Mark Byron

Midday Musings

We've got a trade skirmish at the 49th. The president must have been looking to do some protectionist fan service, for he slapped on a 10% tariff on Canadian aluminum on national security grounds. If our national security is threatened by Canada selling us too much aluminum, we're in very sorry shape, for Canada is just about our closest ally. Cheaper electricity up north might help the Canadians make aluminum cheaper, but having a ticked Canada threatens our security more than an underused US aluminum plant.

However, it sounds good to the anti-trade folks and kicks the Trudeau punching bag for good measure.

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Speaker Pelosi is singing "Why don't you meet me in the middle?" The Democrats passed a $3 trillion Christmas list, the Republicans are offering just a thousand Sagans, so she says "how about two?" This looks like some interesting political theater, but interesting like a NASCAR multi-car wreck or a Battle Bots episode. All we need is the BB ring announcer to announce "It's SAUSAGE-MAKIN' TIME!"

COVID's lingering along, we still have double-digit unemployment, so some help seems called for, but at some point, fiscal sanity has to kick back in.

The unemployment benefits were a bit too generous for some, but the Democrats don't want to back off on the idea of a $15/hour minimum wage, which the $600/week benefit amounts to. $600/week divided by 4o hours/week=$15/hour. That's going to price some jobs out of the market, but market economics isn't a progressive strong suit.

Grab a refill of your beverage of choice; we may be here a while.

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The Tigers got an unexpected four-day break this week with the Cardinals COVID outbreak nuking a four-game home-and-home set. They thought they had the bug contained at seven players and were set to play the Cubs, but as Beetlejuice might say, "Not so fast, buff boy." Or as Tommy Lee Jones might say "We've got a bug." Player 8 now just went viral.

Midday Musings

We have a 33% turnout for Tuesday's primary in Midland County. That's three times the amount from 2016's primary. There weren't too many heated races to boost things (a tight Democratic congressional primary and a Republican sheriff's race), so it may well be that universal absentee ballots might have been the difference-maker.

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Speaking of things Midland County, we had a saw-that-coming-a-mile-away event; Sanford and Edenville dam owner Boyce Hydro just went into Chapter 11. Given that the lawsuits from all the damaged property downstream will run up more of a tab than Boyce is worth, I'm surprised it too this long to file.

For the non-Midlanders in the Peanut Gallery, those were the dams that famously collapsed in May after a near-record rainfall hit the area; what would have been a 500-year-flood slightly less than the 1987 record-holder for the Tittabawassee got morphed into a what-the-bleep disaster when the under-repaired dams gave way. 

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Interesting geopolitics in Beirut today, where French president Macron is trying to tie aid for the mega-explosion of Tuesday to political and constitutional reform of the Lebanese government. Corruption and ineptitude has been producing loud and large protests before the blast, and the leading explanation of a stash of ammonia nitrate being left without safeguards only serves as Opposition Evidence 1 to that ineptitude. 

Two problems with that Macron gambit. One is that having the French, the former colonial power, telling the dysfunctional ex-colony to clean up its act will not sit well with the Lebanese, especially Hezbollah, whose both a terror-friendly paramilitary group and the largest Shia party in the country. Having infidel Europeans tell them how to roll is DOA.

Secondly, serious reform will create winners and losers. The losers could well resist violently; civil war is not that far in the Lebanese rear-view mirror. The protesters are hoping for a peaceful Arab Spring-type result, but a butt-ugly civil war like Libya or Syria could well play out.

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Mike DeWine's got da bug. He was ahead of the curve in getting Ohio to take COVID seriously, which saved Ohio from getting hammered as bad as neighboring states this spring. However, Ohio has been hit hard by the secondary surge after lock-downs were relaxed. 

He's asymptomatic; he was tested as part of preparing for a presidential visit to Cleveland. He's the second governor to get the bug.

Midday Musings

We've had a number of young Shaqs come through college sports already; we now have a Kobe Bufkin heading to UofM. Time does fly, it was 24 years ago that the Lakers got his namesake's rights from Charlotte for Vlade Divac, clearing out the center spot for the incoming Shaq. That's ample time to have a 17-year old named after you, but it doesn't seem that it can be that long ago.

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Interesting story out of Toronto, where the Blue Jays are doing their summer camp. The vigilant Ontario government (Trumpesque premier Doug Ford actually acted statesman-like in his reasonably-proactive response to COVID; miracles do happen from time to time) has the players confined to the stadium grounds under threat of a $750,000 fine and jail time if they leave. Don't worry about sleeping arrangements; they have a hotel in left-centre field (it's Canada, so we need to spell it right).

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Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap seems to be Roger Stone's theme song; either that, or Papa was a Trolling Stone. He gets pardoned for his role in obstructing the Mueller probe. Trump doesn't need to spend a dime to pardon commute him, since it's a perk of his job.

However, the way the Stone rolls, he'll probably do something else worthy of a second trip to Club Fed, so he might not be free for too long. 

[Update 7/12-I was sloppy yesterday. Stone got his sentence commuted, not wiped out entirely. Mueller made a point of noting that's he's still a convicted felon, just not a jailed one. I also misspelled Mueller; it's sadly in the spell-checker, which still wants to turn the senior senator from New York into Chuck Schemer.]

Midday Musings

"Lawful but awful" was the take of one policing expert on the Brooks shooting in this USA Today piece. "That’s the phrase police apply to killings that may be technically legal but could have been avoided." Letting Brooks go and arresting him later was a  valid, if not preferred, option. 

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The Fed is getting into some dangerous territory. Normally, they've stuck to buying short-term debt like Treasury bills, but since 2008 they've started to play with the long-term debt market, buying long term bonds in what's called Quantitative Easing or QE for short.

Historically, QE purchased long-term government bonds to drive down long term interest rates. During the COVID era, they've started to buy shares of long term corporate-debt mutual funds (exchange-traded funds or ETFs) so that they're not playing favorites with companies. 

However, the news hot off the presses is that the Fed will now start buying individual corporate bonds. That's a recipe for some interesting mischief if the Fed buys bonds of politically-friendly company and lets their friends have lower-than-deserved cost of borrowing. Big if, but the temptation is there.

By and large, Fed chairman Powell has seemed to be fairly independent of the White House, resisting the urging from the president to go gonzo on monetary policy and using negative interest rates (Europe has done that in recent years, although the old finance professor is still struggling to wrap my mind around that idea). Hopefully, there'll be some safeguards so that the Fed isn't buying bonds of Fox News advertisers or whoever the next president wants to reward with cheaper cash.  

