Government gets big when families get small

Government will have to be better because it won't stop getting big.  That's because it's common to have one baby and quits.   After two generations of one child families, there is no kin group left.  A kid still has two parents and four grandparents but there is no sister or brother. There are no aunts. There isn't a single uncle.  No one has first cousins.  Who do you turn to when you leave home?  The kin network collapses when one child is the rule.   Government steps up, not in loco parentis but in place of kin.

The chart is from The Federalist: "Why we lose with only two children per family".

The Law That Applies To Raising Children Is Parkinson's.

The role of parents has been transformed by downsizing the family to one or perchance two rug rats.  In summer, my generation roamed the neighbourhood and far beyond with hordes of other kids and generally were back in time for supper and bed.  That was it.  No one had time to fuss over every minute of our disorganized lives.

Now it's dawn to dusk supervision by otherwise underemployed adults.  Now it's  the car shuttle to T-ball where your preschooler gets coaches and uniforms.   Junior can't even walk home on his own, balancing on the fence in a back lane, without Mom and Dad being badgered by Social Services.  There are a lot of parents and appended busybodies who are spending time and money that should be skipped.    Is this an employment scam or simply Parkinson's Law that work expands to fill the time available?

Russia re-set: Threatens Informally To Kill Obama

Army Day parade in Russia on February 23rd includes a missile mock-up with the message "To be Personally Delivered to Obama".  Source, twitter feed of mgurmgur

I don't read Russian but see "Moscow" in the text below. This would be a major parade.

Hokey Data In The Maunder Minimum

The stunning lack of sunspots from 1645 to 1715 (Maunder Minimum) and the cool years associated have to be addressed when you talk about the sun and climate change.  Willis Eschenbach  writing at WattsUpWithThat was busy checking into something else (possible links between volcanos and sunspots) when he discovered unseemly holes in the original sun spot diaries.

Johann Zahn

This is the Zahn's data for the year 1632 in Germany.  The -99 number means there were five days that year when no observations were taken.  All the other entries are zero which means that there were 360 un-cloudy days in Germany that year and no spots were seen in all 360.  Eschenbach writes that most of the years just prior to the Maunder Minimum appear to have about two thirds of the data missing.   Bizarrely, during the Minimum, the opposite is the case with only 3% of the data missing.

No one is saying there was no Maunder Minimum but it looks to have been overstated.   The original entries by Herr Zahn may have conflated days with no sunspots and days when no observations were attempted.  There's a lot more detail at the site with links to sources.

Freud was right and nearly irrelevant

Freud made a name for himself finding feces and mother f***ers in the human psyche.  It's almost irrelevant because everything is in there.   The sea outside my window is the same.  Everything that has ever bumped the surface or bumped the bumps has its own waves and ripples criss-crossing.  Jung slung his net into the same water and came up with archetypal stuff.  Adler's trawl brought up birth order and socializing.  Maslow hooked him some esteem and fulfillment along with the drive to eat and reproduce.  Your dreams are a living stew, themes consuming themes with no polite boundaries at all. (Last night a skate wrapped itself around my leg and I almost pushed my wife out of bed to get it off.)

Of course pooh and how you'd treat your parents if you were adult will show up in your head.  So does eating shreddies,  getting a new hairdo,  wondering what will happen when you die, arguing with the neighbours, mating with someone you saw on the bus, remembering what happened in the war, and forgetting a line in the high school play.  Not just everything that's happened in your life shows up.  Not just every human behaviour that is baked into your genes shows up.  Every possible combination of combinations of them all can show up too.

At work, filtering.

Freud filtered the mind to exclude almost everything relevant and found some gold.  Most is missed.

Will the janitor collect your health data?

A fellow at Cornell has been swabbing subway handrails in New York City.  He's collected evidence of the diseases that ebb and flow in the city.  The data is given out free by tens of thousands of riders daily and collected on a primitive device called a pipe handrail.  He found bubonic plague and 15000 more life forms.

