented as “news” and wonder why more people don’t demand fundamental changes in our nation’s print and broadcast media.
Since many people are not as proficient in mathematical concepts as I am, I like to look at news stories that involve financial and statistical concepts and try to relate background information that might help put the story into an understandable context. Take gas prices, for instance.
I’ll admit that gasoline prices are high right now. If you listen to the media, you probably won't be suprised to learn that we have record gas prices.
“NEW YORK (Reuters) - Record pump prices won't cool America's love affair with the open road, although drivers are starting to fuel their passion with smaller, more efficient vehicles, an auto group says.
"Our historical experience tells us Americans will not give up their travel plans due to high prices of fuel," said Geoff Sundstrom, spokesman for U.S. auto group AAA. "But we think we're already starting to see consumer backlash against high fuel prices in car sales, and that trend may continue."
Average U.S. regular gasoline prices have spiked more than 15 cents in one month to $2.05 a gallon, matching last spring's record, and are expected to keep climbing in the coming days due to soaring costs for crude, AAA said. “
The only problem with this story is, we really don’t have record gas prices.
As I stated in The Devil’s In The Details—Part II, in 1980, during the socialist dictator loving President Jimmy Carter’s reign, the national average price for regular unleaded gasoline reached the equivalent of $2.85 per gallon when adjusted for inflation (2004 dollars.) For some reason (maybe because Carter was a Democrat) you don’t hear this little tidbit of info in the newspaper headlines and on the evening national TV news.
If you look at the chart in this record gas price link, you will see that gasoline cost the equivalent of between $2.00 and $3.00 per gallon all the way up until after World War II when production was increased and gas was made available to the expanding post war middle class whom were all buying new cars for the first time to park in the new garages of their new tract houses.
The liberal media and tree hugging eco-fascists that lament high gas prices and the US dependence on foreign oil are the very same people that loose their minds when the Senate approves oil drilling in ANWR. They can’t have it both ways. Either we explore for, produce, and refine oil domestically or we buy the raw crude and refine it. American’s are dependent on oil regardless and things aren’t changing any time soon.
It’s a fact that much of our domestic oil supplies lie in the ground untapped because it is cheaper to import oil than it is to pump our own oil out of the ground. The breaking point is about $45 per barrel, so expect to see a few new wells pumping out in Texas and Oklahoma this year although the quantity of crude produced is a drop in the bucket compared to the 20,000,000 barrel per year thirst Americans have for petroleum products.
And other thing—there hasn’t been a new oil refinery built since the mid 1970’s. A number of refineries have been shut down due to age and obsolescence. The existing refineries have been modified and improved, but their capacity is strained due to having to produce specific blends of gasoline for specific regions of the country during the summer months. If the environmental morons don’t get off of their butts and let the oil companies build a few new refineries on a regional basis, we are going to really be in a bind in about ten years.
You do realize that you can’t just order a new oil refinery out of a catalogue and have it delivered next week? It takes two or three years to design and construct a new refinery, not counting the two or three years of lawsuits and government permit evaluations that the owners will have to go through to get permission to start construction.
On a personal note, it costs me nearly $90.00 to fill up my Chevy Suburban’s 42 gallon fuel tank. The difference between me and most people is that I don’t blame the government for my ten year old decision to drive a vehicle that gets less than 10 MPG in the city.
I just drive down the road and enjoy the sound of that big 454 cubic inch V-8 engine as it makes the tree hugger’s heads spin around and around.
I love it...
Thanks, But No Thanks
(Just Send Money)
Well, it’s official…“Christian groups and some other private relief agencies are being asked to halt their work in the tsunami-ravaged Indonesian province of Aceh and leave the area by March 26, Indonesia's defense minister said yesterday.
The decision likely will target Western and smaller church groups as the government moves to tighten control over reconstruction work in Aceh, the home of a decades-old separatist insurgency.”
My first reaction to this story was to declare the Indonesian government ungrateful. This was my position when they started talking about asking the military to leave in January when I wrote Looking A Gift Horse In The Mouth. But then I thought about it a little and came to a quite different conclusion. Their actions actually fall under the category of defending their own borders AND protecting the safety of the relief workers.