Midday Musings

Not a good newsday.

For starters, even the teenagers are starting to leave the White House since the "adults" had already been shown the door. John Bolton, a classic bad-cop hawk as UN rep, was ousted as national security adviser.  "I disagreed strongly with many of his suggestions" was Trump's take. The last straw seems to have been Bolton being on the hawkish side over bring the Taliban to Camp David. Trump wants out of a generation-long stay in Afghanistan, but the Taliban would likely fill any power vacuum left by the US. There are no good answers, and leaving some troops there to keep the Taliban at bay might be the least-worst option.

The alternative seems to be having the Taliban agree to play nice and let them split Afghanistan with the current regime as long as they don't become Club Jihadi again. 

I might see White House recruiters on my way past Northeast Middle School later today. Maybe. 

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I might see some British MPs on the Plymouth Elementary playground next door to Northeast, since they're on a five-week recess. PM Johnson requested the extended break (they normally take three weeks off for party conventions in September anyway) to seemingly keep MPs from screwing up Brexit, only to see them get going quickly on the sabotage and order him to request yet another delay if he doesn't get a deal by the time they get back in mid-October.

Johnson's said that he'd rather die in a ditch than ask for an extension. However, the pro-Remain majority in the current parliament wants a bit more altitude for him and are hanging him out to dry, leaving him as PM but making him be their message boy.

The one possible counter-weight to the parliamentary moves is if one of the EU countries hollers "[Crap] or get off the pot! Leave already if you don't want our last-best offer!" The default position would be to grant one more extension, since they don't want to be seen to be the bad cop that forced a no-deal Brexit, but the French are jamming to the Supreme's You Keep Me Hangin' On and want some closure.

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Alaska's former first First Dude is quitting the job, filing for divorce. Sad. Just sad.

The filings make her out to be a diva of some sort, which would be stereotypical of the reality TV star that Palin's become. However, divorce filing legalese is often inflated in order to get better alimony checks, so best leave on the safety on the rhetorical shotgun.

 

 

Who Let The Cats and Dogs Out?

Just editing the Baha Men's classic phrase to fit their home digs; Dorian is hitting the Bahamas as a Category 5. Prayers are an order, both for the Bahamas and the US southeast.

The forecast has the storm staying just offshore of the US, with the eye slated to just miss the Outer Banks of North Carolina. However, it's got everyone from Florida to NC nervous, as it could change course; even near misses of the eye could leave serious damage from tropical-storm-level winds.

Morning Musings

KFT, Kentucky Fried Tofu? That's what getting beta-tested in Atlanta. Well, maybe not tofu, but some sort of faux fowl by Beyond Meat. Their rival Impossible Foods have a vegan Whopper going at Burger King, so it's worth keeping an eye on. I'm not their target market, but if you can come up with less-expensive alternative to conventional dead animal flesh that tastes good, I'm interested.

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Rocky Mountain Way and Life's Been Good earwigs are going; Joe Walsh (not the former Eagles rocker) is throwing his hat in the ring.

This Joe Walsh is a conservative talker by trade and one-time Tea Party congressman. He was seemingly in a Trumpian mold, Birther and all before going sour on the Donald after his Putin lovefest.

The second verse of Rocky Mountain Way seems to fit the campaign, or at least Walsh's foe's flexibility with facts.

Well he's tellin' us this
And he's tellin' us that
Changes it every day
Say's it doesn't matter
Bases are loaded and Casey's at bat
Playin' it play by play
Time to change the batter

I'm not sure if Walsh is the pinch-hitter I'd have it mind, but he meets the modest bar of making Trump look good in comparison. This snarky Chris Cillizsa passage gets a chuckle-

Walsh, the newest entrant (or near-entrant) into the race, was a flame-throwing one-term congressman who repeatedly pushed the much-debunked idea that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States.  [Mark] Sanford was bounced out of the governor's office in South Carolina after he left the country for a week to be with his Argentine girlfriend. [Former MA Gov Bill] Weld hasn't held elective office in more than two decades, and has been kicking around the fringes of presidential politics since the early 2000s.

 

This is, to put a fine point on it, a "Star Wars" bar of politicians.

 At least with the cantina crew, you could make a case for checking their US citizenship papers.

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Who's more honest, Trump or the Chinese government? Jim Cramer goes with The Donald, since he has a domestic media who will call BS on his whoppers, unlike Beijing. Beijing's whoppers are 100% cow  ..  pies, while Trump does have some red meat in there on occasion.

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While we're on 70's rock, we can crank up Steve Miller's Take the Money and Run as a serenade to Andrew Luck. Unlike the Bonnie and Clyde-esque pair of Miller's song, Luck earned his dinero. Like Megatron a few years ago, he wanted to leave while he was still mentally and physically intact.

Morning Musings

Pompeo's Folly? We've bought territory before, but not for quite a while; Alaska, the Louisiana Purchase, and the Gadsden Purchase are three that come quickly to mind. The BBC notes that we bought what's now the US Virgin Islands off the Danes a century ago, but that was back when the colonial era was still a going concern.

However, we're not in the colonial era. Greenland is one of the remaining vestiges of that era. It would help if the Greelanders wanted to become an Arctic Puerto Rico, since they already have that PR-like autonomous status with Danish oversight. They're OK with the status-quo.

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Speaking of purchases, let's look at once that's more likely to happen. The Brooklyn Nets going from being owned by a Russian oligarch to being owned by a Chinese oligarch.

The latter makes me more nervous, although there's little national security implications of the NBA being in bed with Alibaba. It helps the NBA in its outreach to China and highlights how far Chinese capitalism has come, where a Chinese guy outdoes a Microsoft guy (Steve Balmer) and a big southern restaurateur for the record for priciest NBA franchise purchase.

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Speaking of finance....we had a meltdown Wednesday when the markets got spooked by the 10-year Treasury note yield dropping below the 2-year note. Normally, that's the other way around, as interest rates generally go up the longer the maturity. Such an "inverted yield curve" is normally seen just before a recession...

...Normally. Former Fed chair Janet Yellen isn't as bearish as the market is. 

The market seems to be spooked by the trade war in general, as the market will go up when the administration acts nice towards China and go down when they get ornery. If the trade war simmers down, we might not get the feared recession and the folks who fled to the bond market will be disappointed. 

