New Year Resolution

This year I’ve decided to make a resolution. I plan on procrastinating more.

I’ll start tomorrow.

Hunting Beaver!

Those wacky folks at The Scottish Beaver Trial (not a made up name) have lost a beaver. The solitary male beaver is rampaging around the countryside chewing up trees and trying to find a mate. This is a bit on the tough side for the wayward rodent, however, since there are no female beavers running around in Britain.

The hunt was on today to catch an escaped beaver which escaped a sanctuary and is now gnawing its way through great swathes of the Devon countryside.

Leaving the tell-tale signs of felled trees in his wake, the animal with an appetite for destruction has proved he is nothing if not eager after travelling more than 20 miles down river.
The six-stone male fled his enclosure on a farm in Lifton, Devon, along with two females which were soon recaptured and is reported to have established his own territory near the village of Gunnislake in Cornwall.

Obviously, it’s past time to call in the experts: Canadians! Or New York’s Finest!

(Side note: The Daily Mail’s “Beaver Fact File” at the end of the article has some hilarious information in it. Also the little tidbit that a family of beavers can fell 300 trees in one winter. Something for landowners to rejoice about when the beaver is officially reintroduced into Britain. Beavers appear to be contributors to global warming then!)

Change You Can’t Believe In

Dynastic succession in the United States Senate, courtesy of the Democratic Party.

Meanwhile, Democrats in New York are fighting over Caroline Kennedy’s campaign to be appointed to the Senate seat being vacated by Secretary of State nominee Hillary Clinton. Former Democrat and former Republican and now independent Mayor Mike Bloomberg is all for the idea, as reportedly is Mr. Obama, whom the daughter of JFK and niece of Senator Ted Kennedy endorsed at a crucial moment during the Presidential primaries. Not so happy is New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, the son of a former three-term Governor, who would like the seat himself and was once married to a Kennedy……

…….And don’t forget Colorado, where a mooted Senate replacement for Secretary of Interior nominee Ken Salazar is his brother, Congressman John Salazar. Democratic Governor Bill Ritter, who has benefited from the money and organization of the Salazar political machine, will make that appointment.

In addition, there’s the Delaware situation where a longtime aide to Joe Biden will be a placeholder until Biden’s son can return from Iraq and run for the seat. And of course, the ongoing drama in Illinois. Do read the whole thing, its rather amusing in a shake-your-head kind of way.

This sort of thing has gone on for years, of course. It is just unusual to see so much of it on display in such a short time.

Blagojevich To Senate: Dare Ya!

The Senate Democrats warned Rod Blagojevich that they would not seat anyone he appointed. But Blagojevich made an appointment anyway, apparently. He also is daring the Senate Democrats to try and block his appointee – who is black.

Brushing aside charges that he tried to sell Illinois’ vacant U.S. Senate seat, Gov. Rod Blagojevich appointed former Illinois Attorney General Roland Burris to the post today in defiance of Senate leaders who said they would not admit anyone he selected.

It was an abrupt about-face for Blagojevich, who had said after his Dec. 9 corruption arrest that he favored a special election to find a successor to President-elect Barack Obama. But Blagojevich said he acted after the Democratic-controlled General Assembly declined to approve legislation for a special election.

“Please don’t allow the allegations against me to taint this good and honest man,” Blagojevich said while introducing Burris at a downtown news conference.

Blagojevich’s move seemed designed to trump fellow Democrats who control the U.S. Senate and have unanimously warned him against making the appointment because of the criminal charges. His choice of Burris, Illinois’ first African-American elected statewide, presents senators with the dilemma of saying no to a replacement for Obama, who was the nation’s only black senator.

Frankly, Burris is crazy to be party to any of this. His appointment is tainted both by an association to Rod “Highest Bidder” Blagojevich and by the position he is putting his party in. Yes, the Senate Democrats will almost certainly lose any challenge to their attempt to block Burris in the courts – they simply have no grounds. But Reid and his fellows will either have to try anyway or roll over and accept Burris. Either option makes them look foolish and ineffectual. Burris may be a fully qualified candidate for the job and a very nice person. But he’s going to be under a cloud no matter how this all plays out.

Besides, Blagojevich is using Burris specifically to spit in Harry Reid’s eye. Burris should have refused to be used like this. That makes him look like he’s more interested in getting the appointment than he is about his own reputation. That does not speak well for Burris.

The Hollywood Che Cult

Ernesto “Che” Guevara continues to be a hot property in Hollywood, despite the fact that good, old Ernesto would have put most of his Hollywood fans up against a wall to be shot. Wall Street Journal columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady points out the real heroics that Hollywood misses in its fawning over Che. That would be the story of those who still yearn for freedom in the insufferable “worker’s paradise” Che helped create.