I’m not about to start challenging Indonesia’s right to make decisions about what happens on their land contained within their borders, I just want our leaders and the people here in the US to make a mental note that it is OK to make hard decisions and toss “political correctness” concerns out the window when it comes to national security.
Indonesia’s actions are a perfect example. The Aceh provence’s “decades-old separatist insurgency” consisted primarily of kidnappings, murder, bombings of Muslim factions and Christians by other Muslim factions—little annoying things that conservative Americans would call “terrorism.” The PC police and the media insist on calling these actions “insurgency.” Using these standards, why isn’t last week’s Atlanta Courthouse shooter referred to as an insurgent African American inmate?
The two factions in Aceh, the Indonesian Government and separatist rebels, have basically called a cease-fire to allow the relief effort to operate, but now that most of the bodies have been recovered and an infrastructure has been re-established, there is a great risk that the relief workers might become targets for kidnapping or be killed in “insurgent” attacks.
I really would hate to see a busload of Southern Baptists blown to smithereens because they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I say that we should be happy that the Indonesian officials have the foresight to see things as they are and that we should bring our people home ASAP, confident in the belief that the US did more than the rest of the world put together to relieve the suffering of the Tsunami victims.
Now if we could just learn the lesson of not allowing political correctness to get in the way of defending our own borders and population from acts of terrorism.
Of course, that won’t be happening any time in the near future.
Well, it’s official…“Christian groups and some other private relief agencies are being asked to halt their work in the tsunami-ravaged Indonesian province of Aceh and leave the area by March 26, Indonesia's defense minister said yesterday.
The decision likely will target Western and smaller church groups as the government moves to tighten control over reconstruction work in Aceh, the home of a decades-old separatist insurgency.”
My first reaction to this story was to declare the Indonesian government ungrateful. This was my position when they started talking about asking the military to leave in January when I wrote Looking A Gift Horse In The Mouth. But then I thought about it a little and came to a quite different conclusion. Their actions actually fall under the category of defending their own borders AND protecting the safety of the relief workers.
I’m not about to start challenging Indonesia’s right to make decisions about what happens on their land contained within their borders, I just want our leaders and the people here in the US to make a mental note that it is OK to make hard decisions and toss “political correctness” concerns out the window when it comes to national security.
Indonesia’s actions are a perfect example. The Aceh provence’s “decades-old separatist insurgency” consisted primarily of kidnappings, murder, bombings of Muslim factions and Christians by other Muslim factions—little annoying things that conservative Americans would call “terrorism.” The PC police and the media insist on calling these actions “insurgency.” Using these standards, why isn’t last week’s Atlanta Courthouse shooter referred to as an insurgent African American inmate?
The two factions in Aceh, the Indonesian Government and separatist rebels, have basically called a cease-fire to allow the relief effort to operate, but now that most of the bodies have been recovered and an infrastructure has been re-established, there is a great risk that the relief workers might become targets for kidnapping or be killed in “insurgent” attacks.
I really would hate to see a busload of Southern Baptists blown to smithereens because they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I say that we should be happy that the Indonesian officials have the foresight to see things as they are and that we should bring our people home ASAP, confident in the belief that the US did more than the rest of the world put together to relieve the suffering of the Tsunami victims.
Now if we could just learn the lesson of not allowing political correctness to get in the way of defending our own borders and population from acts of terrorism.
Of course, that won’t be happening any time in the near future.
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
There Is No Fairy Godmother
It seems that “(j)ournalists are unhappy with the way things are going in their profession these days. Many (journalists) give poor grades to the coverage offered by the types of media that serve most Americans: daily newspapers, local TV, network TV news and cable news outlets. In fact, despite recent scandals at the New York Times and USA Today, only national newspapers - and the websites of national news organizations - receive good performance grades from the journalistic ranks.”
Isn’t that so darn sad…poor little journalism majors, all upset about the quality of their product and the public perception of their profession. Too bad that after they made an “A” in creative writing class in high school and spent five years getting a four year undergraduate degree in “journalism” that they had to find out that successful professional journalism involves doing research and reporting boring things like THE TRUTH and using messy things like FACTS and DETAILS to support their stories. You can’t just run around reporting stories about what you FEEL or BELIEVE in your stupid liberal head—at least not since the advent of FOX News and the arrival of a couple million bloggers on the scene.