That being said, the market is betting on a trade war doing a number on the world economy and keeping its powder try in the meantime. 

The Ex-Pat Returns Home

I'm returning from a self-imposed exile. I've felt like a man without an intellectual country as of late in a universe where civility has cashed in its chips years ago and both main political camps specialize in demonization. "A pox on both your houses" would be taken as incitement of biological warfare these days, and someone might just go forward with that if they could score some smallpox.

However, I don't want to kill the jerks off by peaceful means (to borrow from Tom Lehrer), I want to show the love of Christ in a place and time where it is in short supply. I'm not sure how much of an audience I can recreate here, as blogs of this ilk have become passe in the last decade, where the big dogs have gone pro and the small-fry have move on to other things like Twitter or Facebook.

Midweek Musings

For the few folks who actually venture over here these days, I'm back. I've dropped off of Facebook for the time being; conversations are still a bit on the toxic side and I've needed to put that into James 1's "keep yourself from being corrupted by the world" bucket for the time being.

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The dead-tree version of this USA Today piece had a picture of anti-racist protesters, one of which held up a "Crtl-Alt-Right-Del" sign. I'd have to explain that one to my mom, but most folks who have had to work with a non-Apple computer over the years will likely have encountered Crtl-Alt-Del; hitting those three buttons on the computer keyboard rebooted the computers in the DOS days and gives you the option of rebooting, turning the machine off, or manually closing a locked-up or resource-hogging program in more recent versions of Windows.

The archetypal alt-righter with their bigoted and tactless nature could use a reboot of their souls. Unfortunately, some of that is hard-coded into their operating system and won't reset with a reboot. Changing the operating system to one more Spirit-centered that will remove the legacy software and its ethnocentric malware is the more effective approach.

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"Democracy sausage" was the Aussie word of the year, with Yank import "deplorables" getting honorable mention. At first, I thought it might be an offshoot of the old legislative saw that the two things you don't want to see being made are sausages and laws, with a topping of Churchill's statement that democracy is the worst form of government with the exception of everything else we've tried. Or should that be the wurst form of government.

Not quite. It's a grilled sausage with tomato sauce on bread commonly served on election day Down Under; since everyone has to vote by law, vendors have a captive audience.

I would not be surprised if "Deplorables" makes Lake Superior State's banished-words list come New Years Day. 

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Dilbert's pointy-haired boss is plotting a hit on their cartoonist celebrity spokesman (likely a alter-ego for Scott Adams). I wonder if the next step will be to have the boss hire Elbonian hitmen, since he is too inept to find a quality hired gun. Instead, he had Asok do it, but he took out Garfield's Jim Davis by mistake. 

I was wrong on the first move, but I still expect to see the Elbonians in the mix by the end of the week.

To Serve

I'm in an odd spot right now. I'm looking for a way to best serve God.

That seems a bit idealistic and self-serving rather than God-serving, but I'm hitting a wall in my life. It has been almost seven years since I had a full-time job and a year since I left the part-time tutoring job that was my primary outlet since losing that college teaching job in 2009.

I'd like to help in church, but have few good outlets available. My nerves don't deal with noise and hyperactivity well, so children's ministry isn't a good fit, especially if Children's Church is more high-octane and high volume than not. I'm not a church elder, so teaching adults isn't an option, and I don't have any significant musical talent to be a part of their music team. I'm not a handyman. My office skills don't have any significant outlets given that they have a church secretary, and as a guy, I would likely have not been considered for such a position.

I might be able to do something small, like usher or help with the sound system, but the greeter-types that do that already are more jovial than I and I would be starting from scratch with sound.

What can I do in the church? Not too much, at least not in the church I'm attending currently.

What can I do outside the church? Not too much, either. 

I'm blocked from college teaching for the time being, given that anxiety attacks drove me out of the classroom in 2009. I'm learning how to handle those better, but the trend towards wanting practitioner-teachers precludes me, since I've not had a chance to have a non-academic position in finance and am unlikely to get a chance to have one at age 55. I'd have to find a school that is cool with no finance experience and will give me a third chance to get back into the classroom after being found wanting twice before.

I wouldn't mind teaching at the K-12 level, but lack both experience and a education degree. Some states let you teach without a ed degree, but Michigan is not one of them. I jumped through the hoops to get Florida certification a decade ago, but failed to convince a school to hire me after a dozen interviews.

I could try subbing, but that won't provide a living wage sufficient to get out of my parent's house. It could be an avenue of service if I want to kiss having a place of my own goodbye and I could manage to handle a bunch of unruly kids who love to terrorize subs (or any authority figure, for that matter, my classmates were death to subs 40 years ago and today's kids are likely no better if not worse).

I have an accounting degree. That at least has gotten me some nibbles. I've had two interviews in the last month, one that turned me down and one that I'm waiting to here back from. Those two interviews for accounting jobs are the first since coming back to Midland in early 2010.

I have accounting experience, but none that fits a normal accounting subset. I did the books for my own computer store and ran herd over a variety of Medicare and Medicaid issues for a hospital for three years, but not the "3 years of payroll/2 years of accounts receivable/2 years of adjusting entries" niches that employers are looking for. Entry-level jobs are few and far between and are most often reserved for new college grads rather than misfit former college professors with a PhD in Finance trying to earn a living.

Thus, when we get sermons pushing us to use our talents and serve, I ask "where?"

I'm not adverse to hard work, but I'm not in great shape to do manual labor or work that would keep me on my feet for hours on end. I've gone through stress tests at the hospital this week as a prologue to getting an exercise regime going, but it will take months to get to a point where I can keep up with an on-your-feet job. Then, I'd have to find someplace who could actually use me as opposed to some teenager with less experience and less scruples.

I took a stab at insurance sales, but I'm too honest to be a telemarketer; it just didn't work for my spirit.

I can write. Facebook might not me linking to this since I don't have a following for the page and don't want to make it a capital F Facebook Page quite yet, but I can write. Is that my service?

Or is merely being an example of perseverance, of not giving up and looking for some pills to expedite meeting my Maker? There are times where I feel of such little use that the idea (very briefly) comes to mind, only to be banished with the idea that I am of value and I am of use. What that use is is very elusive.

Midday Musings

So Russia is pulling troops out of Syria. That begs the question; how many are there in the first place and are they merely moving them out publicly on one hand and moving them in quietly on the other? The folks on the business end of air strkes aren't impressed with Putin's show of restraint, but diplomats looking for something resembling an olive branch might be.

