Good Day for a Funeral

The news was pretty much all in before I got to sleep last night. The only good news was that Tim Pawlenty retained the Governors seat in MN. It may mean that those of us that work for a living can keep a tiny percentage of our paychecks.

I really did go to a funeral today, an uncle that lived a mile up the road from me in my youth. Eighty eight years old and went pretty fast when he went, lived in his home with his wife right up to the last few weeks. The end doesn't get all that much better, lots of family and freinds at a church where he faithfully attendeded. A good life, a fairly quick end, and hope for a better life in heaven. There are worse things than the right kind of a funeral.

Was the Republican loss "the right kind of a funeral". Sorry to say, I really don't see how a thinking person would draw that conclusion, but from the MSM and lefty reactions, it is clear that many mostly feeling people "feel different". The Democrats and MSM didn't run on anything but anger and wishful thinking, so the election didn't really decide anything other than "going 100% negative with no agenda can work".

The Democrats are basically the party of human nature, which is often the same as the party of doing what feels good, or wishful thinking. For a century, they were the party of slavery until Lincoln and the Republicans ended the scourge, but at the very high price of 600K lives. The Democrats sought new lower ground and became the party of Jim Crow for the next 100 years.

They followed that act with some overlap as the party of surrender to communism. Counting the USSR, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and China, communism took something in the 50-100million lives at least. Could it have been stopped earlier? It is always hard to tell, but Reagan and the Republicans got it done yet again. Now we face global Islamic terrorism, and the Democrats have found their calling as the party of surrender to a new menace. Yesterday the odds of victory without the loss of millions of lives went down severely. Surgery for cancer is costly even early, it is usually far more expensive or terminal when we wait and "hope for the best".

Something like 80% of Americans were in favor of the war in Iraq when we went in. Osama and company felt that we were weak in Vietnam, Lebannon, and Somalia, and that we would be weak in Iraq. Some of us thought that we would be different after 9-11. More like the WWII generation. Yesterday we proved that Osama is right, we are going to cut and run, and we will pay the price now, the question is just how high it will be.

Some will say "we were lied to". That kind of thinking is beyond wishful and falls to the most human of natures that says "I won't accept responsibility for my own thoughts, decisions, and actions since it makes me feel better to blame someone else". The idea that Bush KNEW that we wouldn't be able to find WMD is simply beyond the pale. Every piece of evidence and rational conjecture that we have says that he acted on the best information he had, as did the CIA, the congress, and indeed the 80% of Americans that felt that we simply couldn't take the risk. The odds that any of our houses will be destroyed by fire are exceedingly low, yet we almost all carry fire insurance. The odds that Saddam harbored WMD were exceedingly high, and seeing him use them or allow others to use them was very beleiveable. WMD wasn't found in the quantity that we expected. Saying that we are CERTAIN that meant he didn't have WMD is like saying that it is certain that there are no fatal car crashes since we have never witnessed one. However, even if he didn't, the VAST majority of Americans, and virtually ALL of our leadership agreed that it was a risk that we could not accept. It is an abdication of responsibility now to suggest that we are not willing to pay the price for carrying through on what in a democracy is a shared responsibility, yet that is what has happened.

Being a Republican means that one is forced to look at reality, but also that we believe in higher good than human nature and therefore hope. It is human to fall short, and Republicans are just has human as anyone, we just try not to worship at the alter of man and praise vice as virtue. Americans voted on emotion. That is very understandable, but also often very expensive. Let us pray to God that undeserved mercy may be ours and the cost in lives is held lower than would be expected by a hand greater than our own.

Election Night

My wife and I are over at the home of a young couple babysitting for their 1 year old boy while they are out on a long awaitned birthday date. Usually I would be glued to the tube and likely will be later, but since this couple isn't a believer in TV, I'm restricted to "only te net", and it is a lot easier to only check a bit less frequently there.

One of the observations of this year is that the MSM seems very happy with "all negative" as long as it is a Democrat strategy. What was the message for the the Democrats this year? At the most innocuous that can be presented, it was "change", but we all know it wasn't really that. "Bush is bad, evil, incompetent, doesn't listen, lies ... etc". "The Republican Congress is corrupt, out of touch, Bush lapdogs, special interest lapdogs, etc".

What positive things did Democrats suggest? None. Then there is the "suppress the vote" move. There is no doubt that Democrats and the MSM had the Foley scandal in their back pocket for a long time, and brought it out when they did simply to suppress the Christian Conservative vote. It is an old trick, they did it in 2000 with the Bush DWI. They even "double dipped" with the Haggard gay sex scandal for good measure under the "nobody has any morals" kind of heading.

At least at this point, the exit polls are showing "corruption" as the top issue. Gee, I wonder if the roles were reversed and Republicans had managed to tag Democrats with that issue, would it be seen as valid by the MSM? Anyone remember how bogus "values" was seen as 2 short years ago?

If this election continues to go like it looks now, at least we will know that 100% negative with a focus on suppression of the base of the other side can work. I'm sure that the MSM will complain bitterly if Republicans ever do anything similar. Think of how much different this is than the "Contract With America". Of course the MSM didn't like that one either, even though it was a very specific agenda. I guess the bottom line is just that the MSM is never going to like Republicans, so one should stop expecting them to somehow give some consideration to being even handed.

What A Democrat Hopes For

The following is from What Will It Take to End the War and it does a pretty good job of hitting the key point of the left that the Democrats have become.

If the Democrats take power with the elections tomorrow, congressional hearings will have a lot of such questions to consider. But what about the moral question? For all of the anguish felt over the loss of American lives, can we acknowledge that there is something proper in the way that hubristic American power has been thwarted? Can we admit that the loss of honor will not come with how the war ends, because we lost our honor when we began it? This time, can we accept defeat?

As always, the answer is defeat for America and defeat for all that would stand up for any form of values in which individuals have responsibility. A favorite phrase that they love to use is "Truth to Power", easily translated into the perpetual anthem of anarchy, "death to authority".

In my youth, the hopeful power to destroy the evil of the overly powerful American capitalist system object of hatred for the left was the Marxist religion of the gulags in the USSR, the "Great Leap Forward" of mass death in China, and the killing fields of Pol Pot. All could "somehow" be blamed on America in the special view of the left. In 1968, they took control of the Democrat party, and now they believe they sit ready to control one of the branches of power yet again.

State controlled mass murderers seemed odd allies in the 60's and 70's, but they were positively benign compared to Muslim Jihadists, Kim Jong-Il, and nuke toting Mullahs in Iran we face today. At least the soulless communist killers mostly had addresses. The addition of global terror forces without addresses that can act in concert with the remaining evil axist powers that do makes the new world much more dangerous.

Well, if the polls are right, at least the victorious Democrats and MSM will have struck a blow in making sure that "hubristic American power" is reduced over the next couple years, with a vacum to be filled by Kim, Iran, and Al Quaeda. I'm sure we can trust those folks to be be rational, reserved and benevolent with their increased freedom of action. Let us all cheer for the defeat of America, the goal of every (oxynoron break) "honest lefty".

Political Football

Don't expect to see the phote above in the MSM very much. They tried to avoid the Kerry gaffe as much as they could, but it still broke out on them, somewhat again because their hand was forced by the bloggers and more conservative media.

My first reaction was that this is a great example of what kind of a guy Kerry really is. I strongly suspect that he just misspoke, but his arrogance and nastiness came through instantly. Call Rush Limbaugh fat, call Bush stupid, and call Tony Snow an empty suit. Gee, if being in Iraq is stupid, then why did Kerry vote for it? Well before he voted for funding the war he had voted for before he voted against funding the same war. One thing that Kerry is very sure of, he is a super smart guy.

My second thought is that while politics has aspects of a game, it would be great if there was some thought of trying to be even handed in the MSM. It is certainly fine when the "other side", Democrat or Republican jump on somebody that screws up, but one would hope that the MSM might be something of a "voice of reason".

Remember Trent Lott? He made a comment at at B-day party for Strom Thurmond about how things might have been better had Strom been elected as a "Dixiecrat" way back in 1948. What did he mean by that? Well, basically nothing but idle comments at an old mans birthday party. The Democrats (fine with me) and the PRESS, piled on completely. Lott was labled a "racist", aplologized immediately, frequently, and abjectly, but to no avail, and he lost is position as majority leader.

What do we see with Kerry? The press running to his defense, making it seem that the REPUBLICANS are somehow "evil" for "taking advantage", and agreeing with him that somehow it is "improper" for Republicans to take his comment for what he said. What he MEANT to, was of course for a sitting US Senator to call the current US President STUPID in wartime for sending US troops into a situation that the same US Senator voted in favor of. Now THAT is pretty much definition of "intelligent" ... but one which the MSM has no problem with.

If there WERE an unbiased press, one might expect that in BOTH of these cases the parties that looked the worst would be the parties that went after the politician that made a gaff and then promptly and honestly apologized. Kerry would have a bit of a problem with that "prompt and honest", but if he hadn't spent so much history living with the lapdog MSM and thinking that having a "D" next to your name means never having to say you are sorry, may have learned the lesson that when you screw up, you need to apologize.

Will the advent of the press having more than one side with blogs, radio, and Fox eventually drive us to sanity? Maybe, but I suspect that the MSM will continue to tack very hard to the left for a long time to come before a truely moderate middle rises up and provides a voice of reason without the need to look at both sides of the market of ideas to get to the point of reason.

