Auto Politburo

We're going to have a Presidential Politburo Task Force on Autos.  Headed by the Secretary of the Treasury, it's going to oversee restructuring of the industry.  Or at least GM and Chrysler.

An auto-industry official expressed disappointment. “We would have preferred having a single, go-to person focused on the restructuring,” the official said. ”This isn’t bad, but the other would have been better.”

If you really wanted a single, go-to focused individual you should have gone to a bankruptcy court, slick.

Now you've got to deal with at least nine different executive organizations, [1] at least that many agendas and a whole bunch of courtiers representing special interests.

And you thought dealing with the UAW was complicated. 

Y'all have fun with my money, y'hear?


[1] 'At least' the Departments of Treasury, Labor, Transportation, Commerce, and Energy. the National Economic Council, the White House Office of Energy and Environment, the Council of Economic Advisers and the EPA.

Neenah High School Winter Concert - February 19, 2009

The payback for obligatory attendance at middle school concerts is being privileged to attend your spawn's high school concerts: good music played well by youth is a fine thing.

Hearing Ashokan Farewell played with skill and joy? Took me right out of winter and clean into a warm summer evening: that was bliss.

Ashokan Farewell - Jay Ungar

Dentist Day

My love wrote ..

Deep inside I know that dentists are not evil people. There is something deep rooted in my childhood that has me very fearful of them.  Maybe it's the fact that I didn't get to visit the dentist often at all and when I did he said he was putting a "train" in my mouth.

Or maybe she had Orin Scrivello for a dentist ...

Get your mind off wintertime

Clouds so swift
Rain won't lift
Gate won't close
Railings froze
Get your mind off wintertime
You ain't goin' nowhere

Today was just .. about .. perfect. 

We got 2-3 inches of snow overnight, but it was the light stuff and so a breeze to shovel and sno-blow off the driveway.  And it made great snowballs. Which delighted the dog - she likes catching snow in her mouth.  A hint of a breeze but not enough to dislodge it from the trees -so we had that 'snow in trees' thing that makes for great photographs.  Just enough snow to cover the old stuff that was getting sort of grubby, but not so much that you can't leave the house.  Temperature with a bit of a snap to it, but not so cold you feel like you are standing in a deep freeze.

Dogs, children, wife and a fire.  Food in the pantry, roof over our heads.  Who could want for more?

A night of perfect suck

And you thought your day at work was bad ...

According to Stephen Sondheim (who was a production assistant for the original Broadway production) ... Allegro may have suffered the most disastrous opening night in theatre history. In addition to a falling flat, during a dance number in Act One, one of the actors caught his tap shoe in a track on the stage, tearing every ligament in his leg, and had to be carried - screaming - from the stage. In Act Two, Lisa Kirk, who was making her professional stage debut, caught a heel in another track and fell headlong into the orchestra.

Cone of Violence

DFF

“Cone of Violence.”

(Phrase coined by TJIC today, while describing how a sawzall fell apart while in use and almost took his eye out.)

I like that phrase.  Describes with accuracy a shotgun blast, claymore land mines, anti-tank rockets and some industrial accidents.

Rockin'.

Wisconsin State Superintendent - Good vs Bad

So, about the primary election-night victory where the gal who was completely outspent by almost everyone got just 9,904 votes less than the incumbent? Which put her and him in the running for the general election in April?

You gotta love-love-love the headline on Rose Fernandez's website this morning . . .

WE DID IT: Parent Advocate to Face Teacher’s Union Candidate in April Race for State Superintendent

[Mukwonago, Wisc.] Rose Fernandez, a former pediatric trauma nurse and senior administrator at Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin, advanced through the Primary Election for State Superintendent Tuesday night.

“The results tonight are a testament to the power of our message of reform,” said Fernandez. “Our coalition of concerned parents, excellent teachers and fed up taxpayers proved, yet again, that they can go toe-to-toe with the most entrenched and well-funded special interests in Wisconsin politics and not flinch.”

While WEAC spent upward of $200,000 to get their chosen candidate through the Primary, the Fernandez campaign spent less than $20,000 and relied on an informative website, traditional hard work and citizen to citizen contact.