The miserable Argentine was killed in 1967 in the Bolivian Andes while trying to spread revolution in South America. But his vision of how to govern lives on in the Cuba of today. It is a slave plantation, where a handful of wealthy white men impose their “morality” on the masses, most of whom are black and who suffer unspeakable privation with zero civil liberties.

There is something rich about the supposedly hip, countercultural Hollywood elite making common cause with Cuba’s privileged establishment in 2008. Its victims — artists, musicians, human-rights activists, journalists, bloggers, writers, poets and others deprived of freedom of conscience — would seem to deserve solidarity from their brethren living in freedom. Instead, the ever-so avant-garde Soderberghs side with the politburo.

The Cuban regime loves its apologists. They give cover and deflect international criticism while at home the regime brutalizes its people. Reports from the island are that since Raúl took over from Fidel in 2006, the repression has gotten worse.

How about a Hollywood film about the Women (or Ladies) in White, those women who protest regularly about the incarceration of their husbands by the Cuban regime – for daring to speak out against the regime? Those women who are roughed up by government toughs. (Pretty blatant when even The Independent notices.)

The left idolizes Che despite his murderous history. This should make you think hard about what else Hollywood peddles.

Life In Hell

Or Sderot, more or less the same these days. The unrelenting negative press the Israeli government is getting for finally having had enough is unsurprising, given the horribly slanted international press coverage these days. But maybe a look at the other side, the folks at ground zero, would be instructive. For life, such as it is, in Sderot should be considered when criticizing Israel.

Larissa Yaakobov stands before me sobbing. Her young daughter and nine-year-old son look on helpless. “I can’t do it anymore,” she says in broken Hebrew, “I can’t live here.” “Here” is Sderot, an Israeli border community adjacent to the Gaza Strip where Larissa has lived since she emigrated from Russia fifteen years ago. Larissa ’s son does not say a word. He hasn’t said much, she tells me, since the two watched a Qassam rocket slam into a woman a few feet away killing her instantly.

Less than twenty four hours before Israel unleashed its air-force on the Gaza Strip, I sat with four families in Sderot who have been injured and traumatized by Hamas rocket fire. In the hours before Israel ’s incursion, the mood was tense—even by Sderot standards. The streets were barren; everyone is bracing for new waves of rockets.

Sderot has no shortage of children’s playgrounds—twisty blue and yellow slides, swings and handle-bars. But children are no where to be seen. I do see plenty of bomb shelters. Every bus-stop in Sderot has been turned into a lime-colored enforced shelter with a single shrapnel-proof window. I enter one of these rooms to see what it is like inside. A car screeches to a halt and the driver dashes out to join me in the shelter. He is panicked and out of breath. Seeing me enter the shelter, he mistakenly thought a rocket was headed our way. I apologize sheepishly for the confusion as he returns to his car and speeds away.

Thousands upon thousands of these terror rockets have fallen on Israel. Many people have been killed or maimed by them. The rockets are unrelenting and strike civilians. Yet the international media and the political elites across the world reserve their criticism not for the attackers, but for the victims.

Consider for a moment, as the author of this piece does, what the response would be if San Diego was under rocket attack on a daily basis from Tijuana. Think hard about that.

The Camelot Valley Girl

Taylor Marsh writing about the New York Times interview with Caroline, you know, Kennedy.

Um… okay. Whatever.

Now I don’t care who gets the Senate seat in New York, but the celebrity angle embodied in Caroline Kennedy wanting the job wouldn’t be so insulting if she didn’t speak like, you know, some teenager trying to figure out how to, um… well, you know, lie her way through a job interview.

A random excerpt from the interview itself on why Caroline Kennedy thinks she is qualified:

CK: Well, it is up to the governor to decide, and it is up to the governor to decide what’s best for New York. You know, I think that I could advocate for New York, I think that we are losing a very visible, very strong, very powerful advocate in Hillary Clinton, and I think it’s to New York’s advantage to have somebody who can, you know, bring attention to New York, you know, bring four people from The New York Times here to the coffee shop (laughter) and really put that to work for average people. This is not, you know, about me, it’s about what I can do to, you know, help New York get its fair share, help working families, travel the state, bring attention to what is going on up there. So that’s why I think I would be good.

Like, y’know.

Burning Down The Goat

Gavle, Sweden got their goat, as they have for over four decades. Then, on Saturday, someone got the goat, so to speak. Yes, once again, Gavle’s giant straw goat was flambéed.

