"It was a dark and stormy night"

Edward Bulwer-Lytton was the guy who began his 1830 novel, Paul Clifford, with that. The whole sentence is:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

The Bulwer-Lytton award is given annually for the worst first sentence of a novel. Contestants write deliberately bad opening lines. This year Molly Ringle of Seattle won first prize with this:

For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity’s affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss — a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity’s mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world’s thirstiest gerbil

Maybe I'll have a go at it next year.

This is not a Depression or a Recession

It's a re-adjustment to reality.

The Washington Post:

The economic shock has jolted many Americans into a new, more austere reality, which is likely to have lasting consequences for an economy fueled mostly by consumer spending. More than six in 10 Americans say they have cut down on borrowing and spending, the survey found.

The reason: Nearly half of the survey's respondents say they are in worse financial shape as a result of the downturn, which destroyed 20 percent of Americans' wealth.

My parents used to call buying on credit "the never-never system." The West has been living on the never-never system since the profligate Sixties. The economy will never "recover." The days of easy credit are over. We need to adjust.

The difference between nationalism and patriotism

Tonight at dinner we were talking about Jonah Goldberg's contention that nationalism and socialism always go hand in hand. I agree with him if he defines "nationalism" the same as I do. Nationalism to me always seems to be about pride in one's ethnicity and fondness for and trust of big powerful government. Patriotism doesn't care about ethnicity but rather puts trust in good neighbors and distrusts government.

Still more gory details on Al the sex crazed poodle

Daniel Foster:

The newest issue of The National Enquirer (I know, I know) has an interview with Molly Hagerty, the Oregon masseuse who accused Al Gore of sexually assaulting her during a 2006 session inside a Portland hotel. Also interviewed is Hagerty's friend, Greg Boatman, who she told about the incident soon after it happened. Says Boatman:

"She called me on the phone on Oct. 23, 2006. I remember the date because that's my birthday. She was excited about the massage she had scheduled for that evening — she said it was with former Vice President Al Gore.

"I was shocked when she called back and woke me around 4 a.m. that same night. When I picked up, she was in tears. She told me she was assaulted...Mr. Gore groped her and threw her down on the bed.

"I was shocked and believed her right away. Molly's never lied to me — she's one of the most honest people I've ever met."

Last week Molly Hagerty was reported as being 57. This week she's 54. No matter - she's in her fifties. You can see from her photo that she is an aging hippy chick with dyed red hair. I've known plenty of "Mollys" and know her type well. Yes, they are bleeding hearts, "spiritual" and Watermelons but most of them are honest "good people" if a bit sanctimonious. I believed her story as soon as I heard it. It was so plausible that I could have posted it as a "Daily Duh!" because it's obvious that Gore, like Kennedy and Clinton, is a dirty debauched old Democrat.

Amnesty does not mean granting citizenship to illegal aliens

I see that some conservatives are disappointed that Gov. Christie seems to back amnesty for illegal aliens. Here is what he actually said in an interview with Politico:

"What I support is making sure that the federal government [plays] each and every one of its roles: Securing the border, enforcing immigration laws, and having an orderly process -- whatever that process is -- for people to gain citizenship."

He added: "It's a very easy issue to demagogue and I'm just not going to participate in that."

Christie said more resources -- specifically, "money" -- were needed to support federal law enforcement and border security, along with "having a clear understandable law that people can follow."

"Until you have both of those...you're not going to fix the problem," he said.
...
But he did intimate that he thinks stringent state-by-state laws – such as in Arizona – are the wrong approach, and added, “I think President Obama doesn’t do this at his own risk because it’s affecting the economy in the country…to me, I think the president’s really gotta show the leadership on this.”

“This is a federal problem, it’s gotta have a federal fix,” he said. “I’m not really comfortable with state law enforcement having a big role.”

He said that without border security, enforcement of existing laws and a “clear” path to legalization for immigrants, there would never be a fix.

Christie is currently my favorite GOP pol. I find him to be a very sensible and reasonable man and I agree with most of what he says - not only about immigration but almost everything. (I even agree with him about coffee.) Here's another snippet from that interview:

Asked over a breakfast of eggs with cream cheese, scallion and whole wheat toast– but no coffee, which he steers clear of – what he thought Republicans should run on, Christie suggested charting a course of fiscal conservatism.

“They should be talking about treating people like adults and telling them the truth: we’re in huge trouble,” he said. “And it’s going to mean cutting back on a lot of things that folks either have become used to or in a perfect world would like to have.”

He added, “Republicans have to rebrand themselves credibly with the candidates they run, and what they espouse, as the person who will keep an eye on the cash register, who will rein in the spending and the debt.”

Precisely. Congress' main job is to tax and spend on defense and interstate projects. Everything else should be left to the states or preferably by NGO's like churches and other community associations. The GOP needs to just put divisive "social issues" on the back burner for one election and win and then start cutting taxes and spending - especially on entitlements. One term of fiscal sanity could sober up Americans enough to reject socialism and keep voting Republican.

Yes, it is hard to set aside issues like abortion when it is so obviously a barbaric practice. And it's especially hard for me to set aside the issue of guns but they are divisive issues and right now we need to unite sensible reasonable adults from all sides to solve the real problem: the fiscal insanity known as socialism; the sure-fire road to serfdom.

But I do have one quibble with Christie on immigration: his idea for illegals "to gain citizenship." I realize that we are not going to be able to deport every illegal alien. Rounding them up and putting them on buses to Mexico won't happen. I do agree with Christie that we need to provide a “clear path to legalization." But that does not necessarily mean granting citizenship to illegal aliens.

So I give you Barry the Barbarian's "immigration reform":

1) The biggest immigration problem is people entering illegally from Mexico. So we must close the southern border - not only with a fence or a wall but with the National Guard. The border must be policed - not only for Mexican illegals but for Mahomedan terrorists. (Maybe we can designate a one mile wide and 1,000 mile long area along the border as the New Israel and entice some heavily armed Jews to settle there instead of the West Bank. They can smell Mahomedan terrorists a mile away.)

2) If you come here illegally you automatically forfeit your right to ever become a citizen. "Amnesty" should not include the right to citizenship and "amnesty" should only be granted to those who have been here longer than five years. They need to pay a fine of $1,000 for each year they have been here illegally. If they can't pay the fine that means they are lazy bums and should bugger off. Payment of the fine will make them legal and they will be given a licence to live and work here. If they can't pay the fine and do not have a licence, they will be deported.

3) If they have been here illegally for less than five years, they need to go back to Mexico unless they are the parents of "anchor babies." Yes, the "anchor baby" law is based on an incorrect interpretation of the 14th Amendment and should be changed. But, until the law is changed, "anchor babies" are regarded as a citizens and we cannot break up families. That child's parents should be allowed to remain here legally but forfeit their right to ever become citizens.

Hump Day Houses

I needed an antidote to my previous post about the lying murdering communist cow Kagan. So here are some pretty paintings of cottages.