What is amazing is that they still believe that the national media like the NY Times, USA Today, and the LA Times should get a good performance grade. Can they really be serious? Just like a drug addict, they profess to want to change, but their goal is to cut back on their addiction, not to stop altogether, and for this reason they are doomed to failure because they just can’t say no every once in a while—it’s all or nothing.
Take the current hubbub on Social Security reform, for example. If you listen to media reports, President Bush is going to take away our senior citizens’ Social Security Checks and allow STUPID AMERICAN CITIZENS to invest some of their own money in the risky lottery known as the stock market. What, let a common citizen make their own retirement investment decisions—NO WAY—a certain formula for disaster. Quick, everybody, cover your eyes and ears and run away to hide until you are retirement age and let the SOCIAL SECURITY TRUST FUND (held safely in a lock box) take care of you.
Why can’t the media bring themselves to report the truth about Social Security? Because reporting the truth would be favorable to the position of the president and the Republicans and counter the to position of their favored Democratic party. You do realize that the core of the Social Security debate is about government power and winning elections and has very little to do with your long term financial stability, don’t you?
This single issue (social security) really bothers me and further leads me to dislike and distrust the media. How can hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens who make their living as so called “journalists” allow their own political bias and opinions to overshadow the American People’s common good? Why can’t more than a few of them stop reading and reprinting their own mindless Democratic talking points and start doing some actual research and report the FACTS to their viewers and readers?
Fact #1—THERE IS NO SOCIAL SECURITY TRUST FUND. The government is stealing over 12% of my money and giving it to people that have retired. When I retire, they intend to try to do the same thing to younger working citizens, unless I happen to keep earning income at the rate I have been able to earn it in the past in which case the government fully intends to look me squarely in the eye and tell me to GO TO HELL YOU MEAN OLD RICH WHITE MAN. Then there is always the possibility that I will die before I reach the revised 72 year retirement age in which case the government accountants will issue a collective sigh of relief and the actuaries will utter a muffled “I told you so”
Fact #2—THERE IS NO FAIRY GODMOTHER—so if you are under the age of fifty you better start planning for your retirement today because if it is up to the media and the Democrats you are going to be sweeping French fries at McDonalds or greeting people at Wal Mart until you are 100 Years old to supplement all of the money that the government has saved for you in their mighty LOCK BOX.
YOU GET MY POINT?
Isn’t that so darn sad…poor little journalism majors, all upset about the quality of their product and the public perception of their profession. Too bad that after they made an “A” in creative writing class in high school and spent five years getting a four year undergraduate degree in “journalism” that they had to find out that successful professional journalism involves doing research and reporting boring things like THE TRUTH and using messy things like FACTS and DETAILS to support their stories. You can’t just run around reporting stories about what you FEEL or BELIEVE in your stupid liberal head—at least not since the advent of FOX News and the arrival of a couple million bloggers on the scene.
What is amazing is that they still believe that the national media like the NY Times, USA Today, and the LA Times should get a good performance grade. Can they really be serious? Just like a drug addict, they profess to want to change, but their goal is to cut back on their addiction, not to stop altogether, and for this reason they are doomed to failure because they just can’t say no every once in a while—it’s all or nothing.
Take the current hubbub on Social Security reform, for example. If you listen to media reports, President Bush is going to take away our senior citizens’ Social Security Checks and allow STUPID AMERICAN CITIZENS to invest some of their own money in the risky lottery known as the stock market. What, let a common citizen make their own retirement investment decisions—NO WAY—a certain formula for disaster. Quick, everybody, cover your eyes and ears and run away to hide until you are retirement age and let the SOCIAL SECURITY TRUST FUND (held safely in a lock box) take care of you.
Why can’t the media bring themselves to report the truth about Social Security? Because reporting the truth would be favorable to the position of the president and the Republicans and counter the to position of their favored Democratic party. You do realize that the core of the Social Security debate is about government power and winning elections and has very little to do with your long term financial stability, don’t you?
This single issue (social security) really bothers me and further leads me to dislike and distrust the media. How can hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens who make their living as so called “journalists” allow their own political bias and opinions to overshadow the American People’s common good? Why can’t more than a few of them stop reading and reprinting their own mindless Democratic talking points and start doing some actual research and report the FACTS to their viewers and readers?