Really Gay

A nice liberal columnist as finally defined what it means to be "really gay". Apparently it involves sending lurid IM messages to underage boys. Not ALL that surprising, since as was pointed out, for at least gay Democrat members of the House of Representatives it also involved having sex with underage boys AND keeping your job for over twenty years.

Leonard Pitts lays it all out for us here. You see Republicans and the "religious right" hate gays because they don't want gay marriage. I guess that is sort of like hating business if you want higher taxes, or hating security for Americans if you want lower military spending. We all know that Democrats and the MSM are totally on board with those ideas, so their views on thinking of gays and gay marriage are totally warranted.

He also points out that Republicans only like blacks that "don't remind anyone they are black". I guess that is sort of like Abdul Jabbar failing to remind people he is tall when he walks into a room. Tallness and being black aren't something apparent, they are much deeper issues. I can only assume that he means that Republicans only like blacks that don't "act black". If pedophilia is part of being gay, I'm wondering what he would require to be certifiably black? Drug use? A criminal record? The mind wanders, but for some reason black people like Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powel just don't meet his definition. It must fail to include intelligence, dedication, character and career success. Pity, those are the kinds of attributes that evil Republicans find to be completely applicable to both gays and blacks.

Foregone Conclusion

In listening to MPR and looking at CNN on the Web, the message is out that "the only way the Republicans can keep control of the House or Senate is if the election is fixed". MPR is positively gleeful that from their polling, virtually every Republican out there including Pawlenty and our local Congressman are going to lose. They can already feel the anticipatory joy of beginning Bush impeachment proceedings.

They may certainly be right, they have used thousands of hours of airtime presenting that the economy is supposed to be bad in the face of record growth GDP, jobs and new market highs. They have presented Iraq as "another Vietnam", even though the casualty figures are an order of magnitude different, and the similarities in most every other way than the media seeing it as "hopeless" are completely DISsimilar. Any sort of Republican ethics issue has been presented as "an example of the corruption of the party", where many similar and worse Democrat issues ($90K of cash in a freezer, Harry Reid with land deals and using campaign funds for "the help") have been barely touched on. The media has fully done their job to fix this election, any allusions of being "even handed" have been fully left behind. It may well be enough.

The following gives another view. It has already been used on the left as "proof that Rove must have a deal with Dibold". I can't help but wonder if some of the certainty hasn't gone too far, and they may be keeping their own base at home because "this election is won for the Democrats". We shall see, even if they win the people that usually end up taking the biggest loss from their policies are the very people that they claim to be helping.

Rove Sees Victory

Karl Rove had lunch with the editors and reporters of the Washington Times yesterday. He apparently exuded confidence:

White House political strategist Karl Rove yesterday confidently predicted that the Republican Party would hold the House and the Senate in next month's elections, dismissing fallout from the sex scandal involving former Rep. Mark Foley.

"I'm confident we're going to keep the Senate; I'm confident we're going to keep the House."

Rove said it s "almost impossible" for Democrats to take the Senate; he cited Jim Talent's race in Missouri as one that is moving in the right direction.

Rove's optimism stems in part from the Democrats' dismal record on national security:

"I think they have given us here, especially in the last couple of weeks, a potent set of votes to talk about. You had 90 percent of House Democrats voting against the terrorist-surveillance program, nearly three-quarters of Senate Democrats and 80 percent of House Democrats voting against the terrorist-interrogation act. Something is fundamentally flawed."

Rove also sees Republicans having the financial resources they need for the last three weeks of the campaign; he was confident enough to laugh at some mainstream media reports that exaggerate the Dems' chances:

In the hourlong interview, Mr. Rove was upbeat, telling stories from the campaign trail and joking about skewed political coverage that disproportionately shows Democrats poised to take control of Congress.

Mr. Rove said Republican candidates still hold a huge cash edge over Democrats, which will give them clout in the final three weeks of the campaign.

"This morning, I loved it: The [Associated Press] ran a story saying these Democrat congressional candidates outraised their Republican incumbents in the third quarter. Well, what they didn't say was that part of the reason that they did is that we raised the money earlier so that we'd be able to deploy it," he said.

Rove points out that for most of the undecided voters who will determine the outcome of the election, the campaign has only been going on for around two weeks. He notes that over the next 21 days, Republicans will spend $100 million in targeted House and Senate races.

Rove could be wrong, of course. But I think it is noteworthy that he is not laying the groundwork to deflect blame for defeat by, for example, moaning about the unforeseen consequences of the Foley instant message flap. Instead, he is once again staking his reputation on victory. I find that comforting.

A Pirate Looks at 50

While as I commented, Jimmy Buffett isn't very consistent, but I did enjoy the book. It is great that a guy that writes and sings songs, performs, and writes books can create a life as cool as his. Is he really happy? Well it sounds like after a lot of drugs and analysis, and finding a way to finally get along with his second wife, he just may be, at least at a superficial level.

He certainly comes in pretty well on the "he who dies with the most toys wins" scale. Having both a Cessna Citation and a Grumman Albatross is pretty big in the toy department, but it sounds like there are other planes in his private airforce as well. On top of that, houses in Key West, Long Island, Aspen, and it sounds like a Caribbean Island for two. Lack of money and things are not on his list of problems.

It seems that he has discovered a couple of hobbies that he cares about deeply: flying and fishing. He has the resources to be able to pursue those way farther than most people, but he is interested in personally doing well at both of them, and uses the money to help that with guides, co-pilots, training, equipment, etc, but he does get fulfillment out of the accomplishments. He enjoys music, performing, and in many cases the interactions with his fans.

Sort of like the song "Wasting Away in Margaritaville", he pretty much sells escape. The whole Caribbean, Gone Fishing, gone flying, on vacation mentality. He must be a good deal more of a businessman than he lets on, but that is probably part of the deal. To some degree, he IS the product. He is the poster child for the "Jimmy Buffett lifestyle".

The book is well written and fun. While it seems unlikely that the planet could support very many folks living his lifestyle, it is pretty amazing that there is one ... and he doesn't even feel rich!

Top Secret Leak

The following from Michael Barone

The Labor Department Friday announced that the number of jobs increased between April 2005 and March 2006 not by 5.8 million but by 6.6 million. As an editorial in the Wall Street Journal notes, "That's a lot more than a rounding error, more than the entire number of workers in the state of New Hampshire. What's going on here?" The most plausible explanation, advanced by the Journal and by the Hudson Institute's Diana Furchgott-Roth in the New York Sun, is that lots more jobs are being created by small businesses and individuals going into business for themselves than government statisticians can keep track of. Newspaper reports on the number of jobs usually focus on the Labor Department's business establishment survey. But over the past few years, the Labor Department's household survey has consistently shown more job growth than the business establishment survey. The likely explanation: The business establishment survey misses jobs created by new businesses. Our government statistical agencies do an excellent job. But statistics designed to measure the economy of yesterday have a hard time reflecting the economy of tomorrow.

The federal budget deficit has been cut in half in three years, three years faster than George W. Bush called for. Why? Tax receipts were up 5.5 percent in FY 2004, 14.5 percent in FY 2005, and 11.7 percent in FY 2006. That's up 34.9 percent in three years. And that's after the 2003 tax cuts. When you cut taxes, you get more economic activity, and when you get more economic activity, the government with a tax system that is still decidedly progressive gets more revenue.

The bottom line: The private-sector economy is much more robust and creative than mainstream media would have you believe.

Wow, good economic news, now THERE is something that the MSM is REALLY able to keep totally secret. The more I let The Long Tail sink in, the more I realize that we are seeing yet another fundamental economic / business / technical change in my lifetime. From a 10K view:

WWII to Mid to late 60's - The post war boom. If you could manufacture with reasonable capability you could make money. The era of the big mass market, the big corporation, and big labor.

The sick '70s - Nothing kills like success. Japan began to undercut us, fuel prices went up, government regulation and taxes had the golden goose of economic growth on the mat. The unions priced and powered themselves out of relevance. It looked like curtains for the US, and Carter told us the best days were behind us.

The go-go 80's and 90's - Reagan cut the regulations and taxes and freed the engine of US business and the US economy sprinted by Japan and Europe with ease. It was a new economy though. Competitive, non-union, low cost, high stock return, and high innovation. "Just showing up" no longer cut it.

The new millennium bubble and beyond - The "new new economy". Efficiency, connectivity, organic growth, the long tail, usage improving the product and the age of very tight TECHNOLOGICAL customer relationships.

There is a great article on this at O'Reilly Web 2.0. The combination of political bias and attachment to the old world of the late 60's means that much of what counts as "intelligentsia" in the MSM and government is now a few generations behind current.

Turning 50

A week ago today I turned 50. It has been a very busy time at work, but I've also done a bit of celebration with family and friends, including my oldest son coming home from college for the weekend to help wish me a happy birthday. Our house is also completely torn up since we are remodeling the family room in the basement, moving my younger son downstairs to a larger bedroom, and re-doing my beloved office with Techline desk, cabinets, and a bunch of really nice bookcase cabinets. A major change that I'm really looking forward to now, but not to be completed until mid-November. I suppose I can be a bit patient at 50.

Some thoughts on turning 50 seem to be in order. The biggest thought is how important it is to maintain an attitude of thankfulness vs one of anger / outrage / sadness / etc for the blessing of living to 50 in generally good health, great wife, great kids, SUPER cats (they demand top billing), great friends, a job that is way better than many, excellent church home, neighborhood ... and literally on and on. The list of things to be thankful for is literally endless, but thankfulness is not a natural human state.

