Swifty brings home the bacon - and more

Up early today and out to the supermarket on a somewhat hung-over Swifty. Misery loves company. Walking through the aisles, I warmed up from the more-than-a-little-breezy ride. I kept seeing things I "needed" and forgot that I would have to put everything in my backpack. No matter. Bacon, shrimp, hamburgers, bottles of soda, sausages - can you guess I'm on Atkins? But I was a bit dubious after stuffing everything in my Rick Steeves knapsack, which had survived Istanbul, Plovdiv and Sofia. Would a groggy Swiftcurrent carry me up the daunting hills between Publix and home with forty pounds of provisions? Not to worry. She (hmm - have I decided the bike is female? Interesting) zipped right along and I could sense the enjoyment in her heart as we swooped down Morningside, a very steep hilly street nearly covered in trees. Excellent job, my dear.

Not yet there aren't

The above was my reaction to this news story about unusual seismic activity off the coast of Oregon. I was especially taken by the following statement by heavily credentialed geophysicist Robert Dziak:

"It looks like what happens before a volcanic eruption, except there are no volcanoes in the area," Dziak said.

I was paying attention because the kids and I are planning to head out to Montana in June. It would be too bad if a new volcano chose to make its presence known just at that time. I shouldn't worry. We'll stay on the other side of the Rockies from the critical area. If it's big enough to get us there, we're all for it, anyway. You think global warming is bad? Try dealing with a couple of decades of volcanic ash-induced global freezing!

In the spirit of always looking for the good in fearsome events, we may be able to get in an early bid on some nice new oceanfront property in Idaho.

Swiftcurrent survives!

Yes, the strong and the brave and the wise survive. Even after a few brandy-sodas. And so as the sun went slowly down Swiftcurrent V. (for voltage) Electrobike (Swifty for short) brought his master home from the fancy totally jam-packed French restaurant halfway across town. Oh, yeah, the voltage bars were flickering on the last mile or so but there was no need to worry. Even after commuting three miles each way in heavy traffic to work another four or more miles each way was no problem. The e-go bike has a plentiful supply of reserve power, just like those old VW's with no gas gauge. I was flying down Apalachee Parkway. Of course it had been a tad nerve-rattling. There I was with Bill and my old friend Joe Albright and some new friends Cesar and Gigi talking about Cadillacs and Sofia. And all the time I was thinking, hmm, I wonder if Swifty has enough juice to get me back home with the light on. So I left early like a doofus, before it started to get really dark so I didn't have to use the headlight. I am getting better at using the mirrors, though. And I only had one little incident where I forgot to let off the throttle and jammed the bike into the kerb (Brit. spelling). I learned a lot.

Swiftcurrent goes out and gets drunk?

So here's the first big test for Swifty. My friend Bill is going to this fancy French restaurant tonight - Chez Pierre's - not to eat snails, but to drink. So he wondered if I would like to come along. The truck's still hors de combat, so it's going to be Swifty or nothing. After an exhausting day carrying me to work and back, with no time to recharge, will Swifty still be able to get me to Thomasville Road and back? In the dark? Somehow I think I'm going to give it a try. It's so crazy, it just might work. And it would prove that an e-go bike is a practical vehicle for more than just commuting.

First electro-week

So I've completed my first five mornings of riding to work on Swiftcurrent. It has become routine to find ways around traffic, zipping in and out of parking lots and side roads and parking right at the door nearest my office. Swifty is still banned from the building. I'm thinking of protesting but may not bother. This morning I nearly forgot my helmet, which I don't legally need anyway, but I decided to go get it. Then I did forget my knapsack, which wasn't a real problem. I was definitely cold in short sleeves this AM. Monday I had better wear a jacket, since it's supposed to be in the thirties, which may break a cold record.