Fact #1—THERE IS NO SOCIAL SECURITY TRUST FUND. The government is stealing over 12% of my money and giving it to people that have retired. When I retire, they intend to try to do the same thing to younger working citizens, unless I happen to keep earning income at the rate I have been able to earn it in the past in which case the government fully intends to look me squarely in the eye and tell me to GO TO HELL YOU MEAN OLD RICH WHITE MAN. Then there is always the possibility that I will die before I reach the revised 72 year retirement age in which case the government accountants will issue a collective sigh of relief and the actuaries will utter a muffled “I told you so”
Fact #2—THERE IS NO FAIRY GODMOTHER—so if you are under the age of fifty you better start planning for your retirement today because if it is up to the media and the Democrats you are going to be sweeping French fries at McDonalds or greeting people at Wal Mart until you are 100 Years old to supplement all of the money that the government has saved for you in their mighty LOCK BOX.
YOU GET MY POINT?
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
Sports Poll Insanity
(Boring Sports Stuff-Bear With Me Here)
I generally ignore professional sports, but I follow college sports with a good deal of interest. The happenings on the gridiron on a Saturday afternoon in October or on the basketball court on Tuesday night in the middle of January doesn’t control my mood and dictate the level of self esteem that I enjoy in my life, however.
This isn’t true for some people that I know. My dad had a friend, Jim, that was a HUGE Auburn Football fan and Jim would become physically sick if Shug Jordan’s Auburn Tiger’s lost to Bear Bryant’s Alabama Crimson Tide in November in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.
What really amazes and confuses me is the concept of sports rankings.
You know--the so called “Top Twenty (Five.)”
There’s the coach’s poll and the sports writers poll. They keep changing the name(s) of the polls through the years, but it is still essentially the coach’s poll and the sports writer’s poll no matter what you call them. Then in football, there is the Frankenstein of sports polls, the BCS. I’ll save that discussion for another day, perhaps.
I put very little stock in any of these farcical listings, since the coaches are in theory too busy to pay attention to anyone but whomever they are playing tomorrow or next week, and the sports writers are an even more biased, mindless, partisan bunch of ingrates than the “regular” writers in the “mainstream media.”
I did a little research and found out that, in order to be one of the coaches that votes in the “coach’s poll” and maintain the appearance of being “fair and balanced,” you generally can’t actually coach a team that has a basketball program—at least a successful basketball program.
Here is the listing:
"The USA TODAY/ESPN Board of Coaches is made up of 31 Division I head coaches. All are members of the National Association of Basketball Coaches. The 2004-05 board: Dana Altman, Creighton; Tevester Anderson, Jackson State; Eddie Biedenbach, North Carolina-Asheville; Jim Boeheim, Syracuse; Charles Coles, Miami (Ohio); Barry Collier, Nebraska; Dick Davey; Santa Clara; Fran Dunphy, Pennsylvania; Mick Durham, Montana State; Rob Evans, Arizona State; Steve Fisher, San Diego State; Pat Flannery, Bucknell; Greg Graham, Boise State; Tom Green, Fairleigh Dickinson; David Henderson, Delaware; Bob Huggins, Cincinnati; Johnny Jones, North Texas; Gene Keady, Purdue; Eddie McCarter, Texas-Arlington; Bob McKillop, Davidson; Phil Martelli, Saint Joseph's; Joe Mihalich, Niagara; Ron "Fang" Mitchell, Coppin State; Dave Odom, South Carolina; Rick Samuels, Eastern Illinois; Kirk Speraw, Central Florida; Bob Thomason, Pacific; Perry Watson, Detroit Mercy; Gary Williams, Maryland; Dennis Wolff, Boston University; Rich Zvosec, Missouri-Kansas City."
No Dean Smith’s or Frank McGuire’s on this listing, but they must be psychic or psyco or something to conjure up the seasonal ranking and how they do it is a mystery to me.
Suppose, in basketball, the eighth ranked team plays the second ranked team, and the number two team wins. You might say “Hurray for the pollsters, they were right,” right? Well, not so fast there Kemosabe.
