Old World Plagues with New World Incompetence and Immorality

Without anyone taking notice, we’ve become a nation with a privileged and corrupt ruling class and a permanently entrenched bureaucracy. It’s like we’ve adopted the worst elements of the British class system and the French civil service system.

I could enumerate political scandals all day long, but let’s just take the most recent one as an example. Senator Max Baucus hooked up with a staff member. He then went on to nominate her for federal prosecutor in Montana. In the meantime the woman, Melodee Hanes, was meeting with Baucus’s divorce attorney as the attorney was plotting the senator’s strategy to dump his wife.

When things started to look even too ugly for Baucus, Hanes withdrew her name for the position in Montana and slid into a job at the Justice Department. Does anyone think that her, ahem, connection with Baucus has nothing to do with her ability to get a high-paying government job?

The nation has been gleefully following the details of Tiger Woods’s infidelity. At least Woods had enough character to step away from his profession to try to put his family life back together. How often does this happen in politics? Former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer resigned, but I suspect that was more because he was involved with illegal prostitution. Had he been a garden variety adulterer, he would have probably dug in his heels like South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford.

There are dozens of pundits today saying that Baucus’s cheating doesn’t matter. This is the same reaction many, if not most, had when Bill Clinton was found to be an adulterer for the umpteenth time. I ask one simple question: Why do we think that politicians who have broken their vows to their wives and husbands won’t also turn their backs on their oath to uphold the constitution?

We keep returning these people to office. We have developed a class of career politicians who expect to hold office until they retire. And, on the slim chance they lose their office, they slide easily into lobbying jobs and onto boards of directors. It’s just a House of Lords by another name.

When I was younger and thinking about career paths, the predominant attitude toward government jobs was that they paid less than the private sector, but they were more secure. In other words, government workers accepted somewhat lower wages in exchange for greater job security.

In the last couple of years the number of government jobs has exploded and the average government worker now makes $70,000 per year. The average private sector worker makes $40,000 per year. With this pay differential and the security of a government job, where do you think most people are going to want to work?

How did this situation get turned upside down? Blame the new ruling class. As we become more dependent as a nation on the federal government, we are far more likely to return the same people back to Washington: congressmen and senators who won’t rock the boat and derail the gravy train, if you’ll excuse the mixed metaphorical cliches. People are adverse to change, especially if their jobs depend on things remaining the same. Allow those public employees to unionize and you have a recipe for disaster.

And that’s what we have. A disaster.

Wherein I offer the shortest and most insightful blog ever on our current president, Barack Hussein Obama

What a moron.

Obamacare for Everything

It looks like the feds want to bring Obamacare to ISPs by controlling what they allow on their networks. I was reading some comments and I want to share one in particular because I have heard this sentiment several times in the last few days. The person commenting was saying that increased regulation is good and difficult to argue with because, "we are living through the bleak aftermath of an economic collapse created by too little regulation."

First let's quickly examine the main presupposition underlying this statement, that the current recession was caused by "too little regulation." That's like saying automobile accidents are caused by too few cops on the road. No, highway accidents are caused by drivers screwing up. Behind so much of the current push for bigger government is the idea that with just the right committees, advisers, and regulations we can fix all of our problems, or in other words, create a utopia. You see, we have really smart people in government right now, and we can trust them to come up with the correct "plans" for our economy.

If you want to see the ultimate outcome of a planned economy, look no further than Cuba. They have committees, advisers, and regulations to cover everything. I will trade the cyclical recessions of the free market system for the chronically under productive misery of a government regulated and planned economy any day.

I don't think this comparison is unfair because most reporters and commentators have missed a major theme of Obamacare for the economy. President Obama has a vision of what he believes the US economy should look like and he is implementing "plans" to realize his vision. The big issue at the moment is healthcare, 1/6 of our GDP. He thinks it's all wrong the way it is now. Whatever you believe about the "government option," no one can argue that Obama wants to establish a myriad of government panels to guide doctors and hospitals how to best do their jobs.