Overall I am very pleased with my first commuting week. It's getting a little boring but I am relaxing into the process of riding, even having fun with it. I love the surge of power when I take off from a stand. It always surprises me. And sometimes going uphill I'll call for more power and it will be there, which is a pleasant surprise. I've had many waves and comments and questions, making me feel like a pioneer and daring individualist. All I really am is a bureaucrat looking for a cheap and fun way to go to work.

So many different roads home

On my fourth day of electro-commuting, I'm realizing that there may be easier ways to get to work than the main highway I have used for five years with my pickup truck. So each time I'm trying a different way, like The Who and their magic bus, except this isn't magic, it's electric. I'm finding that I can get to work by about a dozen routes using mainly quiet residential streets, just crossing busy streets. The trip may take a little longer than blasting down Apalachee Parkway with all the other traffic, but it's a lot easier on the nerves, and maybe better for the bike, too. I can wave to joggers and mothers with baby carriages and check out all the "for sale" signs, since I'm kinda sorta looking for a good house.

A tactical matter: Am I right not to stop at all the stop signs I come to? I find myself coasting into intersections with four way stops, checking quickly for other cars and then blasting on through without fully stopping if the way seems clear. Seems safe enough to me. My gout-medication wooziness made me fall over at one busy intersection, but I recovered soon, realizing I had to be more aware. I continue to be surprised at the massive acceleration available in the first few seconds after a stop. Makes life easier when you're worried about holding up traffic.

Ridin' in the rain

Bummer. I came out of Publix with a knapsack full of food and it was raining. So what do I do, cry and call for a taxi? Nah, not with Swiftcurrent right there to get me home safely. Of course, Swifty's seat was wet, but what the heck, I was going to get wet all over anyway. I am becoming a careful, skilled electro-cyclist. I never take anything for granted. I shut off the power switch before walking the bike across a busy road. I find my hand has a tendency to twist the throttle when I'm walking along beside the bike, crossing a street. I've got a big bruise on my shin to prove the hypothesis. So I try to turn the e-bike off whenever I'm not sitting on it.

I survived the rain, obviously. It was pounding into me when I was going fast downhill. But it would have been the same on a bicycle. And worse, since it would have taken longer to get home. I was quite aware of the warnings in the user manual about the slickness of wet streets. The tires did seem to have good traction, though. And I had observed how little attention many auto drivers pay to dorky electro-bikers. But, gee, don't I have a right to the road as much as them? Of course not. Rights don't come out of nowhere. In fact, Nietzsche would opine that they don't exist. Only power exists. But when you're riding a 2-horsepower battery machine, you try not to think of things like that.

Swiftcurrent exiled!

I've been pulling my electrobike Swiftcurrent into my office building during the workday, locking it to a railing near an outlet from which I can recharge it. This morning a maintenance functionary told me that the head maintenance guy noticed it and said that it had to be kept outside. I asked the guy if he knew it was electric. Apparently he thought it was a gas scooter. Now I can see a possible reason for being forced to keep a gas bike outdoors - fumes and explosions and all that. But what possible danger was there from an electrobike? More to the point, how can one convince dubious bureaucrats that an electrically-propelled vehicle poses no risk? It would be reassuring to know Swiftcurrent was inside safe away from prying eyes and close to an outlet in case I needed to recharge it during the day.

Then I looked at the door through which I brought the bike in. It was for cripples, with their wheelchairs. And weren't some of those wheelchairs electrically propelled? Would an electric wheelchair be banned from the building? Somehow I don't think so. How un-PC would that be? So maybe when I talk to the head maintenance guy I can use that argument to get him to let me keep Swiftcurrent inside. Worth a try. Also, maybe I can guilt-trip him with "save the earth" nonsense.

