What Has Eight Arms And Floods?

The answer: An escape artist California two-spotted octopus. Workers at the Santa Monica Pier Aquarium were a bit dismayed to find that the octopus in question had flooded the outside of the aquarium, so to speak. They walked in and found a flood.

For one dexterous octopus, an attempt at a great escape turned into a great flood Thursday at the Santa Monica Pier Aquarium in California.

The female California two-spotted octopus swam to the top of her tank, disassembled a valve with her powerful arm, and released at least 200 gallons (757 liters) of seawater into nearby exhibits and offices.

Obviously, the escape plan involved waiting for a sufficient amount of water to build up, then to surf back to the sea when the door was opened.

Illusions

The Wall Street Journal takes a look at the illusions that Barack Obama is selling. Taxes, according to Obama, will only rise for the “rich”. The Journal points out the absurdity of that claim:

Consider the IRS data for 2006, the most recent year that such tax data are available and a good year for the economy and “the wealthiest 2%.” Roughly 3.8 million filers had adjusted gross incomes above $200,000 in 2006. (That’s about 7% of all returns; the data aren’t broken down at the $250,000 point.) These people paid about $522 billion in income taxes, or roughly 62% of all federal individual income receipts. The richest 1% — about 1.65 million filers making above $388,806 — paid some $408 billion, or 39.9% of all income tax revenues, while earning about 22% of all reported U.S. income.

Note that federal income taxes are already “progressive” with a 35% top marginal rate, and that Mr. Obama is (so far) proposing to raise it only to 39.6%, plus another two percentage points in hidden deduction phase-outs. He’d also raise capital gains and dividend rates, but those both yield far less revenue than the income tax. These combined increases won’t come close to raising the hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue that Mr. Obama is going to need.

But let’s not stop at a 42% top rate; as a thought experiment, let’s go all the way. A tax policy that confiscated 100% of the taxable income of everyone in America earning over $500,000 in 2006 would only have given Congress an extra $1.3 trillion in revenue. That’s less than half the 2006 federal budget of $2.7 trillion and looks tiny compared to the more than $4 trillion Congress will spend in fiscal 2010. Even taking every taxable “dime” of everyone earning more than $75,000 in 2006 would have barely yielded enough to cover that $4 trillion.

The Journal also points out that the carbon cap and trade scheme is nothing more than another – brutal – tax that American taxpayers will pay. That tax is completely regressive. It will impact the less well off much harder. All energy will cost more. You and I will pay for all of that.

Do not be confused here. The word “rich” will have to be defined downward in the coming years. Eventually, anyone with a part time job at a fast food stand will be considered a plutocrat.

Gore Effect Reaches Space

The Gore Effect, heretofore observed only on the surface of the earth has reached space. A NASA satellite designed to monitor global carbon dioxide crashed into the Antarctic Ocean when launched today.

Nasa scientists were left red-faced today after a £190 million rocket carrying a global warming satellite crashed into the ocean near Antarctica.
The Orbiting Carbon Observatory was the agency’s first attempt to measure atmospheric carbon dioxide from space and was designed make climate change models more accurate.
But minutes after the launch at 9.55am GMT, the rocket failed to separate properly and plunged back to the Earth.

NASA, like our government, has turned inward rather than outward.

O-Bingo!

I wish I’d thought of this. For tonight’s much ballyhooed Obama speech, Americans for Tax Reform has come up with handy-dandy O-Bingo cards, so you can play along at home. They have a handy key to what the words mean:

“Since the Great Depression” – The economic one, not the feeling you’ve had since he signed the “stimulus” bill.

“Save or create” jobs – Obama’s new metric whereby he can claim credit for the outcome no matter what happens (how exactly does one determine the number of “saved” jobs?)

“Crisis” – Excuse to hike taxes and grow the government per Rahm Emanuel’s theory: “Never let a crisis go to waste.”

“Stimulus” – The 1,000 page Pelosi-Reid-Obama pork bill rushed through in the dead of night with no transparency and that not a single member of Congress who voted for it actually read.

“Hope” – The optimistic expectation, against all evidence that this government will be the first in the history of time to succeed in spending its way out of economic problems.

