Stupid, 7th Century Savages

Yeah, you know who I mean.  Mark Steyn probably said it best,

A mob of deranged ululating blood-lusting head-hackers slaughter Norwegian female aid-workers and Nepalese guards — and we’re the ones with the problem?

As for the disgusting wastes of perfectly good oxygen like Lindsey Graham, Harry Reid, and the others like them, they're unfit for office.  They need to read that document they're sworn to protect and defend. 

Look, Pastor Jones is a media whore, plain and simple, and I have no use for him.  While I'll concede his point about being tired of Christianity getting hammered all the time and no one saying anything, while a single cartoon can enrage the entire Mideast; burning Qurans - or any book because you dislike it - is stupid.

Burning a Koran is archaic and only a savage from the 7th century would be upset by it.  Not only that, it's slow and inefficient compared to the modern equivalent.  You can download an electronic Quran and delete it a thousand times in the amount of time it takes to burn one.  You could write a little program to download and delete copies all day.  Wouldn't mean a thing.  I don't think the head-hackers would understand that the file still exists and nothing happened to it.  Just as they don't understand that the Quran (concept/"master copy") still exists after one copy is burned.  Do they riot and kill the nearest westerner if a madrasah burns down and all their precious books go with it?

Does anyone think we ought to have a Download And Delete The Quran Day?  We could destroy millions of times more copies than Pastor Jones did.  And yet the original would be right where we found it. 

Credits: image by ThePeoplesCube; Islamic Rage Boy by TheNoseOnYourFace

On The US Becoming a Nation of Takers, Not Makers - Part II

To summarize where we were yesterday, Stephen Moore at the WSJ wrote an editorial about the relative numbers of government employees (who take wealth) vs. manufacturing, farming, mining, and other jobs that make wealth.  As someone who has worked in the US manufacturing sector almost all my life, I approached this topic from the perspective of hiring people into manufacturing companies and especially my world. 

But there are other perspectives that beg mention, too.  To begin with, many or most people have heard of Robert Kiyosaki's Rich Dad Poor Dad book and, well, empire.  I have read a few of the books, and I like where he comes from but I'm not a "zealot" about his ideas.  One of his major points, though, is that people can be divided along a line of how much financial risk they're willing to take in life.  In my mind, the opposite ends of this line would a entrepreneur who gambles everything they have to start a business that they believe to be "the next big thing", while the other end would be a municipal worker and union member.  Everything this latter guy has done is aimed at getting a job that "takes an act of congress" to be fired from.  The first guy is willing to bet everything, willing to fail and live homeless, penniless in a car, to get a shot at greatness.  The second guy wants a guaranteed job, guaranteed income, guaranteed retirement, - everything guaranteed.  One has no need for security while the other needs security most of all. 

I believe we need more of the first kind of person and fewer of the second.  As Moore puts it:

Don't expect a reversal of this trend anytime soon. Surveys of college graduates are finding that more and more of our top minds want to work for the government. Why? Because in recent years only government agencies have been hiring, and because the offer of near lifetime security is highly valued in these times of economic turbulence. When 23-year-olds aren't willing to take career risks, we have a real problem on our hands. Sadly, we could end up with a generation of Americans who want to work at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

I understand that these are tough times economically, and security is going to be more attractive than during boom times.  And to be honest, I have more of a tendency to want security and repeatability than I like in myself.  But America needs more Bill Gates and Henry Fords than we need Patty and Selma Bouvier. 

This security-seeking attitude has the added downside of removing these workers from the pool of business starters because the first 10 years after getting out of school and starting a career are also the years most will start families.  If there was ever anything that tended to keep young adults in their jobs, that's the big one.  

The graph of how private college tuition has increased at about triple the rate of growth of the cost of living reveals another problem.  The Federal Government is taking over student loans, and offers amnesty if the student works in the approved "government service" job for the required number of years.  Come work for the government and we won't even ask you to pay back your loans.  This can't fail to make more people dependent on the Fed government - which seems to be a major goal of this administration. 

Federally guaranteed student loans are one of the reasons why tuition has increased as much as it has, by providing a money hose from Fed.gov through the students to the colleges.   Now there are commentators making the case this will allow the Fed.gov leviathan to squeeze some private schools out of business by not lending their students tuition money.  They've already come out against the awkwardly-named "For-profit colleges" with proposals to prevent student financial aid.  Is extortion too strong a word?  Already, there are those recommending that the Fed.gov not loan to colleges or programs that aren't finding political favor.  If you're a professor who steps out of line on global warming or some other fad, your livelihood could be shut off; do you think the college will want staff that keeps them from getting students?  (What's the difference between a private college like Harvard that earns a profit and a "for profit" college?  Political connections?)

Finally, I should never imply that college is essential.  If anything, it's looking like a worse deal all the time. 

There are many jobs that simply can't be taught without the student doing the task.  There may be no better example for "you can't learn it by reading a book" than shooting.  You can read all you want, but sooner or later you need to master your physical gun handling.  As another example, I've ground a few telescope mirrors.  Like shooting, you can read all about concepts, but nothing other than actually doing it will teach you how to do it; it's a task overwhelmingly controlled by the feel, the sound, and the behavior of the glass in your hands.  Things like this were taught by apprenticeship before the gentrification occurred that says we need everyone to attend college.  I have tremendous respect and admiration for opticians, machinists and other workers who can exceed the accuracy of their tools and produce works of mechanical art.  On the opposite end, surgeons go through an internship and residency where they learn the hands-on work of surgery.  This is nothing if not an apprenticeship, for people who already have eight to 10 years of college.   