That brings up all the enviro-weenie reasons for wanting to have an electric bike, none of which are my reasons. Global warming is an absurd delusion. Oil companies are not great big meanies pushing everyone around. There will be plenty of hydrocarbons for the foreseeable future. Cars and trucks are not evil, in fact they're some of the best things ever invented. So why do I want an electro-bike? Mostly because I enjoy it more than a car. I had been driving my Mazda pickup truck to work and back, maybe three miles each way. This was costing me almost $50 a month in gas, at the latest $3 plus per gallon price! I am, after all, at least half Scottish. And I guess I like to be different. I've discovered it's also quite a bit cooler on the bike at 20 mph compared to standing in traffic. No a/c needed! That coolness could come in handy this summer. Today I was positively cold riding into work, even though the sun was shining and it was over sixty degrees.

I can do just about everything on my bike that I was doing with my pickup, and I don't have to worry about finding a parking place near to a store I want to go into. Even at the Publix grocery store they have bike racks. And I want my shiny new bike to be protected from wet and hot weather. It would not be cool to get out of work and have to sit on a wet bike seat all the way home. So I think I should be able to keep it inside. We'll see if the powers that be agree.

Swiftcurrent

I bought an "E-go"(!) electric motorcycle at "All about scooters" to go to work on. Is it just a coincidence that I made a reservation at a place in Glacier National Park called "Swiftcurrent"? For that seems to me an ideal name for this contraption. So Swiftcurrent it is. It has fifty-five pounds of lead-acid batteries, which I am sure in a few years will sound awfully obsolete. By then I'll have installed a micro-mini black hole power source. Millions of miles without refueling.
But for now lead-acid it is. It gets up to a pretty good speed, especially right off the mark. I do have to plan my route smartly, avoiding canopy roads and older roads without a bike lane. My morning commute isn't noticeably longer than before. The bike seems rugged enough.

Four types of men

Some men are smart. Some are stupid. Some men are weak, some are tough. I do not use the word "strong" because the toughness I speak of has nothing to do with bodily strength, except in that tough men usually take steps to make sure their bodies are strong to the extent their genes make that possible. A very physically strong man can be mentally and morally weak.

These dimensions of men's characters lead to the following categorization. Four basic groups appear:
Population
A. Weak, stupid men. Most men in the world.

B. Tough, stupid men. Most criminals, most lesser authority figures

C. Weak, smart men. Most academics, bureaucrats, intellectuals

D. Tough, smart men All rulers and true warriors, some criminals.

So you have to be more than smart to be at the top of the heap, in any profession worth pursuing. A high IQ is necessary to dominance, but not sufficient. What I call TQ is as important.

Elephants create marshmallows

To those who say that government creates jobs, I say, sure, in the sense that elephants create marshmallows. So there's this elephant and he has gotten it into his fermented-banana-fried brain that marshmallows are evil. And he finds a factory that makes marshmallows. And, being an elephant, he starts stomping on the factory, driving away the workers, destroying the marshmallow-making equipment. Then, halfway through, he changes his mind and goes looking for something else to stomp on. And a bunch of Kos kids run up to him and bow down, crying and chanting, "Thank you, Mr. Elephant! You have made it possible to create millions of marshmallows! Thank you for not completely destroying the factory!"
So, yes, in that sense government can create jobs.

Do you really care?

What is the main producer of carbon dioxide - the poison that will make the Earth into Mercury by next Tuesday? The hydrocarbon combustion engine, of course, pushed tyrannically and cynically by the oil companies. So in the supermarket one should look around and see what is being transported more by oil and what less and buy the less-transported. Right? One immediate obvious villain is water from the Fiji Islands. People spend megabucks to have water put in bottles ten thousand miles away and shipped all the way to your local market when they have pure water coming out of their faucets at home and water fountains at work and school. How Gaia shrieks! Why are there no pickets with photos of dead baby seals in the bottled water aisle?

