Wisconsin Kerfuffle...

I've received several emails over the past few days from people wondering why I'm not commenting on the confrontation between Governor Scott Walker and the public employee unions in Wisconsin.  The reason is very simple: I have little to add to the discussion.  But I'm watching with great interest, because I think the outcome of this confrontation is going to be a foreshadowing of the politics of the next year or two.

This sort of confrontation was, I think, inevitable after the 2010 elections.  I certainly didn't expect the public employee unions to simply roll over – they're going to fight back with every tool at their disposal, as we're seeing in Madison.  They have every right to do so.  The interesting element here isn't so much what the unions are doing – rather it's how Scott Walker and the (Republican majority) Wisconsin legislature react.  If they stick to their principles and pass Governor Walker's reform bill, then the conservatives and the Tea Party will have won an important battle in their war on government spending, and their fellows across the country will take great heart.  On the other hand, if they cave in to the public employee unions, the unions across the country will take great heart.  I don't believe the overall war on government spending hinges on the results in Wisconsin, but I do believe that a convincing victory by either side will greatly aid that side.  So I'm watching with great interest, and cheering for Governor Walker... 

Epic Fails: Technology Forecasts...

An amusing collection of forecasts by the experts and pundits of the past – every one of them an epic fail.  These make very clear something that most people figure out if they live long enough: the experts of today have no particular skill at divining the future.

Just as a sample, here's one from one of my personal heroes: Lee de Forest, one of the pioneers of electronics (he invented the first practical vacuum amplifiers, the triode):

While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially I consider it an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming.

Heh, as the Instapundit would say...

And Even More Rain!!!

As I write this on Sunday morning, the storm total is just over 4.5 inches (12 cm).  It's quite thoroughly wet outside!

The dogs and I were a little late this morning for our walk; we didn't get outside until about 5 am.  The sky was filled with dark clouds, but there were plenty of places where the starry sky peeked through – including one big hole with a bright moon.  The moonlight lit up all the clouds most beautifully.  Our walk was uneventful; just happy dogs in a freshly washed environment.  Just a few moments after we came back inside, the heavens erupted once more with another brief downpour.  Judging from the radar, we're in for a few hours of that sort of thing...

Rain!!!

Last night it poured – the proverbial cats and dogs.  We got almost 3 inches (7 cm) of rain just last night.  For these parts, that's the stuff of legends. As I write, we're still getting intermittent showers, but nothing like the sustained intensity of last night.  The pounding on our new (and watertight!) metal roof woke me up a few times, and I was glad it did – I flipped on one of our outdoor floodlights and just stared out at the wondrous downpour.

The dogs and I took our morning walk while the downpour was in full swing.  I was all decked out with my waterproof jacket and rain hat; the dogs could hardly have cared less.  The three field spaniels, as usual, had noses to the ground – the wet was all good so far as they were concerned.  And the border collie just went for the pine cones, also entirely as usual.  Outside the door, on the way back in, all three showed their usual incomprehension of why I might want to rub them with a towel.  You could almost hear them saying “Aw, come on!  Just let me in already!  I just know something exciting is happening in there!”

And for three of them, something exciting was happening – but not in the house.  Racer, Miki, and Mo'i are all headed to Ramona today (with Debbie, of course) to compete in an agility trial.  Mo'i hasn't been to a competition in a long, long time – Debbie's taking him only because she knows he'll enjoy it...

NGC 2841...

Via APOD, of course...

Wet Doggy Morning...

I've been a little discombobulated the past few days – my company has moved to a new building, and my first week in the new building is on an unusual schedule for me.  I'm helping one of my team teach a class on our Runbook Automation product, and the hours aren't what I'm used to.  Nobody else seems to think that 5 am is a good time to start, so we're not starting until 8:30 am.  I still wake up at around my normal time (it's habitual; can't help it), so these shifted hours feel hard.  Oh, well.  It's all done on Friday!