“Change” – Take-home pay of future generations due to massive spending increases and government expansion.

There are, of course, more definitions at the link, along with multiple versions of the cards so you can play with family or friends. Personally, I suspect that the speech will consist (other than the buzz words and phrases that will surely get shouts of “O-Bingo!”, if you’re playing at home) of several things:

Bragging, job-destroying tax increases, Federal spending sprees, self back-patting, onerous regulations, tax increases, more government spending, self-congratulations, expensive regulations that cripple job creation, tax increases, extra-special spending, self-praise, tax increases and a few extra tax increases and draconian regulations leading to further job loss, Congressional waste and tax increases for good measure. Ending on some praise for his leadership and a final tax increase.

O-Bingo!

Bailouts As Reality Shows

The Wall Street Journal is not impressed with the Obama administration’s efforts to stabilize the economy thus far. In fact, they liken it to a bad “reality” show:

The current fear stems in particular from the uncertainty of the government’s intentions toward some of the largest banks that are thought to be too big to fail. The Treasury has promised what it calls “stress tests,” which are reasonable in theory and should have been going on for many months at regulated institutions. But the Obama Treasury has announced them as if they are a new cable TV reality show — Survivor: Manhattan.

Which institutions will be sent off the island this week? Will any of them end up like AIG, wasting away in federal hands? How many of the survivors will be forced to take “mandatory” preferred shares that could convert to common and dilute shareholders, as yesterday’s statement put it? And if they do, what new tortures will Barney Frank and Chris Dodd force them to endure? This is no way to restore financial confidence, much less begin an economic recovery.

The bank insolvency problem needs a disciplined approach, not a bailout of the day announcement. Yet that is what we are getting. As a result, the stock market is tanking, down to 1997 levels as of yesterday. The talk of nationalization of the banks neglects the fact that such a move will hurt little people, not rich plutocrats. Pension funds and 401k funds that hold bank stocks will get creamed by such a move.

Like all reality shows, “Survivor: Manhattan” sucks.

Stimulus?

We are assured by Barack Obama that “Because of what” they did, our economy will rebound.

We are fed the news that Barack Obama will present a budget plan that will “slash” the Federal deficit despite a massive “stimulus” plan that increased government spending by a significant amount.

We are promised that the great, wise leaders in Washington will now unilaterally declare carbon dioxide a dangerous pollutant without benefit of Congressional action on that.

The last two items appear to effectively kill the first one.

To slash the deficit you must increase government revenues or slash the Federal spending. Given the nature of what Congress has just done in passing the “stimulus” we can effectively rule out cutting spending. That leaves raising revenues via tax increases. The choices are to raise taxes on individuals or on corporations.

The “stimulus” plan includes a provision for “buy American” that will likely trigger a trade war. That is most likely to damage American corporations and decrease tax revenues from that source. Leaving individuals to pay the taxes.

The regulation of carbon will, by any measure, greatly increase the cost of energy for individuals. Taxpayers are about to get hit with “sticker shock” over the cost of their energy consumption. Individuals will get hit with rising energy prices, rising taxes and a falling economy – all at once.

Stimulus?

If At First You Don’t Succeed…..

Try, try again. But after failing 775 times, perhaps it is time to rethink your plans. A South Korean woman has failed a driver’s license test 775 times. But is still trying, despite spending close to $7,000 in fees in her failed attempts.

Cha Sa-soon, 68, has been trying since 2005 to pass the written portion of the test to get a licence, but she has so far failed to get the 60 percent required to clear it.

“I’ve looked up some guidebooks to get a driver’s licence, and they were saying it takes at most five years to get this,” Cha said in North Jeolla province, where farmers on tractors or cows can be just as common on country roads as motor vehicles.

“It’s already been four years, so I might pass the test next time. That’s what I hope for.”

Something tells me that Cha Sa-soon would not lose interest in her iPod apps.

She should move to the US. She woulod be a shoo-in for a license in most places here.

Baboon Metaphysics

Well, the latest short list for the Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year has been published. We have, of course, reported on the Diagram Prize before. (We are still hiding from some women and the squids are still riled up.) Personally, we here at Blue Crab Boulevard are pulling for the dark horse candidate: Strip and Knit with Style.