Go look again at the top graph in yesterday's post, the total spent on education vs. the improvement in measured results.  Any rational person would look at that graph and say public K-12 education has failed; no matter what we spend and what we do, the results don't improve.  As if to underline that, you'll find that colleges are teaching remedial classes more and more to try and get their incoming students up to college level (not that this is a problem for them; they simply collect more tuition).  The College Board (famous for their SAT) says up to 40% of students need remedial classes. Kevin, at The Smallest Minority has regular coverage on how bad modern education is, with the recurring theme "I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit - it's the only way to be sure".  Public education is the prime example of Pournelle's Iron Law. 

Every job has some specialized knowledge or skills that are required to do that job.  In rough terms, the more specialized the knowledge, the more of that knowledge needed and the larger the impacts of getting it wrong, the more you get paid.  There are, or should be, alternate routes to getting that knowledge or skill set.  A straightforward trade would be that you can get a recognized, standard degree in four or five years, or learn it on your own while working in the field in perhaps twice that time.  You could then decide whether it was better to roll up years of debt in school, or work at a lower pay rate while you learned the subjects. Instead, we have a system where the degree is used an excuse for the hiring manager.  If the new employee fails and costs the company too much, no one will say too much if the employee had all the qualifications on paper; on the other hand, if the manager offers the job to someone without the degree and they fail, the manager might get fired.  In our world, we say, "no one ever got fired for hiring an MIT grad".

Stephen Moore's essay points out a major problem.  We will not restore the economy and grow as long as risk-averse wealth takers out number the real wealth makers and risk takers.  This trend is going in exactly the wrong direction. 

On The US Becoming a Nation of Takers, Not Makers

One of my responsibilities as one of the Graybeards at work is to mentor new grad engineers.  I usually call them my "padewan learners" as I train them in the ways of the force.  It's not unlike the Jedi/padewan relationship.

As you might imagine, the college graduates in engineering are among the top few percent of the high school class that produced them.  Add to that the fact that our company won't hire new grads unless they were in the upper quintile of their college class, and you can realize it's a rather elite group.  I don't mean to dis their peers that went on to med school, or pharmacy, accounting or other things; certainly dear son (biologist/entrepreneur) and dear daughter-in-law (research biochemist) are in the same group.  Except lawyers, we can all dis them.   

Increasingly, college students that can do the work required to enter engineering or other highly-skilled occupations are choosing to work in other fields.  A decade ago, the lure of big money on Wall Street attracted many; today, it's the lure of a secure Government job.  One of the problems we have is that these top few percent of students see that if manufacturing industry jobs are declining in availability (as percent of jobs), and ask themselves why should they do the work necessary to go into manufacturing. 

This is doubleplusungood.

First: all of the points that Stephen Moore makes are good.  This is a bad trend for society as a whole.  Government workers live off the wealth created by the private sector, so they're not a good investment:

• While the loss of many manufacturing goods can be traced to productivity improvements, government doesn't improve productivity. 

"Over the period 1970-2005, school spending per pupil, adjusted for inflation, doubled, while standardized achievement test scores were flat. Over roughly that same time period, public-school employment doubled per student, according to a study by researchers at the University of Washington. That is what economists call negative productivity."  This graph from the Cato Institute and American Thinker demonstrates that we pour money into K-12 education and get nothing for it. 

• "The same is true of almost all other government services. Mass transit spends more and more every year and yet a much smaller share of Americans use trains and buses today than in past decades. "  I've only taken one class with a traffic engineering aspect, and it was enough to know that mass transit won't work in most situations.  It requires a certain population density to work, one more in line with small Euro-cities than our spread out suburbias.  High speed rail is a solution in search of a problem.

• "Most reasonable steps to restrain public-sector employment costs are smothered by the unions. Study after study has shown that states and cities could shave 20% to 40% off the cost of many services—fire fighting, public transportation, garbage collection, administrative functions, even prison operations—through competitive contracting to private providers. But unions have blocked many of those efforts. "

Second, it's bad for the other places that would hire those graduates, including where I work.  Despite the recurring bleat that "we don't manufacture anything in America", I've been working in a series of manufacturing companies for around 35 years.  If the top students don't think there's a future in manufacturing and choose government work, the remaining manufacturing companies are in trouble.  Then there will be nobody making enough to pay the taxes to keep them employed.  Then everyone is in trouble. 

I think this graph (from Wikipedia) says a lot.  Increasingly, college costs are out of line with the cost of living, and with what you can earn based on that degree. 

There's an old saying that productivity doesn't improve in everything: you still need four people to play a string quartet.  They extend that to say that you still need one teacher to some small number of students and the productivity gains due to new technologies can only be marginal.  In a word: bullcrap.  If the cause was that the number of teachers needed per student had to stay constant, the cost of the teachers would track inflation, not exceed it by a factor of 3x, as in this last plot.