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We've got Palm Sunday coming up just three days after St. Patrick's Day. Palm frond decor would be called for, so you can waive the green after you wear it.

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Speaking of saints, Mother Teresa is set to join the fraternity on the sunday before Labor Day. It's interesting that it took 19 years after she died to get the nod, since she was seen as something of a living saint for decades, only disliked by anti-theists or a few anti-Catholic knuckle-draggers on the evangelical right. 

She now has the two required miracles under her belt where folks asked her to intercede with God for them and a that-just-cain't-happen-on-its-own cure went down. How much that was of God and how much of a supposed intermediary is food for thought and good for a ritual exchange of unpleasantries across the Tiber.

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Kansas and Michigan State seem to be the co-favorites to be on top in three weeks once March Madness turns to early April. Minor problem; Michigan State is a two-seed and thus seen as at best #5 in the country, since the top four would get the four one-seeds.

A wee disconnect between the selection committee and ESPN's cast of pundits? We'll see who needs to correct their analysis in due time, but it's some short-term bragging rights for a MSU alum.

Afternoon Musings

Pete Rose still has a lifetime ban from baseball. I wonder if the ban will actually be lifted when his life is over; so far, Shoeless Joe Jackson's seems to have an eternal ban rather than a lifetime ban, since he's long since assumed ambient temperature and is still barred from the Hall of Fame.

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Rajon Rondo seems to have issues, but the one-game ban he just got reminds me of the old joke about the Soviet soldier getting 20 years for calling the general an idiot; only six months was for insulting an officer, the rest was for reveling a state secret.

Rondo let loose with some sort of homophobic pejorative at Bill Kennedy after he had tossed him; turns out the Kennedy did like guys and outed himself formally, although it seems that his status was known but not publicized.

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The president says we're hitting ISIS (or ISIL as he prefers) harder than ever; does that mean we're using four wet noodles rather than three.

The Dancing Armadillo

I haven't been writing as much, partly because I feel very much an odd duck. In politics, I'm conservative, but not quite Tea Party level. I can relate to the folks who want to run the establishment types out of town, but I can also relate to a somewhat more realpolitik approach that notes that at the end of the day, the government still needs to function.

In theology, I don't have a convenient home, either. I'm a conservative there as well, but I'm not a strong Reformed guy, being open to and old-earth approach to Genesis and don't quite see the word egalitarian as a cuss word. I also am not sure how much of a leash God gives us on the free will front, desiring some middle ground between a God who micromanages every detail and an Open Theism deity who gets overtaken by events.

I also find a lot of the theological nit-picking rather unuseful. It has little to help me make my way through a strange world. It has little to instruct one in how to be humble without losing confidence in one's abilities or how to balance grace and truth in a world either short on both or ODing on one of them.

Texas politico Jim Hightower used to say that the only thing in the middle of the road are yellow stripes and dead armadillos. I'm not dead yet, but I've got my head on a swivel dodging oncoming traffic. 

However, I don't think I'm the only one. I'm hoping to start addressing such things more often.

A Terrible, Horrible, No Good Week

A lot's gone under the bridge since I was starting back blogging earlier in the week. We've had the Supreme Court sign off on the Obamacare subsidies (bad policy but good for our pocketbook, since we're one of the folks who'd be 18-months-of-subsidies in hock had they made a face-value reading) and on nationalizing same-sex marriage (very-to-the-nth-power bad policy and worse legal logic). Both deserve a post (or for on the latter) but not right now.

We're also staring down the barrel of a Greek default. The ECB/IMF folks aren't blinking and the Greek PM is asking for a few extra days to run the deal past the voters, calling a July 5th national vote. The problem is that the clock runs out at the end of this month when a big payment is due, unless the powers that be over there give them the extra time, or some sugar daddy (Russia, maybe) lends them the €1.6B (had to cut-and-paste that Euro sign from the BBC piece) needed to tide them over to the referendum.

We're also seeing the bad guys having good days on the terror front, with ISIS making inroads in Kobane (likely with Turkey looking the other way) and allies of theirs in Tunisia shooting up a bunch of Europeans in a resort there as well as a Shia mosque in Kuwait.

None of those are great news. Only the Obamacare thing is mixed, but you could make the case that the "Grexit" scenario would be a path-of-least-resistance to getting Greece out of an untenable financial mess.

However, I'm not in a great place to expound on all that beyond bullet-point form. I'm blogging from the third floor of the Longmont, CO hospital. My mother-in-law is in very rough shape. I'm not comfortable sharing much more right now, except that some heavy decisions are in the pipeline.

I've blogged my way through the loss of two professor jobs, a bankruptcy and some other heavy stuff in the 13 years I've been blogging. Facing the mortality of a close family member is well up that list if not topping it.

Prayers for Eileen's family are an order right now.  I may be doing a lot of blogging to mitigate the heaviness of the hour, but the radio-silence that has marked the last few months may well return if it is too heavy to write through.

 

Front Range Musings

Yes, I still plan to keep blogging daily, but we were in transit out to Colorado to visit Eileen's family the last two days, making it to just west of Lincoln last night and pulling into Loveland this afternoon.

I actually saw what I think was my first real haystack on the north side of I-80 in central Nebraska this morning. Hay is generally baled into 3-foot-or-so circular wheels but one farmer seemed to be putting them in big haystacks rather than those hay baler wheels.

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Since I was out of radio contact, we had the replacement for Bud Lite named, their labor lawyer Rob Manfred manns the position going forward; shall I go with a Do Wah Diddy or Mighty Quinn earwig? I'm not sure what the bodes for relations with the players, but league lawyers are often the default selection for commissioners these days. The NFL and NBA bosses (and their predecessors) were league lawyers before getting the top job, with Selig being the only guy coming out of another paradigm, being a team owner promoted by his peers to run the sport.

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"The Kings signed a Canadian Indian to a contract."

"That should be First Nations"

"No, a Canadian Indian."

"Why don't you just call him a redskin and cut to the chase"

"He was born in Toronto and his folks are from India, dude."

7'5" 360; that's a load Young Sim Bhullar might well be a bull underneath. Guys that size will always get a long look in the NBA.