We got a half inch of rain yesterday, most of it late in the day and early evening.  This morning it had stopped raining, but the ground was sopping and the sky completely overcast.  The sounds of the morning were completely dominated by our ecstatic frog community.  All four dogs were a little subdued, and very actively sniffing – probably something intimidating visited our yard last night.  I couldn't see or smell any sign of it, but the dogs were all over it.

Bringing the dogs back in after a wet morning walk is always a challenge.  Imagine having four very vigorous dogs on short leashes – bad enough already.  Then when you approach the house's front door, of course they all want to go in – so they're madly jockeying for position as I try to unhook them from the leashes.  After that madness is completed, I've got a writhing ball of dogs at the door, but every few seconds one of them gets distracted and darts away – so I've got to call it back, which isn't always easy (depends on the attractiveness, in dogly terms, of the distraction).  On a wet morning like this morning, I've an additional step: I have to dry off the worst of the water with an old towel we keep by the door.  The dogs, naturally, have zero interest in being dried off; in fact, they have no idea what I'm doing, and find the whole process puzzling and distasteful.  So they wriggle all the more!  Eventually I get them somewhat drier and all positioned by the door – and when I slide it open, the four-dog herd goes thundering into the house.

That home entry always follows the same pattern.  Miki, our youngest field spaniel, always is in the lead.  He's driving as hard and fast as he can, heading straight for the bedroom where Debbie is still in the process of waking up.  Miki's arrival on the bed will speed that process up, and make the final result more certain (you cannot remain asleep with Miki bouncing on you).  After Miki, Racer (the border collie) follows slightly behind.  I think it's mostly reflex with him; he sees Miki running, has no idea why, but can't stand to be left behind.  After Racer, it's Mo'i, our oldest male field spaniel, lumbers along.  He's not running, and he's not headed for the bedroom – he heads for the food bowls in the kitchen (just in case they magically filled up with food while he was outside), and then, always disappointed, heads to the water bowl for a prolonged drink.  That could take five minutes.  Finally, at the back of the herd, is Lea – our oldest dog, a female field spaniel.  I think she's actually running flat out, but she's old and creaky, so that isn't very fast.  She usually gets tuckered out before crossing the living room, so she changes course for one of the doggie beds that our house is littered with, and curls up for a nice nap before doing anything more energetic.  It's the same pattern every morning...

Guard Dog...

The other night, as I was getting ready to go to bed, I noticed Miki (our youngest field spaniel) standing just inside our bedroom door, between our bed and a bookcase.  He had a funny look on his face; to me it looked like he was afraid of something and hiding.  I petted him a bit, trying to comfort him, but he wouldn't budge.

A few minutes later, Debbie came into the bedroom and immediately recognized his behavior as “guarding behavior” – he was guarding something from our other dogs.  But what?  We couldn't see anything there that would interest a dog.

After a few mintues of trying various things, we figured out what he was interested in – something behind the books on the lowest shelf of the bookcase (which is right on the floor).  Our first thought was that some little critter had zoomed across the floor and hidden itself behind the books.  We have any number of little critters out here that could do that, ranging from cute little desert mice that occasionally make their way into the house somehow, to less benign things like scorpions and baby rattlesnakes.

Naturally, it was my job to figure out what was behind the books.  Miki watched the proceedings with great interest, clearly eager to get at whatever we'd reveal.  So, very carefully, I started pulling books off the bottom shelf so I could see behind them.  On about the third book, the culprit revealed itself: a wild dog biscuit fragment.  How that little piece of dog biscuit got behind our books, we have no idea.  Nor do we know when that happened – those books haven't been touched for months, so it could have been quite some time.  But Miki's little cold, wet nose obviously led him to the shelf on that day, and he sure as hell wasn't going to let some other dog capture that biscuit!

Of course we let Miki eat his prize, which he did with evident satisfaction...

Camellia...

Via BPotD...

Stardust-NeXT Visits Comet Tempel 1...