Data collector

This could easily be done by your janitor who daily collects the traces of DNA, disease and medication you leave behind. The issue comes up with pooh too.  Who has the right to sample your waste?   Down in the sewers of the city little gadgets can be installed at sewer junctions.  They can sample down to parts in a billion and phone it in to central health and the RCMP.  If a fugitive flushes, he can be detected.  It comes down to the politics of privacy.  Do you want the health monitors in your own toilet, or on the condo sewer outlet, or at the municipal level down by the sewer lagoon?  All three are likely.
a state employee.

The big ticket item is your own DNA.  Who has the right to know it and clone it?  This one is getting away on us.  I think we'll have to live with our DNA super-duper private recipe becoming widely available to insurers, bosses, nosy neighbours, exes, grandparents and researchers.

I'm for the data collection but sorting out who owns it will be a mess.

Bi-Bi Sitter

Israelis have a sense of humour.  Netanyahu appears in an election ad candidating to be a couple's babysitter.    I hope we get more politicians who can make light of themselves while making their point.   The couple's thoughts about the alternatives put me in mind of Stephane Dion's wife saying "You don't leave him in a house alone."  It's only a minute long so you can wade past the mugging that opens the clip.

DIY Faith and a Fire Extinguisher for Agnostics.

When I was a teen, CHOV radio, Pembroke, played the top ten rock and roll tunes in an hour-long Thursday night countdown.   Those were simpler times for music and faith.   Today, song lists of 100 for R&B/Hip Hop, Latin, Christian/Gospel, Emerging Artists plus Reggae, Smooth Jazz, New Age and Comedy are always on.  Today too we have a thousand little DIY religions blooming across the land.

In the fifties, my neighbours were, as far as I knew, Christian.  Now I often don’t know, myself included.  Despite the patching together of beliefs about karma and meditation, about sin or the denial of sin, about “making love not war”, about the possibility of big government actually working, about an Eden-like state of nature, about eating vegetarian and blessing homosexual unions, the faith DNA still has that distinctive tang of anything touched by Christ.   It’s like a fire extinguisher on the wall behind a glass door, “Break Open in Emergency”.  It's available, recognizable, useful in emergencies, and rarely called on.

Individuals are patching together their Theory of Everything (T.O.E) like a bride’s trousseau, something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.  It’s hard to see how in a single lifetime you can master the data, time and wisdom to come up with a customized just-right-for-you faith but folks are hard at it.  I’ve read the Bible carefully enough to know that when friends and neighbours say “I believe in God but don’t go to church”, they have generally stuffed heretic and scriptural beliefs into the same pod, beliefs that are at war with what Christ said.  They seem happy enough.    It’s our nature to make sense of things.  It’s also our nature to take shortcuts and close off inquiry as soon as we have enough explanations to get by.

I think “agnostic”is the humble position to adopt though it may be wrong. When Christ asked Peter:  "Will ye also go away?" Simon Peter answered him, "Lord, to whom shall we go?"  My T.O.E.  hasn't enough evidence to follow Peter but I have none better.     I think about a self-organizing universe while humming "Tell Me The Stories of Jesus".

There was no mention of Obama

Jordan's King Abdullah met with the House Armed Services Committee,  He "showed an extraordinary measure of anger"and quoted Clint Eastwood on retribution.  Notable line:  "There was no mention of President Obama during the bipartisan meeting, either by King Abdullah or by any of the lawmakers in the room."  The chief man of the chief nation on earth is not a help.

The savages who triggered the meeting burned the Jordanian pilot alive in a made-for-TV cage.  They posted a quotation from the Quran making clear this is chapter and verse for a good Muslim. Abdullah made clear that the prisoners ISIS wants back will be immediately put to death, a language that ISIS understands well.  "The only problem we're going to have is running out of fuel and bullets".

Staged murder in Made-For-TV cage.
"Highly produced 22 minute video"

BC raised the posted speed limit and guess what?

The posted speed used to be 80 KMPH on one BC highway and the 85th percentile of drivers were clocked at 98 KMPH.   A senior engineering administrator in the BC Transportation Ministry told me what happened when the posted speed was raised to 90 KMPH in 2014.  The 85th percentile dropped to 93 KMPH.

