Nom de plume: Rivrdog

Think my librag will publish it?

Dear Editor:

Within hours of the major disasters in Haiti, Chile and Japan, the Red Cross was all over us reminding us of our charitable duties to those unfortunates. How strange is it that a week has gone by since Tropical Storm Irene's landfall and we've heard not a peep from them. Too much expectation that Uncle Sugar will set it all to rights, maybe?

Place your bets, please.

Here's your clue, Federal Reserve

CNBC had Federal Reserve Chicago director Charles Evans on this ayem, before the opening bell. In his remarks, he hinted that Obummer's Grand Labor Day Plan will actually be more "monetizing", or printing of money by the Fed. Something to be known as "Quantative Easing Three".

He was asked, during the interview, why the commodities markets (gold was broadly hinted at, but not mentioned) seemed to reject the Fed's moves, and move in opposition to them. If you just got out of the Transporter Room from the Planet Zargon, the price of commodities ALWAYS reflects the real-world value of the currencies that their contracts are sold in, so when gold zooms upward, it is because the dollar's value is falling by a commensurate amount.

Gold's spot price zoomed $40 (2%) during the Director's interview....despite fierce efforts by the Fed, European Central Banks, and other institutions (including the Chicago Merchantile Exchange) last week to kill off the gold price increase, gold has recovered over 60% of it's 12% losses of last week.

The Central Bankers are fooling no one except themselves...

How to kill Agriculture in one fell swoop

...and naturally, the Obama Administration, which has a severe culture clash with the Agricultural sector (as all Socialists have had), is ready to pull the trigger on this assassination attempt.

Where's the data showing a NEED for rules of this sort, Mister President? You won't show that data because if you did, it would be seen that other sectors of the heavy-vehicle transportation industry have far worse safety records than farmers.

Nope, this is a cultural thing, pure and simple. So, help me out, readers, which Socialist in the top level of the Obummer administration got held up behind a tractor on a rural road? I know the reason for the idea of the rules against the farm-to-market shipments of grain and produce: the Unions want a slice of that pie, and because the farms won't give them that slice, the farmers are to be choked off with these rules. Doesn't make sense under that bastardized political philosophy to regulate combines and tractors with implements moving from field to field, though.

Here's what yours truly will do: I live in a distant suburb of Portland, but hard by important agricultural areas (mostly nursery stock, but berries and orchard-fruits are big out here as well). I have a Commercial Driver's License (CDL), which is still valid except that I would need to get my medical certificate current. Guess what? I have a family member who does those certification physicals!

If this truckload of crap actually makes it into the Federal Register, I will form a volunteer group of drivers to assist local farmers who can't afford to hire a dedicated operator for their heavy vehicles. BTW, I have actually been to the school for the specialist police officers who inspect commercial vehicles, so I know what is a safe one and when a vehicle is not safe or legal to operate on a highway.

I might require SOME compensation, say, a hunting lease. The Willamette Unit (local hunting region) is mostly shotgun-only for deer, but there are thousands of Bambis around, probably hundreds within ten miles of me on those farms.

If my movement to volunteer spreads, it might just make a statement to our MFWIC.

H/T to Gene, master restorer of Old Green Trucks.

Hurricane Hype, the AAR and critique - UPDATED!

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UPDATE: 082911 1241 PDT: Professor Mass of U-WA's Atmospheric Sciences department, now says that there NEVER were ANY reports which indicated that Irene was even a Cat-1 hurricane as and after it made landfall. It appears certain now that New Yawk City and other places were suckered into shutting down whole cities, at a cost of billions of dollars, for a weakening Tropical Storm. The flash-flooding that followed was NOT properly highlighted by NOAA, so, the chief climate-science arm of the US Government got it wrong both ways, over-doing the wind aspect and under-doing the flooding potential.

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Yabu, a regular commenter, beat me to print on what I wanted to say here about the over-hyping of Irene, so just go back one post and read his comment. It's totally to the point.

Why WAS this hurricane over-hyped?

OK, this IS a righty blog, so let's get to the core of it, shall we?