I spent most of my childhood living in a beach cottage so the first three pictures bring back lots of pleasant memories.

Jan Ellen:






















E. Williams:















Joan Corretti:






















Disney's dwarves cottage:















John Constable's "Cottage in a Cornfield":






















And two "chocolate box paintings" by Thomas Kincade:
































Two riverside cottages by Louis Aston Knight:





































I haven't got a clue who painted this one:

Kagan the baby-killing bitch

I'm more libertarian than conservative and often think that I need to back off from my anti-abortion views mostly because I'm not a woman and will never have to deal with it personally. But then something happens that makes me remember just how vicious pro-abortionists are.

Shannen Coffin on How the Supreme Court nominee manipulated the statement of a medical organization to protect partial-birth abortion:

Documents recently released in connection with the Supreme Court nomination of Solicitor General Elena Kagan suggest an answer: wherever it can best be used to skew political debate and judicial outcomes.

The documents involved date from the Clinton White House. They show Miss Kagan’s willingness to manipulate medical science to fit the Democratic party’s political agenda on the hot-button issue of abortion.
...
There is no better example of this distortion of science than the language the United States Supreme Court cited in striking down Nebraska’s ban on partial-birth abortion in 2000. This language purported to come from a “select panel” of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), a supposedly nonpartisan physicians’ group. ACOG declared that the partial-birth-abortion procedure “may be the best or most appropriate procedure in a particular circumstance to save the life or preserve the health of a woman.” The Court relied on the ACOG statement as a key example of medical opinion supporting the abortion method.
...
The problem is that the critical language of the ACOG statement was not drafted by scientists and doctors. Rather, it was inserted into ACOG’s policy statement at the suggestion of then–Clinton White House policy adviser Elena Kagan.

The task force’s initial draft statement did not include the statement that the controversial abortion procedure “might be” the best method “in a particular circumstance.” Instead, it said that the select ACOG panel “could identify no circumstances under which this procedure . . . would be the only option to save the life or preserve the health of the woman.”
...
Upon receiving the task force’s draft statement, Kagan noted in another internal memorandum [PDF] that the draft ACOG formulation “would be a disaster — not the less so (in fact, the more so) because ACOG continues to oppose the legislation.” Any expression of doubt by a leading medical body about the efficacy of the procedure would severely undermine the case against the ban.

So Kagan set about solving the problem. Her notes, produced by the White House to the Senate Judiciary Committee, show that she herself drafted the critical language hedging ACOG’s position. On a document [PDF] captioned “Suggested Options” — which she apparently faxed to the legislative director at ACOG — Kagan proposed that ACOG include the following language: “An intact D&X [the medical term for the procedure], however, may be the best or most appropriate procedure in a particular circumstance to save the life or preserve the health of a woman.”

Every morning when I arrive at my office, I turn on Fox news. Lately it's been the Kagan hearings. I cannot stand looking at this bitch's face. So I switch channels and watch Bonanza instead. She is such a goddamned lying communist cow. She makes me sick. And this stuff about abortion has made me really detest her.

She is the poster child for that segment of the Democratic Party that gives me the absolute creeps: the Marxist "feminist" baby-killers. I don't often hate people but I loathe these people. They are not human. I'm not a Christian so I can pray that they all die horrible hideously agonizingly slow torturous deaths - the sooner the better.

Odds and sods

Cleopatra died of drug cocktail not snake bite:

The Queen of the Nile ended her life in 30BC and it has always been held that it was the bite of an asp – now called the Egyptian cobra – which caused her demise.

Now Christoph Schaefer, German historian and professor at the University of Trier, is presenting evidence that aims to prove drugs and not the reptile were the cause of death.

"Queen Cleopatra was famous for her beauty and was unlikely to have subjected herself to a long and disfiguring death," he said.

He journeyed with other experts to Alexandria, Egypt, where they consulted ancient medical texts and snake experts.

"Cleopatra wanted to remain beautiful in her death to maintain her myth," he says on the Adventure Science show screened by the German television channel ZDF.

"She probably took a cocktail of opium, hemlock and aconitum. Back then this was a well-known mixture that led to a painless death within just a few hours whereas the snake death could have taken days and been agonising."

Shopping makes men impotent:

Researchers have found that a chemical compound found on some till receipts contains enough of the hazardous substance Bisphenol A (BPA) to suppress male hormones in the body.

The compound – used to make ink visible on thermally sensitive paper – is ingested when men handle the paper – and then touch their mouths or handle food.

Professor Frank Sommer, 42, a Berlin-based urologist, said that the substance could just tip the balance.

"A substance like that could shift the balance of the sex hormones in men towards oestrogen," he said.

"In the long term this leads to less sexual drive, encourages the belly instead of the muscles to grow and has a bad effect on erection and potency."

I guess the answer then is to just shoplift and not touch receipts.

Placido Domingo is no longer a tenor:

Domingo, 69, the last of the Three Tenors to perform opera regularly, takes to the stage at the Royal Opera House tonight to sing the baritone title role in Verdi's 1881 version of Simon Boccanegra.

This year he has switched from tenor, which he has sung for his 40 year career, to baritone as he felt his voice had changed.

He was due to make Royal Opera House history by becoming the first performer to sing there in one season both as a tenor and a baritone.

However, in February he pulled out of a series of March performances at the Covent Garden venue, in which he was due to appear as Bajazet in Handel's Tamerlano, for preventive surgery for early stage colon cancer. The procedure to remove a cancerous polyp was successful.

Domingo admitted that he was switching to baritone because he had "changed vocally" and could no longer perform as a tenor as he had done before.

Domingo first started his singing career as a baritone but, with some retraining, managed to perform as a tenor for decades. At 69, it's probable that he no longer has enough lung-power and cannot breathe as deeply or hold his breath as long as tenors have to.

All the gory details of the crazed sex poodle's second chakra

The police report of the masseuse's complaint is 73 pages long and extremely detailed:

Gore said he was tired from travel and described in detail the massage he wanted. It included work on the adductor muscles, which are on the inside of the thighs. "I mentally noted that a request for adductor work is a bit unusual," the masseuse told police, because it can be "a precursor to inappropriate behavior by a male client."

Gore also requested work on his abdomen. When that began, "He became somewhat vocal with muffled moans, etc.," the masseuse recounted. Gore then "demand[ed] that I go lower." When she remained focused on a "safe, nonsexual" area, Gore grew "angry, becoming verbally sharp and loud."

The masseuse asked Gore what he wanted. "He grabbed my right hand, shoved it down under the sheet to his pubic hair area, my fingers brushing against his penis," she recalled, "and said to me, 'There!' in a very sharp, loud, angry-sounding tone." When she pulled back, Gore "angrily raged" and "bellowed" at her.

Then, abruptly, the former vice president changed tone. It was "as though he had very suddenly switched personalities," she recalled, "and began in a pleading tone, pleading for release of his second chakra there."