A giant straw goat erected each Christmas in eastern Sweden was set on fire on Saturday in a violent tradition of vandalism during the festive season that has spanned four decades.

Each year the people of Gavle build a 43-foot-tall straw goat, a traditional Scandinavian symbol of Christmas. But since the yuletide tradition began in the central Swedish city of Gavle in 1966, it has also drawn vandals, who have torched the animal 23 times since it was first set up to mark the holiday season. While the 2007 goat made it through the Christmas period intact, in other years it has been smashed, run over by a car and had its legs cut off.

The vandals have not yet managed to top the 2005 goat torching, though. That’s when Santa Claus and the Gingerbread man set the goat on fire with flaming arrows. No, really. I don’t know why the city fathers didn’t use the massive doses of fire retardant this year as they did in 2006 when I first posted about the goat toasties.

Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others

Victor Davis Hanson writes of life at the new Animal Farm.

By July, we will come to feel that 2009 will be one of the most upbeat years in our history, as what used to be the news media? begins to get behind America and report on all the mysteriously wonderful things that are suddenly taking place.

All the campaign talk of the Great Depression, a Vietnam-like war, and our shredded Constitution will now thankfully subside as the Obama administration assumes office and solves problems with conciliation, dialogue, and multilateral wisdom, rather than shrillness, unilateralism, preemption, and my-way-or-the-highway dogmatism. We will hear that, by historical levels, unemployment is still not that bad, that GDP growth is not historically all that low, and that deficits, inflation, interest rates, and housing starts are all within manageable parameters. “Depression” will transmogrify into “recession” which in turn by July will be a “downturn” and by year next an “upswing” on its way to boom times.

Indeed, almost supernaturally crises will be solved with the departure of the hated Bush: no more flooding streets from cracked water mains that were a result of a President’s neglect of infrastructure, and no more spontaneous crashes of Mississippi River bridges due to diversions of critical federal aid from cash-strapped states to Iraq. And when the temperatures rise or drop, the wind howls, the clouds burst forth or go away, the snow melts or piles up, it will be, well, nature that caused the havoc, not the current occupant of the White House who failed to sign Kyoto.

The press already reports – with completely straight faces – that Team Obama has investigated its own ties with the Rod Blagojevich and has cleared itself of any wrongdoing. Can anyone seriously believe that any Republican would have received the same treatment?

When Obama does pretty much the same thing as Bush has done in the future, can anyone doubt it will be described by the media in completely different words? It, whatever the policy or decision, will be enlightened, not unconstitutional. The press has already been giving free passes to Obama on things that would have sunk a Republican. It will not get better.

Do read the whole thing.

Coal For Christmas

The old warning that naughty children would only get a lump of coal in their Christmas stockings never had much effect on me. We really did not make a big deal about the whole stocking thing in my house when I was growing up. But then, we also exchanged gifts on Christmas Eve, a Norwegian tradition. Or maybe just out Norwegian family tradition. But now, getting coal in your stocking for some folks is a score, not a penalty. The use of coal for residential heating is on the rise.

Burning coal at home was once commonplace, of course, but the practice had been declining for decades. Coal consumption for residential use hit a low of 258,000 tons in 2006 — then started to rise. It jumped 9 percent in 2007, according to the Energy Information Administration, and 10 percent more in the first eight months of 2008.

Online coal forums are buzzing with activity, as residential coal enthusiasts trade tips and advice for buying and tending to coal heaters. And manufacturers and dealers of coal-burning stoves say they have been deluged with orders — many placed when the price of heating oil jumped last summer — that they are struggling to fill.

“Back in the 1980s, we sold hundreds a year,” said Rich Kauffman, the sales manager at E.F.M. Automatic Heat in Emmaus, Pa., one of the oldest makers of coal-fired furnaces and boilers in the United States, in a nod to the uptick in coal sales that followed the oil crises of the 1970s.

“But that dwindled to nothing in the early 1990s — down to as many as 10 a year,” he said. “It picked up about a year ago, when we moved about 60 units, and then this year we’ve already sold 200.”

When my wife and I lived in New York, we bought a lovely, old cobblestone house. It was built somewhere around 1827-1835. It was not a “fancy” cobblestone, with meticulous herringbone stone patterns and had been unoccupied for a number of years before we bought it. It wasn’t all that big, but it was well built with massively thick walls. It also had no central heat.

At some point, a previous owner had installed electric baseboard heaters in the rooms of the house. These cost a fortune to run in winter. My wife and I installed a coal stove insert in the old cobblestone part of the house in the main fireplace and a pellet stove in the newer addition that had been put on at some date.