The assumption here is that the people who are actually doing the work are completely ignorant about how to best do their jobs. Doctors are always ordering the wrong tests. Hospitals have no idea how to run their business. Private insurers are bloated by inefficiency and greed. But committees in Washington will (the heavens open bathing us all in pure white light) be able to guide these poor fools to the truth.

This is just a continuation of what we have already seen. Obamacare applied to the auto industry resulted in the sacking of the GM's CEO and is pushing automakers (heavens open again) into business models centered around environmentally sensitive cars. This will be the ultimate demise of the US auto industry. Rather than let the marketplace guide auto production, Obama insists that his vision of the green future must guide production.

Four legs good, two legs bad. Planned economy good, market economy bad.

Look, I don't know how much clearer President Obama could make this. He repeatedly lectures the American people telling us that our future lies in "green" industry. If we get to this so-called "green" economy via market forces, fine. But if anyone, Obama or any future president, tries to regulate and muscle the American economy into this utopian green vision, it will be a disaster.

Pay attention the next time President Obama speaks on these issues. I want to give you a simple listening guide. First President Obama will declare how he is a firm supporter of the "free market system" and believes it's the "best system to guide our economy." Most people stop listening at this point, relieved that President Obama is a free market guy.

But next he'll start outlining all the ways he thinks government should curb, regulate, and direct the "free market." Forget about the pro-free market rhetoric, this gives us a much better clue as to what Obama really believes.

Fixing the British Healthcare System in My Sleep

It turns out one of the ways the bureaucrats in England think they can improve their National Healthcare System is by somehow getting NHS workers to stop calling in sick so often.

Here's the way it breaks down:

NHS employees on average call in sick 10.7 days each year. This is one full day above the 9.7 day average for all public sector employees. (Gee, why do I suspect that government employees in England get 10 paid sick days per year?)

In case you're wondering, private sector employees in England take 6.4 sick days each year.

Officials are looking at all sorts of health and wellness issues and scheming expensive ways to bring down the NHS employee sick days.

I can save them the trouble. Here's the answer: privatize the healthcare system. The statistics indicate that this move alone should bring healthcare workers sick days down to about 6.4 per year.

You don't have to thank me.

More Moveon.org Disinformation

In response to Moveon.org's TOP FIVE HEALTH CARE LIES—AND HOW TO FIGHT BACK:

1. Of course President Obama doesn’t want to euthanize your grandma. (Although by his own words, he might prefer she take pain pills rather than get an operation.) However, do you want government-backed end-of-life counseling when there will certainly be overwhelming pressures to keep healthcare costs down? The pressure on the poor and handicapped to make themselves less of a burden on society will be powerful.

2. Just because the bill has “words” that say it will not outlaw private insurers doesn’t guarantee there will continue to be private insurers. If one of the options is a public “health insurance” that has the full faith and credit of the US government behind it, not to mention Congress and the President, it will eventually put private insurers out of business. In candid moments lawmakers say this very thing.

3. Of course President Obama doesn’t want Soviet-style rationing. Actually, the Soviets didn’t want it either. There is rationing with any system. The question is: would you rather have the free market allocate the resources, or federal bureaucrats? I agree our healthcare system must be improved. I don’t believe it needs a total redesign.

4. True, Obama is not secretly plotting to cut Medicare. He is very open about it. Anyone who believes the government can cut $200 billion out of Medicare without reducing the care it provides is dreaming. And if you do believe this, by the way, you are signing on to the proposition that the government that allowed this “fraud and abuse” in the first place is now suddenly capable of running a lean-mean healthcare machine. Right.

5. When the government passed the income tax, lawmakers guaranteed no one would ever pay more than six percent. When they passed social security they guaranteed no one would ever pay more than two percent. Medicare is not funded. Bush’s Medicare drug reform is already under-funded. Whenever a politician from either party says something will pay for itself, grab your wallet. Can we please learn something from history?

And finally, puleeeeze, Moveon.org? Gimme a break.