These curves bear the hallmark of a market that isn't free.  Medical costs are rising faster than inflation because the free market isn't allowed to work; the rising cost of education shows strange influences, too.  Where the medical costs are closest to free market; things where people pay their own money like plastic surgery and Lasik/RK, prices have not risen at twice the cost of living.  In the case of college costs, with scholarships and federal student loans picking up much of the out-of-pocket expenses, coupled with a perceived need (that doesn't seem to match the market), people seem willing to bear any debt to get their college degree.   A college degree is turning into a bad investment for people who aren't intending to go into engineering or one of the professions, and I never thought I'd say that.

Edit:  1815 EDT  I forgot a title! 

Not An April Fool's Joke, Per Se...

Just one of my all time favorite videos. 

I Find This All Rather Suspicious

Mrs. Graybeard, who is nothing if not a good researcher, stumbled upon a couple of interesting things last night.  Evidence that what's going on in Libya is not just disaffected students and oppressed locals crying out for freedom. 

To begin with, they've apparently instituted a central bank; their own version of our Federal Reserve.  I won't comment on the wisdom of a central bank, but doesn't it seem strange that a ragtag group of fighters, while not having sufficient C3I to fight a meaningful resistance still has a group that opens the "Central Bank of Benghazi", and signs an oil agreement? (C3I is short for Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence - no modern conflict can be won without it).  

Oil agreement??  That's right, according to the BBC, they've already signed a deal to export oil to Qatar.  Bloomberg concurs, and fills in more details than that short BBC piece.  More interestingly, the Bloomberg piece is datelined March 22nd, over a week ago, which is very early in the rebellion to create a central bank and an oil industry.  Shouldn't you actually, you know, win before you do this?

What does it mean? 

For openers, it implies more organization than you might expect, and that this has been under preparation longer.  It's curious to observe how quickly the rebels fielded a fighting force (such as it is).  Could you put together a force so quickly in your area of operations?  Does it seem reasonable to put together a Public Relations website, in English, this quickly?

Second, it might mean that Responsibility to Protect stuff is just a cover.  The attention to Samantha Power, then, could be a distraction.  What's the other hand doing? 

Is it just a "war for oil?"  Probably not on our part.  Due to our longstanding trade restrictions, we don't buy much Libyan oil; but France is perhaps the biggest instigator of this action, and they do buy Libyan oil.  

You will pardon me if I get even more suspicious about this whole operation, won't you? 

Picture of the Day

 
As well as today's winner of the Intertubes Is... Zomblog's look at Obama's Inner Bracket. 

Let's Face Some Realities - Our 401k's are Gone, One Way or Another

Concerned American, over at Western Rifle Shooters Association links to Francis Porretto's Eternity Road on a recurring theme: the economy is going to crash.  If you're a regular here, you've seen me on the same topic perhaps a hundred times. 

There's a lot of good in the Eternity Road piece so RTWT and follow links as time allows. 

Here's a fun fact for you.  The federal deficit for February was $222.5 billion dollars.  That is way more than the deficit for the entire year of 2007 of $161 billion!  A deficit growth of 138% in just four years; where can you and I make that kind of money?!?  As an aside, the next time some idiot liberal tells you Obama is dealing with Bush's deficits, tell that fact. 

As I've said before, the big problem we have - even bigger than the debt itself - is where can we borrow that much money?  Even if we sell bonds, what economy on Earth can buy that much debt?  The Chinese are getting out of our bonds and buying up every commodity they can find.  The EU has its own debt trouble with Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Spain, and on and on.  The Japanese tsunami disaster is very likely going to shut down their purchase of US bonds. 

In plain English, there are no buyers left on Earth who will buy those bonds. In fact, for the last several months, most of the bonds we've sold have been to ourselves.  The Federal Reserve is buying 70 to 80% of our debt.

Barring a deal with the Vulcans, who are too smart, or the Klingons - and you don't want to deal with Klingon loan sharks - we are left with ugly, ugly options.  Gonzalo Lira puts it this way:

If foreign sources of funding will not cover the Federal government’s deficit after June 2011, and Washington will definitely not cut spending in any sort of realistic sense, then there really are only two—and only two—possibilities:

• The indefinite continuation of QE by the Federal Reserve.

• Or the requisitioning of private retirement accounts and pension funds.

I rush to add that this is a short term fix with no backup.  After they raid all the money in retirement accounts, which has been accruing for 30 years (in some cases), there's no place to sell bonds to after that.  Remember it doesn't have to make sense - this is like a crack ho looking for more crack.  Lira continues:

This could be accomplished very easily, from a practical standpoint—just inform banks, and have them turn over to the Federal government all your mutual funds and stocks you agonized over, and get long-term Treasury bonds of nominal equal value in exchange.

401(k)’s and IRA’s would be the first ones the Federal government would go after—for the obvious reason that union pension funds have the union’s political muscle. But individuals? They have no political machine. So they’re screwed.

There is an alternative, though.  QE3 - the whole point of Lira's article.  More money printing, then QE4, 5,.... who knows, there could be a QE10 if there's any country left by then.

The problem is these "Quantitative Easing" things are inflationary, as you know if you buy gas or food or pretty much anything.  Inflation has the effect of reducing the value of your savings. 