The shortlist for the annual Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year has been unveiled by The Bookseller. Six titles, with subjects ranging from fromage frais to strip knitting, make up the shortlist for the hotly contested award, which is now in its 31st year.

Horace Bent, The Bookseller magazine’s legendary diarist and custodian of the prize, said: “Never have I found it so problematic to pick a shortlist of just six. At a time when the economic climate is forbidding and cost-cutting companies are ten-a-penny, I’m proud to report that the British publishing industry has remained as stubborn in the face of change as ever.”

Philip Stone, a sales analyst at The Bookseller, added: “We received a huge number of entries this year and the debate was furious as to which would be included on the shortlist. Six seems such a cruelly low number given titles such as Excrement in the Late Middle Ages and All Dogs Have ADHD were rejected.

That last title was rightfully rejected. There is no sign of ADHD from the Crabitat staff puppies when food is involved. Trust us. S\

So, go vote for your favorite (which really should be Strip and Knit with Style. We’re just saying). Tell ‘em Blue Crab Boulevard sent you.

The App Bubble

Since I’ve been struggling with tech things the past day, it seems fitting that my first post after the restoration of the Crabitat be about tech things. (Well, it’s the first post not dealing with the crash or the aftereffects, at any rate.)

It seems that all those really cool applications people can buy for their iPhones and iPods from the Apple App Store are only amusing for a very brief time. Like a day at most. Most of those cool, must have apps are abandoned by their purchasers after a day.

Just 30 percent of people who buy an iPhone application actually use it the day after it was purchased, according to Pinch Media, which analyzed over 30 million downloads from Apple’s App Store. And the numbers plunge from there: after 20 days, less than 5 percent of those who downloaded an application are actively using it. The drop-off is worse for free applications.

Talk about short attention spans.

There is some good advice for app developers in the article: Get your money up front. Depending on ad-driven income, given these statistics, is economic suicide.

Website Problems

Yesterday was not a great day. But the website is back up, although the domain name is changed until I can get bluecrabboulevard.com back in shape. There appear to be some problems with scripts on the main site. Unfortunately, I am not much with programming, so the .com domain may be offline for some time.

I don’t know if it was just cumulative errors that caused all the problems or if there was some kind of exploit hitting on a weakness. All I know is that it was a very stressful thing to deal with. Fortunately, I had some really excellent tech support today from the hosting company. They had to go in through the shell to move the database over here to this domain. Some 11,000 posts and 25,000+ comments were too much for the WordPress import feature.

For now, I’m sure there are busted links all over the place and there will probably be some things that are acting weird. But the logs show no slow SQL queries since about 9:47 this morning. That would be about the time I flipped the switch on the redirect to the .net domain.

I’ll be putting the place back together over the next few days. Right about now, I need some Advil. This hasn’t been fun.

UPDATE: The hosting company has just confirmed that the redirect worked and that the website is running fine with no errors. Now comes the hard part: fixing the old site to run again.

If You Can Read This…..

Then a new install of WordPress on a backup domain is working. There should be a redirect that takes you from bluecrabboulevard.com to this bluecrabboulevard.net installation. Please leave a comment if you did reach the site. I’m scrambling like heck to get this thing set up and running properly.

Back

The site should be back up and running.

Elaborations

Well, the Roland Burris saga continues. The ever-changing stories Senator Burris spins out daily are reading more than a bit like a soap opera plot. Or a crime novel. Take your pick. It seems the junior Senator from Illinois DID try to raise money for Rod “Highest Bidder” Blagojevich.

U.S. Sen. Roland Burris now acknowledges attempting to raise money for ousted Gov. Rod Blagojevich — an explosive twist in his ever-changing story on how he landed a coveted Senate appointment from the man accused of trying to sell the seat.

Burris made the admission to reporters on Monday, after releasing an affidavit over the weekend saying he had more contact with Blagojevich aides about the Senate seat than he had described under oath to the state House panel that recommended Blagojevich’s impeachment. The Democrat also said in the affidavit, but not before the panel, that the governor’s brother asked him for fundraising help.