Reposting the Coquihalla in 20-14

My takeaway:  When you place unreasonable limits on choice, people make their own rules.  When you place reasonable limits, they will often accommodate themselves to the limits.  In this case, raising the posted speed appears to have made the road safer.

Example where force of law is invoked
for an unreasonable limit.
Choice is crushed because we depend
on others to make our bulbs.

Vaccination

In 90 seconds, Penn and Teller demolish "Vaccination causes Autism" with grapefruit.  If true, you'd still be crazy not to vaccinate your kids. And it isn't true.

Reform is easy

Every time you squeeze silly putty, you re-form it.  Wily politicians who want to massage your wallet and cater to their donor base will introduce "A Bill To Reform Something" and the fifth estate is in rapture.

Yellow blob
being reformed

The presumption should be that every new bill will add some dysfunction and be more costly. Let the burden fall on the promoters to prove otherwise.  "Reform" is an empty term in politics.

ISIS eyes Mecca.

ISIS has an opportunity to become an empire after the death of Abdullah.  It's plausible that an attack breaching Saudi Arabia's northern desert wall will produce the same craven disorder the Iraq attack did.  Saudi troops may flee, abandon weapons and large numbers may swap sides.  (h/t smalldeadanimals for the link to global guerillas.)  Whoever holds Mecca and Medina is the de facto guardian of the spirit of the Islamic world.

Other points at Global Guerillas:  The Saudis have indoctrinated their population with Wahhabi doctrine that tends to like ISIS and small cells of militant believers can stir up mayhem to add confusion while the ISIS warriors race up paved roads in the desert.   Every win wins more recruits and ISIS has to have increasingly spectacular attacks to keep the spotlight and survive.  More borders will be redrawn, the US could end up with soldiers defending oil fields in Saudi Arabia of all places.

Backgrounder map from Global Guerillas

"If this doesn't occur, ISIS missed the opportunity  ...    ISIS is a theocratic network of networks that is both entrepreneurial and dynamic. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is a theocratic hierarchy that's risk averse and inflexible. Which one wins?"

Also, we heard about the Israeli attack in Syria that killed an Iranian general but we didn't hear about a demoralizing ISIS attack two weeks ago that used insider information to kill the Saudi general in charge of the northern border.

ISIS in Mecca, no longer a black swan proposition.  The pooh-poohers should expect to be killed in ISIS land.

Government waste in the Stone Age.

The 5200 year old Newgrange monument in Ireland predates Stonehenge and is a perfect example of government waste.   Always and everywhere when the wealth of many is spent by a powerful few, the waste is prodigious.      The $1.1 billion loss to stop building the Oakville gas plant comes to mind.  At least the Neolithic Irish got something to look at.

2% useable space, unfinished.

The 48,000 square foot public monument has 1000 square feet useable inside space.  It was not a "billionaire's tomb".  For that 2% cultic drama space, leaders consumed the labour of two generations of the farming district.  They brought sea-shore stones for miles, apparently strapped to the underside of rafts that were lifted by the tide and dragged up-river and then across fields.  The showpiece rock slabs came from farther afield.  The skinny corridor lines up with the December 21st sun rise.  Well, that's nice but I could get the same effect with a couple sticks lined up in the dirt a hundred yards apart.  At the end of the day, there was a narrative that appealed to the Paddies, something like, "We're going to land a man on the moon" and they stacked rocks and dirt for their superiors instead of farming, finishing a task their dead grandfathers began.

To be clear, I'm not against waste.   It's nice to be rich and a show-off project can be fun.  I don't like someone else wasting my stuff for me.

Newgrange, Ireland, 3200 BC Farm District Project.

    

"Corrupt investigation produces corrupt reform": Sub-Prime Lending.

Democrats set up a fake investigation into the 2008 financial crash, burning through ten million dollars. 80 staffers were paid for and supplied to Democrats, none for Republican members.  The commission absolved the government, blamed capitalist greed, and called successfully for even more government.  To get there, they railroaded the Republican members of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission into a blind corner. A new book by FCIS member, Peter Wallison,  details the shenanigans of Pelosi's friend, Angelides, who was put in charge.