This is all about "never let a crisis go to waste" Yabu touched on this, but I'd bet if we could search emails and inter-departmental memos of NOAA for the past week or so, we'd find some where they were INSTRUCTED by the Administration to keep their warnings on the heavy side.

Then there's Obama himself. Didn't he say that ALL hurricane damage would be made good by the Feds? That's just wrong, wrong, wrong. There's a process for this, one which has existed for decades. The localities which suffered damage petition their State governments for monetary relief. In turn, those State executives may petition the Federal Government for a Declaration of Disaster, which then opens the door for the Small business Administration to make very-low-interest loans to INDIVIDUALS who have compensible damages (this system pre-dates FEMA, which has hijacked it to a large degree). The municipalities and the States have a method of getting Federal cash also. So, the system already exists to use taxpayer funds to help relieve storm damages.

The problem with the existing systems, though, is that Obama can't claim much credit for using them, since others have gone before him to fix the Nation after disasters. So, he makes a "Disaster Declaration in Advance", something which is NOT in the Federal policy for Disaster Declarations. Follow the logic: he directs NOAA to over-hype the storm, and they do. He then says, "it's gonna be a bad one, but don't worry, Obama and crew will pull you through." So he shoots the dice, but comes up craps, because despite NOAA's Dire Warnings, the storm is a wet gale, not much more, and that WAS foreseen, since the storm was losing central pressure (a direct indication of it's strength) from just after it's Bahamas strike until it made landfall on Cape Hatteras.

Now, it is up to the Right to show up Obama's tinkering with the proven Disaster Declaration system here. Bit by bit, we will put it together, and after we do, I hope that the House of Representatives holds hearings on this obvious Cloward-Piven attempt by the President to boost his sorry performance ratings.

When disaster prep, warnings, and recoveries are done wrong, people die, people are misled and people lose property. It is important that all this disaster prep is done accurately, and the means exists to do it more accurately, yet it wasn't done accurately.

Yabu is right. Some heads need to roll for this. If NOAA can't do the job with all those tools at their command, there are plenty of private, commercial concerns who could. Names like The Weather Channel and Accuweather come to mind. If those firms had NOAA's tools at their command, this storm would not have been used as a political meat-axe as it was, it would have dampened a few events up and down the Eastern Seaboard, caused some minor moderate high-water damages as it did, and then taken it's place among the minor storms.

Does anyone want to bet that when the Feddle Gummint gets the bills for storm prep and damages, a significant piece of that bill will be for direct response to the Federal over-hype? When those bills come up for appropriation, the House ought to send them directly to the Democratic Party for payment.

"Six to eleven feet of storm surge in New York harbor" was NOAA's prediction. The actual surge? 3.8 feet.

Hurricane hype

Everyone, including NOAA, has been hyping Hurricane Irene as a super-storm. I'm not so sure. The hurricane hasn't strengthened as forecast, and it's path is becoming less predictable. It's eye-wall dynamics aren't there to show it as a super-storm, and it's less than a day from landfall.

As I see things, it will still cause some problems for the East Coast, but not on the level that has been predicted.

My hurricane creds? Well I sat out Hurricane Hazel in DeeCee in 1954, and this storm has some attributes of the similar-tracked Hazel: it doesn't seem to have things fully together. It is unlike the Carolina-beaching Hazel in that it lacks much forward speed. Hazel, though, did a lot of damage in that instead of falling apart after landfall, it hung together, and hammered the inland areas up the spine of the Allegheny Mountains until crossing the border into Canada and hammering Toronto. Hazel survived colliding with a major cold front, something rarely seen.

Nope, Hurricane Hazel piqued my interest in things meteorological, and I have held interest in that science since then, some 57 years. BTW, my Dad was Disaster Director for the Mid-USA region of the Red Cross from 1961-1963, and ran the Red Cross relief efforts on the Gulf Coast after Hurricanes Carla and Cindy. Carla was a doozie, and caused major flooding in the lowlands of  LA, MS, TX. In the command post, my Dad kept hearing reports of workers and citizens getting bitten by snakes, so he called up his Army liason and had the Army issue sidearms (1911s) to all the Red Cross workers. Do you suppose that would fly today?