Obama's Fight for, er I mean against, Civil Liberties

Bush waged his war on terrorists. Obama wages his war on dissidents.

If the truth may be told, both “wars” threaten civil liberties. Bush’s war threatened the civil liberties of terrorists and a small group of ACLU-type terrorist sympathizers. Obama’s war threatens anyone who opposes his policies and has the courage to say so publicly.

We live in an imperfect world. Which civil-liberty-threatening war do you prefer?

My wife said this morning that for the first time she was “scared” by what Obama and the Democrat operatives were doing to silence the political opposition. As I read through various news stories and political commentaries, the word “terrified” started popping up. Something unprecedented is happening in this nation.

Our president started his career as a community organizer. But when communities of Americans who hold moderate and conservative political views “organize” it is suddenly a bad thing. If a community of doctors, or (shudder) insurers, organize it is evil.

Get ready for a mega-dose of the truth: whether we leave our health care system primarily in the hands of private insurance companies, or we go entirely to a government-run single-payer system, costs are going to increase.

Here’s the difference:
The government-run system will cover increased costs by raising your taxes and rationing care, although it will never be called “rationing.” The insurance-based system will cover increased costs by raising premiums and rationing care, although it will never be called “rationing.”

These facts are undeniable. The advantage of the system based on private insurance is that it can have the element of competition injected into it, which will tend to decrease the rate of premium hikes. There is nothing to check increased costs in the government system. In fact, citizens will perceive health care to be “free” and we know what happens when people think things are free.

Let’s put all our cards on the table: Has any federal program ever been known for saving us money?

Believe it or not, sometimes in private industry middle managers lose their jobs to streamline corporate operations. How often do mid-level civil service system bureaucrats get laid off? Does anyone locked into the civil service system ever lose his job except for extreme malfeasance?

What should we do? Level the playing field. Give employees the money that went to their insurance and let them spend it as they see fit. Give the self-employed the same tax advantages businesses receive when they purchase health insurance.

Build more medical schools and nursing schools. Encourage more use of nurse practitioners.

If the uninsured are clogging up our emergency rooms for minor medical problems, establish an adjunct to the emergency room that is staffed by nurse practitioners who can handle minor problems.

Limit malpractice settlements to actual damages. Eliminate punitive damages. When doctors screw up badly, take away their licenses. That should be punitive enough and send a message to the medical profession.

Give patients access to some quality of care rating system for physicians and hospitals. The fast food place where I grab a burger has a health department rating posted for everyone to see. Are doctors and hospitals any less critical to my well being?

Adios American Pie

In Detroit, a rustbelt city busy waving bye-bye to the auto industry, there are plans to split the burg into a collection of small urban centers separated from each other by countryside. This reverse-supersizing is already well on the way to implementation in Flint, Michigan.

I remember touring some Mayan ruins several years ago. A pyramid and a few other impressive stone structures stood restored surrounded by neatly trimmed lawn. I climbed to the top of the pyramid and peered out over the jungle. The guidebook described how the city originally spread for miles in every direction. But for reasons unknown to us, the Mayans abandoned it, giving the entwining vines the only opening they needed to take back what had been theirs.

I imagine some day archeologists will explore the area we now call “Detroit” and conclude that at one time a large, vibrant people group—future anthropologists will call them something like Factory Workers Americanus—had inhabited a vast area but apparently abandoned the land for some reason which, by then, will be lost to history.

The day after I started working on this blog, I came across another item that does not portend well for this nation. WWMT in Kalamazoo, Michigan reports, “More than 20 of the state's 83 counties have reverted deteriorating paved roads to gravel in the last few years, according to the County Road Association of Michigan.” It only costs about $10,000 per mile to grind up old pavement and replace the road surface with gravel. To repave costs $100,000 per mile. This phenomena isn’t isolated in Michigan. According to WWMT, although the trend is biggest in Michigan, it is happening in other states as well.