“Voters will have a clear contrast in April,” said Fernandez. “I want to bring people together to reward excellence in education, promote higher standards, empower parents and protect taxpayers, while we can expect the usual demagoguery from the WEAC-driven defenders of the status quo.”

Fernandez, the outsider in this race, expects to be attacked because her Masters degree and professional background is in nursing and hospital administration, not K-12 education.

“I have not been a part of the educational bureaucracy for my professional life, but my focus has always been on serving the needs of children,” said Fernandez. “For example, I have not been leading the DPI while generations of students have been abandoned in Milwaukee, with taxpayers statewide paying the bills. I am proud of my record and look forward to continuing to run on our agenda of higher standards without higher taxes.”

Rose expects WEAC and other special interest groups will move quickly to demonize her. But she’s ready. Voters who want to know the truth about Rose and her campaign should continue to visit ChangeDPI.com

“Some have dismissed me as a mom on a mission, but I will wear that label as a badge of honor,” said Fernandez, who owns a small business with her union member firefighting husband Javier. “I am looking forward to campaigning across the state and will continue to listen to the concerns of families, teachers and administrators who want to improve our public schools.”

The General Election is April 7th.

Space4Commerce is not associated with Rose Fernandez or Families for Rose Fernandez.  We just like her a whole bunch.

The README is there for a reason

Me: Hey, wait a second. The README claims we need sqlite3 on your webserver. I'm not sure it's installed ...

Her: Give it a shot.

Me: (aghast) But ... if sqlite3 is not on the server it won't work.



And we run smack-bang into a divide more fundamental than the male-female thing: the ones who check things out before launching and the ones who give it a shot and see if it flies or splats into a wall.

God love her, my beautiful and attractively intelligent wife falls firmly into the latter camp.

I fall firmly into the camp whose theme song contains this verse ..

They do not preach that their God will rouse them a little before the nuts work loose.
They do not preach that His Pity allows them to drop their job when they damn-well choose.
As in the thronged and the lighted ways, so in the dark and the desert they stand,
Wary and watchful all their days that their brethren's ways may be long in the land.

Oh, and her revamped web site is up and running. Joe Bob says check it out.

Wisconsin Election Results - February 17 2009

Election Results - here.

Last Updated: 2/17/2009 9:41 p.m.

Wisconsin Superintendent of Schools 1442 of 3450 Precincts Reporting
NAME	VOTES	Pct.
Tony Evers	42,502	37%
Rose Fernandez	33,269	29%
Van Mobley	14,565	13%
Todd Price	13,358	12%
Lowell Holtz	10,125	9%

Unless things change drastically, it's Evers - Fernandez in the primary election. Yow-zah!

Politics at the Speed of Light

Everything moves faster these days. Music has a faster tempo - I find some pop songs that I remember from the 80s as fast and peppy drag along. Television from the 70s - when it's aired uncut - seems to take forever to get to the point and horribly static.

Heck, even politics moves faster than it used to: it took less than a month for President Obama to break seven campaign promises ...

1. Make government open and transparent.

2. Make it "impossible" for Congressmen to slip in pork barrel projects.

3. Meetings where laws are written will be more open to the public. (Even Congressional Republicans shut out.)

4. No more secrecy.

5. Public will have 5 days to look at a bill.

6. You’ll know what’s in it.

7. We will put every pork barrel project online.

Via.


Breaking promises is par for the course with politicians.  But a) this guy was supposed to be different [1] and b) has anyone so explicitly promised a set of talking points and then gone back in less than a month?


A comment from Chicago Boys ..

The Ghost Shirt Democrats are doing their dance, but the vast herds of union-member Democrat-voting buffalo will never return to the plains, and [the] magic ghost shirts will not turn the ballots of angry voters into water [in] 2010 and 2012. Of course, the Republicans could still blow it, but even if they do, the Democrats have shown in a few short weeks that they have no idea how to govern the country, just to loot it. They will be replaced, if not by Republicans, then by somebody else.

Maybe.  We'll see.


Cross Posted to The Daily Brief.

[1] Yes, even I believed he would be.  And there I was, trusting a politician, like a sucker.