Fox Financial had a hypester on today who said that Irene could cause $100 billion damage, and maybe even kick off another Recession.

Jebus, haven't these hosehead hypesters figured out yet that we never got out of the last one?

BTW, does it seem to you that NOAA has overhyped every landfalling hurricane since Katrina? Looks that way to this observer, and I'd bet that there is interdepartmental correspondence at NOAA to show that as intentional. Maybe Congress might look into it, and while they are there, they might just find that science is NOT NOAA's primary mission anymore, NOAA is just another propaganda arm of the Administration.

Stand by for snark!

From a post over at Argghhh! and the comments thereto:

"So, BillT, what was it like, watching God design "air"?"

Gawd, it's going to take the entire Leavenworth, KS Fire Dept to put out all those flames...

Quit ragging on the oldsters, I say. At almost my age, Billllll, as he's known as over there (he's a Chief Warrant Officer), refused military retirement and served in both the Sandbox and the 'Stan, with his specialty of rotor-wing pilot in demand. He helped set up the only US-directed helo school in those parts, and it has turned out at least one class of Iraqi helo pilots who ought to be able to hold their own.

Yeah, some of us can still hold up the lamp to show you kids the way.

Thursday Thuds - 2

First, a shout-out to Mockingbird, who needs to be informed on what a Rave Dress looks like, on a model:

The rest of the article is here.

OK, who says I can't advise on the kultur?

The Thuds:

That reverberating first thud is the sound of the foreign policy on Libya hitting the dance floor. OK, Washingtoon smarties, now that the rebels have succeeded, how are we going to entice them to actually CONTROL former-dictator Ghaddafi's SERIOUS supply of weapons and keep them from getting to the Jihadists, who have made no bones about wanting them? Got a plan for that? The whole world's asking, Mr. President, so where is your plan? Oh, yes, there was a Thud! That means that there was NO plan. We're going to pay for THAT, and dearly, too.

The second Thud! is local. The Oregon DOT, with some sort of hand-shake tax deal to Portland General Electric, the local power company, is building a 7-acre solar power park to power ONE rest area on Interstate Five. This is Western Oregon, folks, and we get maybe 150-175 days with sunshine every year, the rest are cloudy. Solar is strictly a feel-good proposition in these parts. A wind farm would have made more sense, or, if they HAD to do solar, some solar AND some wind. $10 million down the rathole on this Thud!

The next Thud! is more of a KA-Boing! as Ron Paul pin-balls his way down the campaign highway, campaign careening all over the road. Here's an effusive praise-post, proving once again that the Pauloons are still out there. For me, the operative sentence in the post:

"But the candidate can seem less interested in winning the nomination than winning the ideological battle."

Yep, that is Big-L Libertarianism to a "T": three quarters of it makes you smile, but the loons REFUSE to do anything about the pesky 25% of their program that both makes you puke and tries to get you killed.

The next Thud! is actually the sound of yet another Mitt Romney flip-flop, this time on Anthropogenic Glowbull Warmaking, and related "carbon" regulation. Playing along with the Greens up until now, since Perry came into the race, his RINO status was beginning to look loser-ish, so he just flip-flopped, now says he doesn't know if AGW is real, and wouldn't raise emissions standards for industry if elected prexy. Romney is just an old-fashioned political whore, taking whatever position his next trick wants, and the sound you hear is his bony old whore-ass thudding on the floor.

Time for one more Thud! and this one's made by the sound of your pistol falling out of that Open Carry holster. Good, you didn't try to catch it...that can get you shot. Here's a fence-straddling post by the fairly-famous Walls of the City blog on the subject. Linky-love by Uncle. I like his bottom line, "just CARRY", but he ignores several facts, such as what do we do with the 40-60% of ordinary citizens who are scared spitless to see the Average Joe walking about with a heater strapped openly to his/her hip. O/C people, that is an "elephant in the room", and no, I do NOT think that just strapping on arms to "let them get used to it" is going to work. What will work is Alan Gura's method: find firearms freedom in the courts, and when all the court battles are done and won, THEN carry however you may wish. You can do that in AZ, AK and VT now, thanks to court and legislative actions. The rest of the country has to either play the CHL-game or arm themselves with a good pair of running-away shoes. People, those 40-60% of people are NOT going to be "educated into line" about the Second Amendment. Hell, most of them think the Second Amendment is about freedom to hunt game, that's how doofus the hoi-palloy is on the subject of the 2A. Get your Concealed Handgun License and carry concealed. No, you're not "in your face" about the Second, but you ARE armed, and safer for it.