Case in point, my eldest son got me the book "A Pirate Looks at 50" by Jimmy Buffett. It is a fun book, I'm enjoying reading it, and I'm glad that the writer of "Wasting Away in Margaritaville" is a multi-millionaire with a Grumman Albatross seaplane and a Cessna Citation jet, apparently among other planes, along with houses in Aspen, Key West, Long Island and a couple other spots. It sounds like an absolutely amazing life, but I'm struck by a couple of things. First of all, he is obviously liberal, and I suspect that hardly a single liberal out there thinks that Jimmy ought to change his lifestyle. Certainly not Jimmy.

There is a point in the book where he talks about talking to his wife and daughters up in their Citation while he is flying his Albatross below at 150 MPH. Right about that time he breaks into talking about how good he feels about the work he does to protect the environment and how important the environment is. Here is he is with two monster planes sucking as much as fuel as a small town of SUVs would in a year, and it bothers him not at all to point out the poor job the US does on the environment. A few pages later, while talking about checking into the same compound in Costa Rica that Bush I used when he stays there, he comments on how "Americans need to be more humble". I can tell from the writing he sees no irony in this at all, because he "feels good about it in his heart".

Again, it is fine with me that he does all that he does. That is his business. It is also funny to read that he DOESN'T consider himself rich, because he feels he can't afford a Gulfstream IV jet. He has to get by with a Citation. It shows that it truly is all very relative when it comes to money. He has a descent amount of "righteous indignation" about US foreign, environmental, and economic policy (among other things I'm sure). He just has that while celebrating his 50th B-day while flying around Central and South America with two large planes and an entourage of friends and servants. It is indeed a wonder to live in a free country.

Personally, I feel very lucky to have achieved the much more modest level of wealth that I've been blessed with, even though if falls WELL short of the point where either a Albatross or Citation are in my future. I suspect that it may be that money earned by having a hit song gives less of an insight into the "cost of making money" than a 28 year career at a major corporation. He seems to love entertaining, and when you are good at entertaining, you are very highly paid.

Even better, society seems to feel that entertainers are "worth it". Somehow a guy writing a song about drinking too much and ending up with millions is way more acceptable than somebody working their way up some corporate ladder for a lifetime and getting a similar amount of money for taking a CEO job where they are responsible for 100s of K of employees, 10s of billions of dollars of revenue and billions of dollars of profit, and likely 10s or 100s of billions of dollars of market capitalization. It is "unfair" that a guy can make the big bucks for that kind of job, but a good drinking song for the same kind of cabbage goes down a lot easier. That is just the kind of world many folks live in, consistency is truly not an issue.

Given the track that I chose, the "cost of making money" has been plenty, and I have zero desire or envy for the CEO that makes the millions. If I could write a book that made me some millions in the cosmic dollar lottery, that would be great, since I suspect that I'd enjoy writing the book. It isn't that I don't enjoy many aspects of my corporate job, I've just realized over a long career that they tend to not pay you the most for the parts of the job that are the most fun. Programming is so much fun that a lot of folks do it for free in Open Source Software today. Even if they don't, it is now being done in India, China, and beyond. Allocating dollars to tasks, tracking tasks, fighting about what business trade-offs to do make and asking people to do work and bothering them when they are late, off course, or it is just hard to understand what they are doing ... those things tend to be less fun, but often better paid.

As I write on, I realize there is a bit of wistful jealousy in my soul. It would certainly be "nice" to be extremely highly paid for exactly what one wanted to do. There is a core difference there between the conservative and the liberal soul. Yes, it would be nice. It would be nice to be able to eat like a pig, not exercise, and be in great shape. Some folks have the genetics to come a lot closer to that than I do, I guess that is "unfair". The liberal looks at such "unfairness" where they can and tries to figure out how to "fix it" ... or really, how to get someone else like the government to fix it. Conservatives have all the same emotions I think, but at some point we pulled up our socks and said that even falling well short of "nirvana" on our own was way better than a life of bitching and ingratitude.

It is always very human to bitch, and from the vantage point of 50, I can guess that age will always throw some curves that will make it even easier. I'll do my best to remain thankful.

Whose Ox?

The old saw about "whose ox is being gored" is certainly operative with the treatment of the Foley story. Anybody remember Gary Studds? No? Odd isn't it?


This is only Wikipedia, but anyone with a bent that isn't 100% MSM sheep can find a lot more.

Gerry Eastman Studds (born May 12, 1937) is a retired American politician, born in Mineola, New York. He served as a Democratic Congressman for Massachusetts from 1973 until 1997. He was the first openly homosexual member of the US Congress and, more generally, the first openly gay national politician in the US. In 1983, he admitted to having a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old male page in 1973 and was censured by the House of Representatives.

NOTE, he had SEX with an under age page in '73, and he STAYED as a DEMOCRAT in congress until '97. Slightly mild difference in treatment there isn't there? There wasn't any talk radio, Fox News, or Internet then. The MSM was pretty busy getting rid of Nixon, so what is a little gay sex with an intern as long as the Congressman has a D next to his name? So like "where was their leadership"?

It looks pretty likely that this particular incident is an "October Surprise" to keep the Republican base at home and let the Democrats take over congress. My bottom line though is that if we lose because we have different principals that Democrats, then great. If Politics is just "win at any cost", then it truly isn't worth paying attention to. Bill Clinton perjured himself before a grand jury. Impeaching him cost the Republicans votes. The right thing is worth doing even when it costs something, and really ESPECIALLY when it costs something. Those are Christian, Conservative and RIGHT principals. They are not to be found on the left, in the modern Democrat party, or in the MSM.

Some combination of the MSM or the Democrats got a hold of a good nasty card and they played at exactly the right time. Most likely it isn't recoverable. If Hastert knew there was a problem and he did nothing, then he ought to go down too. To do anything less would be to behave like the Democrats and the MSM, and then not only politics but life becomes meaningless.

The Long Tail

Completed the subject book by Chris Anderson on my recent fishing trip. The graphic shows the statistical "long tail" from which the book gets it's title. The old 80/20 rule and a number of other statistical models net a graph where a large number of products, people, profits, or something else are crowded in the head of the graph and then a "long tail" of diminishing numbers heads off to "infinity" on the right of the graph. However, if one can negotiate it, there can be similar, or even more demand in the long tail than in the traditional "hits". The future according to this book is "selling less (units) of more things".

Anderson argues that the long tail in markets is an aberration of the last hundred years of technology. The rise of national newsprint, movies, radio and TV all led to "scarcity marketing". The number of hours, stations, and pages of mass market advertising capability was "scarce" (at least limited), and so was the carrying capacity of even the biggest stores. We became a "hit driven culture", where we all wanted to watch the same shows, see the same movies and follow the same suburban "ideal lifestyle". Everything became about "star power" in people, products, or ideas. He feels that culture peaked somewhere in the 50's - 60's, but then started a slow decline.

The internet has created a tectonic shift, and the "mass culture" is radically changing very rapidly now, and headed toward a "niche culture" where the majority of products and even ideas are out in "the long tail". Amazon, iTunes, Google, eBay, Netflix, Blogs, Wikipedia, and a host of others are all raised as current examples of "connecting with the tail". Amazon and iTunes have nearly infinite "shelf space" and little or no cost of inventory. He points out how Google and other search technologies provide the "filtering capacity" so the infinite choice of the tail can be effectively navigated. Interesting contrast to "The Paradox of Choice" here, partially because the Paradox failed to recognize that the new world of the net also provides more powerful tools that allow the choice to be managed. People that never left their home town had no use for maps and celestial navigation skills. Once a set of people begin to travel, those tools become critical. So it is with the new world of "infinite choice", attempting to deal with it without the tools doesn't work.


He ends the book with some key rules for business in the long tail, the two key ones being:

1). Make everything available
2). Help me find it

For those that have used Google and Amazon, most of the other items are "obvious", but that book is worth a read as a pretty good summary of a major change that seems to be going on the world, even though it doesn't really predict where that change will end up, the information on how to deal with it will no doubt make it one of the key business books.

Paradox of Choice

Paradox of Choice: Why Less is More, Barry Schwartz

I finished up the subject book a week ago, but am up at Williams Narrows Resort on Lake Winnibigoshish in Nothern Minnesota for a few days fishing and have been lazy on the Blog. The first couple days the weather was great and so was the fishing. Decent numbers of fish from the 14" inch size up to 20" on the rockpiles along the N side of the main lake along with some success on crankbaits in Cutfoot Sioux. Yesterday the weather changed and so did the fishing, it has been slow since, but we have still been able to pick up a few, so not the complete drought. It has been nice to have a top for the boat since last night as there has been a good deal of rain.

I really enjoyed the Paradox book, even though I tend to think that the author misses the fact that humans and technology tend very much to adapt to problems. Yes, "too much choice" CAN be a problem, but it doesn't HAVE to be. He points out how all the available choices that we face today can cause anxiety, and regret as we realize that "wow, I could have had a V8!" after having mere tomato juice, but it doesn't have to be that way, and the alternative (not enough choice) is not really that good.

His point is that as the number of available choices rises, the ability of any consumer to select the "best alternative" becomes more and more difficult. Worse, with the increasing rate of change and the available mass information, a consumer is going to see and be able to compare themselves with many others, and are likely to be aware when they make a poor choice. This leads to a greater "decision cost" as they try to decide, and for many consumers it means that they are less satisfied with what they purchase, as they either have specific evidence (or are at least suspicious) that they didn't select the best alternative.