While the next poll will still probably show the number two team as number two, the former number eight team will probably fall in the rankings to number twelve or thirteen (unless the looser is UCLA, Michigan, Duke, North Carolina or one of a few other perennial national favorites in which case they will only drop a few spots as a result of being out played by the number two team.)
How can the outcome of a single game yield such a result? I mean, if number two beats number eight, the universe is in order, isn’t it. Two is better than eight, eight is better than twenty, Right?
Well, maybe not in the world of sports rankings.
Number twenty beating number eight or number two is an entirely different matter. Yessirreee. If you are number twenty and you beat number two, particularly “early’ in the season, the best you can expect is to rise a half dozen spots to maybe number fourteen or fifteen while number two will drop half that distance to number five or so. They figure that your team just got “lucky” and the pollsters refuse to acknowledge that they might be wrong in ranking the number two team number two.
If number twenty beats number eight, number eight will take a nose dive again to number twelve or thirteen, but the winner (number twenty) will only rise a couple of points to number seventeen or eighteen.
I guess it is like stretching or compressing a spring or something—the further you push or pull it the harder it gets to make progress. All in all, it makes absolutely no sense to me and I really don’t spend much time paying attention to it all or run around “crowing” about my team’s ranking in public.
Another interesting thing to notice when you look at the membership of the College Board of Coach’s is to wonder why the heck most of these guys get to decide the college basketball rankings when they coach at such no name institutions? South Carolina’s Dave Odam made a name for himself at Wake Forrest and Maryland’s Gary Williams took Maryland to a regular season ACC championship in 2002 and won the 2004 ACC tournament, but the balance of the coaches’ schools are relatively invisible in the regular season polls.
Not so with this year’s NCAA Tournament. Tom Green’s Fairleigh Dickenson is seeded number 16 and Fran Dunphy’s Pennsylvania is seeded number 13 in the Chicago Bracket.
In the Albuquerque Bracket, Dave Altman’s Creighton is seeded number 10.
In the Syracuse Bracket, Kirk Speraw’s Central Florida is the number 16 seed.
In the Austin Bracket, Joe Mihalich’s Niagara garnered a 14 seed and Jim Boeheim's Syracuse is a number 4 seed.
There is a general perception that any one basketball conference like the ACC can only be allocated five or at an absolute most--six spots in the NCAA tournament. Some years it’s a battle to get four seeds out of sixty-four.
This year the ACC got two number one seeds and five seeds overall—Duke, GT, NC, NC State, and Wake Forrest.
Here is the funny thing--the Coach’s Board members did even better than the ACC. They made out with six seeds, with Syracuse and Creighten being the only no-brainers. Two sixteen seeds, one fourteen seed, and one thirteen seed seem to be ample rewards for this group of “insiders.”
I wonder how many of these same members of the college “Board of Coaches” are also on the NCAA selection committee?
Just wondering…
I generally ignore professional sports, but I follow college sports with a good deal of interest. The happenings on the gridiron on a Saturday afternoon in October or on the basketball court on Tuesday night in the middle of January doesn’t control my mood and dictate the level of self esteem that I enjoy in my life, however.
This isn’t true for some people that I know. My dad had a friend, Jim, that was a HUGE Auburn Football fan and Jim would become physically sick if Shug Jordan’s Auburn Tiger’s lost to Bear Bryant’s Alabama Crimson Tide in November in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.
What really amazes and confuses me is the concept of sports rankings.
You know--the so called “Top Twenty (Five.)”
There’s the coach’s poll and the sports writers poll. They keep changing the name(s) of the polls through the years, but it is still essentially the coach’s poll and the sports writer’s poll no matter what you call them. Then in football, there is the Frankenstein of sports polls, the BCS. I’ll save that discussion for another day, perhaps.
I put very little stock in any of these farcical listings, since the coaches are in theory too busy to pay attention to anyone but whomever they are playing tomorrow or next week, and the sports writers are an even more biased, mindless, partisan bunch of ingrates than the “regular” writers in the “mainstream media.”
I did a little research and found out that, in order to be one of the coaches that votes in the “coach’s poll” and maintain the appearance of being “fair and balanced,” you generally can’t actually coach a team that has a basketball program—at least a successful basketball program.