"Chakra," in Gore's new-agey jargon, refers to the body's "energy centers," which the masseuse interpreted as having a specific meaning. "This was yet another euphemism for sexual activity he was requesting," she told police, "put cleverly as though it were a spiritual request or something."
...
Later, she talked to friends, liberals like herself, who advised against telling police. One asked her "to just suck it up; otherwise, the world's going to be destroyed from global warming."

Of course Gore's advances weren't sexual. They were spiritual as befits the pope of the global warming religion.

For those who don't know New Age Hindu-speak: chakras are supposedly "energy centers" like small brains which run up the spine. The second chakra is just behind the penis. Maybe the main part of Al Gore's brain resides there.

Caravaggio

Excerpts from Andrew Graham-Dixon's new book, "Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane":

Caravaggio’s art is made from darkness and light. His pictures present spotlit moments of extreme and often agonised human experience. A man is decapitated in his bedchamber, blood spurting from a deep gash in his neck. A man is assassinated on the high altar of a church. Faces are brightly illuminated. Yet always the shadows encroach, pools of blackness that threaten to obliterate all.

Caravaggio’s life is like his art, a series of lightning flashes in the darkest of nights. He was one of the most original artists ever to have lived, yet we have only one solitary sentence from him on the subject of painting – the sincerity of which is, in any case, questionable, since it was elicited when he was under interrogation for the capital crime of libel.
...
Caravaggio was certainly friendly with prostitutes, some of whom modelled for him. His favourite was Fillide Melandroni, a dark-eyed girl destined to become one of Rome’s most famous courtesans.

In 1598 or 1599, Caravaggio painted a startlingly sado-erotic Judith and Holofernes, with Fillide in the leading role. Like that of David and Goliath, the biblical story of Judith was a parable of underdog virtue triumphing over tyranny: a Jewish heroine seduces a ruthless Assyrian general and then slays him, with his own sword, in his tent.

Under Caravaggio’s hand, sanctified execution in an Assyrian tent has become murder in a Roman whorehouse. The bearded Holofernes, lying naked on the crumpled sheets of a prostitute’s bed, is a client who has made a terrible mistake. He wakes up to realise that he is about to die.

Fillide pulls on his hair with her left hand, not only to expose his neck but to stretch the flesh so that it will part more easily. She frowns with grim concentration, as he screams his last, and as the blood begins to spray from the mortal wound in bright red jets.

Caravaggio has imagined the whole scene as a fantastically extreme version of the violent incidents that he and his companions were so often embroiled in.
...
On July 4 1600 the painter received a final payment of 50 scudi for The Calling of St Matthew and The Martyrdom of St Matthew, two paintings destined to adorn Rome’s prestigious Contarelli Chapel. His matchless sense of drama and use of extreme contrasts of light and dark would prove intoxicating.

It is no exaggeration to say that they decisively changed the tradition of European art.

Caravaggio led a debauched life, taking male and female lovers. He murdered a man (by mistake - he had merely wanted to cut off the man's balls) and fled Rome. He was pardoned but, on his return from exile, he was mortally wounded and died at the age of 49.

Probably Caravaggio's most famous work, Judith and Holofernes, 1599:














From left: The Calling of Saint Matthew, The Inspiration of Saint Matthew and The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, 1600: (Click to biggify.)

Are you a chimp or a bonobo

Forget macho or metrosexual, men should be split into two types of apes – aggressive chimps or peace loving bonobos, scientists have found:

Researchers have discovered the way men's bodies react to competition varies just like those of their closest cousins.

Whereas "status-striving" men tend to produce the macho hormone testosterone when challenged, like chimpanzees, laid-back men produce cortisol, nicknamed the cuddle compound, like bonobos.

Chimpanzees live in male-dominated societies where status is paramount and aggression can be severe, with frequent fights to the death.

In bonobos, a female is always the most dominant and tolerance can allow for more flexible co-operation and food-sharing.

They are often referred to as the "peace and love" apes.
...
In their new study, researchers led by Harvard University collected saliva from the apes using cotton wads dipped in Sweet Tarts candy, then measured hormone levels before and after pairs from each species were presented with a pile of food.

They found that males of both species showed hormonal changes in anticipation of competing for the food, but bonobos and chimpanzees were completely different in which hormones increased.

Male chimpanzees showed an increase in testosterone, which is thought to prepare animals for competition or a fight.

By contrast, male bonobos showed an increase in cortisol, which is associated with stress and more passive social strategies in other animals.

I would like to have been a bonobo but I was not born rich and have had to fight like a chimp for survival most of my life. Also I soon realized that many of the peace and love bonobo hippy types were actually passive-aggressive manipulators and not really peace-loving at all - and that really pissed me off and stimulated my testosterone aggression for at least 30 years.

Supremes sing my favorite song

Supreme Court limits local gun bans:

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that the Constitution's "right to keep and bear arms" applies nationwide as a restraint on the ability of the federal, state and local governments to substantially limit its reach.

By a 5-4 vote split along familiar ideological lines, the nation's highest court extended its landmark 2008 ruling that individual Americans have a constitutional right to own guns to all the cities and states for the first time.

Chocolate is as good as exercise for high blood pressure

Just a chunk of chocolate a day could have the same effect on high blood pressure as half an hour of exercise, new research suggests:

For those suffering from high blood pressure the effect of chocolate was so dramatic it could reduce their chances of having a heart attack or stroke by 20 per cent over five years.

Chocolate – and especially dark chocolate – contains chemicals known as flavanols which naturally open up blood vessels in the body.

That means blood flows more easily and the pressure drops.

"You don't always need medication to reduce blood pressure," said Dr Karin Ried, at Adelaide University who carried out the research.
...
For the latest research, Dr Ried and her team combined the results of 15 other studies looking at chocolate and cocoa between 1955 and 2009 covering hundreds of people.

They found that for people with hypertension, eating chocolate could reduce the blood pressure by up to five per cent. For those with normal pressure it had no effect.

"This is a significant finding," said Dr Ried.

Dr Ried then rushed out to buy a pound of her favorite chocolates. Now I'm thinking that I wasted my money buying a treadmill. Maybe I should have spent the money on Godiva chocolates instead.

The human brain improves as it gets older in some functions

Ageing brains retain knowledge, study finds:

A study has found that that long-term memory remains unaffected with age and a person’s vocabulary, emotional intelligence and social skills may all get better.

Short-term memory, learning skills and the ability to reason do decline with age, the research shows, but not all mental faculties reach their peak when a person is in their 20s as is commonly believed.

It comes after similar studies last week showed the elderly can still learn new abilities but are 'wiser' because their brains are less dependent on 'feel good' hormones making them appear less driven by emotion and impulsivity.