He goes deeper to correctly lament the effect of "loss of values". He uses the example of marriage as a case where people that for religious, cultural, or personal reasons are able to simply decide that "they are married for life" have a happier marriage. It turns out that "always being in the market" creates dissatisfaction and tends to lead to a series of divorces, none of which produces a marriage as happy as the person who "limited their choices". He goes on to talk a bit about how "on average", the Amish are happier than the rest of us, and their lives are simpler and they have less choice. He somehow seems to miss the concept that they also believe in more than a material world and pure consumerism being the basis for a happy life.

It seems he manages to point out some items that are likely obvious to all but the most jaded pure materialist consumer, but misses the idea that deeper meaning doesn't depend on growing a beard, wearing black and living an agrarian lifestyle. For a man of ideas, he seems to miss the fact that ideas are way more powerful for humans than "things", and it is quite possible to realize that while living at even the forefront of the technological world. He also seems to somehow miss the fact that much of the "noise" of the modern world of choice can be filtered with variants of the very same technology that has created it. "Google" being a primary example, but there are countless others. In the area of electronic gadgetry for example, I like CNET for advice. I've decided that I will voluntarily limit my choices to some of their top picks, rather than do all the research myself. Therefore, no matter how many choices there are in the real world, my set of choices is small.

There is a lot of "left world view" in Paradox. I'm often struck by how the far left eventually decides that the "masses" can't be left with the full choice of the market economy, and "something must be done". It is also interesting how frequently they are drawn to the fringes of traditional isolated religious groups like the Amish to attempt to make their point. The left is often driven by envy to such a degree that they become fixated on even the idea that "someone may have chosen better", or "be happier", or even be "enabled" to POTENTIALLY make "better choices" or "live a better life". They tend to have an extreme problem though in their definition of "better". They seek to view economic choices in terms of "objective measures" like income or assets. They then seek to quantify "happiness" in the same way with some sort of "survey says" mentality.

To those who already see life as more than just a materialist chase, it becomes very evident that the "Paradox" thinking has completely missed most everything. A combination of sadness and the danger of the left is very visible as one realizes that once they have completed their "objective analysis", they see "no other alternative" than to forcibly limit choice for ALL in order to "increase happiness" by the measures that THEY choose.

Switchpod

PB Article

The son of a long time friend from work and fishing started up a Podcasting company on his own at age 15 and sold it this summer for $200K in stock and a $40K a year part-time salary to continue working on it. Small part of the opportunity in the new economy that gets not a whole lot of media attention. Note that while his monetary gain is much greater than other teens, he didn't "take anything away" from other teens working at local burger joints or stocking shelves. The value he created is new value, value that didn't exist prior to the innovation of creation of the company. While the left tends to look at all business as a "zero sum game" where when one succeeds, others are forced to fail, MOST of the modern information economy is not this way. New value is created and the entire market rises with the addition of the new value. The left will of course lament that the value creator usually benefits the most, but being on the left means that it is very hard to be happy about anyone doing well, because you have allowed envy to become your dominant thought vs appreciation for the success of others.

Hearts, Minds and Calcium

In the process of my physical for age 50 I was treated to a Cardiac CT scan. The procedure is relatively easy as medical tests go. You lay on a slab that moves you in and out of the big CT donut with some leads attached to your chest. The technology allows a calcium score to be calculated that is considered a new indicator for the potential of a cardiac event. Calcium in the arteries is "atherosclerosis" or "hardening of the arteries". It ISN'T "blockage", but they believe that it is a precursor to blockage. I managed to fail it very well with a score for my age that would put only 6 people out of 100 being worse off.

The test was a week ago Thursday, with the results the following day, so I got a full week to enjoy "limbo" relative to how bad this really is. Friday AM I took a stress test, which fortunately I passed with flying colors. A good hour was spent in the PM talking to a couple of I'm sure very high priced Mayo cardiologists. The bottom line is "it is another risk factor, but it is too early to give a solid % of exactly how bad it is". What it means for sure is "Lipitor, low cholesterol diet, lose weight, more medication to reduce blood pressure and be sure to keep up all the exercise".

Interestingly, we don't really have the technology to predict "sudden death heart attacks", although the Cardiac CT is often oversold as just that. At least at Mayo, the next test after the Cardiac CT is the stress test, and they have no inclination to do a Angiogram where they put a probe into the heart unless there is chest pain and/or a negative indicator on a stress test. Putting a probe into the heart is not without risk, and unless someone is 50% blocked or greater, they aren't going to stent it anyway. They will proceed with the same drug therapies that I'm now on in hopes of some level of reversal, or at least slowing the deposits so that the rest of the population catches up with the patient.

Everyone over "40 or so" carries around an increasing risk that "something will go wrong" and a piece of plaque (that nearly everyone that age has some of) will break off and lodge in the wrong place. When it does, things go bad in a hurry and life is in danger. They have a lot of theories about the mechanism; inflammation is a leading guess, and they check the blood for something called "C-reactive protein", yet another risk factor which was fortunately normal in my case.

So, I embark on an attempt to radically change my weight profile ... even though a relatively svelte Moose at 6'4" 280lbs, it is time to work toward the lower bounds of "lost Moosehood" in the lower 200lb register. Some nut claims that even for 6'4" and "massively boned" (size 14 ring) something like an anorexic 240 is "obese". "Living" seems a better idea than "living large", so a smaller feedbag is already in evidence.

Certainly I would have preferred a great score and no need to make any changes, but being given the opportunity to make changes and hopefully avoid a heart attack seems like a blessing that should be looked at positively. The "easy week" of weight loss is behind me with 6lbs down. It ALWAYS seems easy for the first week ... but when 10% of your bodyweight is 28lbs, it ought to be ;-(

I'm thinking that the logical thing is to "blame the skinny" and lay some sort of a "skinny tax" on them. I've seen some of those high metabolism types eat like there was no tomorrow and not put on weight. Such things are simply "not fair", and any decent Government would find some way to put those folks in their places as fast as possible! It must be Bush's fault that it hasn't been done already!

Will On Wal-Mart

George Will does a few great columns every year, this one is one of his best and WAY worth a read all the way through. Showing my ignorance of how long things live on the Internet, I'm going to both copy it in here and link it. Take your pick, the link is likely prettier, but once it is in here it gets copied to my e-mail, so it goes up in my 2.7GB free Google archive, which means I sure hope it lasts "forever".

I often comment on the nature of what I see as a "looking glass world"; we all have a remarkable tendency to exhibit the same traits or thoughts that we abhor in others in some form that is shifted from the original we think we hate. Like a mirror shows a reversed image. Many times those "shifts" are not as precise as a mirror, but they can be close; a person that constantly harps on greed is easy prey for its mirror, envy. Unfortunately, none of us is exempt from this human trait, and maybe the best we can hope for is awareness, but like awareness of many other things; say aging and death for example, mere knowledge does little to avoid our peril.

But potentially awareness can at least reduce our certainty. The religious can often fall prey to fundamentalism where whey believe that they have discovered the full truth of God and lose their humility. For liberals, typically lacking any God but man, there seems to be no choice but fundamentalism. The must believe in the rightness of their truth, since they have manufactured it, and have no higher power to appeal or bow to. Thus, condescension is pretty much a way of life for the left, and Will captures a piece of it very well here.

Liberalism As Condescension

September 14, 2006
Liberalism as Condescension
By George Will

EVERGREEN PARK, Ill. -- This suburb, contiguous with Chicago's western edge, is 88 percent white. A large majority of the customers of the Wal-Mart that sits here, less than a block outside Chicago, are from the city and more than 90 percent of the store's customers are African-American.

One of whom, a woman pushing a shopping cart with a stoical 3-year-old along for the ride, has a chip on her shoulder about the size of this 141,000 square- foot Wal-Mart. She applied for a job when the store opened in January and was turned down because, she said, the person doing the hiring "had an attitude.'' So why is the woman shopping here anyway? She looks at the questioner as though he is dimwitted and directs his attention to the low prices of the DVDs on the rack next to her.

Sensibly, she compartmentalizes her moods and her money. Besides, she should not brood. She had lots of company in not being hired: More than 25,000 people applied for the 325 openings.

Which vexes liberals like John Kerry. (He and his helpmeet last shopped at Wal-Mart when?) In 2004 he tested what has become one of the Democrats' 2006 themes: Wal-Mart is, he said, "disgraceful'' and symbolic of "what's wrong with America.'' By now, Democrats have succeeded, to their embarrassment (if they are susceptible to that), in making the basic numbers familiar:

The median household income of Wal-Mart shoppers is under $40,000. Wal-Mart, the most prodigious job-creator in the history of the private sector in this galaxy, has almost as many employees (1.3 million) as the U.S. military has uniformed personnel. A McKinsey company study concluded that Wal-Mart accounted for 13 percent of the nation's productivity gains in the second half of the 1990s, which probably made Wal-Mart about as important as the Federal Reserve in holding down inflation. By lowering consumer prices, Wal-Mart costs about 50 retail jobs among competitors for every 100 jobs Wal-Mart creates. Wal-Mart and its effects save shoppers more than $200 billion a year, dwarfing such government programs as food stamps ($28.6 billion) and the earned-income tax credit ($34.6 billion).