All hail the Holy Bicycle!

Here in Stumptown, USA (Portland OR), we get this Holy Bicycle crap until it chokes us. As an example, when a huge (1 billion-plus) local public-works project, the Big Pipe (a 120" storm drain interceptor, running 4 miles under the City) was finished, there was actually a surplus of $22 million. Flouting the City ordinance which said that such surplus, if any, must be returned to sewer ratepayers, Hizzoner pirated the funds and stuffed them into the Holy Bicycle kitty, to be used to further degrade the City streets for motor-driven traffic, and make the streets more "friendly" for bicycles. That work is in progress, and some boulevards that formerly had 3 or 4 lanes for traffic and two lanes for parking, now have just one or two lanes for auto traffic, a bus lane and a bike lane, no parking allowed. The rest of the seized pavement is turned into tree planters, curb-extensions, bio-swales and other impediments to traffic.

And the doofus Mayor wonders why commerce in the Central City is drying up...

But, I digress.

Today I open the Op-Ed section of my local wet-garbage wrapper (another glorious "green" story), and find an op-ed by a well-known liberal scrivener, Neil H. Simon. In the op-ed, he extols the city of Copenhagen, Denmark for having a 50% bicycle commute rate. I read through the piece, and nowhere do I find any data relevant to a valid comparison to Portland, OR.

Here are MY points of difference between Portland and Copenhagen:

1. Copenhagen has a much older tradition of bicycle commuting, one which goes back 125 years or so. Portland's streets have only been paved for the past 70 years or so, Copenhagen's have been paved pretty much forever.
2. Copenhagen is a densely populated city. Most European capitals are. Portland is a patchwork quilt of joined small cities with "urban in-fill", and as such, does not logically lend itself to bicycle commuting.
3. In Portland, we have an active underclass which supports itself primarily by theft, and bicycles are a primary target of these thieves. Bicycling in Portland, you have to carry $100 worth of heavy locking equipment, and sometimes your bike still gets stolen. It is so bad here that the transit district has put up bike-locking facilities that cost six figures to lock up about 100 bikes. Copenhagen doesn't have much of an underclass, and the underclass they have isn't into much bike theft.
4. Copenhagen is a flat city, laid out on a seacoast. Portland is a river town, and the streets climb steeply to the west to a Coast Range ridge at 800 feet elevation, and more gradually to the east to 440 feet where I live 15 miles from downtown.
5. There is far less tradition of owning cars in Europe generally, and in Scandinavia particularly. It's very expensive to own an automobile there, with huge taxes on the purchase, and fuel that costs over twice as much as ours. The old city of Copenhagen was NOT laid out to have either parking downtown or garaging in the environs for cars, but Portland has adequate, if expensive, downtown parking, and almost all homes have garages.
6. Finally, there is the matter of safety. It is well-known that in Europe, motor vehicle drivers generally pay attention to bicycle traffic, but that fact of driving culture is not as strong in the American driver, so bicycling safety suffers, and badly, as a result. Portland has had 4 or 5 bicycle-auto deaths this year, and none of the fatalities were drivers, either. The lack of safety just plain keeps people off their bikes around here, except for recreation. It is a sad, but inescapable fact, and it cannot be remedied by painting lines on streets. Lines don't cheat physics.

Finally, the second purpose of Simple Simon's story is to claim that further spending on the Holy Bicycle culture will cause us here in Stumptown to pull ourselves out of the recession (Oregon is two percent worse in unemployment than the national figure).

What a load of BeeEss!