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I'm still getting my mind around the Ferguson protests. You have a tragic shooting that we still don't have the details of, but folks there and their abetters in the black-activist universe are making this Rodney King and Trayvon Martin rolled into one; Trayvon's folk's lawyer is laying on the "executed in broad daylight" hyperbole thick while working with the victim's parents. The news of the day that the young man, sainted by his backers as a college-bound blameless kid, was a robbery suspect, muddies the waters a bit.

Trashing neighborhood stores and throwing bricks on to I-270 (I think I've been on that stretch a decade ago for my sister-in-laws wedding in nearby St. Charles) isn't going to help bring the dead teenager back, get better treatment for black youth or get jobs for black youth. Trashing your neighborhood will drive jobs away rather than bring them in other than some government make-work program that will be harder to transition into more long-standing work down the line.

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I'll finish on a light note; I saw the last couple of innings of this Little League WS game, where a young lady, Mo'ne Davis, pitched a two-hit shutout in leading her Philly team to an opening round win. Eight strikeouts and 70 pitches to dispatch 18 batters in the six-inning LL game; not bad for anyone, really not bad for a girl playing with the boys. Success as a 12 year old (or a 14 year old posing as one) doesn't always translate into making the majors, but it would be interesting if Mo'ne were putting mo'ne in the bank in 2022 or so as the first woman to make a major league roster (or a roster in any major men's sport).

Thursday Musings

One of the last words you want to see about an athlete is "consensual." That does open up the question of whether Winston tastes good like a quarterback should. One athlete too many has been in a he-said-she-said sexual episode that is best avoided in the first place.

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Some folks are checking for semen, others are checking for Prince. Fielder, that is, who's heading to the metroplex in a straight-up deal for Ian Kinsler... well, with a $30m chaser. Fielder might fare better in Texas, where comparisons to his dad Cecil and talk of the strained relations between the two will be less.

It also allows for an interesting set of musical chairs, with Kinsler filling second and Cabrera moving back to first, allowing prospect Nick Castellanos to slide back to third rather than continuing his crash course as an outfielder. Omar Infante is likely gone with the Kinsler signing, so we would likely see an infield of Castellanos, Iglasias, Kinsler and Cabrera from left to right; three newcomers since August and a new spot for Miggy.

Speaking of Omar, Omar Vizquel is heading to Detroit as first base coach and infield/running coach. I can't think of anyone better (outside of Ozzie Smith, possibly) to coach Jose Iglasias than one of the best glove men at short in baseball history. I recall watching him anchor the Indian infield in the mid 90s, doing the kind of highlight reel defense that we've started to see from Iglasias.

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On a heavier note, Rand Paul is playing The Gap Band's You Dropped a Bomb on Me, as Dirty Harry went nuclear today.

In a rapid-fire set of developments on Thursday, the Senate narrowly approved a rule change that would limit the ability of the minority party to block key presidential appointments. Instead of needing 60 votes to break a filibuster, Democrats will now need only 51.

It's not a banana republic or a bully, just majoritarian. It does take some of the Senate's traditions out of the mix, but the 60-vote cloture rule has been disliked by the majority party, with Republicans talking about such a move during the Dubya years. The minority will always take the cooling rhetoric of George Washington to heart but chafe at the same rules when their side runs the Senate.

This is a pro-action move, which will irk the "standing athwart history yelling 'Stop!'" school of conservatism, but it will let a center-right coaltion work to pass things in the future.

 

 

Midday Musings

Facebook can be draining at times. One of my former church 2YO Sunday School charges in Lexington is now 7 and has bone cancer. We're FB friends with his mom, and she's posting away a blow-by-blow of his progress as he starts chemo.

That's hard to read; the little squirrel deserves better than that.

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When the news of Toronto mayor Rob Ford's crack video came out, I thought that anyone smart enough to get elected mayor of that big a city wouldn't dumb enough be caught on tape toking away while talking profane trash about local politics; you have Marion Berry as a case to the contrary, but I wasn't buying that the dumb stick would strike twice in that way.

Well, yes it did. And like Berry, Ford is a political Rasputin, refusing to follow the script and resign. Can you get stupid-drunk and take pipe hits and still have the voters respect you? One would hope not, even if his replacement would be a step down on a policy level.

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Speaking of Ford, I once described him as Chris Christie with a third of the charm. The original got re-upped, giving liberals glee across the board. Not only did their favorite Republican this side of John McCain win, the more socially-conservative Ken Cuccinelli lost a tight race to former DNC head Terry McAuliffe in Virginia.

That sets up the meme of moderates win, theocons lose; but that's a simplistic take. Moderates win in blue states where a more-conservative candidate would be road kill in a general election. Conservatives can win in conservative-leaning states unless they are sailing upwind.

Cuccinelli was saddled with a scandal-laden outgoing GOP governor, a Central Casting black conservative preacher as the LG nominee, and a Libertarian candidate Robert Sarvis drawing social moderate voters away, even as real libertarians like Ron Paul noted that Sarvis wasn't much of a libertarian even as he had the big-l Libertarian nomination.

Add a government lockout that made Tea Party folks look bad and a media that wanted to case the devout Catholic Cuccinelli as the second coming of Torquemada, and you had a near-perfect storm for McAuliffe. A liberal Washington insider would normally be easy pickings for a solid Republican candidate in VA, but even the Healthcare.gov fiasco didn't give enough anti-Democratic blowback to drag Cuccinelli over the line.

Saturday Musings

I noticed in the transactions section of the Midland paper that Corliss Williamson had signed on to be an assistant coach with the Kings. He was known to me as a good character guy in the Piston clubhouse, which ran somewhat counter to his Big Nasty nickname. A good guy to run heard over the emotional DeMarcus Cousins, right?

I called up the Cowbell Kingdom blog to see what they had to say about Big Nasty; he's been working up some coaching chops since leaving the NBA-

Williamson joins the organization after spending three years as the head coach of the University of Central Arkansas. Prior to his stint with the Bears, Williamson spent three seasons as both an assistant and later head coach of Arkansas Baptist College.

Not bad, especially working for a church school as a coach. I haven't seen where Cousins is on his portfolio directly, but I'd be surprised if he wasn't, as the one big man type on the coaching staff that I could recognize.

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Speaking of big man coaches, Hakeem Olajuwon had been becoming this generation's Pete Newell as the go-to guy for post play coaching, having any number of players from LeBron on down going to Houston during the off-season for some Dream weaving of their games.

However, that's going to now get privatized to the benefit of Superman 2.0-

[Amare] Stoudemire had planned to return to Texas to refine the post moves he learned last summer. That Olajuwon is about to be named to the Rockets staff as instructor for Dwight Howard and Omar Asik is not a factor in Stoudemire not attending.