So whether they seize your 401k or inflate it to meaningless, it's as good as gone.  To put it another way, it's as safe as social security.

(Michael Ramirez, IBD, 12/7/10)

Arm Them Today - Fight Them Tomorrow

After all, they're the same men you were fighting yesterday.
 
The Telegraph (UK) is running with the story that jihadists who fought our guys in Iraq, and perhaps killed US soldiers or Marines, are now fighting under our protective air cover.  Not "they're members of a group" who fought us, actual jihadis who fought us are in Libya now.

Abdel-Hakim al-Hasidi, the Libyan rebel leader, has said jihadists who fought against allied troops in Iraq are on the front lines of the battle against Muammar Gaddafi's regime.

If that doesn't give you warm fuzzy feelings, how about this gem:

Mr al-Hasidi insisted his fighters "are patriots and good Muslims, not terrorists," but added that the "members of al-Qaeda are also good Muslims and are fighting against the invader".

When these reports first started to surface, they were coming from the government, so we all laughed and said, "That's good ol' Daffy Qa-daffy for you!  Ha ha!".  I don't particularly feel like laughing now.   So, the jihadis don't mind us being there because "the enemy of my enemy is my friend".  I wonder whom he'll be fighting if they win and his current enemy is no longer there?  So Senator "Maverick" McCain wants to arm them?  If we send them guns, will American forces be looking down the barrels of our weapons in six months?

If you want to know whom to blame for us being involved in this mess, look no further than the darling couple in the White House, Cass Sunstein and his wife Samantha Power.  I couldn't tell you which one is more virulently anti-Israel.  I suspect he's more dangerous, but it could just be I've been studying him longer. She is the creator (one of the creators?) of "Responsibility to Protect" (R2P) the UN doctrine that's responsible for us being there.  New Zeal has a good overview of this. Samantha Power seems to be driven by angst over the Rwandan genocide, especially angst that her heroes did nothing to stop it.  Her book, "A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" lays out the ideas that led to R2P.

Responsibility to Protect has the potential to, or if I may, is intended to, eliminate national sovereignty. 

“We can no longer hide behind state sovereignty.”

Let that sink in and don't overlook this detail.  Libya itself may be a nothing.  We may be out of there in a few weeks.  The principle and the precedent, though, may just have been established that the US has no right to do what it deems its own national interest, under penalty of international courts.

The Mideast Changes Again

The Mideast has a way of making fools of us when we predict things.  It has a way of confounding experts and pundits - not to mention rank amateurs like me.

Caroline Glick, who writes for Townhall.com offers this analysis of the changing face of the terrorist war against Israel.  She points out that the usual groups who rush to take credit for killing Israelis first claimed credit for the massacre of the Fogel family - then said they didn't. 

The fact that today neither Hamas nor Fatah is interested in taking credit for Wednesday’s bombing in Jerusalem or for the massacre of the Fogel family is a signal that something fundamental is changing in the political dynamic between the two factions.

She then goes on to ponder the deeper meanings of what the parties may be after.  

While the internal political dynamics of the various Palestinian terror groups is interesting, it is not the main game in town. For both Fatah and Hamas, the most important target audience is Europe. But before we discuss how the Palestinians’ assessment of Europe is connected to their move to obfuscate organizational responsibility for terrorism, it is necessary to consider the concrete political goal of their new terror war.

Having decided the US is out of the game, and doesn't care what happens to Israel any longer, and knowing the Europeans already live in a state of dhimmitude, they feel they have nothing left to lose, nothing left to hide:

The Palestinians recognize that they don’t need to pretend to be good to get Europe to support them. After the people of Europe have been brainwashed by their media and intimidated by the Muslim communities, they have developed a Pavlovian response regarding Israel whereby every mention of Israel makes them hate it more. It doesn’t matter if the story is about the massacre of Israeli children or the bombing of synagogues and nursery schools. They know that Israel is the guilty party and expect the governments to punish it.

and reaches this conclusion which shakes me to my core: 

What the Palestinian silence on who committed what atrocity tells us is that in this new terror war, the Palestinians believe they cannot lose. With Europe in tow, Fatah and Hamas feel free to join their forces and advance both militarily and politically.

Palestinians hand out sweets to celebrate the slaughter of the sleeping Fogel  babies.  If you have a strong stomach, image search "Fogel family massacre" with your favorite search engine.

Genesis 12:3 (God to Abraham about Israel), "I will bless those who bless you,
   and whoever curses you I will curse;"

It's Earth Hour - Turn On Your Lights

It's Earth Hour from 8:30 to 9:30 local time Saturday night.  I hope you're marking the occasion properly.  Me, I'm turning on pretty much everything I have that uses electricity.  My goal is to be seen from Proxima Centauri.  And remember -

“If it can’t be seen from space, you’re doing it wrong.”

There's no end to the nonsense carried out in the name of "climate awareness" (ack phfft).  We may go down in history as the only nation that caused a world wide food shortage over some obscure statistical fraud with some unfortunate (but completely predictable) assistance from nature.  Speaking of fraud, more has been found in hockey-stick land.