I thought of putting this in the Daily Duh! category because it's been obvious to me for a while - not only in observing my own brain but in others younger than me. Chas and Andy are 20 years younger than me. I've watched Chas mature over the past 28 years and Andy for 17 years. Their brains have definitely improved with age. Of course some people (mostly Democrats) never overcome the control that "emotion and impulsivity" have over their intelligence.

I don't know exactly how other peoples' brains work but I've noticed that, as I've aged, I quickly delete information that I regard as unimportant. My memory has become more efficient. I explain this in computer terms to Chas and Andy. My RAM (short-term memory) is limited so I quickly clear the cache of anything that I do not want to remember and my hard-drive (long-term memory) has been defragged and organized so many times that it is not as haphazard as it was when I was too young to know what's important enough to bother to retain.

Zhang Xin, China's self-made billionairess

She is five times richer than the Queen:

Zhang Xin spent her childhood in a grim five-storey block on the outskirts of Beijing, eating canteen-produced rice from an iron bowl alongside other offspring of toiling Chinese workers.

As a teenager she became a factory worker herself, turning 12-hour shifts in the fire-trap sweatshops of Hong Kong, desperate for every extra dollar she could save.

But by the age of 20, she had earned a Hong Kong passport and enough money to fly to Britain - where, helped by scholarships and grants, she won a university place first at Sussex, then at Cambridge to complete a masters degree.
...
Yet Zhang's personal story is not unique. The Forbes list revealed a startling fact: no fewer than half of the world's 10 richest self-made women hail from the formerly Maoist, now aggressively state capitalist, People's Republic of China.

Some animals are more equal than others - even in communist China. I don't know about the other Chinese billionairesses, but Zhang Xin's wealth does not seem to have been amassed because of connections to the Party hierarchy. She really did earn it through hard work and business acumen. Some animals will always work harder then others.

Maybe Saddam Hussein would have preferred one of these instead of that dinky wood-chipper with which he disposed of his enemies

Before Blendtec, there was the Universal Food Chopper:

Ad illustration magic from the year 1890. Yep, just crank the handle and start grinding up the pigs and cows and turkeys and chickens and lambs and lobsters and running carrots and coconuts with legs and what the hell is that green thing lower right?

Slaves Who Liked Slavery

Ta-Nehisi Coates:

Here's Clara Davis,circa 1937, waxing nostalgic about her days of bondage in Alabama:

White folks you can have your automobiles, paved streets and lights. You can have your buses, and street cars, and hot pavement and tall buildings cause I aint got no use for em no way. I tell you what I do want--I want my old cotton bed and the moonlight shining through the willow trees, and the cool grass under my feet while I run around catching lightening bugs.
...
But they took me away from that a long time ago. Weren't long before I married and had children, but don't none of em contribute to my support now. One of them was killed in the big war with German, and the rest is all scattered out--eight of em. Now I just live from hand to mouth. Here one day, somewhere else the next.

Coats comments:

One of the most disturbing aspects of the long conversation about slavery is the way the "black people were happy slaves" argument has really poisoned the well.

Rod Dreher comments:

It shocks our senses to encounter a former slave praising slavery, but it's not that hard to understand, if you think about it. Why do some people in, say, the former East Germany pine for life under communist dictatorship, which was a kind of slavery? Because they miss the sense of security it provided.

I disagree with Coates. The well has not been poisoned. We need to talk about it. How else to explain the willingness of so many blacks to accept dependency on government as a permanent life-style instead of temporary relief? I think the same slave mentality applies to whites who have lived on welfare for generations. Perhaps their ancestors were indentured laborers.

What civil political discourse?

From The Feuding Fathers:

Americans lament the partisan venom of today's politics, but for sheer verbal savagery, the country's founders were in a league of their own. Ron Chernow on the Revolutionary origins of divisive discourse.

In the American imagination, the founding era shimmers as the golden age of political discourse, a time when philosopher-kings strode the public stage, dispensing wisdom with gentle civility. We prefer to believe that these courtly figures, with their powdered hair and buckled shoes, showed impeccable manners in their political dealings. The appeal of this image seems obvious at a time when many Americans lament the partisan venom and character assassination that have permeated the political process.

Unfortunately, this anodyne image of the early republic can be quite misleading. However hard it may be to picture the founders resorting to rough-and-tumble tactics, there was nothing genteel about politics at the nation's outset. For sheer verbal savagery, the founding era may have surpassed anything seen today. Despite their erudition, integrity, and philosophical genius, the founders were fiery men who expressed their beliefs with unusual vehemence. They inhabited a combative world in which the rabble-rousing Thomas Paine, an early admirer of George Washington, could denounce the first president in an open letter as "treacherous in private friendship…and a hypocrite in public life." Paine even wondered aloud whether Washington was "an apostate or an imposter; whether you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any."

I promise you that the rest of the article is worth reading.

Dumpster diving on the Net

For my son (who is a comic book artist) and his lady (who is an animator):

A letter on how to train an animator by Walt Disney that he wrote in 1935.

For gun-lovers, Chas and Andy and myself:

A comic book on the operation and maintenance of your M16 which was given out in Vietnam.

DIY sheds, barns, saunas etc

For Chas and Andy - there are also building tips:

Backyard barn in Connecticut

If you have kids around, you may be familiar with the “Tractor Mac” series of children's books, which follows the adventures of an antique farm tractor. In real life, Tractor Mac is a 1948 Farmall Cub that's owned by Billy Steers, the author and illustrator of the series. Steers' wife, Julie, bought him the tractor at a flea market after his first book was published in 1999. Billy Steers restored the old machine, and even painted on eyeball headlights to resemble his main character. Once the restoration was complete, Steers, 45, had no place to store Tractor Mac. So, with help from his three sons, ages 10, 13 and 16, he built a downscaled barn from plans he drew himself. Steers' dad assisted with the electrical work, and his brother, a carpenter, helped out with the roof.
...
Tractor Mac's 12-by-22-foot home sits behind the Steerses' house on 9 acres of mixed woods and fields in the Connecticut countryside. Like many of the old New England barns in the area, it features a pole-barn frame, pine vertical-board siding, double-wide swinging doors, an overhead storage loft and a gravel floor. For the roof, Steers chose metal panels instead of asphalt or wood shingles. "The metal roof didn't cost that much more than asphalt shingles," Steers explains, "and it'll last longer." To help create the look of an old barn -- and to curb construction costs, which eventually climbed to about $5,500 -- Steers salvaged the windows, doors and exterior trim from a local dairy barn. He installed a small door high on the gable end to access the storage loft.

Working on and off, it took Steers about a year to complete the barn, which isn't unusual for a homeowner-built project of this size.

English cottage in Minnesota

While vacationing in the Cotswolds region of England several years ago, retired electrical engineer Tom Schroeder came across the quintessential English Tudor cottage. The centuries-old building had dark, exposed timbers contrasted with bright white stucco panels. The first-floor walls were built of rough-cut rock and mortar. Schroeder admired the building, and snapped a picture of it before returning home to Minnesota.