According to a Rockets source, Houston is allowing Olajuwon to fulfill any of his prior commitments with opposing players this month before he exclusively works with Rockets big men. Hence, Stoudemire might never work with Olajuwon again.

He and a number of other big men from around the league.

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Cold War 2.0? Seeing Putin let Snowden have temporary asylum in Russia is not a great sign for US-Russian relations, but it does relieve the PR nightmare of having Snowden play Man Without a Country at the Moscow airport. This way, Putin looks somewhat decisive while encouraging Snowden to get out of Dodge in the long term.

One quick take here on Snowden; he's neither a whistle-blower or a traitor. The first is reserved for calling out clear wrong-doing (which the NSA was of iffy constitutionality but not clearly an evil act) and the second is somehow who supports a foe of the country (which Snowden didn't do; he merely opposed the NSA's omnivorous approach to intel gathering and told the public of it).

Interestingly, Wikileaks inside man Bradley Manning did not get convicted of treason, either. The stuff he made public might have helped some of the US' foes, but he seemed to be trying to be the "War on Terror" analogue of Daniel Ellsberg in leaking the Foggy Bottom cables. A military jury passed on convicting of aiding the enemy but did convict him of compromising security.

Sunday Musings

Revis and Buc-Head? I'm not sure if the was the first guy to get the "two thirds of the earth are covered by water and the other third is covered by [fill in CF/CB name]", but Darrelle Revis comes close; he just got traded to Tampa Bay, where he'll help a dysfunctional secondary. A sidebar on the ESPN piece noted that the Bucs were next to last in giving up 30+ plays outside the numbers, making their secondary the Tampa Poo.

I googled for that, and Garry Maddox is the original guy that got applied to.

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They had Wacky-tobaccy Day yesterday. One gal pictured on Drudge either had lit up a Happier Hour burrito or had gotten into the prop room from Up in Smoke. If they folks were of a spiritual bent, they'd give high church a new meaning this morning.

You can get five-cent bags at Aldi, so skip the dime bags they're trying to sell.

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The post-mortem of the Boston bombings begins; one interesting report had Tamerlan intereviewed by the FBI two years ago. It seems he had shown up on Russian intelligence radar and they asked the US to look into him. At the time, the federales didn't find anything to act upon.

I was just thinking of our pressure-cooker bomb. Buying a pressure cooker isn't going to show up on radar; we usually don't put Bed, Bath and Beyond on terror-watch mode. Buying a pound or two of nails at the hardware store to make the shrapnel won't raise any red flags, lest every building contractor get the white glove treatment. Only the explosive itself would create an issue, and in some cases (as OKC clearly would remind us) that you can make bombs out of "dual use" stuff with mundane applications.

Thus, folks like the Tsarnaev brothers wouldn't be caught doing anything wrong until they actually did something wrong. Remember, only donut shop owners like a police state.

Afternoon Musings

I'm already getting Bingage for the Tittibawassee flood; somehow, Google ignores my post but Bing has it covered.

On a heavier note, they are starting to use Midland High as refugee housing; Eileen has Friday off since she teaches there.

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I was reading USA Today at lunch and they are in full yellow-journalism mode on the background check bill, with a dishonor roll of the folks who voted against the bill.

I made the mistake of forgetting that a trick a leader of the yeas can do is to vote against the bill if you're going to come up a bit short, since a no-voter can ask to reconsider the bill later. Dirty Harry did just that, but it's a trick that folks in both parties do on a regular basis, so it's not as sneaky as it sounds.

In order to list Reid's no vote on the dishonor roll behind the FAIL red stamp, they gave him an asterisk, noting the procedural rationale for his vote. That way he can figure out who's ass to risk twisting down the line after mau-mauing the Sandy Hook shooting a while longer.

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The Ricin-letter guy was found, a Tupelo, MS native who portrayed the most famous resident of that town on the side and was seeming born disgruntled and was, well, multiple bubbles off plumb. His vibe reminded me a bit of Gabby Gifford's shooter, a guy who like conspiracy theories and distrusted authority across the board; in Mississippi, that attitude will make you look liberal since you have conservative powers-that-be.

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When you get one toxic letter, false alarms are the order of the day. Saginaw had a scare when Sen. Levin's field office there has a supicious package that proved benign. That's just a half-hour away from us, so that was a bit spooky.

Thursday Musings

"American Athletic" sounds like a competitor for Dicks and Dunhams; I can already see the sweatshirt, which always has XL up front even on someone in a lower weight class.

That's what the football half of the Big East will go by. On a related note, Tulsa is joining the new configuration, giving them a dirty dozen football teams by 2015 when Navy starts tossing the pigskin with AA.

Ooh... all of the stairwells on campus have twelve steps, it take it.

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Speaking of folks Anonymous, they are at it again, but are on the side of the angels, giving what passes for North Korea's Internet a hard time.

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Interesting; Minnesota goes from one guy with UK roots to another, hiring away Florida Atlantic's Richard Petino. Yep, son of Rick "Get a Room" of Louisville fame. The second-generation college coach will get to go up against a trio of second-generation ballers at Michigan every year; he could get some advanced notice of them if they go up against his dad in the finals.

Friday Musings

Here's an odd piece that went from a hyper-local piece in the Midland Daily News to ESPN overnight; it turns out that the guy who robbed a gun shop in Gladwin (about a half-hour north of Midland) was a missing-and-presumed-dead amateur MMA fighter.

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Time flies. When I started the blog, Ralph Klein was a big-mouthed premier of Alberta, prone to say something that would not sit well in the salons of Toronto or Vancouver on a quarterly basis. Now, he's on his last legs heading to hospice care.

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Did Mike Tomlin put a hit on read-option QBs?

But as Tomlin's comment hints, the read-option carries risk and exacts from the quarterback a physical price that the small sample size doesn't yet prove teams are willing to pay.

So while the read-option may be the hot concept of the NFL moment, opposing defenses view it instead as something to be stamped out.

"We look forward to stopping it," Tomlin said. "We look forward to eliminating it."

That can be read two ways. One way is to be able to counter-scheme the read-option and render it ineffective. The shotgun was introduced a half-century ago by the 49ers as a running set, which confounded the NFL until George Halas pulled out his old single-wing defense playbooks and stuffed SF when they played his Bears. Some hot DC might come up with a scheme to contain the spread.