Stasis

Our Government now brings us .. FinancialStability.gov

On Tuesday, February 10th, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner outlined a comprehensive plan to restore stability to our financial system. In the address, Secretary Geithner discussed the Obama Administration’s strategy to strengthen our economy by getting credit flowing again to families and businesses, while imposing new measures and conditions to strengthen accountability, oversight and transparency in how taxpayer dollars are spent. And Secretary Geithner explained how the financial stability plan will be critical in supporting an effective and lasting economic recovery.

Stability can be another word for stasis - if you ain't growing, you're stagnating. This is true for markets, companies and countries.

Speaking of the cultural stagnation . . .

We have a culture that holds engineers and inventors in contempt and views new technologies first and foremost as threats to be mitigated. The Chinese nearly worship engineers and inventors and adopt new technologies with a reckless disregard of all but the most gross dangers.

Our intellectual class spends its time trying to generate contempt of our institutions, history and traditions and to shatter our belief in our own capabilities. China’s intellectual class spend its time creating and instilling a fierce confidence in their institutions, history and traditions and building a belief that they can accomplish anything.

The Chinese have become the lean and mean, energetic barbarians sweeping down on a fat, decadent and leaderless civilization. They have the same cowboy attitude towards technology and commerce that drove America to the top in late 1800s. They are going to do to us what we did to Europe in the pre-WWII era and for the same reason. The difference this time is that the Chinese share no cultural bond to the rest of the world as America did to Europe.

I suppose we’ll learn to adopt an attitude of superior impotence just as the Europeans have done. China will do great things while we will claim we’re too wise and mature to attempt such things.

Evolution and You

Speaking of stability ...  evolution is still working away on us ..

Cochran, Harpending and their colleagues examined about 2000 examples of such sweeps in an African population and 2000 in the European population. They found strong evidence that advantageous alleles in these regions are sweeping through the human population - evidence of natural selection at work. These sweeps began earlier in Africa than in Europe, perhaps 80,000 and 40,000 years ago, respectively. They can be dated by looking at the degree to which the linked SNPs have started to break down through the continuing process of genetic recombination.

The authors conclude that these and other signs of more recent human evolution are the result of rapid cultural changes, triggered by the invention of agriculture and the urbanisation of our species. This can be seen in evidence of selection on specific genes such as those that influence our physical ability to form words or to metabolise new foods.

Greeks In Space

Well that was an odd dream.

Spaceships.  City-states on other worlds.  Soldiers wearing Grecian Hopite armor.  Stylized formation combat with dudes wielding swords.  A timber palisade.

Was I replaying the Peloponnesian War mashed up with a random SF novel from my bookshelf?  What the heck, sub-conscious?

Rose Fernandez - State Superintendent

Why should you vote for Rose Fernandez for State Superintendent on February 17th?



She is not endorsed by the teacher's union.
She is not part of the educational bureaucracy.
She is the only candidate to decisively reject calls for tax hikes.
She forged a genuine compromise to keep virtual charter schools open.
She wants the schools to be about kids.

“This is an exciting opportunity to change business as usual in Madison. I’m not part of the status quo. I’m not going to merely listen to a select group of special interests who have been at war with each other over educational issues for decades. I intend to listen to, and be the public voice for, all in Wisconsin who support fiscally-sound policies that encourage and promote educational excellence.

“Pouring more money at a problem doesn’t solve it. That’s true in business, government and public schools. The decisions we face center around not just investment in education. It’s about the return on that investment. We can, and must, expect better outcomes for what we are already spending.” -Rose Fernandez

You should get out and vote on Tuesday for Rose because it's the right thing to do.


Space4Commerce is not associated with Rose Fernandez or Families for Rose Fernandez.  We just like her a whole bunch.

More Fun With Kids

The Monkeys spent the day at their sister's house.  And what did I do with some of the time they were gone?

YM: Hey, the living room floor feels funny - and it's shiny!

I waxed the floor in here.

YM: Cool. (Runs to his bedroom)

Oh, I also

YM: (run-run-slip-WHAM) "Ow."

waxed the back hallway.


Kids are fun.