After its initial mission was successfully completed, the Stardust robotic explorer had some extra fuel.  After holding a contest for ideas on what to do with this, NASA picked a proposal to revisit the comet Tempel 1, which was first visited by the Deep Impact mission back in 2005.  NASA named this new “bonus” mission Stardust-NeXT. 

After a lot of work and some very tricky orbital mechanics (to keep the fuel use low), on Valentine's Day (Monday) Stardust-NeXT made a successful near pass to comet Tempel 1, collecting all sorts of science data including a spectacular series of images like the one at right (via APOD, of course).

Total cost of this scientifically fruitful mission: less than the cost of shipping Tang to the International Space Station.

Dang!

Niall Ferguson on TV...

Niall Ferguson is one of my favorite authors, with a series of non-fiction books covering a variety of topics in history and economics (often blending the two).  They're uniformly excellent, very readable, and I recommend them often to my friends.

I had no idea that Mr. Ferguson appeared as a pundit on TV (since I rarely watch TV!), but yesterday I happened across this clip yesterday.  In it, Mr. Ferguson (apparently an invited guest on MSNBC) eviscerates the rather obvious pro-Obama position of the talking heads.  He brooks no nonsense, avoids anything resembling platitudes, and absolutely nails them with those pesky things called facts.  Highly entertaining!  I'd really like to see more like this, but I suspect that Mr. Ferguson's career on MSNBC has come to a screeching halt, for he ran completely off the approved narrative rails...

PC in the Military...

Remember this guy?  He's Major Hasan, the Muslim extremist who happened to be an Army psychiatrist – who attacked his fellow soldiers in Ft. Hood just over a year ago, killing 12 of them.

Dorothy Rabinowitz has an excellent piece in today's WSJ discussing the results of the military reports on the incident.  An excerpt:

In this report, titled "A Ticking Time Bomb" and put out by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, there is a detail as dazzling in its bleak way as all the glowing misrepresentations of Dr. Hasan's skills and character, which his superiors poured into their evaluations of him. It concerns the Department of Defense's official report on the Foot Hood killings—a study whose recital of fact made no mention of Hasan's well-documented jihadist sympathies. Subsequent DoD memoranda portray the bloodbath—which began with Hasan shouting "Allahu Akbar!"—as a kind of undefined extremism, something on the order, perhaps, of work-place violence.

This avoidance of specifics was apparently contagious—or, more precisely, policy. In November 2010, each branch of the military issued a final report on the Fort Hood shooting. Not one mentioned the perpetrator's ties to radical Islam. Even today, "A Ticking Time Bomb," co-authored by Sen. Joe Lieberman (I., Conn.) and Susan Collins (R., Maine), reminds us that DoD still hasn't specifically named the threat represented by the Fort Hood attack—a signal to the entire Defense bureaucracy that the subject is taboo.

There is something seriously amiss when the military can't (or won't) see the obvious evidence of our main enemy's infiltration into its own ranks.  The political correctness/multicultural movement is bad enough in the civilian world.  In the military, it puts our warriors unnecessarily in harm's way...

WTF: Weapon of Mass Destruction Found in the U.S.?

I'm not entirely sure what to make of this story.  The Daily Mail isn't exactly at the top of the list of reputable new sources.  On the other hand, the Obama administration would probably behave in exactly the way this article implies they are (hiding evidence of terrorist success), and the lamestream media here definitely has a history of supporting the administration. 

So I'm left wondering...

More Governor Awesome!

I'm still struggling with the concept that this outstanding example of effective government is from freaking New Jersey!

It's hard to imagine a response from a politician I'd like better, to a challenge like this one:

Egypt...

I have so much hope for the people of the Middle East, and at the same time I'm very worried about the bazillion ways this could go horribly wrong...

Peggy Noonan, apparently fully recovered from her Obama spell, has some interesting thoughts.  One paragraph:

And youth trumps age. Egypt is a young nation, median age 24, with high youth unemployment. All revolutions, in the end, are about the young versus the old, because the young are driven by hope and the old by experience. The men who massed in Tahrir Square the first week looked to be aged roughly 16 to 35. A few days into the revolution, I received an email from a friend just back from Cairo. He told me, he'd seen a young man run out of his suburban Cairo house. He was off to the demonstrations, to take part in history. Running after him was his grandmother, who literally grabbed him by the ear and tried to drag him back inside.