For those who don't know the inside stories, Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit is an unlikely global hero, but he is one.  Hearing some stories on the economic impact of climate legislation, McIntyre, a financial guy, wondered why there were no independent audits of the climate scientists.  Since every financial market transaction that might cost an investor a few dollars has to meet audit requirements, why not science that will cost trillions of dollars and millions of lives?  So he started auditing their statistics.  Threw up repeatedly, and then told the world how fraudulent it was, with ironclad, high quality math... 

OK, I made up that part about throwing up repeatedly. 

image from Caltech.

Scraping By On $250,000 Per Year

A friend at work sent me a link to this MSN article on life on $250,000 a year.  It opens:

In the ongoing debate over whether to use tax policy to help resolve the nation's massive deficit, a single number has emerged from the crossfire: $250,000. It's the annual income that President Barack Obama and others have used to define what it means to be "rich" in America today. And while the Bush-era tax cuts were temporarily extended to 2012, when their deadline comes around for the second time, $250,000 will be etched in the minds of policymakers and pundits as the number that separates the middle class from the wealthy.

It's an interesting article, but I'm sure its message won't be that new or shocking to this readership: $250,000 just isn't "rich" any more.  With two working adults and a couple of kids, especially if those adults are working for corporations, they have less disposable income than you might think.  They're probably just squeaking by.  

They may not have much money when the month runs out, but at least they don't have much month when the money runs out.  Most such couples would probably do just as well if one of them stayed home with the kids, they sold off the second car and got rid of all the other expenses associated with that parent working.  In the mid '90s, it was pretty widely stated that in that sort of dual income house, if both parents were making virtually the same pay, instead of household income doubling, it increased by 25 to 30%.

In truth, these are the kind of folks "The Bernank" and "Turbo Tax Timmy" have crosshairs on.  Savers, people playing by the rules, doing their best, are the ones to be drained of blood until there's nothing left.  If you've read Tom Baugh's "Fully Taxated" articles these concepts are familiar to you.  Tom is, of course, selling a book he firmly believes in - nothing wrong with that - called "Starving the Monkeys".  He's not alone in saying these things, either.  Tyler Durden at Zerohedge pointed out In Entitlement America "a one-parent family of three making $14,500 a year (minimum wage) has more disposable income than a family making $60,000 a year.  And if that wasn't enough, here is one that will blow your mind:

"If the family provider works only one week a month at minimum wage, he or she makes 92 percent as much as a provider grossing $60,000 a year."

This underscores the most serious problem with reforming welfare laws.  Note that more than doubling pretax income from $14,500 to $30,000 results in a loss of 28% of their net income.  It would take an exceptionally rare person to go through a drastic drop in quality of life for the possibility of getting really high income and better standard of life some day way in the future. 

It also points out that Tom's main point, that the tax system is set up to milk people like our $60,000 family above, the $250,000 family we started out with, and, to be honest, folks like me.  And many of you. 

If you look up "unsustainable" in the dictionary, you should find the US financial situation.  US Finances Are Near the Worst In the World.  Things that can't go on won't. 

The Replacement for The Replacement Is In Place

I casually mentioned on Monday that I had a broken computer to fix and I've been bit scarce here.  We developed a plan to replace it with the desktop I've been using for the last three years, and replace that one with a new desktop (we "hand me down" computers until they fail - every room in the house has one, and the cats are surfing the 'net all day).  Thankfully, I'm able to do this without excessive financial hardship, and the new computer is pretty much set up - Ubuntu 10.10 and Windoze dual boot.  With monitor, it cost about what my first PC cost, a Turbo XT (I'm dating myself, but no one else would) - and that XT was a kit without a monitor.  

My regular blend of ... whatever it is ... will be returning soon.  In the meantime, a good read is at Kevin's place.  

In the James Cameron [*spit*] movie "Titanic," there is this great scene that illustrates a point about our current economic situation.  The iceberg is struck.  Because of the glancing blow, the more primitive metallurgy that resulted in brittle steel of the hull, a long gash was ripped across three of the main watertight compartment sections of the front of the ship. With the first three main sections rapidly filling with water, the engineer/ship designer, played by Victor Garber, lays out the side view plans of the ship to show the captain that there is no doubt that the ship is going down and there is absolutely no way to stop it.  It may take an hour or so for the ship to disappear below the waves, but no amount of bilge pumping or anything else is going to stop the inevitable.

That's what is happening with our economy.

Go read Our Economic Titanic.

On European Mountain Goats and Michelle Obama

A friend sent me these incredible photos of a dam in Italy, and the mountain goats (more properly European Ibex) on the shear walls.  These goats scramble across the walls in search of lichen and salt.  I guess you could say they've taken a likin' to it...

Now I'm not a hunter, but as a hiker and backwoods wanderer, I know that there are natural salt licks - places where animals gather to get salt.  I know that hunters will leave salt blocks as a means to gather deer or other animals, and to acclimate them to a certain area.  Mammals have a feedback mechanism that makes them crave salt when they are low in it, and it's my belief that there could be a correlation between these urges for salt and deficiency in other minerals that might naturally occur with it: perhaps magnesium or potassium, phosphorus or zinc.

I've been reporting for just about a year now about the Fed.gov's attempts to control your salt consumption, including the stunning Fed argument that you have no fundamental right to eat what you'd like.  Reducing salt use is one of Michelle Obama's signature issues.  You have the idiotic mayor of New York City spending $300,000 on a campaign to tell you there's salt in canned soup. Should we cut salt consumption because they say so?