People who buy their groceries from Wal-Mart -- it has one-fifth of the nation's grocery business -- save at least 17 percent. But because unions are strong in many grocery stores trying to compete with Wal-Mart, unions are yanking on the Democratic Party's leash, demanding laws to force Wal-Mart to pay wages and benefits higher than those that already are high enough to attract 77 times more applicants than there were jobs at this store.

The big-hearted progressives on Chicago's City Council, evidently unconcerned that the city gets zero sales tax revenues from a half a billion dollars that Chicago residents spend in the 42 suburban Wal-Marts, have passed a bill that, by dictating wages and benefits, would keep Wal-Marts from locating in the city. Richard Daley, a bread-and-butter Democrat, used his first veto in 17 years as mayor to swat it away.

Liberals think their campaign against Wal-Mart is a way of introducing the subject of class into America's political argument, and they are more correct than they understand. Their campaign is liberalism as condescension. It is a philosophic repugnance toward markets because consumer sovereignty results in the masses making messes. Liberals, aghast, see the choices Americans make with their dollars and their ballots, and announce -- yes, announce -- that Americans are sorely in need of more supervision by ... liberals.

Before they went on their bender of indignation about Wal-Mart (customers per week: 127 million), liberals had drummed McDonald's (customers per week: 175 million) out of civilized society because it is making us fat, or something. So, what next? Which preferences of ordinary Americans will liberals, in their role as national scolds, next disapprove? Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet?

No. The current issue of The American Prospect, an impeccably progressive magazine, carries a full-page advertisement denouncing something responsible for "lies, deception, immorality, corruption, and widespread labor, human rights and environmental abuses'' and of having brought "great hardship and despair to people and communities throughout the world.''

What is this focus of evil in the modern world? North Korea? The Bush administration? Fox News Channel? No, it is Coca-Cola (number of servings to Americans of the company's products each week: 2.5 billion).

When liberals' presidential nominees consistently fail to carry Kansas, liberals do not rush to read a book titled "What's the Matter With Liberals' Nominees?'' No, the book they turned into a best-seller is titled "What's the Matter With Kansas?'' Notice a pattern here?
georgewill@washpost.com

9-11 +5

Like most things these days, I'm late with my 9-11 post. I'm sure there will be more on that later, but work, health, my school board job, and a few other odds and ends keep me slowed down on writing.

Five years have passed since 9-11. I remember the day well, I was in a meeting with a guy from Haifa Israel whose sister worked at the WTC (she got out OK). How many Americans can honestly say that they would have believed on this day 9-11-2001 that we would not have been attacked in the 5 years following? I'd assume very few, and that would include me. We had been attacked with relative frequency somewhere in the world during the '90s; the first WTC attack, Kovar Towers, the USS Cole, and other smaller attacks. It was only reasonable to assume that we would have more, and likely greater attacks. 9-11 taught most of us for a few weeks, and some of us for our lives that there was no limit to what these people were willing to do. The current Iranian president is on tape saying that if they attack Israel with enough nuclear power to kill the Israelis but Israel gets off enough to destroy Iran, it is still a "victory". Israel is gone, and billions of Muslims live on. The US and world press ignores this, as they did all the signs leading to 9-11.

The reason for not being attacked seems obvious. We went on offense. We are fighting Al Quaeda in Iraq and Afghanistan with relatively large military forces. We are fighting them and other groups around the world with CIA and other intelligence services. They are forced to hide for their survival, their funds are cut off, their communications are monitored and when caught, they are incarcerated for long periods of time with the best modern methods of interrogation. Their lot is much worse than it was prior to 9-11. Were the Democrats in power, we can be sure that the MSM would be telling everyone these facts, and calling them "success".

Who would have thought that our economy would be comparable to even better than it was during the late '90s after the dual shocks of the Internet bubble recession that started in 2000 followed by the 2001 shock of 9-11? Virtually nobody I'd suspect, it seemed flat out impossible. Add in a few huge hurricanes and oil price shocks, and it would have seemed ridiculously optimistic. We couldn't possibly be experiencing moderate to high growth in incomes and jobs and low inflation in that kind of world could we? Well, we are, but again almost nobody knows it.

The MSM has a HUGE problem that something like 1/2 of Americans will still indicate the Saddam had WMD. He only used them in the late 80's, and we found 500 rounds. Nope, that is the WRONG ANSWER, the right answer is "no WMD were ever found" ... because those 500 rounds were much less than expected, so they just don't count. However, on the economy something like 65% of Americans think it is "bad" which would mean that we only had a "good economy" in like '98, '84, and '53. Things have just been bad in this country most all the time by that logic. That however doesn't bother them, they are quite happy that the sheep got that one right!

On top of it all we have over 100K troops in Iraq, and have lost 3k military lives in defense of the country since 9-11. Name wars in which it took 5 years for the military losses to equal the civilian losses on day 1. Stumped? One; the Current War on Terror. That isn't really a war though, that is some sort of an action for "political benefit". It is politics of the oddest kind though ... again, something over 60% OPPOSE the war, and the MSM that often wants to claim it was all "for political purposes" expects a Democrat rout this fall because of an "unpopular war". The MSM keeps trying to make it into "Vietnam". Well, I guess Al Quada is telling America to "give up and go home" now and N Vietnamese used to do the same thing. Somehow though, I don't see these guys as the sort that are likely to have Jane Fonda come over and sit on a gun, and I don't think they are going to operate many prisons for US prisoners. One would think that the left would find Muslims that provide zero rights for women, pray 3 times a day, stone gays, and cut peoples heads off to be somewhat unappealing, but it goes to show that any group willing to fight America is popular with the left and the MSM.

Just like most anything else that happens, 9-11 pretty much just made everyone more of what they are. The right has more resolve to stand and fight for America and freedom around the world. The left has found a new ally in the never ending fight of anger and rage to "tear it all down". The battle is always here, it just looks a bit more stark when the issues are brought to the surface by an event like 9-11.

Working for Rove

I spent a couple hours Saturday AM working at the local Republican headquarters on one of the "Karl Rove evil secret mechanisms". The awful secret consists of a phone list, created from who knows where with a canned set of questions as a "survey" that are mark-sense for later reading into a computer.

You call the party, indicate that you are "taking a survey", and then go through a series of questions. Taxes, Gay Marriage, Gun Control, Abortion ... then you ask "party preference". Only if they specify Republican do you ask the next questions about registration and interest in volunteering. In any case, you remain polite and thank them for their time.

Depending on how they answer, even if they are Democrat, Independent, or "don't care", they will get targeted mailings. Democrats and the MSM find this "evil" ... Republicans should NEVER raise the issues of "God, Guns and Gays", since those issues are "unimportant". Of course, if the issues are "unimportant", then one would think that Democrats would just be willing to agree with the Republicans on them and get them off the table? No? Hmm, maybe they aren't THAT unimportant.

Prior to the time when I'm sure I exited 95% of the Democrats lists by making contributions to republicans large enough to show up on public lists, I'd get calls with questions like "Are you in favor of clean water", or "Do you think the rich should pay their fair share of taxes". I'd bet dollars to donuts that they were doing the exact same thing, but no doubt that was "grass-roots political action", and the folks thinking of it and carrying it out were to be admired from the perspective of the MSM. It really is all a matter of perspective.

Certainly not "fun or glamorous work", but I suspect it is the kind of work that if done over and over for years builds up the kinds of mailing lists and information that helps win elections. I suspect that I'll put in a few more hours this fall just out of motivation from the MSM telling me that any hope for Republicans is a lost cause. They may always be right, but it is fine with me to do my best in a lost cause.

Hollywood and Truth

We have no less a symbol of truth than Bill Clinton out telling ABC to "tell the truth" about 9-11.

We also have Harry Reid, Senate Minority leader in a letter to ABC not being too subtle about threatening their license:

Presenting such deeply flawed and factually inaccurate misinformation to the American public and to children would be a gross miscarriage of your corporate and civic responsibility to the law, to your shareholders, and to the nation.

The Communications Act of 1934 provides your network with a free broadcast license predicated on the fundamental understanding of your principle obligation to act as a trustee of the public airwaves in serving the public interest. Nowhere is this public interest obligation more apparent than in the duty of broadcasters to serve the civic needs of a democracy by promoting an open and accurate discussion of political ideas and events.

We urge you, after full consideration of the facts, to uphold your responsibilities as a respected member of American society and as a beneficiary of the free use of the public airwaves to cancel this factually inaccurate and deeply misguided program.

Hmm, lets see. Does anyone remember Fahrenheit 911? A guy named Michael Moore? A movie that re-defined "inaccurate", was praised in the press as a "Documentary", and Moore sat next to Jimmy Carter during the '04 Democrat Convention.

"Inaccurate"? Republicans didn't even threaten CBS license when they ADMITTED that they put on a NEWS STORY multiple times that was based on FAKE DOCUMENTS! If they had, there is a word that would have been all over the MSM. That word is "chilling". It shows up every time Republicans question the accuracy of any media creation.

I have no idea if the ABC show is accurate. I don't have any real problem with Democrats not liking the show and wanting parts or all of it pulled. A threat on the broadcast license seems like a bridge way too far, but it is FINE that they want to have their say about the program.

BUT, just look at the MSM! When Republicans had something to say of the proposed Reagan mini-series, we say "chilling" and worse all over. We heard of suppression of "free speech", and how "artistic freedom" was being abridged. Where is that talk now? The MSM CHEERED Fahrenheit 9-11 in an election year, and it wasn't a matter of a "couple scenes", the whole movie was complete propaganda.