Here is the listing:
"The USA TODAY/ESPN Board of Coaches is made up of 31 Division I head coaches. All are members of the National Association of Basketball Coaches. The 2004-05 board: Dana Altman, Creighton; Tevester Anderson, Jackson State; Eddie Biedenbach, North Carolina-Asheville; Jim Boeheim, Syracuse; Charles Coles, Miami (Ohio); Barry Collier, Nebraska; Dick Davey; Santa Clara; Fran Dunphy, Pennsylvania; Mick Durham, Montana State; Rob Evans, Arizona State; Steve Fisher, San Diego State; Pat Flannery, Bucknell; Greg Graham, Boise State; Tom Green, Fairleigh Dickinson; David Henderson, Delaware; Bob Huggins, Cincinnati; Johnny Jones, North Texas; Gene Keady, Purdue; Eddie McCarter, Texas-Arlington; Bob McKillop, Davidson; Phil Martelli, Saint Joseph's; Joe Mihalich, Niagara; Ron "Fang" Mitchell, Coppin State; Dave Odom, South Carolina; Rick Samuels, Eastern Illinois; Kirk Speraw, Central Florida; Bob Thomason, Pacific; Perry Watson, Detroit Mercy; Gary Williams, Maryland; Dennis Wolff, Boston University; Rich Zvosec, Missouri-Kansas City."
No Dean Smith’s or Frank McGuire’s on this listing, but they must be psychic or psyco or something to conjure up the seasonal ranking and how they do it is a mystery to me.
Suppose, in basketball, the eighth ranked team plays the second ranked team, and the number two team wins. You might say “Hurray for the pollsters, they were right,” right? Well, not so fast there Kemosabe.
While the next poll will still probably show the number two team as number two, the former number eight team will probably fall in the rankings to number twelve or thirteen (unless the looser is UCLA, Michigan, Duke, North Carolina or one of a few other perennial national favorites in which case they will only drop a few spots as a result of being out played by the number two team.)
How can the outcome of a single game yield such a result? I mean, if number two beats number eight, the universe is in order, isn’t it. Two is better than eight, eight is better than twenty, Right?
Well, maybe not in the world of sports rankings.
Number twenty beating number eight or number two is an entirely different matter. Yessirreee. If you are number twenty and you beat number two, particularly “early’ in the season, the best you can expect is to rise a half dozen spots to maybe number fourteen or fifteen while number two will drop half that distance to number five or so. They figure that your team just got “lucky” and the pollsters refuse to acknowledge that they might be wrong in ranking the number two team number two.
If number twenty beats number eight, number eight will take a nose dive again to number twelve or thirteen, but the winner (number twenty) will only rise a couple of points to number seventeen or eighteen.
I guess it is like stretching or compressing a spring or something—the further you push or pull it the harder it gets to make progress. All in all, it makes absolutely no sense to me and I really don’t spend much time paying attention to it all or run around “crowing” about my team’s ranking in public.
Another interesting thing to notice when you look at the membership of the College Board of Coach’s is to wonder why the heck most of these guys get to decide the college basketball rankings when they coach at such no name institutions? South Carolina’s Dave Odam made a name for himself at Wake Forrest and Maryland’s Gary Williams took Maryland to a regular season ACC championship in 2002 and won the 2004 ACC tournament, but the balance of the coaches’ schools are relatively invisible in the regular season polls.
Not so with this year’s NCAA Tournament. Tom Green’s Fairleigh Dickenson is seeded number 16 and Fran Dunphy’s Pennsylvania is seeded number 13 in the Chicago Bracket.
In the Albuquerque Bracket, Dave Altman’s Creighton is seeded number 10.
In the Syracuse Bracket, Kirk Speraw’s Central Florida is the number 16 seed.
In the Austin Bracket, Joe Mihalich’s Niagara garnered a 14 seed and Jim Boeheim's Syracuse is a number 4 seed.
There is a general perception that any one basketball conference like the ACC can only be allocated five or at an absolute most--six spots in the NCAA tournament. Some years it’s a battle to get four seeds out of sixty-four.
This year the ACC got two number one seeds and five seeds overall—Duke, GT, NC, NC State, and Wake Forrest.
