Cars - again?!

Doesn't it burn you up when you see the ads this time of year from new car dealerships? They all say, "Hey, we've got 2005 models coming in and no room to put them anywhere! We've got to move out the 2004's pronto! Come in and get your best deal now!"

Wait a minute. How dumb do they think we are? Well, considering these ads play every year, they must work, so they must think we're plenty dumb, and I guess we are! But really, who believes that new car salesmen are sitting around in the summer with a lot full of cars, saying to each other, "Wow, it's a good thing we've got all this room for all these 2004 cars. Sure hope the manufacturers don't send us a whole passel of new 2005 models. Nah, that's not gonna happen."? Then October approaches, when new cars have been sent out from the factories for, what a HUNDRED YEARS NOW?? And trucks start showing up full of cars and the dealers expect us to believe they're SURPRISED???!!! So the best they can come up with is to put ads in the paper complaining that something that happens every year has happened again, darn it? Nope, no way they could have, for instance, only ordered the number of new cars they actually had room for! No way. Then the ads wouldn't work and they wouldn't be able to create in the prospective buyer's mind the image of car dealers stacking up cars three deep and desperately slashing prices in half to get rid of the old ones. The most amazing thing is that some buyers actually fall for this nonsense. The older I get, the dumber people get. And the sleazier car salesmen get.

Metaphors

The long-overdue Day of the Blogosphere may finally be dawning. How predictable was this? But, then, who predicted the rise of Protestantism out of the new technology of printing? Hmm. Everybody can read and comment on the original text and therefore see how stupid and vicious the hierarchy's reading of it is. And perhaps how irrelevant the "authentic" text itself is to everyday life. And then there's Open Source, the god of some lefty-types, but now serving as a model for the self-correcting blogosphere, inexorably crushing the idols of left and right. It IS a good thing for thousands of bloggers of every conceivable political and cultural orientation to see and comment on news events, isn't it? And for such comment to be instantly available to everyone with an internet connection? Or, at least, it has to be an improvement on a few rich white male Democrat "journalists" putting out the only "authoritative" texts of such events. We do all believe in diversity, don't we?

Becalmed in a hurricane
Here at ground zero it's barely raining, blowing a bit. I had a power outage last night, annoying only because the AC and fan went off. Storms make for cool days but warm nights, for some reason. I keep seeing pictures on TV of trailers blown to pieces and think "Gulp!" The rain and wind I've had so far, though, is barely sufficient to move the surrounding trees around. I'm looking more carefully at those trees. They seem to be tall and thin and far away from the trailer. Good. A large decrepit tree right over the bedroom would be worrisome. At least no one's ordered me to evacuate. I'd rather stay right here and read about Perkin Warbeck and Lambert Simnel.

Stormblogging

Frances has finally showed up, or at least her far outskirts. The eye's still over Tampa and we're feeling strong winds and rain here in Tallahassee, so I guess for once the weather Cassandras were right. It IS a large storm. But I'm in my snug little trailer here, not worrying about anything. It would just be inconvenient if the lights went out just as I was bloggin

Ha.. Just my little joke. I've got plenty of time to evacuate if it should become necessary. Haven't I? Looking on the bright side, if this rain and wind keeps up maybe I'll get a day off work on Tuesday.

OK, back to reading about Buckingham's rebellion against Richard III. That's what I like about the Wars of the Roses. One surprise after the other.

The Wounds of Time

All I'm going to say about this is what a good thing it is that no one really has to worry about what happens to Bill Clinton any more. It doesn't matter, as it did in the days when he had his wandering finger on the nuclear button and his backup was Al-Gor. I certainly won't mention the rumors that his weak heart may be a result of cocaine ingestion, not Big Macs, or wonder why he didn't release his medical records while he was president (no capitalization deserved in his case).

Nuance

John Kerry says he can’t be blamed for voting to give authority to George Bush to wage war to liberate Iraq because how was he to know that Bush would take that authority and “use it in the wrong way”? He seems to think he can be absolved of the consequences of any action he takes if he didn’t predict those consequences in detail. In other words, he claims to have intended that Bush would not have used Congressional authority to go to war but would have, for example, NOT gone to war!

Isn’t Kerry responsible for the consequences of his votes in Congress? Isn’t he responsible for making the judgment that Bush would properly and responsibly (in Kerry's view) use authority granted him? How stupid does Kerry think people are? Or, perhaps more to the point, how stupid is Kerry?