-The commissioners weren't told when 100's of witnesses were being interviewed with no cross examination and under no oath.
-A memo from the Fannie Mae chief credit officer showed government policy drove risky lending. It was suppressed.
-That 3/4 of the nothing-down mortgages ended up on Fanny Mac and Mae books was suppressed.
-The draft was only shown the other commissioners the week before it was published and three quarters of the Republican dissent was deleted from the version sold in stores.


From the Investors.com article:

"As a result, Fannie and Freddie, now under full federal control, are back making low down payment loans to low-income borrowers, and the Dodd-Frank-mandated Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is forcing banks to ignore credit risks in the name of affordable housing. A corrupt investigation led to corrupt reforms."

Kabuki Performance

Pravda headline: "Paris unity march brings many war criminals together"

You thought the march in Paris was standing against islamic terror? Pravda notes "Apparently, the president of Ukraine considers himself the most outstanding participant of the march" and ""The participation of scoundrels like Poroshenko in such events minimizes any positive meaning of this action. He tries to show that he is with Europe, marching along with European leaders and he is doing it while resuming military actions in the Donbass."

Other popular English Pravda headlines:

"USA harbors plans to decapitate Russia within minutes"

"Russia must keep USA at gunpoint"

"USA instructs Russian Central Bank how to strangle Russian economy".

And from the linked article:
"Russia's new sea-based cruise missiles reduce the military power of the United States on a vast geopolitical region from Warsaw to Kabul and from Rome to Baghdad."

You don't find this stuff in the Globe and Mail or Washington Post because we don't talk about our own country that way.  But Russia does.    Posturing and truth aren't very different.

Jihadists and Bank Robbers

Only 1 percent of 1 percent of 1 percent are robbing banks.  About the same number of jihadists are shooting RCMP,  driving over cops and invading Parliament Hill.  That doesn't mean we don't guard banks from thieves.  It should mean we target radicalized Muslims. They are a threat to public safety.

Some protest the Allahu Akbar murder types aren't real Muslims, don't speak for Islam.  But who does?  Islam has no popes and council of churches.  When they quote the Quran, yell "Allahu Akbar" with a weapon, and call us "Kafir",  that works for me.






"Unfortunately it has become a trend to copy the Khaleejihijab style, with people layering their scarves and using hair clips to create big, camel hump hijab styles. This is not only a deception but also a form of Tabarruj which is not only contradictory to the rules of hijab but also a destructive sin in the Sight of Allah swt."
http://alhamthulillah.blogspot.ca/2012_04_01_archive.html

Put America's Enemies On Notice Now

Roger Simon advises the GOP to talk like a president now "because we don't have a real president at the moment and we are at war with Radical Islam".  Ignore protocol and buy prime time for the bully pulpit.  Say what Obama won't say about radical Islam and skip the State of the Union speech which would be be like "root canal surgery".

Take away line:  "I have a solution for Romney. He should throw caution to winds – BE THE PRESIDENT NOW!"  (Romney has the bucks to buy the time. Other campaign stuff matters less.)

Roger adds that Governor Bobby Jindal may have beat him to the punch with this speech in London.
Take away line: "Let me be blunt about this. I want America’s allies to trust us and respect us, and I want our enemies to fear us"

Cosby Show In Ontario Gets Ovation Or Did It Flop?

From Bourque I learn "Bill Cosby Gets Standing Ovation In Canada".  He's selectively quoting the BBC. From the Daily Mail I learn, "A cynical attempt to restore his good guy image... fails as he's greeted by empty seats, protesters and hecklers".  When observors trained to report get such different stories, is it a surprise that sexual immorality and political misdeeds are often concealed successfully?

Paris Bombing Is Business As Usual For Islam's Ugliest.