Here is the funny thing--the Coach’s Board members did even better than the ACC. They made out with six seeds, with Syracuse and Creighten being the only no-brainers. Two sixteen seeds, one fourteen seed, and one thirteen seed seem to be ample rewards for this group of “insiders.”
I wonder how many of these same members of the college “Board of Coaches” are also on the NCAA selection committee?
Just wondering…
Monday, March 14, 2005
Wireless Network Under Construction
(Anyone Got A Big Hammer?)
Blogging may be light this week because I'm installing a Linksys wireless network with VOIP (voice over Internet protocol) capability. I'm excited and exasperated all in the same moment.
I'm up to my ears in anacronyms like DHCP, IP addresses, PPPoE, MAC, and some other things I've never been involved with before other than on a superficial basis.
We've dropped our dial up access a little prematurely and I'm under the gun to get this stuff working while Pat is out of town. Her Dell has a Ethernet port, but my older Dell just has a RJ11 jack and I refuse to pay $39 for an Ethernet card when I can get the 802.11g wireless card for the same price.
Poor planning on my part, but at least I'm forced to put in the wireless network that I've been talking about for a year. The good news is that prices have come down drastically and VOIP is readily available and reasonably priced.
Wish me luck...
Blogging may be light this week because I'm installing a Linksys wireless network with VOIP (voice over Internet protocol) capability. I'm excited and exasperated all in the same moment.
I'm up to my ears in anacronyms like DHCP, IP addresses, PPPoE, MAC, and some other things I've never been involved with before other than on a superficial basis.
We've dropped our dial up access a little prematurely and I'm under the gun to get this stuff working while Pat is out of town. Her Dell has a Ethernet port, but my older Dell just has a RJ11 jack and I refuse to pay $39 for an Ethernet card when I can get the 802.11g wireless card for the same price.
Poor planning on my part, but at least I'm forced to put in the wireless network that I've been talking about for a year. The good news is that prices have come down drastically and VOIP is readily available and reasonably priced.
Wish me luck...
Sunday, March 13, 2005
Liar, Liar, Pants On Fire
(Or Full Of Bullet Holes)
Well, the dust has settled a good deal since I wrote Are They Just Plain Stupid, I Was Right, They Were Just Stupid, and What Is There To Not Understand about the little kidnapped communist Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena.
Apparently, other than getting kidnapped and costing her homeland a whole bunch of Lira, she accomplished very little in her latest “wonderful communist adventure” as described by Jack Kelly in the Post Gazett:
“Sgrena went to Iraq to report on the heroic resistance to the American imperialists. Dutch journalist Harald Doornbos rode in the airplane to Baghdad with her.”
"Be careful not to get kidnapped," Doornbos warned Sgrena.
"You don't understand the situation," she responded, according to Doornbos' account last week in Nederlands Dagblad. (Excerpts were translated into English and posted on a Dutch writer's Web blog.) "The Iraqis only kidnap American sympathizers. The enemies of the Americans have nothing to fear."
Sgrena left her hotel the morning of Feb. 4 to interview refugees from Fallujah, the resistance stronghold captured by U.S. Marines in November. The interviews didn't go well.
"The refugees ... would not listen to me," she said. "I had in front of me the accurate confirmation of the analysis of what the Iraqi society had become as a result of the war and they would throw their truth in my face."
Sgrena's feelings were hurt that the refugees could be so curt to her: "I who had risked everything, challenging the Italian government who didn't want journalists to reach Iraq and the Americans who don't want our work to be witnessed of what really became of that country with the war and notwithstanding that which they call elections." (Maybe it reads better in Italian, or maybe she just can't write worth a damn.)
She got nabbed on her way back to her hotel. Sgrena told her captors she was on their side, and suggested they kidnap an American soldier instead. But the U.S. government doesn't pay ransoms.”
Italy has admitted that they paid a ransom for the return of her troublesome carcass and that the Italian government has agreed at the insistence of President George Bush to not be paying any more money for wayward journalists in the future.
I find it hilarious that the Iraqi’s would be “curt” to her. Well, most of the Iraqis are not STUPID like she is. They have enough every day first hand experience to know what is actually going on in Iraq and they don’t need a little communist Italian to tell them any differently. Sgrena has started believing her own propaganda, I’m afraid.