Here at the end of August, the Kerry campaign doesn't seem to have any traction at all. I will be very surprised if he manages to gain any voters out of the Republican convention. If form holds, Bush will gain. He may gain big. And if by the middle of September Bush is ahead by five points or more in most polls, Kerry is an ex-politician. He has gone to join the choir invisible of politicians who never quite made it onto the big stage, like his former boss Dukakis, Mondale, Gore, Dole and his special buddy, Captain Oldsmobile. ( I just saw somewhere that nickname for Teddy Kennedy, and I love it!)

--

Gambella Massacre

It's amazing what you find just by ambling around the blogosphere. Actually, I found this site while I was looking at Africapundit. The Anuak blog tells a detailed story of the Ethiopian government's ethnic cleansing of an area of western Ethiopia called Gambella state. Here is a
map.
I have never heard about this. I followed the Ethiopia-Tigre-Eritrea story for years, mostly, I guess, because it corroborated my idea that collectivism always leads to violence. The stories on Anuak Genocide Watch are as bad as what came out of Rwanda, much worse than Bosnia and Kosovo. Because Gambella has no oil (that I know of) or uranium and doesn't fit any pet victim profile that would galvanize the UN into action (hah!), it has been totally ignored. It makes one wonder how many of these stories exist around the world, holocausts that fade unnoticed into history. Their motto is not "Never again". It's "That never happened". People care more about the elephant or the mountain gorilla than they do about Anuaks. The tragedy can be best appreciated by seeing where the survivors headed for refuge: Sudan!

Update: there is, apparently, an oil angle, though this article is irrationally biased against oil extraction. I understand the mistrust of government, but there's no reason why oil can't be produced to the profit of the Anuak. It will only be the fault of the left-leaning government if it isn't. To call the use of valuable resources "socially and environmentally destructive" tells you everything you need to know about the real agenda of "Genocide Watch" and their "Cultural Survival" project to keep people as pets, protected from the nasty twenty-first century so they can stay poor on their farms and never get it together to defend themselves from the Ethiopian government. I'm only linking to these collectivist fools because there's some interesting history in their article.

Oh, those fascinating Olympic sports! I tuned in to the coverage this morning and saw two teams of women playing something that looked like a cross between field hockey and water polo on land. I remembered before too long that there was something called "team handball" and this must be it. I'd never seen it before. It was the Hungarians, who all seemed to have their hair frosted in unison, and the Chinese, who seem to be able to come up with skilled athletes in any sport in a month or two after the sport is adopted in the Olympics. The US is definitely at a disadvantage in women's team handball, since hardly any Americans are even aware such a sport exists. All our athletes are out playing "beach" volleyball, which is now an Olympic sport distinct from regular volleyball. Maybe this is a trend. Why not have "beach" soccer or "beach" tennis or "beach" cycling, where athletes try to ride a bike through deep sand? No doubt they'd develop new bikes with big tires. Didn't the Romans set their gladiatorial combats on sand? I think "arena" comes from a word for sand. So once again the Romans were there first. But there's little blood in women's beach team handball, just a lot of screeching and hair pulling.

As for men's basketball, starring two NBA stars against the rest of the world, the US lost to Puerto Rico yesterday. Which is very odd, considering that PR is PART of the US! Does no one else find this disturbing? Why not the US vs. Florida in football? Florida would win. I've been puzzling over the autonomy of PR in basketball since I've been watching Olympic sports. I suppose it's an outgrowth of the move for independence, which has been soundly rejected by the Puerto Riqueno populace every time it's been voted on. And for good reason, considering that half or more of the PR populace receives US government Food Stamps funded by the taxpayers of the rest of the US. But still. In the Soviet era, Belarus and the Ukraine were not allowed to have separate Olympic teams. All their athletes had to play for the Soviet team, even when in the United Nations they had separate votes as part of the Soviet bloc. And you know who's responsible for all this nonsense? Yep. You guessed it. SHEMP!!

On the Lighter Side
Measurement. It's such an annoyance. The Metric Maniacs insist that a system invented during the French Revolution is clearly superior to the English system, based, as far as I can determine, on the size of various parts of the human body. Let's see, which is more universal, easier to understand? One ten millionth of the distance between the North Pole and the Equator along the Greenwich meridian or the size of my thumb?
I was watching this documentary about the feasibility (see http://denbeste.nu/) of a manned Mars mission, when I started thinking, OK, so this is it. We're going to the stars. For thirty years it's been really hard to actually believe it was going to happen.