Of course, almost all liquids sold as food contain water. Take milk, for instance, which supermarkets pump out in vast quantities in liquid form. The distance it is transported varies, depending on if the supermarket is surrounded by a dairy farm or not. But right there in the spices aisle is another product that contains no water at all. You take it home, put it in a bottle and fill the bottle with water and shake. Voila! Milk! And no water has been transported anywhere except out of your faucet. Think how the polar bears will love you. Juice is another product which offers tremendous carbon reduction value. Buying juice in liquid form should be a crime, because it is a crime against the Earth. How much diesel fuel is pumped into the air to bring bottles of orange juice from the Indian River to you? Even "reconstituted" juice is transported. But the "real, whole, undiluted, pure" juice should, nay, indeed, must be banned immediately lest we turn into glowing red sparks in a desert wasteland. Frozen concentrated juice is not quite so carbon-expensive, but we can do better, if we really care. In the beverage aisle, you will find little packets of fruit flavor, which weigh almost nothing and produce, when mixed with a little sugar and a half-gallon of untransported water, many drinks. And if you haven't tried Kool-Aid lately, I guarantee you will be surprised at the improvement in the flavor. I mean, if you're not willing to make that small sacrifice to take trucks off the road, what credibility is left to you in urging others to stop driving their gas-mobiles?

Fruits and vegetables also waste enormous amounts of transport energy if bought whole and "fresh". Compare the carbon cost of ten or more fresh tomatoes with that of a can of tomato paste, which gives almost the same tomato flavor. Aren't you ashamed of buying real fruits and vegetables? What do you think, you deserve luscious fresh produce and the penguins can just dry up and blow away? I'm sure, if they weren't bribed by the oil companies our chemists could produce a crystalline powder, that, when mixed with your water, would produce tomato paste analog, at an even greater carbon savings.

And that brings up the whole idea of refrigerating or freezing food. What a waste! Think how much electricity is wasted on those foods that have already cost mega-carbon being transported around the world. What is in your fridge that you couldn't get out of a can, anyway? Or reconstitute from a powder? Nothing! You'll just have to buy a cow for fresh milk and have fresh tomatoes once a year for a couple of weeks and real orange juice when you take a (walking, of course) vacation to Florida. You do care, don't you?

Just beginning

This war is just starting to get interesting. Until everyone's against it, there's really no reason to be for it. You'll just be one of a crowd. But now, when everyone's saying it can't possibly work, why that's the time to get into the details and figure out what's going on and what startling results could occur if things don't go as expected. And, of course, they never go as expected. That's why I can't believe these global warming buffoons. They're tying their whole view of the world to their ability to predict - wait for it - the WEATHER!! And not just next week, but a hundred years from now! Who could imagine anything so stupid could gain a mass following? Oh, sure, Spengler, but he must be the Antichrist. Me, I will decline the opportunity to be wrong about the weather. It's too easy.

Did you dance for rain?

So everyone is dancing for rain today, even though it was sprinkling most of the day here in Tallahassee. I didn't bother to dance. But I thought of another metaphor for voting. It's sort of like buying a lottery ticket, and thinking your purchase is going to affect the outcome of the lottery. Or buying a ticket on a horse and thinking you've made a difference in how the horse runs. The difference between voting and buying a lottery ticket is that your chance of winning anything - unless you're actually running for office - is vanishingly small. Hmm. Actually that's also true of buying a lottery ticket. But there at least you've got a hundred-to-one or so chance of getting a free ticket or five bucks. So if voting gets you nothing, why do so many people do it, why do all these idiots insist that everyone has a "duty" to vote?
I guess idiocy loves company. It's like the emperor's new clothes. If anyone admitted the true state of affairs, that, no, an individual vote doesn't do anything except gain you the transitory approbation of your fellows, the system would collapse. Of course further analysis reveals that not only does an individual vote not count for anything, even if it did, it wouldn't matter at all which candidate won in most times, most situations. And buying into the voting myth cements the officeholders in power, the last thing most people really want. But it is a spectacle.

Islamic analysis

Rants and Raves has a sharp and interesting essay on Arabs and tribalism and what he found out by living in Saudi for a year. A sample:

1) They don’t think the same way we do.