Or, you hit the quarterback enough where they stop wanting to run the spread before they get turned into sandwich spread. I'm reminded of this snark about Tubthumping ("I get knocked down, but I get up again") on this worst-song list; "Please, let's all keep knocking them down. I don't care what they say, eventually they'll stay down for good."

It wasn't that long ago that the Steelers had a QB that could run the spread. Kordell Stewart used to drive folks crazy with a proto-Wildcat and Dennis Dixon saw some time as a third-stringer promoted to starter; however, Dixon is now understudying Michael Vick on the other side of PA. You're not running the spread with Big Ben, so you want to make the spread go away if your Tomlin.

Saturday Musings

I haven't been blogging much the past few months; Facebook seems to take the random blog post, since you can do quick-take posts there easier than via a blog with a post-to-Facebook button.

In addition, I've been fighting off underemployed depression. I've got time to blog but fight to have the energy to. In addition, I'm in something of a-pox-on-both-your-houses mode in politics, where folks fight over which cliff to drive off of.

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Pre-season box-scores are hard to track down, but MLB.com seems to have it covered. The Tigers got beat 10-3, but all of the runs were allowed by farm-hands. Sanchez pitched two shutout innings and closer-designate Rondon pitched a shutout inning, albeit with a walk, a  hit and two strikeouts; the latter sounds like Papa Grande circa 2011 a bit too much, having an adventure before getting out without damage.

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Interesting piece on Ron Sider calling out the AARP for being unhelpful in the bigger-picture budget debate; some trimming of wealther-seniors' benefits might well be called for as part of a long-term budget solution, but special-interest groups don't get funds for supporting only slightly messing with their demographic. Your pro-choicers will lobby to kill 'em off at 8.999 months and the AARP will go to the mat to protect Bill Gates' Social Security check.

Sadly, it's a AmSpec piece in the "liberal who gets the big picture" mode. Sider's actually been looking after "the least of these" since Hector was a pup and he can see that the Sun City crowd is generally not part of them. I recall selling his books two decades ago when I ran the Cedar Campus bookstore; he's one of the guys who didn't check his theology at the door when he takes a liberal economic take.

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There has to be a pony somewhere in that massive road apple the Pistons dropped in Indy last night; Khris Middleton looking like an NBA three and Kravtzov getting a double-double and occasionally playing a gawky Drummond to a Bynum lob. Since the Pistons traded their two main small fowards, Middleton might get some playing time going forward.

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Very odd Johnny Football story; he can't make money off his nickname, but he can sue people who are and pocket the results of the suit with the NCAA's blessing. That might give him some pocket money until he starts playing on Sunday a year or two from now.

Once Around The Front Page

A newly-popular rapper has some less-than-helpful comments about the US in his past. That shouldn't be that much of a surprise, since everyone from the Dixie Chicks on down were dissing the superpower side of the US in the mid-00s. Rappers are generally critters of the left, and when you throw in the semi-colonial relationship that the US has with South Korea, thus making the US an easy authority figure to rage against for Korean lefties, one could see where the path of least resistance for our young Psycho would be to dis Uncle Sam.

You expected him to do Lee Greenwood? It still doesn't make it right, but it at least makes it explainable. To top it off, Psy is back-peddling so well, the Lions might want to sign him to the practice squad.

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We've got some modest right-to-work legislation pending in Lansing. It doesn't go as far as the Wisconsin reforms that stripped public-sector workers from the right to bargain on wages; this just gives folks the right not to belong to a union and still work at a union-represented workplace. So, if Eileen gets hired in as a full-time paraeducator and is part of a workforce that is AFT-represented, she could opt not to pay dues and not be a part of the union.

That does create some free-riders who get the benefits of the strength-in-numbers effect of a union, but it also keeps unions from having a captive audience that has to make de-facto donations to the Democratic Party as part of their job; they can ask for the part of their dues that is political in nature back as part of current law, but there is a lot of comingling of union and political activity that would still be not refundable.

This would end the closed-shop, where you have to be a union member to work at a unionized facility. That hits the unions in their pocketbook, but is only un-democratic if you think that a majority should get to be able to browbeat a minority into going along and make them give money to questionable causes if a majority at work think its a good idea.

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Here's an interesting story out of Bay City (my mom's home town); they are looking to trim their fire department and cross-train some policemen as backup fire-fighters. That makes some intuitive sense, creating something of a generic first-responder who can do both police and fire functions, but it surely won't make the fireman's union happy.

If done sloppily, you can have an under-trained responce team for fires which could cost lives; if done well, you can have your combo-responders doing police functions until extra firemen are needed, rather than playing fetch with the Dalmatian mascot between runs.

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California's Prop 8 is heading to the Supreme Court, along with a companion case which questions DOMA and asks for a same-sex couple to be treated as such by the IRS, who has to treat them as single per DOMA. The latter creates some interesting headaches, where state law can treated them as married but the IRS needs to treat them as single; it creates a mess during tax time for such folks.

The Prop 8 case has some interesting implications for things outside of same-sex marriage; the district judge questioned the use of tradition as a valid reason for banning same-sex marriage, calling religious arguments irrational. If that part of the case is upheld, it creates an open season for a whole host of other laws that have some traditional roots.

 

Grumbles and Rumbles

More Southern Poverty Law Center mission creep; suing churches for trying to straighten out gay folks. I'm not sure what this has to do for protecting the little guy; once could see where their core mission of hate-group containment fit their title, since it was poor blacks that the Klan and Nazi types preyed upon, but gays aren't an impoverished group. A put-upon group at times, but not poor.

However, things have morphed where the SPLC is anti-conservative rather than for the little guy. It takes away from the honorable work it's done keeping tabs on hard-core haters and hitting them in the pocketbook via well-placed lawsuits; now, they're seemingly looking for the pocketbooks first and expanding the mission to fit.

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I've passed on commenting on the 2.5 Men story, but this American Spectator piece opts to take both barrels to... Seventh Day Adventism, pulling out the greatest hits from the anti-cult literature on them; that's something of an own-goal to tackle the lesser evil first. The former half-man Angus Jones seems to have had a conversion through a SoCal SDA church; while it's theology leaves a bit to be desired (swapping annihilation for hell and some odd dietary rules alongside the Saturday-sabbath quirk), it's a better place to spend the weekend than the local bar.