But when we're out on Aldebaran a thousand years from now why should we be using a system of measurement based on a more or less random distance on a third-rate planet in a mediocre solar system in an average galaxy? OK, I've been reading Stephen Hawking, too. So English would be better. If we still have thumbs and feet. But maybe we won't.

So why not adopt a measurement system based on something that won't vary no matter where in the universe we go? I'm talking about light. The speed of light, that is. The light year is used extensively right now. It's neither metric nor English. Its only not universal because of that "year" thing. Why the time it takes for a somewhat average planet - etc. - to go around a mediocre star is relevant will not be apparent to our descendants on Aldebaran. A light year is of course a bit lengthy to be useful for cutting cloth or constructing football fields. But that's where exponents can come in handy. We can use an appropriate fraction of a light year to represent a convenient unit of length. Cloth, lumber or licorice can be measured as a fraction that is universal, at least for observers in a similar frame of reference.

Mountain of lies
I'm awed by the mountain of lies the political campaign has thrown up, almost all on the Democratic side, although if the Republicans started talking about the War on Some Drugs, they would add to the heap. But no one talks about the WOSD these days. Does that mean the war's lost or everyone's given up or the war's won and no one cares?

Michael Moore and Leni Riefenstahl. Both won awards from the French:
see Triumph des Willens

Moore lies intentionally and continuously, by implication and outright. Riefenstahl was just going along with the Nazis because she wanted to make films.

The lies will form an avalanche and bury their sponsors eventually. But will it collapse before the election or after? I've come to the conclusion that a Kerry presidency would be a great opportunity for the Republicans to consolidate their control of the Congress and would be a disaster for Hillary Clinton's hopes for 2008. So not so bad. But Bush's speech yesterday makes me think he's going to turn up the heat. Also, Theresa appears to be cratering. So maybe now it gets to be fun.

Got a truck. Got a W04 sticker for the back window of the truck. Funny not having a back seat. At least I have a cool silver tool box and a plastic bedliner.

Reagan and stupidity
I never liked Reagan. Mostly because he just had to be a stupid actor but he turned out to be right about most everything. That's really annoying. Lileks has a good summary of the situation in today's Bleat. I voted for Carter in 1976. In 1980, because Carter never came through on his promise of zero-based budgeting, I didn't vote. That was the beginning of my Harry Browne-inspired "there's no point in voting" period. As Lileks remembers:

We didn’t hate Reagan; we viewed him with indulgent contempt, since he was so obviously out of his depth. I mean, please: an actor? As president?

Then when the wall fell in 1989 and it obviously had something to do with the stances Reagan took, I was so ashamed of myself. I mean, the Berlin Wall. I remember when it went up in 1961, I was twelve. The wall became a permanent part of the world. It was the concretization (!) of the Iron Curtain. Which would never go away. And then all of a sudden there it was, gone. Something was going on which I couldn't understand. What blows my mind today is that anyone could live through all that and not realize that they didn't understand anything. And reexamine their political assumptions. Then the Gulf War and twelve years of ineffective Cartering around. Then 9-11. Then Bush actually does something about it. How can anyone not love it? Or at least give it a chance? The point is that freedom is something tangible, as real as a good meal. Something everyone can learn how to enjoy.

Sounds familiar
A news story about Jose Padilla, a traitor who worked on bombing US apartment buildings, reminded me of stories during the Russians' little problems with Chechnya. Weren't something like 500 or more Russians killed by Chechnyan (Muslim) terrorists blowing up buildings around Russia? And didn't these terrorists use exactly the same technique Padilla is accused of contemplating? That is, renting an apartment and filling the apartment with gas by opening the pipes and then lighting the whole building off with a timed bomb.

And if my memory serves, wasn't it mostly because of this horrific bombing campaign that the Russian military went into Chechnya, killing thousands and losing hundreds in Grozny alone? Why haven't I seen any reference to this similarity?