When Charles Erwin Wilson, then GM president, was on his way to being President Eisenhower’s Secretary of Defense, he told the Senate, “…for years I thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa." Certainly Michigan’s troubles can be directly traced to the failing auto industry. Was Wilson speaking a truth perhaps bigger than even he thought at the time?

The American automobile has been the icon of the good life in the United States for the last 60+ years. It enabled the invention of something called “suburbia” which set the stage for modern America, the America that became the leader of the free world.

But now the automotive heartland is plowing itself under and letting its roads revert to ruts. Can the rest of the nation be far behind?

More truth than you can take

Want to raise money without raising taxes? How about this: US out of Germany. Better yet: US out of everywhere. Then let's allow countries to bid on our presence. Our troops provide protection and pump billions of dollars into the economies of the countries where we have bases. That should be worth something to the "host" countries.

• • •

If Presidents Bush and Obama have accomplished nothing else, they have certainly brought into focus the social divide between conservatives and liberals in our nation:

Conservatives believe in freedom which is tempered by responsibility and the belief in eternal, transcendent truths.

Liberals believe in freedom as unfettered permissiveness with no absolute truth. Pornography on public school and library computers. In-your-face expression of homosexual (and heterosexual) behavior. Violent pornographic lyrics blaring in public. Video games that portray the most gruesome killings imaginable.

On security issues, conservatives want to maintain a safe society in which responsible citizens of all stripes can exercise their rights and freedoms while liberals believe the highest good is to protect the rights and freedoms of those who most directly threaten the rights and freedoms of responsible citizens. For example, liberals object to snooping on people talking to known terrorists, yet advise police to start snooping on people sporting Palin bumper stickers.

Conservatives desire to protect the innocent while liberals desire to protect the guilty. We see this most starkly in that conservatives oppose abortion while liberals oppose capital punishment.

Tell me where I’m wrong.

• • •

MISCELLANEA: Iran Clones Goat. I'll let you, valued reader, build a joke around this news item. And not to be outdone, scientists at Dubai's Camel Reproduction Center (this place actually exists) have cloned a camel, of course…Want to cut oil imports? Make all the roads toll roads tomorrow…Newspaper closings. As we depend on electronic media we open ourselves to info disruption by enemy hackers or EMI…The day I read about thousands of government workers being laid off the same way I've been reading about factory workers, I'll know someone in Washington is serious about saving money… Are you as tired of President Obama's "nose in the air" national lectures as I am? His arrogance is overwhelming.

• • •

"The impact of climate change is a tremendous risk to the security and well-being of our countries," Nancy Pelosi announced to a group in China. Exactly what is the risk to our security if the world warms up or cools down a few degrees? Or to our "well-being"? Explain please. It's just hyperbole, nothing more. Isn't it ironic, by the way, that perhaps the biggest socialist in our government, Nancy Pelosi, went to the world's biggest socialist/communist nation, and found that they are more committed to growing their private sector than we are?

• • •

During the campaign no one dared whisper Hussein when referring to the candidate's name, but now President Obama virtually insists on using this Muslim moniker. As part of his rapprochement to the Islamic world, our president asserted that the US is one of the world's largest Muslim nations if you count the number of Muslims in the population. As soon as people started to crunch the numbers it turns out that even with the most generous estimate of the number of Muslims living in the USA, the country would be no more than the world's 34th largest Muslim nation, behind world powers such as Burkina Faso and Tajikistan. Another lie from BHO. (Isn't that an airport abbreviation?)

• • •

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life,” Judge Sonia Sotomayor, Obama's pick for the Supremes, said repeatedly.

Of course I disagree with her, but if what she said is true, I know one thing: a wise Latina woman who happened to be a judge aspiring to higher office would have had the sense not to say as much publicly.

The cure for cancer and arrogance

Environmentalists make an interesting point when they plead for saving large tracts of wilderness to protect endangered plant life arguing that the plants might hold the keys to curing cancer or other illnesses. The same folks favor unfettered abortions ignoring the possibility that we might be killing the future researchers who will discover these cures.