MPR On Rumsfeld

I got to hear a few minutes of a great example of MPR "journalism" today on their "Mid Day" program. They opened by saying they were going to "discuss" Donald Rumsfeld and the Democrats moves to try to get him removed as Secretary of Defense. They introduced Joseph Galloway, and then "in the interest of full disclosure" announced that he has been trying to get Rumsfeld removed for THREE YEARS. To cover the other point of view, they had NOBODY! They didn't even manage their usual capability of covering both the left and the FAR LEFT. They just had one stooge blathering about how bad Rumsfeld was supposed to be.

As the Zen Masters say, "What is the sound of one hand clapping"? Yes, the general media and certainly Public Radio are in full "kill all the Republicans, take over both houses of congress and impeach Bush" mode. Of course, it may work ... it ALWAYS looks like it will, this was about the same time as the Dan Rather debacle in '04. They are going to try everything they can. Something like 65% of people are sheep enough to think that THIS economy is BAD. If they had seen Jimmuh Carter they would have just a tiny clue what a bad economy is. This economy is the best since the 80's , now better than even the Fornicator in Chiefs Internet bubble.

It is a real privledge to pay taxes for the Public Propoganda Station ... one would think they could put on somebody that even CLAIMED to be somewhat unbiased. Guess not, it is time to get all the sheep riled up and charging for the Democrat cliff. I imagine that the typical MPR sycophant ate it up like truth from on high.

In case you like pure rancid bias, or don't and want to see how the easily led think what they do, take a look at this. The picture pretty much tells the story without even listening.
The Drivel

Ideas Have Consequences, Richard Weaver

http://www.amazon.com/Ideas-Have-Consequences-Richard-Weaver/dp/022609006X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1454533869&sr=1-1&keywords=ideas+have+consequences

I finished the subject book by Richard Weaver over the weekend, and have to say that "The Closing of the American Mind" has a solid, and I think better pre-cursor in this book. Published in 1948, the VAST oversimplification of it is:

1). Once Transcendence was abandoned in the 14th century, we started down the road that has left human thought cut off from the greater reality of at least history, and to the best of an intellectual understanding, reality and truth itself.

2). The core reason is that once the higher function of "universal types" and "pure intellect" is given up, all that is left is material and supposedly objective measurement. The senses (that which does the measuring) take over, and there is nothing to stop the descent until it ends at "man is the measure of all things".

"The issue ultimately involved is whether there is a source of truth higher than, and independent of man; and the answer to the question is decisive for one's view of the nature and destiny of humankind. The practical result of nominalist philosophy is to banish the reality which is perceived by the intellect and to posit as reality that which is perceived by the senses".

Two elements in the book that give strong pause to me personally. One is the assertion that the reformation unleashed the forces that led to the decline and eventual at least effective loss of Western civilization. Being a Lutheran and a conservative, it gives one pause to consider that essentially such a combination can't exist in at least one intelligent world view.

The other areas are the related items of capitalism, technology, science, money and comfort. First, it is hard to argue that science and technology has not been a strong ally of the move to materialism and the worship of man. As a computer scientist and technologist however science and technology look much different from the inside. Yes, our modern tools have great leverage, but they fall far short of ultimate ideas and truth. However, is it practical to continue to advance technology and expect the bulk of mankind to be able to grasp true transcendent knowledge and truth? Not an easy question to answer, and Weaver would certainly answer it "no".

With no transcendence, man is left thinking that "comfort is happiness", and finds himself on an endless treadmill of competition to acquire the next convenience to give him comfort, until he ends up on a cruise ship, and bliss is achieved. Just joking ... ends up on a cruise ship with a book, and then ... ok, seriously.

I'm not going to claim that I've got this whole book wired, but it seems to me that there is nothing in science / technology / economics / etc that prevents SOME people from deciding that there ARE external perfect forms (eg God and religion), and "reaching ground" at some point for which the cruise ship or even a decent US middle class home close to a WalMart would be a justifiable point to declare the race to the ultimate comfort is now over, and it is good enough to consider THIS the equivalent of enough food, clothing and shelter to cover "primitive" materialist needs". Then we can light up the fireplace, open a Bass, and declare the search for real meaning in session. (yes, that is flip ... this line actually DOES give me pause, so I'm being flip)

BUT, he doesn't go there, and maybe he doesn't go there because I'm missing some impossibility. He seems to be a bit more hyper-smart than I'm going to grasp on one reading, but that is OK. I need to have some set of books that I hunt to the ends of the earth to get leather bound copies of (or try to talk my Sons into doing that for me some day). Somehow I think that particular consumptive paradox might be one that Weaver would approve of ;-)

I imagine that I'll try multiple blogs on this book, but in the meantime, this is on my philosophical "just buy it" list. Unless you are a raving liberal, and then you might just blow a gasket reading it!

The First to College

Saturday we took our eldest Son off to school a mere hour away. We carried the stuff to the room, put it all together, said our goodbyes, and headed home with hearts turning to lead. As plans are now, he will return in two weeks time for the weekend. He has been gone for nearly two weeks on trips away from home before, and there have been times with back to back Scout and Church camps that we have seen very little of him for longer than that. Intellectually it ought to be easy, but the emotions don't seem to agree.

At the bottom of it all, it is clear that he is no longer "ours". That has of course been less and less true the last few years, but his home was still here. We generally knew what he was up to pretty much all the time, and he was part of our life mostly on a daily basis. If not for the next week or two, then "pretty soon", and he would be back. He may yet be back again for the summer, but there is the knowledge of the transition. Not the same. It ought to be better, and it likely will be, but the arrow of life goes only one way. A point has been crossed and so much is now clearly only a memory not to be repeated.

Were he to still be here and wanting to "spend some more time", we would no doubt support him in that as well, but there would be tension. When the chick is grown too big for the nest, it is time to leave. Life lived the best it can be is at best "bittersweet" at times. The very lucky watch their children grow to go and live wonderful lives of their own on their own. We have been among the most lucky, and are well aware. Sometimes after a wonderful break we joke that "we ought not have so much fun, it makes it hard to come back to the real world". Love less and wish for less blessings?

No solution there. There is no real alternatives, certainly not desired ones, but love isn't one of those things that allows the heart to feel like the head knows it should sometimes. Loss, pride, concern, wishing, hoping, missing, Christmas is over, vacation is over, and the family pet died. Complaint? No, only reality. Our lives and our times together with all in all situations are timed. We live in time. One of the likely meanings of "eternity" is "outside of time". The idea of temporal and "it is over" is just not present. Easy to see Heaven and Hell in that definition.

We know of our blessing and good fortune, and no doubt in a few days or weeks our hearts will catch up to what the head knows is right. There is another Son to care for each day and hopefully not smother with the reaction of overcompensation. No doubt there are moments of bittersweet for the luckiest people in the world. We ought to know.

Rich get richer

That was the top headline in our local paper here. The completion would be of course "the poor get poorer". The media expects their gullible public to be just like Pavlov's dogs ... "What goes up"? ... well, of course "must come down". But what did the article REALLY say?

Well, it said that there are MORE "rich". Households earning $100-150K went from 4,444 to 7,409, and those earning over $200K went from 1,397 to 2,399. But wait, it DOESN'T say that "the rich got richer", it says there are "more rich". How about at the other end? Well, here they do some slight of hand, so we can't really know. They DO say that there are LESS in the under $10K category. 2,580 in '99, dropped to 1,985 in '05. Wouldn't that be GOOD news? One would think so, because it would seem to be that their implied headline is completely false, the poor DIDN'T get poorer, which of course they ONLY implied, not said.

The median income locally went to $57,667, it went to $52,024 in MN, and $46,242 nationally. I guess is it is "bad" that both MN and the local community have higher incomes than the next level of comparison. Would it be better if MN was LOWER than the national, and we were lower still than the state? I suspect not, I guess it is just "bad no matter what".

They did say that "the % of families whose income was below the poverty level" went up from 3.8 to 4.9%, BUT, they fail to mention what that level is, I imagine because that level almost certainly went up. They also don't mention "why", which looking around locally is almost certainly due to immigration which they are strongly in favor of. There are more immigrants, they generally take lower paying jobs, so the % below the increased poverty level goes up. We can't know that from their story.

Bias is a wonderful thing. A story that essentially all good news is characterized as bad news. Other than the obvious political reasons, what purpose does that serve?

Rumsfeld on Iraq

The following is stolen from the NY Post. Don't expect to see much coverage of this in the MSM, the sheep can't be allowed to graze on this kind of information, or they may become confused about the hopelessness of the task in Iraq or the evil of America.

August 30, 2006 -- EDITOR'S NOTE: The following is adapted from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's speech yesterday at the American Legion National Convention.

THE American Legion has achieved a great deal for our country since its founding in the months following World War I.

That year, 1919 turned out to be one of those pivotal junctures in modern history - the beginning of a period where, over time, a very different set of views would come to dominate discourse and thinking in the West. A sentiment took root that contended that, if only the growing threats that had begun to emerge in Europe and Asia could be appeased, then the carnage and destruction of World War I might be avoided.

It was, as Churchill observed, a bit like feeding a crocodile, hoping it would eat you last.

There was a strange innocence. Someone recently recalled one U.S. senator's reaction in September 1939, upon hearing that Hitler had invaded Poland to start World War II: "Lord, if only I could have talked with Hitler, all this might have been avoided." Think of that.

Once again we face the same kind of challenges in efforts to confront the rising threat of a new type of fascism.