Let me jump to the important conclusion (with italics added tonight):

Did you get that?  This Doctor, President of the American Society of Hypertension, said that we don't even know that if we tell the public to cut their salt consumption that it won't hurt them.  So the fed.gov can't even say, "cut your sodium because even if it doesn't help blood pressure, at least it won't hurt you"; we don't know that.  But the FDA is going to do it anyway.   Michael Alderman, President of the American Society of Hypertension, Department of Epidemiology and Social Medicine, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Br Med J 1997; 315: 484-5  

So what's going on here?  By reporting in the press, Americans typically consume about 1500 mg of salt a day.  By analysis of my diet, I know I consume about 1/5 of that.  I have no aversion to salt, don't try to restrict it for any medical reason, I just don't use a lot of it. Could it be that people crave salt for the same reason those goats do? 

Don't those goats on the nearly-vertical wall of that dam know that the US Fed.gov is concerned about them eating too much dam salt? 

I don't have an answer, but just like I know study after study has shown fat people often eat less than "normal" people, I know there are powerful feedback loops in the body.  Could it be the American taste for salt is not because "they like it" but because American food is low in magnesium or calcium or phosphorus - or something - and our feedback system says to eat salt because salt licks often contain those minerals?  Is it that we tend to eat muscle tissue and not livers and other sources predators typically eat?  Is there a physiological explanation for the desire for salt?

Whatever happened to "keep your laws off my body"?  Or does that only apply to uteri?

I Would Have Written This...

...except I don't have the experience to back it up that the author does.  Mike Adams, a professor a University of North Carolina on why "Fill In the Blank" studies programs should be shut down. 

For some time, I have made a habit of asking students their major (and minor) immediately after they ask me a silly question. This is necessary because I teach two basic studies courses per semester – both populated by students from across the spectrum of academic disciplines. I have found (consistently) that nearly all inane questions and comments come from students in just a handful of academic majors.

I know I've posted this thought in various places, but I don't have the bona fides that the author has.  

Go read.  I have a broken computer to work on. 

A Journalist's View

We have a pretty good local talk show here weekday mornings, on the one AM radio station that still makes enough profit to stay in business.  (Coincidence?  And on a side note: remember when a broadcasting license was a license to make money?)  On Thursdays, the host has a regular visitor - a reporter from the local paper.  This reporter is relatively moderate, and does a fairly good job of digging out objective data.  He even moderates his viewpoints when the data proves him wrong.  Pretty unusual for a reporter these days! 

Last week, the reporter had an insight that I thought was interesting and has been rolling around in my head for about 10 days. 

People on the left tend to think business is the root cause of all the problems.  People on the right tend to think that government is the problem.  On it's face this seems true: think of the number of times you heard left-wing idiots screaming "Halliburton Halliburton!!".  From my standpoint, their argument is silly. 

Let's say a company wants to get me to buy their product.  They can target ads to appeal to me, and do everything they can to try to convince me to buy it, but in the end, if I don't want to buy their product, they don't get my money.  There's nothing more they can do.  By contrast, let's say the government (local, state or federal) decides they want money out of me.  If I don't want to give them that money, someone eventually shows up and puts a gun in my face to get my money.  It may not be a direct gun in my face, but the threat is plainly there.  Furthermore, the government wants the monopoly of force over me so that there is nothing I can do to resist.  Maybe they won't kill me, I don't want to take that bet, but they can put me in jail and destroy my life in every other way.  I'd rather deal with a company any day. 

While a corporation might want to print their own money, they can't and generally don't try (there's a term for companies that do: organized crime).  Local and state governments are in the same boat.  The fed.gov has given itself the right to do this, causing misery and agony for everyone outside their inner circle. 

One thing I think we can all agree on is that when companies and government get together, that's the worst of all worlds.  Whether it's the "Military Industrial Complex" that Eisenhower warned us about using their might to force us into foreign adventures, or ACORN and the AFL-CIO pushing governments to rob Peter to pay, well, everyone, when government and cronies get together, bad things happen.  I believe some people thought that was the change they were getting with Obama - get rid of the business crony relationships of the Bush White House.  They did - and replaced it with a different bunch of cronies and corporate/government alliances. 

So That's Why Obama Went to Brazil!

No, not the girl from Ipanema.  And probably not simply to visit Brazil's Marxist guerrilla president.  It was part of a deal to authorize the Brazilan petroleum giant, Petrobras, to

"operate the Gulf of Mexico's first floating production, storage and offloading vessel, clearing the way for the Brazilian oil giant to start pumping oil from two deep-water fields, federal regulators said Thursday."

Isn't that special!  We're going to allow a Brazilian oil company to do something we've never allowed Exxon or Shell or other American companies to do.  I suppose it's only right, since under our stimulus program, we authorized a loan to Petrobras for up to $2 billion, (although they apparently only used about a sixth of that). But why a Brazilian company?