I was just about to start this sentence by typing "radical environmentalists" but I paused for a moment and tried to delineate for myself the differences between an "environmentalist' and a "radical environmentalist" and frankly, I can't think of any. Do you know any issues on which a garden-variety environmentalist and a radical environmentalist will disagree? I don't.

When I lived in California's Mendocino County it was the center of gravity for Earth First!. I got to see a number of Earth First!ers stage various protests. They drove the oldest, most beat up, highest polluting cars to their protests where they screamed that everyone else was killing the planet. I suppose a few hitch hiked around the countryside depending on the kindness of productive individuals.

• • •

Some social chasms that have been growing throughout the last couple of decades in America are beginning to be dramatically exposed with the Obama administration. Things that people would not say in public are now being spoken for all to hear.

Conservative pundits have long charged that liberals harbor some shame or even hatred of America. This bubbled to the surface when Michelle Obama made the comment about being proud of her country "for the first time" during last year's campaign. The president himself expressed a similar sentiment when told a French audience:

In America, there is a failure to appreciate Europe's leading role in the world. Instead of celebrating your dynamic union and seeking to partner with you to meet common challenges, there have been times where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive.

Where to start? First off, what does he mean by "America"? All Americans? Sounds like nationalistic profiling. Secondly, what does he mean by "Europe's leading role"? When the Balkans were coming apart at the seams, it took the courage of the United States to get the world to react. What has Europe done to curtail Iran's nuclear program? Why is Europe sending "police trainers" and not more soldiers to Afghanistan?

If by "leading" President Obama is referring to Europe's chronically high unemployment, or the Muslim riots in France, or the radical Islamic threat to tear apart the Netherlands, or the fact that French youth see no employment future for themselves, or budget busting healthcare rationing, I see what he means.

But if he is talking about making tough and sometimes unpopular decisions on the world stage and then backing up those decisions with blood and money, I don't see that from any European nation except Great Britain.

The United States, because of our power, will always be unpopular in many circles. We are not a perfect nation. But if you have to choose one country to be the "cop" of the world, who do you choose: the USA, China, or Russia? Those are the options. European leaders don't have the guts to step up to the plate. If we want someone to sit next to us at a United Nations meeting, we can always call the French. If we want someone to hunker down in a foxhole with us, we're usually our own.

Because our nation has had the courage to do what it thinks is right, until now at least, we are often preceived as being arrogant. That is a burden we have to bear. It is not something President Obama should be apologizing for abroad.

I pray that President Obama doesn't mistake his fleeting personal popularity throughout Europe for renewed respect for the United States.

Is it too soon to start the USA death watch? Or is it too late...

When the press musters the nerve to point out that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects a deficit $2.3 trillion larger than that projected by the administration over the next 10 years, President Obama responds, "Shucks, no one really knows what's going to happen in the future."

In other words, Obama is saying, "Data-shmata. That's our story and we're sticking by it."

In his second prime time, glacially-paced press conference, Obama made the argument that we need to spend our way back into prosperity. I'll be honest, I've tried to do that in my family with credit cards, and it just doesn't work.

But the press conference wasn't all bad. Obama managed to get rid of the teleprompter. Now he's reading off what looks like an 80's era big screen TV of some sort.

Have you noticed that Obama's presidential campaign seems to continue full bore? He's still conducting "town hall" meetings. He is still keeping his email marketers busy. It looks to me like his handlers are trying to establish a personality cult. I'm just waiting for the day his ardent supporters start calling him, "Dear Leader." The song and the artwork are already in place.

And just like totalitarian regimes around the world stage phony-baloney populist protests and demonstrations, ACORN, Service Employees International Union, and Move-On.org are doing the dirty work in this country (also check out this link). Corporate "news" reports conveniently forget to omit who is planning, funding, and busing folks out to protest in front of companies like AIG, trying to make the "demonstrations" look like spontaneous outbursts of worker rage.

And to add insult to injury, guess who's making money amid all our financial misery.

George Soros.