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Computer software is getting scary at times. The other day, someone Googled here under "FSM Save the Queen"; Google figured out on its own to translate the acronym to Flying Spaghetti Monster and found an old post of mine.

On a comparable vein, Typepad now has a link-generator that provides possible links for you based on your post. For instance, as I type this part, it gives me a Wikipedia link for FSM, which I just used above. What's creepier is that it's offering a Hulu link to 2.5 Men, translating the decimal appropriately; that's one Siri-ous algorithm. Thanks, but I'll pass, since I kinda agree with Jones' rant of the week.

Saturday Morning Confusion

Gen. Petraeus seemed to be about the last guy to get caught with his pants down, but he would up having an affair and stepping down from his CIA post because of it. He seemed to be one of the good guys, having written the book on counter-insurgency warfare and becoming the top general on the ground in Southern Asia before getting the CIA job. He was mentioned as a possible running mate for Romney, as many respected generals are.

No, I don't think this is designed to head off him talking to Congress about the Benghazi case; there wouldn't be anything to stop the committees from asking a newly-former CIA chief to talk about stuff other than the standard security issues that might require part of his testimony to be done privately to keep secret stuff secret.

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The Air Force provided a great backdrop for Michigan State's basketball opener, as they turned a C-130 hanger into a fieldhouse in a couple of days at the big Ramstein base in Germany. Alas, UConn won, giving interim head coach Kevin Ollie a win in his first win since taking over from Jim Calhoun. However, MSU loves to play a tough out-conference schedule, since you'll learn more by losing to UConn than by mopping the floor with Slippery Rock, as Michigan did last night.

Speaking of openers; Kentucky has reloaded. This might well be a better club that last year, and they won the title last year.

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Interesting divorce of sorts in Alberta, as the provincial Tories are looking to distance themselves from their federal brethern. Since Alberta's conservative split in two with a Tea Party-style Wildrose Alliance starting up and coming in a solid second in the last election, you saw a few federal Conservatives MPs backing Wildrose. The automatic seats that federal Conservative MPs get at the provincial conventions may be pulled as a result.

That's a natural progression, since the provincial PCs are more centrist, having pruned the more libertarian/social conservative wing off via Wildrose; the current provincial Tories look more like the RINOey federal Tories of the 90s before merging back with the Reform/Alliance movement, more Joe Clark than Stockwell Day or Stephen Harper.

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I'm showing my age, but the news of Justin Welby as the new Archbishop Of Canterbury had me thinking of Marcus Welby, the old TD doctor. Welby is a moderate evangelical within the Anglican camp, somewhat more in line with the southern old-school churches than the British and North American churches who have listed left by and large. He's not an economic conservative, having chewed out lenders in a speech at the House of Lords, but he does have a business background, having worked for an oil company before entering the ministry.

What that means for pan-Anglican affairs remains to be seen. Welby seems to be pro-women-in-ministry but old-school on homosexual issues; thus, he's on the liberal side of one hot-button issue and on the conservative side of the other. The classic mugwump, with his mug on one side and his wump on the other.

Saturday Musings

Odd era, where I have my laptop in the computer shop (the plug-in spot broke off) and am using an older-but-underperforming laptop. The idea that we have a spare laptop in the house says something about where the computer has gone.

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My mom needs to get into the computer age; she get ticked a bit when we tell her what my sister and niece are doing via their Facebook posts, but Mom's not one to use computers... yet. We may just need to get her a laptop or tablet for Christmas.

I'm reminded of when we got Grandma Kraenzlein a microwave; she didn't see the need for one until we pulled an intervention and bought her one. We made need to do that with my mom, dragging her kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

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I've got a heavy heart for what I'm seeing out of the Sandy aftermath. Having ten million folks in one concentrated area requires a lot of infrastruture to get food, electricity, gas and all the others stuff of modern life into that area; that system broke down badly this week.

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The one guy who seems to have looked bad so far is Bloomberg and his tone-deaf attempt to get the NYC marathon running tomorrow despite areas near the course needing help. After an outcry, he did a 180 and cancelled the race. There is something to be said for sports being a way to getting back to normal, but not when it gets in the way of taking care of needs.

There's not much folks from outside the area can do to help, it seems. I don't own a gasoline delivery truck nor do I have electrical repair expertise or have a truck full of food that might help. Prayer is about all I can do.

Tuesday Musings

The first presidential debate is tomorrow. It might be the first time some swing voters took a good look at Romney. The Republican-leaning crowd had a regular dose of him during the copious number of debates during the primary, but we've been in a lull since then.

If Romney can come up with a good back-track on the 47% line, it might well carry the day. Also, he'll need to get at least one dig on the "You didn't build that" front.

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Boko Haram seems to have lived up to its name on this one, shooting up a Nigerian college; You can't get much more "western education" sounding than Federal Polytechnic for "Western ed's not kosher" to attack. However, they aren't quite ready to chalk it up to BH; there are some gang-related activities that could possibly explain it, but there were BH backers on campus.

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Good times for a Tigers fan; they clinched the AL Central last night and saw Cabrera move into sole posession of first place in all three Triple Crown stats. The bias writers have towards winners might give Cabrera a nod over Mike Trout, given that the Angels came up short out west, albeit with a record two games better than Detroit.

Tuesday Musings

Stadium of Dreams? If you build it, the NBA will come... back to Seattle. Of course, they could force the issue; financier Chris Hansen has had his eye on the Sacramento Kings in the past, and the Cereal State (home to flakes, fruits and nuts) capital is struggling to get a new arena built. However, it seems foolhardy to build a $300M stadium without a firm commitment to having a tenant that can take advantage of it.

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9/11 +11. Somehow, I have a feeling things are about to get worse before they get better. Somalia is a free zone for radicals and northern Mali has become jihadist territory. Pakistan continues to be dysfunctional and unfriendly to civilization. The hangover from the Arab Spring winds out as new democracies in Libya and Egypt work out the kinks and a civil war in Syria could easily destabilize Lebanon and possibly through Turkey for a loop.

al Qaeda is on the run, but it has lots of places to run to.

The US embassy in Cairo got rushed in a sacrilege protest. Thankfully, no serious damage was done; seems that a US-based ex-pat Copt had made an anti-Islam video that made the rounds and the crowd blamed the US for anything bad done by our residents.

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I'm still wondering what Ryan Rayburn is blackmailing the Tigers with; batting second in a pennant race with a .171 batting average? Something doesn't quite make sense.