I was torn with anger by the Charlie Hebdo slaughter but this is business as usual for the Allahu Akbar warrior types.  We don't pay attention until it hits close.  I had a wonderful holiday in Paris and enjoyed being on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, but will never see Gombe or Mlang.  Other news in the last seven days:

Thirty dead today in Sanaa,Yemen, from car bomb outside the police college.  Muslim on Muslim.
One officer blown up in Cairo yesterday as he tried to defuse bomb in the street. Muslim on Muslim.
Four more bombs in Egypt this week at theatre and a mall but no deaths.  Muslim on Muslim.
Two dead from bomb in the Mlang market in the Phillipines.  Muslim on Christian. (Nails added)
Body parts after bomb goes off in Nigerian church  (Gombe).  Muslim on Christian
Tanker bomb in Anbar near the Saudi border.  Muslim on Muslim.
"Miscreants exploded crude bomb" outside Dhaka newspaper in Bangladesh.  Muslim on Muslim.
Car bomb at checkpoint kills 13 in Nigeria along the Potiskum-Gombe road. Muslim on fellow citizens.
Car bomb in Mogadishu, Somalia, was aimed at security people.  Muslim on Muslim.
And, odd man out, a home made bomb went off outside a NAACP office in Colorado Springs today. No one was hurt and a person of interest is white.    May be White on Black.

Update January 8th.  Up to 2,000 killed as Boko Haram burns town in Nigeria.  Muslim on Christian and Muslim.

Kaboom in Cairo..
No Mercy.

Free Snow

Seen in OK Falls, BC.

Dipped in Pig Shit

The "Allahu Akbar" murderers in Paris should be dipped in pig shit before being brought to room temperature.  This morning two gunmen slaughtered a dozen unarmed people at Charlie Hebdo, the Paris magazine which dared to publish Mohammed cartoons.  They think they are fine fellows.

 Rather than Avenging the Prophet, they made clear that the culture spawning them needs to re-qualify for admission into civilisation. We have our own little Zehaf-Bibeau shooting up the Parliament buildings as a reminder.  I like many cultures sharing life together in cities but cultural relativism as policy has failed. Remember the opposite of discrimination is indiscriminate.

Relevant: Arab leader tells Islam's top clerics to stop scaring people.

And from Obama, one tiny plus, one big minus.

He uses the word "terrorist" but pretends this has nothing to do with Islamists.

And tweeted by Claire Berlinksi who had the misfortune to be on the scene:

Names and photos of killers (Zero Hedge)

Lose Real Weight With Imaginary Meals

Stephen Leacock's famous story about the baby who swallowed a pill containing thirteen thanksgiving dinners (just add water) has been overtaken by real life. Roll back the obesity epidemic with a pill that mimics the body's response to food, turning fat digestion on and cleverly doing this in the guts, thus avoiding your blood stream where it would have turned on all the other organs that process dinner.  Fat is burned but you won't feel hungry.  With few side effects likely, expect human trials of Fexaramine soon.

"Evans wondered whether switching on FXR only in the intestines -- rather than the intestines, liver, kidneys and adrenal glands all at once -- might have a different outcome. "When you eat, you have to quickly activate a series of responses all throughout the body," says Evans. "And the reality is that the very first responder for all this is the intestine."

When the group gave obese mice a daily pill of fexaramine for five weeks, the mice stopped gaining weight, lost fat and had lower blood sugar and cholesterol levels than untreated mice. In addition, the mice had a rise in body temperature -- which signals metabolism ramping up -- and some deposits of white fat in their bodies converted into a healthier, energy-burning beige form of the tissue. (Reported in Science Daily News).

Fexaramine acts on the FXR receptor protein that our own body turns on when we start a meal.    It "triggers the release of bile acids for digestion, but also changes blood sugar levels and causes the body to burn some fats in preparation for the incoming meal."

From Stephen Leacock's tale of baby and the pill:

"I see from the current columns of the daily press that
"Professor Plumb, of the University of Chicago, has just
invented a highly concentrated form of food. All the
essential nutritive elements are put together in the form
of pellets, each of which contains from one to two hundred
times as much nourishment as an ounce of an ordinary
article of diet. These pellets, diluted with water, will form all that is necessary to support life. The professor looks forward confidently to revolutionizing the present food system." ..... The expectant whispers of the little ones were hushed as the father, rising from his chair, lifted the thimble and disclosed a small pill of concentrated nourishment on the chip before him. Christmas turkey, cranberry sauce, plum  pudding, mince pie--it was all there, all jammed into that little pill and only waiting to expand. Then the father with deep reverence, and a devout eye alternating between the pill and heaven, lifted his voice in a benediction.         At this moment there was an agonized cry from the mother.
"Oh, Henry, quick! Baby has snatched the pill!" It was too true. Dear little Gustavus Adolphus, the golden-haired baby boy, had grabbed the whole Christmas dinner off the poker chip and bolted it. Three hundred and fifty pounds of concentrated nourishment passed down the oesophagus
of the unthinking child.
"Clap him on the back!" cried the distracted mother. "Give him water!"
The idea was fatal. 
The water striking the pill caused it to expand. There was a dull rumbling sound and then, with an awful bang, Gustavus Adolphus exploded into fragments! And when they gathered the little corpse together, the baby lips were parted in a lingering smile that could
only be worn by a child who had eaten thirteen Christmas dinners."