Today, another enemy - a different kind of enemy - has also made clear its intentions - in places like New York, Bali, London and Madrid. But many have still not learned history's lessons.

We need to face the following questions:

* With the growing lethality and availability of weapons, can we truly afford to believe that somehow vicious extremists can be appeased?

* Can we really continue to think that free countries can negotiate a separate peace with terrorists?

* Can we truly afford the luxury of pretending that the threats today are simply "law enforcement" problems, rather than fundamentally different threats, requiring fundamentally different approaches?

* And can we truly afford to return to the destructive view that America - not the enemy - is the real source of the world's trouble?

We hear every day of new plans, new efforts, to murder Americans and other free people. Indeed, the plot recently discovered that would have killed hundreds - possibly thousands - of innocents on planes from Britain to the United States should have demonstrated to all that the enemy is serious, lethal and relentless.

But we find ourselves in a strange time:

* When a database search of America's leading newspapers turns up 10 times as many mentions of one soldier at Abu Ghraib who was punished for misconduct than mentions of Sgt. 1st Class Paul Ray Smith, the first recipient of the Medal of Honor in the War on Terror.

* When a Newsweek senior editor disparagingly refers to the brave volunteers in our Armed Forces as a "mercenary army."

* When the former head of CNN accuses the American military of deliberately targeting journalists and the former CNN Baghdad bureau chief admits he concealed reports of Saddam Hussein's crimes when he was in power so CNN could stay in Iraq.

* And when Amnesty International disgracefully refers to the military facility at Guantanamo Bay - which holds terrorists who have vowed to kill Americans, and is arguably the best run and most scrutinized detention facility in the history of warfare - as "the gulag of our times."

Those who know the truth need to speak out against these kinds of myths and lies and distortions being told about our troops and our country. This watchdog role is even more important today in a war that is to a great extent fought in the global media - to not allow the lies and the myths be repeated without question or challenge, so that at least the second and third draft of history will be more accurate than the quick first allegations.

In this "long war," any kind of moral and intellectual confusion about who and what is right or wrong can severely weaken the ability of free societies to persevere.

Our enemy knows this well. They frequently invoke the names of Beirut and Somalia - places they see as examples of American retreat and weakness. And as we have seen most recently in Lebanon, they design attacks and manipulate the media to try to demoralize public opinion. They doctor photographs of casualties, use civilians as human shields and then provoke an outcry when civilians are accidentally killed in their midst.

The good news is that most of the American people, though understandably influenced by what they read and see in the media, have inner gyroscopes and good centers of gravity.

And I am confident that over time they will evaluate what is happening and come to wise conclusions.

One soldier, who recently volunteered for a second tour in Iraq, likely captured the feelings of many of his peers. In an e-mail to friends, he wrote:

"I ask that you never take advantage of the liberties guaranteed by the shedding of free blood, never take for granted the freedoms granted by our Constitution. For those liberties would be merely ink on paper were it not for the sacrifice of generations of Americans who heard the call of duty and responded heart, mind and soul with 'Yes, I will.' "

I believe the question is not whether we can win. It is whether we have the will to persevere. I believe that Americans do have that steel. And that we have learned the lessons of history, the folly of turning a blind eye to danger, and of ignoring our responsibilities.

Being Left Means Never Learning

CNN Exposes the Leaker

After years of political posturing and braying in the press about "Bush trying to attack and destroy people that expose his lies", we see where the lies are. They are with the folks that made up the story and pretended that it was a story all along. Armitage was 2nd at the State Department, was not at all one of the "inner circle of evil" that the press likes to create around Bush / Cheney / Rove / Rumsfeld. By his own admission, it was "inadvertent", and as has been discovered during the investigation, that was a non-issue anyway since Plame was not undercover (even though the MSM refuses to ever come out and say that).

So where does the administration go to get back their reputations and especially Scooter Libby who is under indictment for "perjury" since he apparently remembered some chronology in this non-case wrong? Where are the scathing articles about time wasted by Democrats in a purely political witch-hunt that has been revealed as being about absolutely nothing? Don't hold your breath.

In order to stay on the left, there is an aswful lot of reality that has to be ignored, and this is but a tiny part. Being a lefty means having your set of stories that may be fake, but you like them, so you have decided they are "fake but accurate". The fact that this story has now been completely proven to be about nothing will change nothing. The MSM and the people of the left will still treat it as truth and use it as an example of how "Bush lied, and then attacked people that tried to expose the truth", or how "he claimed he would prosecute leakers, but never did".

Howard Hughes

In a fit of light summer reading, I read "Howard Hughes: The Untold Story" by Peter Brown and Pat Broeske. While the book was too highly detailed for my taste, and focused far too much on his sex life, it is indeed an amazing story. Here is a case of a guy that was clearly a genius, but also very clearly was poorly raised by a disturbed mother and no doubt inherited the genetics of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Today, he could have been relatively easily treated, but the combination of his chemistry, head injuries, and incompletely cured syphilis combined to move his mental problems into psychosis that cost him and those around him dearly.

The idea of having a 320' ocean going yacht with a crew of over 30 that he could sail anywhere in the world in complete luxury, along with his Sikorsky S-43 twin-engine amphibian that could carry a crew of six and enough fuel to cross the Atlantic. He used both to maximum advantage with women and business associates. He would fly coast to coast, land on the East River in NYC, taxi up to a pier and do the night on the town with Kate Hepburn or some other movie starlet.

Yes, he certainly was a playboy, but he was also a self-educated movie mogul, businessman extraordinaire  when he decided to be, test pilot, and self-taught aircraft designer. At the time of his July 1938 flight around the world, he was a household name almost on par with what Lindberg had been earlier. His innovations in the use of the Constellation at TWA, air racers, and even with the "Hercules", better known as "The Spruce Goose" were hugely innovative in moving aviation forward.

He is often held up as one of those cautionary tales of vast wealth, but it is likely better to think of him as a cautionary tale of untreated mental illness. Had is OCD been treated with modern methods, it is unlikely that he would have died as alone and unhappy as he did.

News from Iraq

The following stolen from WSJ "Best of the Web". They have a great wit ... Murtha has said "there is nothing good the toops can to by being in Iraq", and they should be "re-deployed over the horizon, to some place like Okinawa".

We Get a Lot of Smiles and Waves
"Military Stryker vehicles saturating Baghdad's most dangerous neighborhoods have been credited with what Iraqi authorities say is a 30 percent drop in violence in the city since the deployment of 5,000 additional U.S. troops to the region," ABC News reports from the Iraqi capital:

While U.S. figures show a 22 percent drop in violence, either way, its good news for the troops.

"It's been great. We get a lot of smiles and waves," said Lt. Patrick Paterson of the 114th Cavalry.

One of the most dramatic changes has occurred in the Dora neighborhood. In July up to 20 people were killed in the area every day. As part of this new military effort, U.S. and Iraqi troops have been searching thousands of buildings in an effort to stop car bombs. . . .

And there are signs it's working. During 14 days of patrols in Dora, there has been just one killing.

We look forward to hearing Rep. John Murtha, the Democrats' leading military strategist, explain how this could be better done from Okinawa.

Sometimes the Predictions are Quick

A couple days ago I blogged on how the MSM tells us as much about their bias with what they DON'T say as with what they do and asserted that if it is possible to predict what they will do in the future, then they have to be biased. Link The future isn't predictable (or we would all be making big $$ on Wall Street), so if you can predict the MSM, then they are following something other than the news. Little did I realize that they would prove my case quite so rapidly.


The snap above shows reporting on a tropical depression that MAY become a tropical storm, and an article on the potential for a "mega-storm" that is nothing more than a bedtime story about what COULD happen ... along with asteroids, tidal waves, earthquakes, and volcanoes ... Today, tomorrow, or "in 100 years". NEITHER story mentions that hurricanes are WAY off the predicted pace for this year. Now if Bush had predicted that the deficit would drop at some rate and there was a story about the deficit MAYBE dropping, or how far it "might drop", do you think they MIGHT point out that the rate of the deficit dropping was "off predictions"? Nah, the press is "unbiased"!

Barone, Covert Enemies

Michael Barone is a genius, and he says something here that I've been trying to say for years, but he says it better than I likely ever will. Read it all, it is WELL worth the time. Our Covert Enemies

Key excerpts for posterity:

In our war against Islamo-fascist terrorism, we face enemies both overt and covert. The overt enemies are, of course, the terrorists themselves. Their motives are clear: They hate our society because of its freedoms and liberties, and want to make us all submit to their totalitarian form of Islam. They are busy trying to wreak harm on us in any way they can. Against them we can fight back, as we did when British authorities arrested the men and women who were plotting to blow up a dozen airliners over the Atlantic.

Our covert enemies are harder to identify, for they live in large numbers within our midst. And in terms of intentions, they are not enemies in the sense that they consciously wish to destroy our society. On the contrary, they enjoy our freedoms and often call for their expansion. But they have also been working, over many years, to undermine faith in our society and confidence in its goodness. These covert enemies are those among our elites who have promoted the ideas labeled as multiculturalism, moral relativism and (the term is Professor Samuel Huntington's) transnationalism.

Nevertheless, the default assumption of our covert enemies is that in any conflict between the West and the Rest, the West is wrong. That assumption can be rebutted by overwhelming fact: Few argued for the Taliban after Sept. 11. But in our continuing struggles, our covert enemies portray our work in Iraq through the lens of Abu Ghraib and consider Israel's self-defense against Hezbollah as the oppression of virtuous victims by evil men. In World War II, our elites understood that we were the forces of good and that victory was essential. Today, many of our elites subject our military and intelligence actions to fine-tooth-comb analysis and find that they are morally repugnant.