A few years later, a large oak tree fell in Schroeder's backyard. He decided then and there that he'd harvest that old tree and build a potting shed based on the cottage he saw in England. Using the photograph as a guide, and a portable sawmill to slice up the oak, Schroeder devoted a year to constructing his 8-by-10-foot building.
...
On the right side of the shed, Schroeder built a modest 5-by-8-foot greenhouse, which he and his wife use for starting plants in preparation for Minnesota's short growing season. The interior of the shed is outfitted with a wood-burning fireplace and a circa-1920 three-burner gas stove.

Garden shed in Michigan

Plumbing contractor Randy Gerweck says that his mom has been gardening for as long as he can remember and that, as a toddler, he helped her clean out the flower beds. So, one day when she showed him a magazine photo of a garden shed, he decided it was time to put his carpentry skills to work. Ten Saturdays later, her handsome 10-by-12-foot "puttering shed," as Gerweck calls it, was finished.

The outbuilding, designed as a secure place for gardening tools and supplies, has plywood siding, rough-sawn cedar trim and architectural asphalt roof shingles. It rests on a skid foundation made of 4-by-6 pressure-treated timbers. There are four vinyl windows, a roof-mounted cupola and two metal doors. Gerweck built a ramp outside the rear door, so it's easy for his mother to wheel garden equipment in and out of the building.

Big Sky sauna in Montana

The 10-by-12-foot building features a small front porch, two large windows and a sod roof. Inside, there's a cast-iron, wood-burning stove that provides heat for the sauna.

The unusual log design Tyler used is called cordwood construction, or stove wood masonry. Instead of incorporating long logs, the walls are built of short lengths that are stacked like firewood. The spaces between the logs are filled with mortar mixed with sawdust. The sawdust acts as insulation to help retain the sauna's heat.

Tyler built the sauna out of lodgepole pine logs, but he now says he would've been better off choosing cedar or black locust. "The pine shrank more than I would've liked," Tyler says, "but it was the only wood available at the time."

Saturday dining rooms

Beck's "conspiracy theories"

Daniel Foster on Matthew Continetti's cover story on Glenn Beck, Rick Santelli, and the Tea Party — from the latest Weekly Standard:

Before I get to why, let me first say that there is much I love about what Beck is doing. Anyone who puts Hayek at the top of Amazon is not without his merits.
...
Beck's ties to a Bircher named W. Cleon Skousen and his world of fringe conspiracy theories:

Read and watch enough Glenn Beck, and you realize that he is not only introducing new authors and ideas into public life, he is reintroducing old ideas. Some very old ideas. The notion that America’s leaders are indistinguishable from America’s enemies has a long and sorry history. In the 1950s it led Robert Welch, the head of the John Birch Society, to proclaim that President Dwight Eisenhower was a Communist sympathizer. For this, William F. Buckley Jr. famously denounced Welch and severed the Birchers’ ties to mainstream conservatism. The group was ostracized for decades.

But not everyone denounced Welch. One author, the Mormon autodidact W. Cleon Skousen, continued to support the Birchers as he penned books on politics and the American founding. And Skousen continued to believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that American political, social, and economic elites were working with the Communists to foist a world government on the United States.

Glenn Beck is a Skousenite.

Wanna know more about Skousen? Well, after some pecking around the archives, I found an an excellent sketch of his weirder beliefs by NROer Mark Hemingway, penned in 2007 when it emerged that Mitt Romney was also a one-time fan. Some highlights from therein:

Skousen though the Communists were creating “a regimented breed of Pavlovian men whose minds could be triggered into immediate action by signals from their masters.”

...

[T]he as-yet amorphous Tea Party movement must lead with free-markets and small-government, not conspiracy theories and doom-saying. As I've said above, both Beck and I happen to think that conservatives like Continetti are too kind to the post-New Deal order, but whether one sees that order as the well-intentioned but fatally flawed American project, or as the fruits of an Illuminati conspiracy, is surely important to the future of the Tea Party — and the discourse.

Skousen is a bit too breathlessly agitated for my tastes and that's the same criticism that I have of Beck. It's a "personality thing." I just don't like that style of breathless agitating and demagoguery. But the fact is that I agree with them that there is a Marxist conspiracy. It's not a formal organization. It's simply that many Western intellectuals are Marxists and they are dedicated evangelists for communism. The true believers have been successfully proselytizing their religion of "Christless Christianity" for 160 years.

Korea - our 60 years war

What we know as the Korean war was only a series of battles in a 60 year war:

On June 25, 1950, 90,000 North Korean soldiers backed by 150 Soviet-built T-34 tanks poured across the border into South Korea. The Cold War had suddenly turned hot, and America found itself drawn into the longest war in its history.

Vietnam used to claim that dubious title. Now it's Afghanistan. But the surprise communist invasion 60 years ago today began a Korean war that eventually saw an armistice but still no peace treaty.

Indeed, since major fighting stopped in 1953, more than 90 Americans and 300 South Korean soldiers have been killed in clashes along the DMZ barbed wire between North and South Korea -- in addition to the 46 ROK sailors killed by a North Korean torpedo in March.
...
To relieve Pusan and reverse the war's course, Gen. Douglas MacArthur launched his dramatic amphibious landing at Inchon on Sept. 15, and the long slow slog of retaking South Korea began.

For a year and a half, the fighting in Korea would range like a yo-yo up and down the peninsula. When MacArthur's victorious forces pushed too close to the Chinese border, communist China entered the war and pushed the Americans down the peninsula again. After months of more slaughter came stalemate.

Finally, when the Soviets learned that Truman's successor, President Dwight Eisenhower, was ready to use nuclear weapons to secure victory, they forced North Korea to the negotiating table. The endless truce was the result.
...
The Berlin Wall is gone, but the DMZ on the 38th parallel remains, the dividing line between totalitarianism and freedom, between the Stalinist darkness of North Korea and prosperous and open society of South Korea. Thirty-six thousand Americans gave their lives to establish it, and 28,000 Americans are holding it there still.

Four veterans offer their memories of the conflict.

Mammals chewed on dinosaur bones

Scientists see squirrely bite marks made 75 million years ago:

Squirrel-sized animals gnawed on the skeletons of Triceratops and other dinosaurs, leaving behind distinct tooth marks on the bones of these extinct giants.

The bite marks are about 75 million years old from near the end of the age of dinosaurs. They are the oldest mammalian tooth marks found yet. Though small mammals existed in the dinosaur era, it was the fall of dinosaurs that spurred the rise of large mammals, theory holds.
...
All the bones the researchers analyzed come from rocks in southern Alberta, back when they lay on the western margin of the Western Interior Seaway, a vast inland sea that divided what is now North America in half. The warm temperate environment there was home to a remarkable diversity of animals, including dinosaurs, birds, pterosaurs, alligators, turtles, lizards and mammals.
...
All the marks were only 4 to 7 millimeters long and 1 millimeter wide, suggesting they were made by squirrel-sized animals. The marks were made by opposing pairs of teeth, something at that time and place that was only seen in mammals. Specifically, the researchers suspect they were made by now-extinct rodentlike animals known as multituberculates, which had paired upper and lower incisors.