Where's the outrage over this greedy capitalist's success? Oh, by the way, do you know that the honorable Mr. Soros has a financial career noteworthy for the billions he has made betting against both the dollar and the British pound?

What a guy.

EXTRA! Clothing may protect you from the sun and bugs

L.L. Bean has made some major breakthroughs in the field of outdoor clothing. The company now has two special lines of apparel: SunSmart and Insect Shield Repellant. Apparently a crack team of L.L. Bean researchers discovered that their shirts have a tendency to shade the wearer's torso and prevent mosquitoes from landing directly on his or her skin.

I'm not a scientist, but I think what they are saying is that if you wear one of their shirts—say during a day spent at the beach—you can stay out in the sun for a much longer time without getting burned than if you went bare chested. Further, it seems that if a bug takes sight of you and tries to alight on your skin, the cloth of the shirt will act as some sort of barrier and prevent the insect from actually getting to your skin.

Astounding!

I'm going to go out on a limb here, but the more I think about this, I'm beginning to believe that a wide brimmed hat just might keep your face from getting sunburned.

• • •

With the collapse of our lending system and the knowledge that some AIG traders are receiving million dollar bonuses for essentially engineering this catastrophe, we find our government trying to regulate and legislate against Wall Street greed. Obama and others are talking seriously about restricting pay for corporate executives.

Why is the government trying to reign in greed? Because the United States, as a whole, has turned its back on its commitment to Christian morality. The Bible speaks directly to this in Romans 13:1-3:

Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and he will commend you.

• • •

And finally, this is me.

Real March Madness

We get the government we deserve.

At the urging of the Obama administration, wording was put into last month's "stimulus" bill that protected executive bonuses agreed to before Feb. 11, ahem, like those at AIG, for instance. Almost all the Democrats voted for it along with a few Republicans.

Obama and the same Democrats who supported the bill last month are screaming bloody murder about the AIG bonuses this month. Please, can we have some Oscar nominations here?

With the exception of the soon-to-be-re-regulated conservative talk radio, I don't hear anyone going ballistic at this flip flop. Obama, with a straight face, decries the AIG bonuses as do our members of Congress. Cooler heads pleaded for Congress to take the time to read and have a robust debate on the bill. But sorry, we were told, this is such an emergency that we don't have even a couple of weeks to read and debate the bill.

So what does Obama do? The teleprompter-reading-$500,000-book-advance-taking-second-biggest-AIG-money-grabber president heads to the Tonight Show to hobnob with Jay Leno. On the way to the studio—by the way—he stops to fill out his March Madness brackets.

For real March Madness, forget the round ball games; follow what Obama and his Democrat buddies are trying to pull off in DC. I hope we can turn that madness into outrageous anger and direct it to our Democrat-controlled government.

On the bright side, it's taken Obama and the Democrat Congress just two months to do something George Bush was never able to accomplish: make George Bush look like a competent president.

• • •

While this political circus has been going on, the Fed, with some fancy shuffling of IOUs and freshly-minted greenbacks, has pumped $1,000,000,000,000 into our money supply. Say "hello" to hyperinflation. If you got a kick out of worrying about the coming depression, the coming Third World hyperinflation should be pleasing indeed.

You see, the financial gurus that run this so-called system, are desperate to get American consumers spending again. This is what happens when our whole economy is based on us going into ever-increasing consumer debt so we can buy stuff from each other and not be bothered about having to produce anything anymore.

One of the good things about the current recession is that our rate of saving has actually increased. But nooooo, even after decades of deriding us for not saving, central bankers don’t want us to start saving now: we need to spend, spend, spend, borrow more, and spend, spend, spend again.

Does the American electorate care, or even notice? I don't think so.

We get the government we deserve.

Half the nation we used to be

This is so simple and as such it will be quite short.

Over the last couple of years Americans have seen the value of their major investment, their homes, plummet.

Now stocks have dropped in value by about one half.

Many years of wealth creation has been for naught. We have a president who thinks the way out of this predicament is to borrow money and use it to save or create government jobs.