First of all, all the public works projects related to Holy Bicycles are just that, public works projects, and other than the immediate positive effect of the construction jobs created, there is zero lasting effect from public works. In fact, when commerce is damaged in the process, as most public works projects seem to do, there is negative effect on the local economy. Second, even if these Holy Bicycle projects exceed their progenitors' fondest dreams and actually manage to increase numbers in central-City shopping, look at the shoppers: they are BICYCLISTS, for Christ's sake! When did you last know a dedicated bicyclist that spent money on anything other than their bike? These people are the original cheapskates! The "do more with less" crowd. Aside from maybe a penchant for paying too much for their beer or arugula sandwiches or bran muffins, they spend next to nothing. If you don't believe that, just listen to them howl when proposals are published to tax their bicycles, maybe $10 per year, to pay for bike lanes.

Nope, the Holy Bicyclists and their "green" ilk have chased the big spenders, mostly folks from the suburbs, out of downtown. Stores that catered to the affluent have mostly shuttered and either fled to the suburban malls or gone out of business. Yeah, there is night life, but Martini-sipping, thirty-something broads in rave dresses and metro-sexual men don't pay the bills, either.

History of the culture: The responsibility of banks

If you have a cast-iron stomach, and you read the liberal press often enough, you will see a lament frequently expressed about banks not lending money to people.

This is a phony lament, as anyone with an ounce of historical perspective ought to know.

Banks exist for one purpose: to provide a secure place to keep their clients' wealth. Any other purposes of banks are strictly ancillary to this main purpose. For example, banks are not required to lend money out, and if they do, there is no formula of how much of that money must be consumer loans and how much business loans. Banks are not required to have something called "civic purpose", whatever liberal idea that may be.

Banks may be expected to make money for their stockholders, if shares of their stock are publicly owned, but that is only an expectation of the market and exchanges where those stock equities are traded, it is not a responsibility of the banks.

No, Virginia (Democrat of la-la land that you are), the continuance of the recession, depression or whatever it is that you want to call our current economic non-growth, is not the fault of the banks. If anything, they are saving us now from a worst fate: our well-established bad habit of spending more than we take in. That bad habit, on a national basis, is the cause of our current economic woes, and little else, that little being government over-regulation of commerce.

I've bashed banks in this column, mostly for predatory practices against consumers, the little guys who never paid the banks' bills before, but are now expected to for some perverted reason. Those rips on banks are still valid, and they serve to illustrate the above: if banks stuck to their purpose of being banks, we wouldn't be in this mess, but it was banks who marketed the credit cards to us, then encouraged us to maintain floating loan balances on them. It was banks, encouraged by the Federal Government who made no-down-payment mortgages the rule (via Fannie and Freddie) rather than the rare exception they were when I bought my first home in 1973. How we howl when we are now asked to put 20% of a home's price down in cash. The previous practice would have reserved that 20%-down loan for only the best clients, most of the rest were required to put 30% down, back when home mortgages first became common, some 70 years ago. I remember that it was a huge perk of being a military veteran when I could get a home mortgage with 10% down and my DD214 showing an honorable discharge from military service.

It's the same with auto loans. Time payments to buy a car were a risky business, because cars previous to this generation were not so well made, and a long loan would result in unsecured money out there for the banks as the used car's value fell like a stone after it was driven off the showroom floor. The banks used to require enough cash down payment to cover that nearly-instant depreciation in value, but now we howl when we don't get a 100% car loan, with a term that might be suitable for a main battle tank that is never used in battle.

Time flies, times have changed, and we've screwed ourselves into this mess, so it's up to us to get ourselves out of it. I'd almost be willing to let the Government make just one more preposterous regulation, that of requiring every wage and salary earner to deposit 10% of their take-home pay into a time-locked savings account every month.

Holy Smoke

I'd heard of this process of celebrating the life of a valued family member who has gone before us, but I thought it was being done by a few handloaders. Now it turns out that it is being done commercially.

As a way of celebrating life, it might just catch on. For example, let's say that John Mallard was a duck hunter. He had belonged to a duck club, and almost all of his large circle of friends were waterfowl hunters as well. Having a case of shotgun shells loaded with his ashes and sent down to the club and maybe even passed out at his funeral service would be outstanding.

If this is a variation on the Viking funeral, it is a good one.

H/T to the Real Country Gal