The "squirrels" were probably not carnivorous but only gnawed the bones for minerals. If the little mammals had been anything like my dogs, they would have buried the bones so well we probably would never have found them.

Summertime and the livin' is easy

You can live outdoors here for almost six months of every year - not this year because we had rain earlier this month. But it usually doesn't rain between May and October and the temps are comfortable: average daily high is 65F and it seldom gets hotter than 80F. And, now that we've spent six years clearing brush from the surrounding forest, there are far fewer mosquitoes.

I saw this article about outdoor showers. We don't need one. We just use the garden hose if we get dirty. But I had to post this pic for Chas and Andy. It's of a shower in a light-well. Our house in San Francisco had a light-well and I used to fantasize about turning it into a shower full of plants. (Light-wells are common in SF because the houses are built right next to each other and have no windows on the sides.) It seems someone else had the same idea.

Light-well becomes a shower deck:

Measuring 6 feet by 9 feet, this former light-well functions as an outdoor shower off a master bedroom in a San Francisco Victorian. A tall outside wall hides it from view; you get to it through French doors.

After owners Alison and David Cameron moved in, they hired a plumber to hook up the shower. The redwood 2-by-6 decking serves as duckboard; water trickles between the boards and falls to a lower area with a drain.

The deck opens to the sky and makes a welcoming, wind-sheltered location for houseplants that periodically come out for a shower of their own. A shelf along one wall provides extra space for smaller plants.

Then I saw another article about outdoor living rooms and there was my latest fantasy: screening in our front porch like this.

Filtered light from the screened porch....

Al Gore is a crazed sex poodle - all the gory details

I bet everybody has read about this already but, if you haven't, don't read this if you have a delicate stomach or an easily tickled funny-bone and a mouthful of liquid.

The woman later discovered stains on the front of her pants -- and didn't launder them:

Gore, according to the woman, at one point started making sexual noises. "He was moaning, groaning, moving and acting in a very suggestive way," the unnamed woman told police. At another he grabbed her hand and put it on his crotch and later gave her a "come hither" look and tried to have sex with her. "I squirmed to try and get out of his grasp, telling him stop, don't, several times and I finally told him and said, 'You're being a crazed sex poodle,' hoping that he'd realize how weird he was being, yet he persisted," she told police.

More lurid details here:

The alleged victim told detectives Gore attempted a “big tongue kiss,” “caressed” her “back and buttocks and breasts” and “shoved” her hand ... you know.

Gore, who recently split from wife Tipper after 40 years of marriage, fed her chocolate and attempted to coerce her to the bedroom to listen to a Pink song "Dear Mr. President."

But police, for reasons unknown, investigated the case further in 2009. According to the masseuse, it began as Gore booked a massage, saying "Call me Al."

On her arrival at Portland’s up-market Hotel Lucia, Al stretched out his arms to wrap her into an embrace before purposefully dimming the lights, she said.

“It was apparent from the beginning he had been drinking,” she claimed. “The hug went on a bit too long and I was a bit taken aback by it. If it weren’t Al Gore I would have seriously questioned the situation right there."

In police documents, which identify “Mr. Stone aka Gore, Al” as the person of interest, the woman claims Gore said he wanted his inner thigh worked on.

“I was taught that a massage of the adductors could cause an involuntary erection,” she said, later, for some reason, adding, “I even voted for him in the last election, although in truth I was more accurately voting against Bush.”

BTW the "masseuse" is 57 years old and Gore comes off sounding more pathetic than pushy. Maybe he would have been satisfied just to hump her leg for a bit.

Restaurant’s lion burgers cause uproar

Novelty meal in honor of World Cup generates protests:

PHOENIX - An Arizona restaurant owner dreamed up a novelty meal to give customers a South African experience during the World Cup. But serving burgers made with African lion meat has generated protests.

Cameron Selogie says his Il Vinaio restaurant in Mesa has received a bomb threat and more than 150 e-mails from protesters. He says African lions are on the protected list, but not endangered.

The restaurant ordered 10 pounds of African lion meat from a USDA-regulated, free-range farm in Illinois, which Selogie says he researched to make sure they were humane. It's mixed with ground beef, and the restaurant says it's serving about 15 burgers a day.

USDA spokesman Jim Brownlee says lion meat is an uncommon dish, but he knew of no prohibitions against it.

What a dumb gimmick. South Africans do not eat lions. Yes, they eat a lot of meat (mostly barbecued) but it's usually lamb or pork chops or bone-in beef steaks - and boerewors (literally farmer's sausage) a spicy sausage usually made with ground beef and sometimes lamb.

People who eat cats and dogs obviously don't follow the rule that one should never eat anything with legs whose shit smells worse than your own - which means not eating four-legged carnivores and sticking to eating tasty vegetarians.

One of the reasons that I don't eat pork is because pigs eat anything including - if push comes to shove - each other. So do chickens and fish but fins and wings don't count as feet.

Absolute final word on McChrystal

Marc Ambinder yesterday:

Even more about McChrystal: now it can be told. The story about him voting for Obama is not contrived. He is a political liberal. He is a social liberal. He banned Fox News from the television sets in his headquarters. Yes, really. This puts to rest another false rumor: that McChrystal deliberately precipitated his firing because he wants to run for President.

Ambinder today:

The fact, revealed in Rolling Stone, that Gen. Stanley McChrystal voted for President Obama may well have been a planted nugget designed to show how receptive McChrystal was to Obama's worldview. But several people who worked for, and continue to work for, Gen. McChrystal say that it's true. McChrystal told his subordinates about his ballot choice in November of 2008. More surprisingly, this choice did not surprise them. McChrystal was a hard core operator, aggressive as hell, a JSOC ninja -- but he was also a social liberal.

That explains why he agreed to do a profile for that left-wing hippy magazine, Rolling Stone.

The new "culture war"

Here are the best bits (IMO) from K-Lo's conversation with Arthur C. Brooks about his new book, The Battle: How the Fight between Free Enterprise and Big Government Will Shape America’s Future:

LOPEZ: Are free enterprise and big government natural enemies?

BROOKS: There are some things that government does well. When the U.S. government was fighting Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, it was the champion of freedom in the world. It took a big government to win World War II. But it takes a smart one to realize it is only the entrepreneurialism of individuals that can deliver thriving economies and human flourishing. Government has a role, of course, such as enforcing the rule of law. But when it takes resources out of the hands of innovators and risk-takers, when it regulates small businesses out of existence, when it favors crony corporations instead of entrepreneurs, when it taxes corporations so much they move abroad — then, yes, big government becomes the enemy of free enterprise.
...
LOPEZ: What is the “30 percent coalition”?