The only way to recover from this historic evaporation of wealth is to get the wealth creating machine—capitalism—geared up and running smoothly again.

And the capitalists among us need to learn the lesson that wealth is created by hard work and innovation, not clever investment devices. The socialists among us need to realize that government spending doesn't create wealth, it just creates a dependent class.

It's going to be hard to bounce back from this one. If anyone has a contrary opinion, I'd like to hear it.

• • •

Addendum: This article appeared on Bloomberg.com after I wrote this blog. It says the same thing but looking at the world situation. However, the Bloomberg article fails to take into consideration the collapse in real estate, so the situation is even worse than they posit.

Obama's Plastic Surgery

Even prior to his inauguration, Obama has managed to implement a successful economic stimulus program for our nation's plastic surgeons. The botox biz is up between 200 and 300 percent driven by folks getting ready for the festivities in DC. All the frozen smiles you see at the swearing in ceremony won't be from the cold weather. Don't believe me? Read it yourself.

• • •

My wife and I moved last summer and when we arrived at our new place, we had to get busy finding new jobs. I registered with a bunch of the online job banks and placement websites. One of these was Beyond.com which makes the following claims:

The right people. The right skills.
The right location. Right now.

My background is in teaching, writing, editing and quality assurance. I was thrilled last week when I got an email "instant job alert" from Beyond.com:

Dear Raymond,
We wanted to notify you immediately about a new job posting that may fit your interest and skill set. Please review the information below. You can easily access the job description by clicking on the link provided.

The job they so breathlessly needed to call my attention to? Pool boy. Well, actually pool manager. It seems Beyond.com hasn't seen me in a bathing suit, nor read my resume.

• • •

Tell a lie enough times and people will believe it. It worked for the Nazis. It's working for the global warming doomsayers. A NASA scientist is warning that we have less than four years to reverse this so-called man made climate change.

NASA scientist Jim Hansen is warning about rising oceans etc. I'm not even going to call him on the facts that ice packs are growing and the earth is cooling. Let's assume, for a moment that the oceans do rise. They won't rise overnight, it will take considerable time. People will move out of the low lying areas. Maybe people will get out of Bangladesh where about every other year thousands die due to flooding. There have been plenty of human migrations in this history of mankind. There will be more.

• • •

When high schoolers read Orwell's 1984, is it seen as tragic irony? Is it possible to write books like 1984, Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451 anymore? With security cameras on nearly every corner of our major cities and politicians employing armies of spin doctors. It doesn't seem like disturbing fiction about our future is disturbing anymore.

Tell me I'm wrong.

Apologies to Herb Caen

ROUX CONFESSIONS: I'll admit reading the comments made on Internet news stories. So witty and enlightening. Regular Oscar Wildes most of them. Found one guy making comments whose screen name was "your an idiot." Ah, public schools... Completely hooked on honkey-jocks Rick and Bubba in the morning and, truth be told, I only understand about every third word.

MICHELIN (MAN) GUIDE: How's this for culture: Tuesday, Ben Stein's "Expelled"; Wednesday, the Met's HD broadcast of Massenet's "Thais"; and Friday the high school's staging of Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court" in the gym/multi-use room. Mix up the lead characters from these three productions and you've got the makings of a memorable nightmare... Of course, prior to the Twain, I had to take my lovely wife out to a little Italian place I know, The Olive Garden.

PHIL HER UP: Bought gas at Kroeger's. Twenty-five cents a gallon higher than a week ago. A bit later I saw a picture of the Saudis parachuting $3 million dollars onto a hijacked oil freighter to pay off Solmali pirates. I'd like to see a pie chart showing where our gas dollar goes. I'm thinking a pretty good slice is going to feed swashbuckling Somalis at this point. Another question: who polls better, the Somali pirates of the Saudi sheiks? To me it's a toss up.

NAME PHREAK: The New York Times ran an op-ed essay making the point that cocaine use among white teenagers is some four times higher than among black teens. The author? Charles M. Blow.