Arab leader tells Islam's top clerics to stop scaring people.

Over-looked is Egyptian president al-Sisi's bold address to Muslim clerics, telling them to stop scaring the rest of the world and get some enlightenment.  New Years, he spoke at thousand-year-old al-Azhar University, the theological hub of the Sunni Islamic world. His sub-text is getting help to stomp down on the Muslim Brotherhood, his political opposition.  The plain text is extraordinary.  He calls for religious revolution to stop scaring the rest of the world.

``I am referring here to the religious clerics. We have to think hard about what we are facing—and I have, in fact, addressed this topic a couple of times before. It’s inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire umma [Islamic world] to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world. Impossible!  That thinking—I am not saying “religion” but “thinking”—that corpus of texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the years, to the point that departing from them has become almost impossible, is antagonizing the entire world. It’s antagonizing the entire world!   Is it possible that 1.6 billion people [Muslims] should want to kill the rest of the world’s inhabitants—that is 7 billion—so that they themselves may live? Impossible! `   I am saying these words here at Al Azhar, before this assembly of scholars and ulema—Allah Almighty be witness to your truth on Judgment Day concerning that which I’m talking about now.     All this that I am telling you, you cannot feel it if you remain trapped within this mindset. You need to step outside of yourselves to be able to observe it and reflect on it from a more enlightened perspective.  I say and repeat again that we are in need of a religious revolution. You, imams, are responsible before Allah. The entire world, I say it again, the entire world is waiting for your next move… because this umma is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost—and it is being lost by our own hands. 

   Quoted by Roger Simon at PJ Media.
   Highlighted by Barrelstrength, another blog I enjoy reading.
   Overlooked by Americans who follow news religiously. "Surprised they hadn't heard about it, they agreed that the story warranted banner headlines world-wide.".

Related: "Sisi first Egyptian President to attend Coptic Christmas mass". Story in English from Egyptian paper, Ahram.

Marriage length inversely correlated to cost of the Wedding

The bigger the diamond and gold-plated the reception, the less likely the marriage is to endure. That's a takeaway from Francis and Mialon's much-downloaded study of 3000. Of course, the detail is complicated.

Modest expenses and lots of people attending the reception are a big plus.  Low cost and no ring and few people attending, not so good.  Ring over $2000 is a risk factor.  Over $20,000 spent is definitely not a plus for an enduring marriage when the woman is spending it and under $1000 is a plus if the man is spending it.  Going into debt for the big day is quite a stress factor,  not good.  The data is presented in dense tables but the preceding discussion is easier to follow if you download the free paper.

h/t Tax Prof Blog

End of the world, according to Oreo

h/t Ace of Spades

Sex while under the influence of youth

Controlling for age reverses the popular wisdom:  Living together before marriage doesn't cause divorce.  Doing so while under the influence of youth does.    Perhaps this explains why arranged marriages are fairly stable because adults are involved to set up and supervise until the bride and groom have grown up.   Being under 23 when you marry is a greater risk factor than cohabitation before the wedding.

The Council on Contemporary Families reports their findings.

One liner for Butterfly Brains

Fractal theory updated for people worried about beaver methane:
"A beaver builds a dam in Siberia, and .. Hurricane Sandy prompts a thousand stupid op-eds halfway around the world. "

Don't be misled by the cute face on
this arctic ground squirrel.