BROOKS: The “30 percent coalition” is a term I coined for the minority in this country who do not like or support our free-enterprise culture, and who seek to change it for the rest of us. The 30 percent are led by the usual suspects — opinion-leaders in academia, the media, the entertainment industry, and so on. All the data available tell us these are among the most radical players in the battle against our culture of free enterprise. But adding them all up doesn’t get us to 30 percent. The ranks of the coalition are swelled by others, especially young people, who have not (yet) experienced the depressing realities of a redistributive economy. A January 2010 Gallup poll found that a majority of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 actually hold a positive view of socialism. Which probably makes sense, since the only socialists they’ve seen are their professors at college.
...
LOPEZ: Are you a defender of economic inequality? Isn’t it the cause of misery?

BROOKS: Unequal outcomes don’t make us miserable. Americans like success stories — they feel they can succeed, too. Misery comes from thinking you have no chance to improve your lot in life, no chance to get ahead through hard work and drive. If you approve of people getting big rewards for big efforts, that’s not defending economic inequality — that’s defending fairness. A fair system is not one that levels outcomes — it is one that rewards hard work, merit, and excellence (while penalizing free riding and laziness). Fairness is a concept that we in the free-enterprise movement have to take back.

Incidentally, none of this is to suggest that we can’t ever be in favor of minimum basic services for people, which might be necessary to allow citizens to exploit opportunity. Even Hayek noted that this is can be a legitimate competency for government. But protecting people from starvation is very different from what the welfare state increasingly focuses on today: redistribution for the sake of equality (“fairness and balance” in our tax code), social engineering (everybody deserves a mortgage, no matter how lousy his credit), and policies intended to take the downside risk out of our decisions (bailouts).
...
LOPEZ: So how do we stop America’s current slide toward Europeanization? That’s a big question, I realize.

BROOKS: One way is simply to point out the ethical differences between the Greek and the American street today. In the past month, Greek citizens have rioted and gone on strike against the government. Why? Despite the worst economic conditions in years, labor unions and state employees are demanding that others pay for their early retirements, lifetime benefits, and lavish state pensions. In America, by contrast, our tea partiers demonstrate not to get more from others, but rather against government expansion, bloated government debt, bailouts, and a government overhaul of the health-care industry. In other words, the tea partiers are protesting against exactly what the Greeks are demanding. It is a near-perfect example of American exceptionalism.

Why Obama appointed Petraeus?

I hate thinking like Soros but sometimes I do:

He fears that "General Betray Us" will challenge his glove-puppet Obama in 2012 - and win. Obama will pull the plug on Afghanistan just as Petraeus is about to succeed. Hero Petraeus will be seen as a failure and will not challenge Obama.

Mahonia Hall

For Andy:

Mahonia Hall in Salem, Oregon, United States, is the official governor's mansion for Oregon. The building was acquired by the state in 1988 with private donations. It is also known as the Thomas and Edna Livesley Mansion, after its original owners. The house was renamed Mahonia Hall after the Latin name of the Oregon-grape, Mahonia aquifolium, Oregon's state flower. A naming contest was held by The Oregonian in 1988, and Eric Johnson, a 13-year-old from Salem, came up with the winning entry. Other finalists were The Eyrie, Trail's End, The Oregon House, and The Cascade House.

The half-timber Tudor-style mansion was designed and built in 1924 by Ellis F. Lawrence, the founder of the University of Oregon School of Architecture, for hop farmer Thomas A. Livesley. The structure includes a ballroom on the third floor, a pipe organ, a lavish wine cellar, and formal gardens — all of which were part of the original design. The home has 10,000 square feet of space.

Mahonia aquifolium:






















You can see why the (edible) berries are called Oregon grapes:

Marilyn Monroe's shrink

From Shrink's family put MM's therapy couch on auction:

Over the course of two years in the early Sixties, a long black limousine would pull up every day outside a home in Santa Monica, California.

At exactly 4pm, the front door of the house would swing open, giving the signal to the chauffeur to open the passenger door, the window of which was veiled with a blue-grey sheet of cardboard.

A young woman would emerge wearing dark glasses, her blonde hair wrapped in a scarf, her petite frame drowned in a huge black fur coat, and walk purposefully down the path to the house.

Marilyn Monroe’s daily Californian assignations were not with a lover but with an analyst, Dr Ralph Greenson, to whom she’d been referred by her New York analyst Marianne Kris.
...
Greenson diagnosed her as a ‘borderline paranoid addictive personality’.
...
Several of her biographers have implicated Greenson in Marilyn’s death, characterising him as a proprietary control freak, a dangerous Svengali who exercised a sinister power over the bleached legend.

Donald Spoto, for instance, accuses Greenson of having ‘betrayed every ethic and responsibility to his family, his profession and to Marilyn Monroe’ in his ‘egregious mishandling of his most famous patient’.

Spoto also alleges that Greenson used drugs to make her increasingly reliant on him – encouraged, perhaps, by the ambiguity of some of Greenson’s own statements, such as the suggestion that he gave her pills in order to, in Greenson’s words: ‘give her something of me to swallow, to take in, so that she could overcome the sense of terrible emptiness that would depress and infuriate her’.

Others suggest that he might have killed her by accidentally administering an overdose, or at her boyfriend Robert Kennedy's specific request.
...
[D]uring the filming of The Misfits, Marilyn had a nervous breakdown and complained of hearing voices, a paranoid state for which Greenson prescribed even stronger doses of barbiturates.
...
Ralph Greenson was one of the last people to see Marilyn alive. He visited her house at 4.30pm on the fated day and found her drugged up and depressed, upset that she didn’t have a date on a Saturday night. He stayed until 7pm when he went to a dinner party.

At around 9pm Marilyn phoned her friend, the actor Peter Lawford. ‘Say goodbye to Pat [Lawford], say goodbye to Jack [Kennedy]. And say goodbye to yourself because you’re a nice guy,’ she slurred. These are her last recorded words.

Lawford had someone call Marilyn’s lawyer, Greenson’s brother-in-law Mickey Rudin, who called Eunice Murray, the woman Greenson had employed to watch his star patient. She reported that all was well.

However, at 3am Murray had an uneasy feeling that something was wrong and went to check on Marilyn. Her bedroom door was locked, her light was on and the telephone cord ran under the door, all of which were highly unusual (after the psychiatric clinic, she couldn’t abide being locked in). She called Greenson, who rushed over and broke into a side window.

Marilyn had been dead for some time; he had to prize the telephone from her hand.

Hump Day Houses

Weird houses. I've actually seen the first one when I lived in Berkeley.

Fish House:


















Bubble House:

















Cave Cottage:



















Conch Shell House, Mexico:

















The next two pics are of the Crazy House in Dalat, Vietnam:





































Shoe House:

















Hippy House:















Mushroom House, Cincinnati:






















House in a hill:















Shell Cottage:

Last word on McChrystal

He lied about Pat Tillman's death. He lied about Camp Nama. He voted for Obama. Conclusion: he's not only amoral; he's nuts. 'Nuff said.