It's obvious
The suicide rate in New Jersey is twice the homicide rate, according to a new study. This isn't surprising, since anyone who has seen any part of the rest of the world and finds himself trapped in New Jersey has no other realistic option than to commit suicide. The small number of murders is no doubt accounted for by the few native New Jerseyites who realize the nature of the hellhole they inhabit. The few who do will do anything, even murder, to get out.

The only boooks in the world
Thought I'd come up with a list of the only real books out there. It's odd to go into a bookstore and not see any great number of books, just a few here and there, separated by meaningless jumbles of typography on wasted paper. So I'll just give you authors' names. Not all the authors listed actually wrote a book every time they put words on paper but most of their production is real:

Rand
Hugo
Balzac
Adam Smith
Orwell
Carlyle
Stendhal
Asimov
Gogol
Dostoevsky
Voltaire
Simenon
Bernard Lewis
Raffaello Pumpelly
Benvenuto Cellini
Hayek
Vernon Howard
Bunyan
Lysander Spooner
Thomas Paine

I'll add more as I think of them and perhaps someday figure out how to move the list into a permanent section of the site. Odd how few wrote after 1900, eh?

More Fish War
To be even-handed, I must present the Pakistani view of the piscine pugilistics off the coast of the subcontinent. But who will speak for the fish?

Indo-Pak fish war
Yes, only on Conundrum will you hear about the Indo-Pakistani fish war:

An Indian Navy patrol boat fired at a fishing trawler that strayed into Indian waters in the Arabian Sea , killing three Pakistani fishermen, officials said on Tuesday.

One just hopes it doesn't scale up.

Bye-bye Briscoe
I've said a lot about the racism and leftism (but I repeat myself) that characterizes the "Law and Order" TV show. But still I must admit to a little rueful pang when Jerry Orbach retired his Lenny Briscoe character last night. I managed to catch the last few minutes of the show in a timeout of the Kings-Timberwolves fiasco. I always liked Briscoe's attitude toward the bad guys and his skepticism about the weenie DA's and their technicalities. His battle with alcoholism gave him a dimension not shown by anyone else on the show. His daughter was a drug addict killed by a dealer. This character had depth, pathos. His every action and word was colored by the pain he'd been through. His anger at a kid who was throwing away his life, or had taken someone else's, appeared more understandable and real than that of some of the other characters. Good on yer, Lenny.

Good Cocktail
God Bless Google! I found a Dubonnet Cocktail on some site:

Equal parts (red)Dubonnet and gin (I used Beefeaters - mmm!)
over ice in a rocks glass
with twist - I used lemon wedge.

Delicious and powerful and smooth. And the formula is simple to remember after you've had a few. After all, Dubonnet, as I understand, is a vermouth or vermouth-related. So it should go well with gin. And it does. I may try it with some soda or seltzer as a long drink.

I have no idea if it goes well with my Cortislim non-diet. But I don't care. I'm still taking four a day and eating and drinking pretty much what I want. And have yet to see the looser-clothes phenomenon.

Nailed
Lileks nails Hunter Thompson, after scaring all of us former fathers of formerly small children by losing Gnat momentarily. The only mystery is why someone else has not nailed Thompson so definitively before this. I can only feel glad I am not Thompson.

The plan
OK, four weeks have gone by since I started using Cortislim and I have hardly lost any weight or inches, but I do feel better. Big deal. I'm spending a hundred dollars just to feel better?! No!! I want weight loss and svelteness. So I'm switching from two capsules a day to four, starting today, two at breakfast, one at lunch, one at supper. And I'm continuing my regular diet, but no eating between meals or after about eight at night. We'll see what the next four weeks brings. On the bright side, my Peugeot cinq-cent-cinq should be back a la route by Tuesday, or Wednesday at the latest. A small oil leak apparently caused all the trouble.

My digital camera is working great - I bought a Nikon Coolpix 3200. With my older son's help it's hooked up to my Linux computer, without using any of that software that comes with the camera. Linux rules again! Now I can bring photos into the Gimp and warp them beyond recognition. Went to a little air display out at the Tallahassee Airport today. Saw two F-16s and the inside of a Fedex 727. Oh, yes, and two old AT-6s took off in front of us. Actually they were in Marine garb, so I guess they were really SNJ's or some such designation. I felt the History Channel was coming to life. I'm inspired. Maybe one of these years I'll make it to Oshkosh. I've always wanted a Bensen Gyrocopter. But I want someone else to build it for me. Now to find another place to live. True independence beckons.