Now here is a real pisser. The US government has admitted that “the attack on the Toyota Corolla carrying Sgrena and Nicola Calipari, the intelligence officer, to Baghdad airport had been prompted by a satellite monitoring system. This detected that their vehicle did not have clearance from US military authorities. A signal alerted a mobile checkpoint near the airport and its soldiers opened fire.
“The Italian team should have known what to expect, but it appears they didn’t realise how sophisticated the American military are,” said Selva."
So isn’t that special. As a result of this silly bitch deciding to run around with an anti-American agenda in a foreign country where US forces are at war, our government has revealed detailed information about security measures being taken to protect our troops.
Not to say that all of the regional military muckity-mucks (except the Italians) didn’t already know about US satellite technology (here is a picture of where I live taken from satellite), but it really pisses me off that this stupid idiot “journalist” can run around the world spitting bile and venom about the US and the end result is the further compromising of our own national security.
Hey, Sgrena--kiss it baby.
Why don’t you get a life, and shut the hell up while you’re at it.
Well, the dust has settled a good deal since I wrote Are They Just Plain Stupid, I Was Right, They Were Just Stupid, and What Is There To Not Understand about the little kidnapped communist Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena.
Apparently, other than getting kidnapped and costing her homeland a whole bunch of Lira, she accomplished very little in her latest “wonderful communist adventure” as described by Jack Kelly in the Post Gazett:
“Sgrena went to Iraq to report on the heroic resistance to the American imperialists. Dutch journalist Harald Doornbos rode in the airplane to Baghdad with her.”
"Be careful not to get kidnapped," Doornbos warned Sgrena.
"You don't understand the situation," she responded, according to Doornbos' account last week in Nederlands Dagblad. (Excerpts were translated into English and posted on a Dutch writer's Web blog.) "The Iraqis only kidnap American sympathizers. The enemies of the Americans have nothing to fear."
Sgrena left her hotel the morning of Feb. 4 to interview refugees from Fallujah, the resistance stronghold captured by U.S. Marines in November. The interviews didn't go well.
"The refugees ... would not listen to me," she said. "I had in front of me the accurate confirmation of the analysis of what the Iraqi society had become as a result of the war and they would throw their truth in my face."
Sgrena's feelings were hurt that the refugees could be so curt to her: "I who had risked everything, challenging the Italian government who didn't want journalists to reach Iraq and the Americans who don't want our work to be witnessed of what really became of that country with the war and notwithstanding that which they call elections." (Maybe it reads better in Italian, or maybe she just can't write worth a damn.)
She got nabbed on her way back to her hotel. Sgrena told her captors she was on their side, and suggested they kidnap an American soldier instead. But the U.S. government doesn't pay ransoms.”
Italy has admitted that they paid a ransom for the return of her troublesome carcass and that the Italian government has agreed at the insistence of President George Bush to not be paying any more money for wayward journalists in the future.
I find it hilarious that the Iraqi’s would be “curt” to her. Well, most of the Iraqis are not STUPID like she is. They have enough every day first hand experience to know what is actually going on in Iraq and they don’t need a little communist Italian to tell them any differently. Sgrena has started believing her own propaganda, I’m afraid.
Now here is a real pisser. The US government has admitted that “the attack on the Toyota Corolla carrying Sgrena and Nicola Calipari, the intelligence officer, to Baghdad airport had been prompted by a satellite monitoring system. This detected that their vehicle did not have clearance from US military authorities. A signal alerted a mobile checkpoint near the airport and its soldiers opened fire.
“The Italian team should have known what to expect, but it appears they didn’t realise how sophisticated the American military are,” said Selva."
So isn’t that special. As a result of this silly bitch deciding to run around with an anti-American agenda in a foreign country where US forces are at war, our government has revealed detailed information about security measures being taken to protect our troops.
Not to say that all of the regional military muckity-mucks (except the Italians) didn’t already know about US satellite technology (here is a picture of where I live taken from satellite), but it really pisses me off that this stupid idiot “journalist” can run around the world spitting bile and venom about the US and the end result is the further compromising of our own national security.
Hey, Sgrena--kiss it baby.
Why don’t you get a life, and shut the hell up while you’re at it.