Update: Obama has fired McChrystal and replaced him with Gen David Petraeus.

The Good Old Days Are Now

Mark J. Perry:

Economist David Henderson at the EconLog Blog recently pointed to a great online archive of Radio Shack catalogs going back to 1939. David commented, “Choose any date earlier than 10 years ago and you get a feel for just how much our standard of living has increased. The items are generally what we regard as junk—and they’re expensive.”

One example from the 1964 Radio Shack catalog is the “Moderately priced, excellent stereo system” on sale for $379.95 (pictured below). That might not seem too expensive, except when you consider that the average hourly wage in 1964 was only $2.50 (data here). When measured in what is ultimately most important—the “time cost” of goods—that 1964 stereo equipment was actually very, very expensive. At the average hourly wage of $2.50, the typical American in 1964 would have had to work 152 hours (full-time for almost an entire month) to earn enough income (ignoring taxes) to purchase that “moderately priced” stereo system.
...
To help understand how expensive the 1964 stereo system really was, consider that a typical American today would earn almost $3,000 working 152 hours at the current average hourly wage of $19. Now imagine what you could purchase with a $3,000 budget for today’s electronics products, and you’ll begin to appreciate how fortunate you are today compared to the consumers in previous decades like the 1960s.

Perry then lists what you can buy for $3,000 at Radio Shack today:

1. Panasonic Home Theater System for $500.

2. Insignia 50″ Plasma HDTV for $700.

3. Apple 8GB iPod Touch for $175.

4. Sony 3D Blu-ray Disc Player for $219.

5. Sony 300-CD Changer for $209.

6. Garmin Portable GPS for $139.

7. Sony 14.1-Megapixel Digital Camera for $200.

8. Dell Inspiron Laptop Computer for $450.

9. TiVo High-Definition Digital Video Recorder for $300.

That list above might not be your personal, preferred bundle of electronics products if you had $3,000 to spend, but it clearly illustrates how much purchasing power consumers have today when it comes to electronic products. After working 152 hours at the average hourly wage in 1964, all an average American consumer would have been able to afford was one very expensive stereo system. For that same amount of work in 2010, the average consumer today can afford an entire houseful of electronics goods.

And since none of those items on the list above were even available in the 1960s at any price, it’s a “miracle of the market” that almost all Americans today can purchase low-priced electronics products that even a billionaire in the past wouldn’t have been able to buy.

The woman who will crush Jerry Moonbeam Brown?

From Ranks of self-made female billionaires growing:

When Meg Whitman won the Republican nomination for California governor on June 8 it was a first for a Republican woman in the state. It was also the first time a female candidate ever contributed so much of her own money to a political campaign. Whitman, 54, worth an estimated $1.3 billion when we last totaled her wealth back in March, has spent more than $70 million on her campaign so far and has reportedly said she's willing to double that number to get elected.

It is an audacious sum, but even more notable is the fact that Whitman has so much cash to spend in the first place. Twelve years ago Whitman was just another rising female executive with an admirable track record at such firms as Procter & Gamble, Disney and Hasbro. Then in 1998 she took a leap of faith and accepted a job as chief executive of eBay, then a small tech firm with 30 employees. The payoff was equity in the burgeoning company.

Thanks to that decision, Whitman soon joined the ranks of the 1,011 billionaires in the world. Rarer still, she's one of just 14 female billionaires in the world right now who earned their fortunes, rather than inherited them.

Whitman will probably end up disappointing conservatives in much the same way that Arnold does but I think she is the only Republican who can crush Jerry Moonbeam Brown.

South African engaged to Princess Grace's son

Princess Grace’s longtime bachelor son, 52, will wed former swimmer, 32:

Prince Albert of Monaco is engaged to marry Charlene Wittstock, a former Olympic swimmer for South Africa, a union that will give this wealthy Mediterranean principality its first crown princess since American Grace Kelly died in 1982.

She's been living with him for the past four years and he already has two illegitimate kids.

General McChrystal

I've read some opinions that is he very shrewdy and knew what he was trying to achieve. Supposedly he only eats one meal a day and sleeps for only four hours. Maybe he was just tired and his foot slipped into his mouth when he yawned. Or maybe he's just stupid - after all he claims that he voted for Obama.

The BP Racket

Rich Lowry:

The Brits are upset that Pres. Barack Obama has been referring to disgraced oil giant BP as “British Petroleum,” a name it shed long ago.

But what else should Obama call an enormous Britain-based petroleum company? To ask such an innocent question betrays ignorance of the ways of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research. The marketing gurus at the firm — led by über Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg — helped conceive and execute one of the most perverse rebrandings of all time for BP.

British? So yesterday. Petroleum? Not very green. A logo of a shield emblazoned with “BP”? Disturbingly martial. In 2000, newly christened BP ditched all these negative associations by adopting the slogan “Beyond Petroleum” and emblazoning itself with a sunflower-like logo that could be mistaken for the symbol of the Green party of Canada.
...
The case study outlining this extraordinary marketing success has since been removed from the firm’s website. (Greenberg et al. are image-conscious people, after all.)

BP knew how to play the game. It repeated all the environmentally correct platitudes that tickle the fancy of “NGO leaders, journalists, political elites,” in the words of the case study. It supported the fashionable reform of the day, cap-and-trade, knowing that the system would favor the big and connected, like itself. And it showered campaign contributions on the candidate of Hope and Change (its employees gave Obama about twice as much in donations as they did John McCain in 2008).

BP couldn’t have been notionally greener if Al Gore were its CEO.

No summer jobs for teens

Thanks to the minimum wage:

It's notable that the federal minimum wage has seen a swift and steep increase in the past few years. Since 2007, it has jumped 41%, growing to the current $7.25 an hour from $5.15. In that same time, the May teen unemployment rate has skyrocketed to 26% from 16%. A 10% increase in the minimum wage reduces teen employment by about 2%, Sherk figures. And while the recession clearly played a large role, the rapid minimum-wage hikes exacerbated the job losses. A March policy brief from Ball State University estimated that 310,000 teens were without part-time employment because of the increases. When the minimum wage rose, creation of part-time entry level jobs plummeted — disproportionately impacting teens.

Just the other day we were talking about how the workforce has changed in the six years since we moved here. When we first came, the joint was jumping with teen workers - mostly in summer jobs in tourism-related businesses but many worked part-time all year round in 7-11s and pizza parlors.

The reason that we noticed this was because the local teens seemed so much more civilized than their peers in San Francisco, few of whom worked and then usually reluctantly and resentfully.

Then, in Jan 2009, Oregon put it's minimum wage up to $8.40 and the polite friendly teens disappeared. The 7-11s are now staffed by middle-aged women. Why hire inexperienced teens at $8.40 when you can get middle-aged women who do not have to be trained and already have self-discipline and people skills?