I SAID I'M SORRY: OK, I took a swipe at The Olive Garden a couple of paragraphs ago. (Or was I taking a swipe at myself? Not important.) But today I had the leftover lasagna for lunch and it was tops. So, Olive Garden, if you're reading this, please accept my apologies.

Google from "a" to "z"

I'm not sure exactly what I was doing, but the other day I did a Google search for the letter "D." What came up as the first hit? The wikipedia entry for the Democratic Party.

Hmmmm.

I decided to do a Google search for the letter "R." No Republican Party. I scrolled through the first few pages of "R" results. No entry for the Republican Party. Don't believe me? Here are the results:

...and we've always been lead to believe that there's a huge right wing conspiracy. Hah!

This little exercise piqued my curiosity just a smidgen so I did Google searches for every lower case letter of the English alphabet. The results were at times quirky, unexpected, totally expected, and just so-so. Here they are:

• A HTML links. Obama speech. Don't have much use for either.
• B Wikipedia, second letter in the Latin alphabet.
• C Speed of light and lots of Citigroup stuff. Interesting fact: Citigroup is burning through taxpayer money at the speed of light.
• D Democratic party.
• E Natural log and E! Online.
• F Ford Motor Company. The only automaker not on the dole. I will remember this next time I go new car shopping. (Cue laugh track)
  
• G Surprise! Gmail scores the coveted first spot. Second goes to Wikipedia on the Latin letter G. Seems like they missed the spot on this one.
  
• H Planck's constant and Wikipedia Hydrogen. I'm thinking Planck's constant doesn't get a lot of hits.
• I Apple's iPod and iTunes at the top then Wikipedia Latin...
• J Wikipedia Latin J
• K Boltzmann constant and Wikipedia K. BTW the unknown (to me) label of K Records ranked above K Mart by one spot on the list.
• L LaTeX project. Where's Wikipedia's Latin L for crying out loud?!
• M The movie "M" (1931) which starred Peter Lorre. I have no gripe here. Also, Wikipedia is back with the thirteenth letter of the modern Latin alphabet.
• N Nitrogen, the Wikipedia entry. OK that makes sense. We also learn from Wikipedia that, "N represents the dental or alveolar nasal in virtually all languages that use the Latin alphabet." Don't know how I've made it this far in life without that pearl of wisdom.
• O O, The Oprah Magazine. Anyone surprised? Beats out number two—and one of my favorite gasses—oxygen, and another name from the theatrical world, who I hope and pray outlasts Oprah: Othello.
• P Wikipedia Latin alphabet.
• Q Wikipedia, Semitic sound value.
• R R-project website. Something to do with statistical programming. Wikipedia runs a distant third here.
• S Craigslist. Yeah, that's right, Craigslist. You explain it to me. Also on the first page of search results: Victoria's Secret. I guess it just takes two S's to rank highly here...or maybe not. With that logic Guess Jeans should have beat them both.
• T The website for public transit in Boston. Wha?
• U After a long hiatus, Wikipedia is back with an alphabet listing.
• V Is for Visa. No Mastercard. No American Express. No Discover. Are people really sitting down at the computers and saying themselves, "Gee, I wonder how I can get a Visa card?" Hello, go look in your mailbox, moron.
• W Interesting. Our second movie. Oliver Stone's "W" (2008). Do you think it will still be listed first in another 78 years like the Peter Lorre movie "M"? And let's face it, shouldn't President Bush get the number one spot here?
• X Hmmm. What would you expect to find here? You'd be wrong. "X The Band" scored the top spot. The kind of scoring that gets XXX ratings didn't show on the first page at all. You know Google is messing with this search big time.
• Y Huge surprise here: Yahoo! And Yahoo! mail took the number two spot. If Yahoo! and Microsoft ever pull off the merger, it'll be, "Hello page 47 of search results!"
  
• Z And to end this pointless list, Wikipedia's back on top, beating out the much faster and sexier 2008 Nissan Z.