No, I mean THEY REALLY DON'T THINK THE SAME WAY WE DO.
***
3) Their values are fundamentally different from ours, their self-esteem is derived from a different source.

And you know what? Theirs is PHONY.

So I just had to comment, based on observing my sister's attitude after living among Muslims for almost ten years now and my own observations from a mere ten days, but an interesting ten days, in Egypt:

Excellent. The amazing thing is that so many Westerners can live among Arabs for years and fail to grasp the obvious facts you lay out.

I gleaned an interesting factoid from Spengler's The Decline of the West: the rise of Islamic civilization was largely traceable to the role of Jews, who were especially important in Moorish Spain. Arabs were as dependent on Jews then as they are on Westerners now. I believe many educated Arabs realize this and know that when they kicked all the Jews out of Arab lands, who then mostly went to Israel, they doomed themselves to social and cultural primitivism. This despair makes a peaceful resolution of the Palestinian problem impossible.

Analogy?

Thinking of the idiocy that is global warming theory, I was reminded of another collectivist delusion. Communists and fascists have long thought that a government can run an economy more efficiently than the free market. All it takes is massive amounts of computing power and the right theory, which they figured was handed to them by Marx or Hitler or Mussolini. How complex could it be? And for decades, seven in the case of Russian Communism, economies were massively screwed up, with hardly enough money produced for military needs. North Korea today is the poster child for the success of central economic planning.
Apparently collectivists cannot let go of their obsession with central planning. After losing on the economy, costing many millions of lives, they've turned their attention to the weather. Just put enough computers together with really smart people and not only can we come up with a theory that will convince people that the earth is in danger, but we can show them how to save the planet by simply turning their economic prosperity over to the weatherman computer geek. Right, the same computer geek who can't tell you within a thousand years when the local volcano is going to erupt next. And the same one who can't tell you within five degrees what the temperature will be five days from now.

Help with smoking

I need some help with my smoking. I never smoked tobacco when I was younger. I'm 58 now and I think it would be appropriate to my dignity to start smoking a pipe. My father smoked one and I have often remarked on the attractive fragrance of pipe tobacco. I bought myself a pipe and some tobacco and tried it out. Twice so far. The second time I felt a bit sick and disoriented. I still want to smoke, though and don't want to fail at this endeavor. I don't seem to be able to get myself to keep at it long enough to make it a habit. Sort of like playing my violin. I wonder if there's some easy way to get started. I aspire to the Sherlock Holmesian state of heightened mental functioning, which he attributed in part to smoking shag tobacco. Maybe I need a deerstalker cap. Hey, and he played the violin, too!

What he said

From the Ayn Rand Institute website (hat tip to Diana Hsieh):

It is often said that we must win the "hearts and minds" of supporters of totalitarian Islam. Indeed we must: their hearts must be made to despair at the futility of their cause, and their minds must be convinced that any threat to our lives and freedom will bring them swift and certain doom.

Amen, brother. Amen.

Discovery

I am impressed by this Adamant guy. I just can't see why he has so few commenters when idiots like Kos and Andrew Sullivan have hundreds. You don't think that's because most people are idiots, do you???

Here's a sample of Adamant:

Al Qaeda cadres and Islamist Kashmiri separatists can readily lose themselves among the flux of refugees in a region famed for discreet hospitality. It cannot have escaped Osama Bin Laden's attention that in the 19th century the Aga Khan spent tranquil years in Hunza while internecine war made him a hunted man elsewhere in the Islamic world.

Lots of stuff you won't see anywhere else.

John Buchan, Greenmantle:

As I follow events, there's a skunk been let loose in the world, and the odour of it is going to make life none too sweet till it is cleared away. It wasn't us that stirred up that skunk, but we've got to take a hand in disinfecting the planet.

Plus ca change, eh? And at that particular time British troops were having a hot time in Basra and the Persian Moslems were stirring up trouble.