Blue Monogamy

a softer world.  It's odd, it's funny ..



... and so right.

Drunk Old Sam

Travis on Keynesian spending and the stimulus package: in theory, under some circumstances, it could help the economy.

But ....

I do not think that under the political process, anything remotely approaching the “some Keynesian spending that could be effective” could ever get enacted. The only thing that you can possibly get out of the swamp of DC is a metric ton of lard with a bow on top.

To make an analogy: if your garden shed is on fire and some folks say “we should get drunk old Sam to throw a bucket of water on it” and I say “I’m not sure that that’s a good idea”, it’s not because I deny that water (sometimes) puts out fires: it’s because I happen to know that the four of the last five times that Sam has tried to put out fires he’s crashed through three other people’s living rooms to do so, by the time he got to the fire it was pretty much out, and what he actually ended up doing was throwing a bucket containing gasoline through the living room window of the house next door, thus starting another fire, and the fifth time drunk old Sam did show up on time and pitched a sealed bottle of Evian into a bonfire.

Well said.

Eclectic Diet

Said the Older Monkey after our trip to the grocery, and dinner: "This is the best .. day .. ever. Kumquats, pepperoni pizza and cranberry juice!"

Teenaged boys make interesting diet choices.

Tyrol

Before you read any further ...

1. This contains spoilers for the Battlestar Galactica episode 'Blood on the Scales'
2. Re-reading this I can't believe how fanboy I get about this show.


About Tyrol ...

No, first I gotta blockquote this. Because it is so right.

Also not rolling over: Admiral William Adama, who literally spends the entire episode telling every single person in the world to fuck off as loudly as one can through one's dentures. He is a Lean, Mean, Fuck You machine. It is amazing. Turns out his Bucket List has one item on it, and that item is: Everybody Goes To Hell. Bill's Care Bear Glare powers have never been so magically delicious. He tells Gaeta to cram eleven things up his ass, invites Zarek to blow him, calls his lawyer a pimp, tears holes in the hull using his glare... A couple of lieutenants actually cry, because he's that scary. Finally they have no choice but to tie him to a chair in front of a firing squad. Then he just starts spitting at people.

I will never find myself captain of a ship with a mutinous crew. But if I do find myself in a comparable situation ... there are worse role models to emulate.

Speaking of role models - Galen Tyrol.

Chief spends the entire episode crawling through exceedingly tight ducts and getting into hilarious scrapes, then pulls out the actual guts of the Galactica FTL drive with his bare hands at the very last second, saving the day.

Like this: Tyrol over the course of a few months has had his life profoundly changed. He's not a husband, he's not a father, he's not the Senior Chief Petty Officer. He's not even human.

What is Galen Tyrol? He is what he chooses to be. He is the guy who knows how things work. The guy who sees a job to be done and gets down and does that sucker.

There is a lot like about a character like that.

Whoops: Artifical Reef Edition

I remember reading about this really keen idea in My Weekly Reader in elementary school: tie up a bunch of tires, sink them in the ocean, create a reef. Wildlife is attracted and from an unsightly mess Good Things Happen.

Fast forward a few decades ...

Of some concern to environmentalists is a "minortoxin" being emitted by the tires.

Well that might be a problem ... but surely the amount of marine life attracted by the reef outweighs a little bit of toxin . . .

Todd Barber, chairman of the Reef Ball Foundation downplayed this aspect of the tire reef in comparison to the damage they cause other reefs: "I don't think anybody's worried about [the toxin] [...] The primary hazard [is] they're moving around."

Yes, moving around.  The tires are still intact but the nylon and steel used to tie the bundles together corroded clean away.

Two million tires were soon loose in sixty-five feet of water.  Scrubbing marine life off as they scoot around.  Crashing into nearby natural reefs and destroying them.  Washing ashore as far north as North Frickin' Carolina.

The same thing has happened to other tire reefs all over the world.  Indonesia and Malaysia mounted similar, larger efforts in the 1980s so you can just imagine how much junk people with good intentions have tossed into the water since the 1970s.

All in all a good argument for people to think really long and hard before committing to a course of action that will have long term affects on future generations. 

Unintended consequences are a bitch.