Beaver and now even squirrel methane is a hard core worry for a few gentle souls and you can read more about it here. Cow farts were considered an assault on all we hold dear.  Now it's micro-aggression from smaller beasties.

US Conservative Poll Has Interesting Take Aways.

From would-be presidents to supreme court justices and media figures, some 85 US Conservatives were rated by right wing blogs.  There are a few saints (Scott Walker, Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell)  much admired and no negatives.   While George W is widely admired, his brother Jeb is not. Others touted for president like Chris Christie, Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul have heavy negatives.  Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush and Donald Trump have love-hate splits.  In the mostly positive column are Ted Cruz, Rick Perry, Ben Carson,  Allen West, Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio.   The one presidential saint is Scott Walker of Wisconsin with no whisper of criticism from this group and esteemed.

 Least loved is Megan McCain and her Dad's not far behind although David Frum, Peter King, Graham Lindsey, Karl Rove and Arnold Schwarzenegger fill the space between.

A significant takeaway is the gap between support for Tea Party principles and lack of support for specific Tea Party groups presently in the public eye.  This is a big opportunity for someone to articulate the values and step forward as a unifier.

Also striking is the open-mindedness of the right.  The most highly regarded besides Governor Walker include women (Mia Love and Michelle Malkin) and three distinctive black Americans (Thomas, Sowell and West).

In the media, Glenn Reynolds, Thomas Sowell, Michelle Malkin, Mark Steyn and Drudge are saints but others like Charles Krauthammer, Dana Loesch, Michelle Malkin and the Limbaugh brothers are almost as shiny, being admired and having few scorners.

The Chamber of Commerce is mostly "blah" with negatives, not what the Left would expect. The dreaded "blah" zone includes a lot of people who may be distinctive for good and bad reasons but just haven't much public recognition.

The Supreme Court numbers are interesting. Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas are saints while John Roberts has a lot of negatives and Anthony Kennedy is a cipher.

I repackaged the numbers into a spreadsheet.  If you want a copy to search and graph, email me. The source poll from Right Wing News is based on data from 72 websites (which is a lot) but another 158 sites were contacted and didn't respond (which is also a lot.)

Canada's Transport Bottleneck In Chicago.

With 1300 trains a day in Chicago, and even with transit times down from 44 to 33 hours, it's still the biggest rail bottleneck on the continent.  40% of CP and 25% of CN traffic squeezes through the hub which is so famous most commodities are priced f.o.b. Chicago.   40% of that total traffic is dysfunctional scheduling of passenger trains.

"Shippers often lament that it can take just as long to get a product from Los Angeles to Chicago as it does to get that same product from one end of Chicago to the other". 

To understand how heavy commodities move in North America is to understand how six rail networks trade and compete their way through Chicago.   Thousands of containers switch to trucks daily to get by.

As Keith Creel, chief operating officer at CP, said:   “I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had over the past six or seven months explaining how congestion in Chicago affects my ability to move a potash train in Saskatchewan. It’s all connected,” 

CN has a special edge, having bought a railway you never heard of before, Elgin, Joliet and Eastern.   EJ&E routes through nearby Gary, Indiana  and let CN gain over 60% speed and volume.

Much of this information is from National Post's article Welcome To Chokepoint USA
Things to know: Item 1 a map showing rail networks by volume and Item 2, a breakdown of how goods are moved in the US.

I'm with Spin Assassin

Danielle Smith sent a message from the Wildrose Party:  Herself and eight wise opportunist colleagues. I think Spin Assassin's assessment is right.  Prentice with his bankground as a banker and Federal Environment Minister is a timely leader and Smith an able lieutenant.  They may be the best outcome available for a damaged Alberta PC party at a time when some unity will help push back an irrational electoral wave fronted by Trudeau II.

The happy couple.

Is it rape? No answer came the stern reply.

It's deeply disturbing to read the Washington Examiner's effort to get someone to answer the law's question:  How can a man prove consent before engaging in sex?  No one answered.  Ms. Schow approached sponsors of seven different "Yes mean Yes" bills around the country, including Cuomo and Brown.  She approached more than two dozen universities involved in implementing a "Yes means Yes" policy. "No answer" was the stern reply.