While (as far as I understand) we can't stop a foreign company from drilling for oil in the open Gulf of Mexico, since it's international waters, this is not where the Cubans/Chinese plan to drill.  We have no authority there; this is 165 miles from Louisiana.  We are favoring a foreign company to produce and sell oil that an American company could just as easily get.  Every one of this administration's policies I can think of is anti-energy and especially anti-US energy.  This is a good example.  What can you expect from a president who campaigned on wanting to destroy the coal industry and cause energy prices to skyrocket (which would further cripple the US Economy)? 

As I said during the BP disaster, I understand the sentiment of not wanting another spill, but saying we're not going to drill anymore is like saying, "I got food poisoning so I'll never eat again".  Ultimately, it's suicidal. Allowing a foreign company to do things Americans are not allowed to do is economic suicide.  But in keeping with the colonialist/socialist views we keep seeing out of this president. 

The World After America

It's here.  Look around.  France is taking the lead in establishing the Libyan no-fly zone, from Italian bases. 

I posted last month that the rest of the world is saying, "America has lost it", and America is done. 

Could it be that at least one reason why the world is on fire now is that Pax Americana is gone?  There are no adults in charge now, and they know no one will do anything about them?  Even the European leaders look at us and wonder what happened to us.  I'm sure anti-American countries and their leaders are celebrating the end of "American Hegemony", but the best explanation of Pax Americana I heard was something along the lines of "think of it as your older brother kicking the shit out of you for hurting the cat". 

Frankly, I don't want US planes covering a civil war in another version of Douchebagistan.  I sure don't want ground troops in another pointless war.  I have to say, though, I think doing this helped aid global stability - at the terrible cost of American lives.

The world is now aligning itself into how it will be arranged after we collapse.   

Buckle Up - It's Going to Get Interesting

Have you been watching oil?  It had been sagging in price lately, as the pace of the revolutions around the Mideast had been slowing down.  Until about 6PM EDT, when the UN voted to declare war on Libya.  It has been going up for the last 24 hours and just gone into a steeper slope.  I read roughly $6 since last night, and $1 in an hour or so. 

Have You Been Watching the Yen?  Tyler over at Zerohedge has been. Some of this is early reports that may not be right, but the timeline looks like this:

On Monday Night/Tuesday morning (our time) the Japanese market Nikkei index was down 17%.

The Japanese government's first action was to allow the Bank of Japan (BOJ - their equivalent of the Federal Reserve) to buy more Exchange Traded Funds and Real Estate Investment Trusts.  This is an indirect quantitative easing. 

A couple of hours later, the USDJPY (US Dollar Japanese Yen) jumped way too much.  It looked like the BOJ bought a bunch of dollars, but that wasn't formally announced.

Then, another few hours later, it became known they had pumped ¥26.5 trillion into the market, which caused the Nikkei to recover somewhat.  This is direct quantitative easing.

Overnight, they sold another ¥1.1 trillion in long term bonds (20 year).  It's now yesterday morning, US time.

A mere 5 hours later, the USDJPY hit a 16 year low.  It's not over yet.

By the end of the day, the BOJ was pumping another ¥13.8 trillion into money markets.  In case you're adding, that's  summarized as:

The Bank of Japan has offered an additional 13.8 trillion yen (some USD 170 billion) to money markets, bringing to 55.6 trillion yen the total emergency funds made available by it to protect the nation's banking system from the negative impact of Friday's massive earthquake. (speculation from market watchers)

By last night, US, it looked like the Yen was collapsing.  The USDJPY dropped from that 16 year low to a new low over $2 lower.

Meanwhile, in Japan, banks were shutting off ATMs and refusing to issue cash.

Finally, today, the BOJ and Group of Seven (G7) nations come to an arrangement to allow the BOJ to start selling them bonds.  The Nikkei and USDJPY indices both recover nicely. 

The Nikkei 225 index, from the Financial Times. 

When we judge the health of a market by numbers like the Nikkei or the USDJPY, we allow ourselves to be manipulated by the bankers.  The real question is not "what's the N225?", which gives an answer in Yen, but what's it worth.  All central bankers play this game - it's why "the Ben Bernank" will take credit for keeping the DJIA above 11,000 with QE2, but won't take credit for food prices rising.  The Keynesian world floats all currencies with respect to all others.  Nothing has a reference value, there is no standard.  

So rather than say the market has collapsed, they print money to keep the number as close to the same as they can.  See?  It was $10,000 Monday morning and it's 9200 now.  It hasn't gone down that much!  But the extra number of Yen the government has printed means that each Yen is worth less, and that 9200 on Friday is not as valuable as 9200 was on Monday.

And the slide to worthless currency continues.

A Little Olds A Little News

I posted on Saturday night that I was having problems with my first reloading project.  The RBCS hand primer was not working properly.

I wrote RCBS on Sunday, explaining the problem (after a reply from MidwayUSA telling me that since it was part of a kit, I needed to contact RCBS).  On Monday, I had a nice answer from their Technical Services Manager, asking a question or two and saying they were committed to make it right. 

I did a few things on my own, reaming the bases of the .223 a little, and successfully primed another handful of shells.  This time I might have been as much as 75% successful.  Still, I buggered a couple of rounds and had to de-prime them.  Both primers were torn open, exposing the primer powder; the one on the right has a sliver of torn metal hanging off to the right.  I sent this picture to RCBS,

and they said, "send it back".  They also asked for the shell holder, because it not being cut right could cause this.  