No need to add anything, genius has spoken.

Mere Christianity

C. S. Lewis Mere Christianity is a book that should be read by all, atheist, Christian, and agnostic. Lewis was all of the above at some time in his life, and he was one of the intellectual giants of the 20th century. It is hard to believe that this book resulted from talks he gave on the BBC from 1942 to 1944 on the Christian faith. Times have changed.

One point of his conversion that I find quite interesting.

"Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God does not exist - in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless - I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality - namely my idea of justice - was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning."

The decision to believe in God is still a decision, this "proves" nothing. Anything that can come of intelligence and order CAN also come of randomness. As I've said before, God isn't going to force you to believe in him, you are welcome to worship chaos and meaninglessness. Down that path, the highest moral certainly is "what feels good". You may dress it up as "what feels good for the most people", but it is still a human determination about "pleasure". However, the Lewis formulation on meaning is still a nice try.

In chapter 4 he makes one of the best statements of not only why Christ had to die, but why nobody is "saved by their own decision".

"Remember, this repentance, this willing submission to humiliation and a kind of death is not something God demands of you before he will take you back and while he could let you off of if he chose: it is simply a description of what going back to him is like. If you ask God to take you back without it, you are really asking him to take you back without going back. It cannot happen. Very well then, we must go through it. But the same badness which makes us need it makes us unable to do it."

He then goes through a discussion of how God himself is unable to help us in his God state; ...

"But supposing God became a man - suppose human nature which can suffer and die was amalgamated with God's nature in one person - then that person could help us. He could surrender his will, and suffer and die, because he was man; and he could do it perfectly because he was God.".

The chapter that hits home to me the most was chapter 8, "The Great Sin". ...

"There is no fault which makes man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves. And the more we have it in ourselves, the more we dislike it in others. 

The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-conceit: and the virtue opposite to it in Christian morals, is Humility. ... According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil is Pride."

He goes on to talk how it is of course pride that makes Satan, and of course one can't be human and be without some of this most grievous of sins. In the modern world, it has become very common to refuse to acknowledge God at all, but even for those that would like to do so, removal of pride is a great gift.

"The real test of being in the presence of God is, that you either forget yourself altogether or see yourself as a small, dirty object. It is better to forget about yourself altogether". There isn't a lot to be added to that.

I'm not going to go on any more. I know it is a book that has changed many lives for the better, and no doubt made some more angry and bitter as well, but that is certainly not the intent of it. It is with certainty a "great book" in that it takes on the questions of most fundamental meaning to a human. Is this all there is? C.S. Lewis makes a marvelous case that it is only the beginning.

Why "Everyone" Believes

Anyone notice anything missing on the news this year? What about Hurricanes? They seem to be strangely absent, yet we were assured last year that due to global warming there would be more and more hurricanes every year.
2006 would be WORSE!" Take a look at Hurricanes Below Normal to see just how far below last year we are.

What does it mean? Who knows? The point is that the media knows that it is very difficult to react to what you DON'T see, so they feed us the stories that they want us to believe, and leave off the stories that don't fit with their model. They like global warming, it fits their model, people that buy into global warming vote the way they like, so we get a lot of information about how true and dangerous global warming is. When something is happening that just doesn't fit the media model, we just don't hear it and most of the population just goes along hook line and sinker.

Be a true radical! Free yourself from only listening to the MSM and read and learn "outside the lines". You too can think for yourself, and once you do, you will never go back to the processed MSM gunk that the rest of the sheep are feeding on exclusively. Unlike the sheep though, once you think outside the box, you don't have to be on any "restricted diet", you will be ready to look at information from all sources critically. You can look at BOTH CNN and Fox News, and understand the viewpoints behind each.

Then you can have YOUR viewpoint, and that is the most refreshing of all.

What if hurricanes DO start up now? That is OK too ... you don't have to live by ideology like the rest of the sheep while being told that you are "unbiased". It is enough to know that if the number of hurricanes were CLOSE to the predictions by now, it would be a MAJOR story. Just watch and discover, if some biggies happen, it will be right back front and center and interpreted to fit their model of global warming. If they don't happen, you will never hear, and they will never let you know. You can predict the future behavior of the press. Since you know the real world isn't predictable like that, you know they have to be biased.

Part of "intelligence" is a mental model that maps to reality, and you can test that by seeing if your mental model makes accurate predictions about reality. It is hard, because we all love to be right, and never wrong, but one never really learns that way. The MSM model is tempting because if lets you live the fantasy of always being right. As long as you agree with them and follow only them, you will see ONLY things that show that their model is right. You won't have to suffer the pain of being wrong, since you can always agree with them, be with "the majority" on a day to day basis and know that any ACTUAL "inconvenient truths" will be dutifully ignored. Even better, some nice distracting story will always grab the front page to help you forget that something that was supposed to be happening isn't , or to tell you that something happening (like the current good economy), "really isn't". Just believe, and you can be happy.

The only problem is then you are a sheep living the life that is being fed to you, and you never get to be you and to have your viewpoint. You don't learn and grow. OK with the Democrats and MSM, but it ought not be OK with YOU!

Brave New World

The education in the small Northern WI town in which I grew up wasn't exactly "prep school", and I didn't manage to really get the idea that "reading/education is fun for it's own sake" until a few years into a corporate career when "making a living", at least in the sense of food/shelter/clothing/Bass Beer became assured enough that I felt I could "waste some time" on recreational reading. I finally got around to reading Aldous Huxley: "Brave New World".

Other than a rather strange obsession with sex, and the kind of almost cute replacement of god with "Ford", I doubt that it will be memorable. The rise of consumerism and the need for perpetual mental occupation with nothing of meaning seems to be a pretty good prediction of where modernism moved. His writing style has been criticized, but while I didn't think it added much, it also didn't get in the way for me.

While Huxley is concerned with the masses being "infantile", the book is founded on that infantile idea that there is "some controller" or "some conspiracy", or "some secret human knowledge" that is someone helping "those in the know" and enslaving the rest of humanity. Oh if it were only so, then such "knowledge" COULD "get out", unfortunately, it doesn't exist and a bunch of fallible humans are all just making it up as we trundle along.

Pictures

Ok, there are some pictures out there now

The URLs don't seem to edit in very well with the .Mac stuff, although the upload from iPhoto is very nice and simple.

Macaulay Hatchery where fish ranching vs fish farming is done. Fish farming is illegal in AK, and it involves big pens and keeping the fish captive. In fish ranching, a hatchery is built, some salmon eggs are obtained, hatched, and the fingerlings are "imprinted" on the chemical composition of the water at the hatchery site, and then releases. Seven years later, they come back and fight to get into the hatchery. We happened to be there as this was happening. 100's of thousands of salmon boiling the water in the bay in front of the hatchery and fighting up the fish ladder.

We saw the Mendenhall Glacier outside Juneau.

The ship went into College Fjord where we saw beautiful mountains and glaciers.

We spent the last two days of the trip in Seward Alaska, surrounded by beautiful snow capped mountains, but breating sea level air.

Lieberman Loses

The angry left defeats the sitting Senator from Connecticut and VP candidate from 2000 in the primary. We live in radical times. The MSM of course refuses to see the angry left as “radical” at all, since they are so close to what the reporters themselves believe. Even to come up with their usual leftward slant, they feel that they are “pulling punches” and forced to be “conservative” by their editors and the owners of the media outlets that they work for. Their hearts are over with the wing of the Democrat party that managed to defeat Lieberman in the primary.

When I hooked up at the Anchorage Airport, Time/CNN was already lamenting the thought that the Republicans would be able to “exploit this”. Their little articl was pretty weepy about “Just when the Democrats should be in the drivers seat with Bush’s low poll numbers, trouble in the mid-east, etc, they will “use this” to try to develop a “wedge” to their advantage. Hardly seems fair … somehow, all the of the reasons for disliking Bush are “real”, but the Democrats themselves voting out a guy that was good enough to be a VP candidate 6 years ago is some sort of a “fake issue”.

While the media spends a ton of time trying to make the Republican party out to be “radical”, “extreme” and “out of the mainstream”, it is pretty clear which party that is actually true of. Lieberman is a moderate Democrat, but WAY less so than Olympia Snow, Lincoln Chafee, or even Arlen Specter are “moderate Republicans”. Lieberman is more the Democrat equivalent of John McCain in the Republican party, or even in many ways George Bush.

The reasons that Bush’s poll numbers are as low as they are is because he is quite moderate, and loses at least he poll favorable ratings from 10-20% of the Republican party … the “no social programs, isolationism, budget balance at all costs, close the border if you have to shoot Mexicans” wing of the party. The media is pretty quiet about that wing right now, since they are just happy to see Bushes numbers low, and certainly don’t want to portray him in any way as a “moderate”.

So does the right wing of the Republican party stay home in November as the MSM and the Democrats hope? Does the leftward tilt of the Democrats bring more folks to the Republican side from the middle ground of the Democrats (a trend that has been going on since Reagan)? These are key factors on which the election will turn, at least we know where the MSM stands.

I'm Back

We arrived back home at 2AM Thursday, and worked the last couple of days, so still in catch up mode. Some significant posting will likely happen over the weekend since some posts were written on the trip, but not uploaded. So, continuity may suffer as it may look like I'm "still on the cruise" since that is where the posts were written.