The only on-record comment she found was this:

Asked how an accused person could prove consent was obtained before sex, California Assemblywoman Bonnie Lowenthal, D-Long Beach, told the San Gabriel Valley Tribune in June that “your guess is as good as mine.”  “I think it’s a legal issue,” she added. “Like any legal issue, that goes to court.”  

Accusation IS the evidence.  That's shabby law.  Legislators surge in a crowd to create fashionably solemn statements.   Without a tool to measure by, it is fraudulent and undermines the rule of law.

In the same vein, read this.  If you didn't have your camera filming at the time, do you think you wouldn't be in for a world of trouble?   Your guess is as good as mine.

Frack meet ZIRP

Near Zero Interest Rates favour risk over thrift and puff up stocks.  They put at hazard an industry undergoing capital intensive expansion which became dependent on low rates of interest and high prices per barrel of oil.  Zero Hedge, in self-congratulatory fashion, makes this point well about fracking.  The fracked wells take a lot of capital and are spritzed up for just a couple years during which time the money must be recovered.   A reversion to the mean for interest rates to give savers a premium for taking on risk will send a shock through the fracking industry which, coupled with the drop in world prices for oil, will stall out the industry for a few years.


From the source article at Zero Hedge:

"ZIRP destroyed the most fundamental index in the financial universe: the true cost of borrowing money. ...  It also destroyed the entire relationship between borrowed money and the cost-structure of the endeavors it was borrowed for. Take shale oil, for instance.  The fundamental limiting factor for shale oil was that the wells were only good for about two years, and then they were pretty much shot. So, if you were in that business, and held a bunch of leases, you had to constantly drill and re-drill and then drill some more just to keep production up. The drilling cost between $6 and $12-million per well.   .... In a few short years they drilled to beat the band and the results seemed so impressive that investment money poured into the sector like honey, so they drilled some more. It was going to save the American way of life. We were going to be “energy independent,” ...They goosed so much oil out of the ground in a short period of time that they killed the goose — demand for oil at a price that made it worth drilling for. Now, much of the junk financing will default, and the result of that is no more junk financing for a long, long time, meaning that a lot of planned wells will not be drilled and completed, meaning that the current crop of short-lived wells will crap out in the 24 months ahead, and production will not be replaced by new wells".

Obama and the Monkees

Like the Monkees, Obama had wealthy sponsors with media ties.  'Creators' may be a better word than 'sponsors'.   Both were vaulted to stardom by them.  I prefer the Monkees.  They entertained and the force of law was not used to separate us from our money and liberty.   Obama's enablers have a lot to answer for.

From Victor Davis Hanson's column:  That he had no record of achievement was seen as an advantageous clean slate.  .Teleprompted glibness was preferred to ad hoc repartee, as if an entire presidency could be scripted and Photoshopped with backdrops of Greek columns and Latin mottos."   ..   He had at best a mediocre record as a state legislator and rookie senator. Yet he quickly dazzled the liberal establishment. Joe Biden and Harry Reid were wowed by his sounding and behaving like a white liberal, while retaining the ability to turn on his supposedly authentic black persona when needed. 

Socialism will never go away and will never work.

We are socialized in a family, a top-down redistributive structure that works.  It works in a nuclear family until the beloved kids move out .  It somewhat works in a tribal group that shares a lot of DNA.  It's a colossal failure on the scale of the nation state and can't be fixed.  Our baked-in destiny is to keep believing that Socialism might work for the whole world and we will love one another as brothers and sisters.  It won't.  This is well put by Weirddave at the Ace of Spades link.

"Ordered liberty, free market capitalism, rule of law and other bottom up organizational methods are the aberration in human history. Humans are not wired to respond to these concepts the way they respond to a hierarchy. It's better for them, but it isn't instinctive."

Song bird brains resemble ours.

Birds that learn songs have a clump of fifty extra-active genes.  We language-loving humans have the same active clump.  Primates that don't talk and birds that don't learn songs have a lot less going on in that gene nexus.  

This finding comes from sequencing the entire genome of 48 species of bird, Dr. Jarvis of Duke University being the lead investigator in a flurry of papers published this week.  Sourced from Science Daily News.