Heh. I can easily visualize that grandmother!

The always-interesting Fouad Ajami has a great column, also at WSJ, which concludes:

Umm al-Dunya, the mother of the world, Egyptians and other Arabs call the fabled city of Cairo. It had been there, in that city founded a millennium ago, that Islam fashioned a civilization, made its peace with the world, outwitted and outwaited conquerors.

Egyptians know that this Arab revolution of 2011—and the upheaval has earned that name—had not begun in their metropolis, that it had travelled eastward from Tunisia. When that revolt arrived in Cairo, it found a stage worthy of its ambitions. For decades now, Egypt has been the lens through which Arabs see their history. This is the case today. A new Arab politics has spawned in Liberation Square, a movement of a piece with the modern ways of protest and reform.

It will be said that the great, enduring dilemmas of Egypt—a huge country that has lost out in the game of nations—will still be there. There will be accounts to settle, a struggle between those who were sullied by the dictatorship and those who weren't. The Egyptians will be tested again as to their fidelity to democratic ways. But if this standoff that ended in the demise of the dictator is any guide, the Egyptians may give us a consoling tale of an Islamic people who rose to proclaim their fidelity to liberty, and who provided us with a reminder that tyranny is not fated for the Arabs.

Our fingers are crossed and our thumbs are pressed (as my German friends would say), reflecting our fervent hope for a good outcome from all this turmoil.  We're also hoping that this revolutionary wind keeps right on traveling, across all the thugocracies in the region...

Code of the West...

Via my lovely wife.  There's an interesting backstory.  The code:

1. Live each day with courage

2. Take pride in your work

3. Always finish what you start

4. Do what has to be done

5. Be tough, but fair

6. When you make a promise, keep it

7. Ride for the brand

8. Talk less and say more

9. Remember that some things aren't for sale

10. Know where to draw the line

Lots to like about that...

Parable for Our Times...

Via reader Dr. Simi L.:

"Winston, come into the dining room, it's time to eat," Julia yelled to her husband. "In a minute, honey, it's a tie score," he answered. Actually Winston wasn't very interested in the traditional holiday football game between Detroit and Washington.

Ever since the government passed the Civility in Sports Statute of 2017, outlawing tackle football for its "unseemly violence" and the "bad example it sets for the rest of the world," Winston was far less of a football fan than he used to be. Two-hand touch wasn't nearly as exciting.

Yet it wasn't the game that Winston was uninterested in. It was more the thought of eating another TofuTurkey. Even though it was the best type of VeggieMeat available after the government revised the American Anti-Obesity Act of 2018, adding fowl to the list of federally-forbidden foods, (which already included potatoes, cranberry sauce and mince-meat pie), it wasn't anything like real turkey. And ever since the government officially changed the name of "Thanksgiving Day" to "A National Day of Atonement" in 2020 to officially acknowledge the Pilgrims' historically brutal treatment of Native Americans, the holiday had lost a lot of its luster.

Eating in the dining room was also a bit daunting. The unearthly gleam of government-mandated fluorescent light bulbs made the TofuTurkey look even weirder than it actually was, and the room was always cold. Ever since Congress passed the Power Conservation Act of 2016, mandating all thermostats-which were monitored and controlled by the electric company-be kept at 68 degrees, every room on the north side of the house was barely tolerable throughout the entire winter.

Still, it was good getting together with family. Or at least most of the family. Winston missed his mother, who passed on in October, when she had used up her legal allotment of live-saving medical treatment. He had had many heated conversations with the Regional Health Consortium, spawned when the private insurance market finally went bankrupt, and everyone was forced into the government health care program. And though he demanded she be kept on her treatment, it was a futile effort. "The RHC's resources are limited," explained the government bureaucrat Winston spoke with on the phone. "Your mother received all the benefits to which she was entitled. I'm sorry for your loss."