They worked great. A lot of work, but heat was not a problem. Because of the house layout, natural circulation kept the house nice and warm, no matter how cold it was outside. That coal stove put out some serious heat, too. (We had to have a stainless steel liner installed in the old stone chimney to accommodate the stove.) I burned pea-sized anthracite in the stove. A ton takes up a surprisingly small volume and I built a smallish bin to hold it. Yeah, I had to lug coal and ash on a regular basis, but it wasn’t all that bad. It also kept the house comfortable.

Via Memeorandum

Something To Think About

Try to stay humble.

Second, consumers in many parts of the world are in relatively good shape. That statement might strike many as absurd, given the mantra of “consumers have been living beyond their means.” But it’s not just the third of American households that have no mortgage, or the 50% savings rate in China, or the still massive wealth accumulation in the Gulf region, Brazil and Russia. It’s that the credit system, even at its most promiscuous, didn’t allow consumers to take on the obscene leverage that financial institutions did. Millions of people who shouldn’t have been lent money were, either in mortgages or through credit cards. But they couldn’t be levered 40-to-1 as investment banks and funds were……..

…….The rush to declare the future bleak has obscured the fact that no one knows the outcome of an unprecedented event. No one. The worst course in the face of uncertainty is blind faith in conventional wisdom and past patterns. The best is to stay humble in the face of the unknown, creative and unideological about solutions, and open to the possibility that as quickly as things turned sour they can reverse.

The nonstop pronouncements of doom also have a certain self-fulfilling quality to them. People read them and change their behaviors based on a perceived threat. There are some troubling aspects to the speed of the downturn, but, as Karabell points out, there is no historical perspective here – the downturn is unprecedented.

Oddly, here where I live, the economy is not doing particularly badly. I recently met with the accountant who has done our taxes for years and she said that the clients she was seeing all were doing ok right now. Not that she was cheery about everything. Not everything is exactly as it is being reported.

Away In a Test Tube

Not to ruin anyone’s Christmas, but this story bothers me on several levels. It seems that some ardent amateur scientists have decided that breeding new creations in their homes is a really great idea.

SAN FRANCISCO — The Apple computer was invented in a garage. Same with the Google search engine. Now, tinkerers are working at home with the basic building blocks of life itself.

Using homemade lab equipment and the wealth of scientific knowledge available online, these hobbyists are trying to create new life forms through genetic engineering — a field long dominated by Ph.D.s toiling in university and corporate laboratories……

…..Jim Thomas of ETC Group, a biotechnology watchdog organization, warned that synthetic organisms in the hands of amateurs could escape and cause outbreaks of incurable diseases or unpredictable environmental damage.

“Once you move to people working in their garage or other informal location, there’s no safety process in place,” he said.

That, in a nutshell, is the problem. These folks working in their dining rooms or garages have no containment, no safety procedures, no way to stop a release of something unfortunate – or really, really bad – as a result of their experiments. They have little or no actual scientific training and most will have no actual ability at what they are attempting. Most of these folks are, frankly, merely dilettantes who will accomplish nothing other than to stink up their garages or dining rooms and will soon lose interest and move on to their next hobby.

But there is a real possibility that someone, having just enough knowledge gleaned from the interwebby to be dangerous, will make a mistake. The ethical implications of all this are a whole other discussion.

Merry Christmas

A very Merry Christmas to all of my readers. May your holidays be safe and happy.

Silent Night

“God bless all of you, all of you on the good earth.” On December 24, 1968, American astronaut Frank Borman ended a live transmission from lunar orbit with those words. The crew, Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders had each read part of a passage from the book of Genesis.

I watched that transmission live when it happened forty years ago tonight. We sent men to the moon in my lifetime. Now we are only able to reach low earth orbit. Tonight the night around the moon is silent indeed.

It should not be.

Bogey!

NORAD is again tracking a large, red-suited man riding a flying sleigh pulled by gravity-defying reindeer. For fifty years now, NORAD has tracked this apparition as he circumnavigates the world.

The US and Canadian military personnel has been keeping tabs on a strange object flying across the world tonight – Santa Claus. What’s more, they’ve been joined on the internet by millions of his believers thanks to Google.
They can follow Santa’s path online with a Google two-dimensional map or in 3D using Google Earth, where he can be seen flying through different landscapes in his sleigh.

But the tracking technology comes courtesy of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (Norad) which monitors air and space threats against the U.S. and Canada.

The NORADSanta website is here. My wife and I heard a report about this on NPR this afternoon. She, despite being of the same generation as me had never heard of this 50 year old tradition. She was charmed. Our thanks to the men and women away from their families tonight who help make this happen. And thanks to all those who have gone before them.