So my hand primer is on the UPS truck out to Calley-fornia.  Hopefully the replacement will work.

Do you own any of those compact fluorescent bulbs, the darlings of the greenies?  Do you get the famously long life out of them?  No?  Neither do I.  I have to confess I bought my first few of these when they first came out, for use in hard to reach fixtures, before I knew about the toxic mercury load in them.  I have one fixture that seems to get just a few months out them.  I wouldn't be too surprised if they lasted only as long as a regular bulb.  The question of why they don't last as long as they're supposed to comes up in a lot of engineering forums. 

Essentially, there seem to be two common answers: first, the weak area is the ballast, especially heat from the bulb.  This argument is that the bulb works better if they're mounted with the base below the curly glass part, like most table lamps would be.  If your bulb is mounted upside down, like many outdoor lights, or one hanging from the ceiling, the heat from the bulb rises onto the ballast and causes it to die faster. This implies recessed ceiling fixtures, or any fixture with no air circulation, would be a bad place to put these

The second argument is that they are tested and characterized like fluorescent bulbs: they're turned on and left on.  If you turn these bulbs on only long enough to walk into a room, get something, and walk out, they burn out much, much faster.  They don't do well with short on-times. 

No matter the real reason, these bulbs are not worth the hype and not worth the premium over incandescent bulbs.  Stockpile good old "heat balls" while you have the chance.  Cheap LED lights are still a few turns of Moore's Law away.  In 4 to 5 years, they should be reaching really good economics. 

from  - this might be a joke, but it's very similar to what our city garbage collection service says...except they tell us to put it into a plastic bag and hold it.  They'll let us know in 20 years or so what do with that bag. 

So Much Going On, So Little Time

There's so much I could write on tonight, but let's go here:  is it night time where you live?  If so, walk outside where you can see stars and look up.  The farther you are from lights the better.  Stay there a minute or two so your eyes adapt to the dark and you see well.

Everything you see that is shining by its own light is nuclear powered.  Everything you see shining in reflected sunlight (the moon, the planets), all of that is lit by nuclear power.  Now look toward your house or a nearby city.  Everything you see is lit by chemical bonds being broken and re-established.  As someone put it, "everything God powers is nuclear; everything man powers is fire".  Almost true.

Every light in this picture is a thermonuclear fusion reaction. Photo credit is to a friend of mine, who probably wouldn't want to be identified on a blog, but the object is the area around the left star in Orion's belt - the brightest star in the image.  The object just below and to the left of it is the Flame Nebula; to the right, the famous dark nebula known as The Horsehead Nebula.  Imaged under city lights, but in the alpha light of Hydrogen.  Edited by me to colorize, in the Gimp.

Where's this going?  The news is full of dire stories about problems with damaged reactors in Japan.  It is difficult to sort out "wheat from chaff" in the reporting, Dr. Joseph Oehmen of MIT writes,

I repeat, there was and will *not* be any significant release of radioactivity from the damaged Japanese reactors.

By "significant" I mean a level of radiation of more than what you would receive on - say - a long distance flight, or drinking a glass of beer that comes from certain areas with high levels of natural background radiation.

The whole article, "You Can Stop Worrying About A Radiation Disaster In Japan -- Here's Why" is worth the time to read.  If I may be permitted just another nice quote (since I've given two links back to them, sounds like fair use to me!):

I have been reading every news release on the incident since the earthquake. There has not been one single report that was accurate and free of errors (and part of that problem is also a weakness in the Japanese crisis communication). By “not free of errors” I do not refer to tendentious anti-nuclear journalism – that is quite normal these days. By “not free of errors” I mean blatant errors regarding physics and natural law, as well as gross misinterpretation of facts, due to an obvious lack of fundamental and basic understanding of the way nuclear reactors are build and operated.  I have read a 3 page report on CNN where every single paragraph contained an error.

Dr. Oehman goes to great lengths to describe the attention to cooling used in commercial reactor design.  He didn't mention they have a "SCRAM" mode, in which a failsafe mechanism plunges the moderating rods into the core to stop the main power source (the Uranium reaction).  He didn't quantify the radioactivity from the released gas, and compare it to the banana equivalent dose. I've heard many people got as much radiation as if they ate a dozen bananas.

People are unreasonably afraid of nuclear power.  Call it the Jane Fonda Syndrome, or the Cher Syndrome, whatever.  People react to nuclear power with more fear, even though they get a higher dose of radioactivity from a coal fired plant, or from a ski trip to the Rockies.  Just as we are getting close to putting nuclear plants online, the media has the opportunity to hammer on the fears people have, thanks to this disaster.  "Never let a crisis go to waste", right?  If the president (as a candidate) states "under my policies, electricity prices would necessarily skyrocket", is there any doubt his acolytes would do their best to deny any source of cheap energy?  There has been only one accident in a nuclear power plant that caused loss of life, Chernobyl; a plant designed by third-rate engineers and run by unmotivated idiots.  Even there, the actual effects, while undeniably present, have not come close to the dire predictions of disaster. 

There are new technologies for nuclear reactors that make a meltdown impossible.  There are many ways to address the technical issues, and I've never met a practicing engineer that's opposed to nuclear power.  We can't lose the public will to put more power stations on line.