Ed couldn't make it either. He had forgotten to plug in his electric car last night, the only kind available after the Anti-Fossil Fuel Bill of 2021 outlawed the use of the combustion engines-for everyone but government officials. The fifty mile round trip was about ten miles too far, and Ed didn't want to spend a frosty night on the road somewhere between here and there.

Thankfully, Winston's brother, John, and his wife were flying in. Winston made sure that the dining room chairs had extra cushions for the occasion. No one complained more than John about the pain of sitting down so soon after the government-mandated cavity searches at airports, which severely aggravated his hemorrhoids. Ever since a terrorist successfully smuggled a cavity bomb onto a jetliner, the TSA told Americans the added "inconvenience" was an "absolute necessity" in order to stay "one step ahead of the terrorists." Winston's own body had grown accustomed to such probing ever since the government expanded their scope to just about anywhere a crowd gathered, via Anti-Profiling Act of 2022. That law made it a crime to single out any group or individual for "unequal scrutiny," even when probable cause was involved. Thus, cavity searches at malls, train stations, bus depots, etc., etc., had become almost routine. Almost.

The Supreme Court is reviewing the statute, but most Americans expect a Court composed of six progressives and three conservatives to leave the law intact. "A living Constitution is extremely flexible," said the Court's eldest member, Elena Kagan. " Europe has had laws like this one for years. We should learn from their example," she added.

Winston's thoughts turned to his own children. He got along fairly well with his 12-year-old daughter, Brittany, mostly because she ignored him. Winston had long ago surrendered to the idea that she could text anyone at any time, even during Atonement Dinner. Their only real confrontation had occurred when he limited her to 50,000 texts a month, explaining that was all he could afford. She whined for a week, but got over it.

His 16-year-old son, Jason, was another matter altogether. Perhaps it was the constant bombarding he got in public school that global warming, the bird flu, terrorism or any of a number of other calamities were "just around the corner," but Jason had developed a kind of nihilistic attitude that ranged between simmering surliness and outright hostility. It didn't help that Jason had reported his father to the police for smoking a cigarette in the house, an act made criminal by the Smoking Control Statute of 2018, which outlawed smoking anywhere within 500 feet of another human being. Winston paid the $5,000 fine, which might have been considered excessive before the American dollar became virtually worthless as a result of QE13. The latest round of quantitative easing the federal government initiated was, once again, to "spur economic growth." This time they promised to push unemployment below its years-long rate of 18%, but Winston was not particularly hopeful.

Yet the family had a lot for which to be thankful, Winston thought, before remembering it was a Day of Atonement. At least he had his memories. He felt a twinge of sadness when he realized his children would never know what life was like in the Good Old Days, long before Obama and government promises to make life "fair for everyone" realized their full potential. Winston, like so many of his fellow Americans, never realized how much things could change when they didn't happen all at once, but little by little, so people could get used to them.

He wondered what might have happened if the public had stood up while there was still time, maybe back around 2012, when all the real nonsense began. "Maybe we wouldn't be where we are today if we'd just said 'enough is enough' when we had the chance," he thought.

Maybe so, Winston. Maybe so.

Not All Entertainers Are Liberal Pantywaists...

A musical tribute to the troops in Iraq, by Gene Simmons (of KISS).  Via my cousin Mike D.:

It's Really Getting Cold Back East!

Via my mom:

I just got off the phone with a friend living in northern Maine near the Canadian border.

She said that since early this morning the snow has been nearly waist high and is still falling.

The temperature is dropping way below zero and the north wind is increasing to near gale force.

Her husband has done nothing but look through the kitchen window and just stare.

She says that if it gets much worse, she may have to let him in.

The Ultimate Cookbook...

It's 2,400 pages and 47 pounds, and costs $625.

I think I'll wait for the Kindle edition...

Mystery Solved!

How fleas jump...