There is more than a bit of the appearance of impropriety here. Burris denied many things and has now admitted doing many of the things he denied. While Roddy the salesman might be gone from office, his aroma lingers.

Seriously, Burris cannot possibly be an effective Senator. The unseemly way he got the appointment and what is increasingly looking like potential perjury make him friendless in the Senate. He simply won’t accomplish anything even if he retains his seat.

Burris is supposedly preparing a “concise document” explaining all this. As a former resident of Illinois, I can attest to the fact that many people there would like to see a very, very concise document from him.

Reading “I resign”.

Via Memeorandum.

No Hurry

For all the dire warnings about the urgency of passing the “stimulus” plan, Barack Obama isn’t inclined to take any time to actually sign the bill that Congress spewed until he takes some time off.

After pushing Congress for weeks to hurry up and pass the massive $787 billion stimulus bill, President Obama promptly took off for a three-day holiday getaway.

Obama arrived at his home in Chicago on Friday, and treated wife Michelle to a Valentine’s Day dinner downtown last night. The couple was spotted leaving upscale Table Fifty-Two, which specializes in Southern cuisine, with the first lady toting what appeared to be a doggie bag.

The president plans to spend the Presidents’ Day weekend in the Windy City, and is not expected to sign the bill until Tuesday, when he travels to Denver to discuss his economic plan.

Far be it from me to nay say a person’s wish to treat their spouse to a getaway. I just returned from doing just that. I, however, have not been proclaiming – several times daily – that there is an emergency that requires immediate action. There’s a bit of a difference there.

It’s a bit hard to believe that there is a crisis when the one proclaiming it takes a three day vacation. There is a huge disconnect between Obama’s urgent proclamations and his behavior. Those mixed signals are a problem that he appears to be oblivious to.

The Detroit executives who went, hat in hand, to Congress begging for taxpayer dollars found out the hard way that flying in to beg on private jets was not smart. One hopes that the American voters also notice the stupendously bad judgment of a doomsayer who takes a vacation before delivering “salvation”.

Let’s Not Go There

A chilling column today from Mark Steyn. He recaps the “progress” of the Obamateur administration to date – and isn’t impressed:

It requires a perverse kind of genius for the 44th president not to have waited for a single “event” to throw him off course. Instead, he threw himself off: “Is Obama tanking already?” (Congressional Quarterly) “Has Barack Obama’s presidency already failed?” (The Financial Times). Whether or not it’s “already” failed or tanked, the monthly magazines still gazing out from their newsstands with their glossy inaugural covers of a smiling Barack and Michelle waltzing on the audacity of hope seem like musty historical artifacts from a lost age. The ship didn’t need to hit an iceberg; it stalled halfway down the slipway. This is still the phase before “events” come into play, when an incoming president has nothing to get in the way of his judgment and executive competence. President Obama chose to nominate Tim “Indispensable” Geithner and Tom “Home, James!” Daschle, men whose enthusiasm for the size of the federal budget is in inverse proportion to their own urge to contribute to it. He chose to nominate as commerce secretary first the scandal-afflicted Bill Richardson and then the freakishly scandal-free Judd Gregg, and wound up losing both of them.

Do read the whole thing. Steyn is spot on, but somewhat muted today. Usually, Steyn is a wealth of snarky humor. There is not much to laugh at today:

America has a choice: It can reacquaint itself with socioeconomic reality. Or it can buckle its mandatory seat belt for the same decline most of the rest of the West embraced a couple of generations back. In 1897, troops from the greatest empire the world had ever seen marched down London’s Mall for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. Seventy years later, Britain had government health care, a government-owned car industry, massive government housing, and it was a shriveled high-unemployment socialist basket-case living off the dwindling cultural capital of its glorious past. In 1945, America emerged from the Second World War as the preeminent power on Earth. Seventy years later….

Think hard about that parallel. Even we Americans are diminished in the power we can project. Pirates are thriving again because the two great powers that used to guarantee the freedom of the seas are down to one – and shrinking. The stimulus bill is a down payment on our decline.

Let’s not go there.