I moved!

And not just to get away from Borepatch.  All of you who commented, I have tried to reply as best I can at the new url.  Also, I apologize to my two followers, one of which is Borepatch.  And to put that number in perspective, I am pretty sure I have at least as many followers as there are supporters of the Obama administration's economic policies.  Anyway, I am new to the blogging thing, but I found a name I liked better-"northern blogger"-and a new url that fit it far better:

http://greatnorthblog.blogspot.com/

More impressively, I managed to export the whole blog over to the new site.  Since there are only two of you, I wish to make it up to you.  So the next time you are in Boston, dinner is on me!  Ha.  Let's see Matt Drudge offer to take all of his followers out to dinner. 

P.S. Borepatch, the offer doesn't count for you since I figure you owe me innumerable dinners, and drinks, and apologies...

Yes! At long last...

The Three Stooges movie trailer is out:

Etymology of "Expressway"

I work in downtown Boston.  Normally I take the train in, but drove in today.  I come in by way of the Southeast Expressway.  Which was it's normal parking lot.  Since my father was an English professor, I often think about the origin of the words we use.  Somewhere around a mile before my exit, I figured out the etymology of Expressway.  When I expressed numerous and evil ways to return the torture to the traffic engineers who designed the darned thing.

I've heard that once something is out on the internet it is in the public domain forever

So I guess there is no way to deny it.  That's right.  I overcame a great obstacle and adversity in my childhood.  I was a friend of Borepatch growing up.  And miraculously, I turned out OK!  Well, at least I am gainfully employed.  All right, I am an attorney, but we occasionally really do work.

As for the reference to the minor incident involving Gulflite and the loss of Borepatch's eyebrows, it was entirely due to his bad judgment and therefore his fault.  I will claim some credit for innovation, though, because the story involves ten year old boys using lighter fluid to burn little green army men.  And that was decades before Toy Story stole it.  (I am still considering a lawsuit against Pixar, but then I would have to admit to being "Sid" as a child.)  To make a fairly simple story shorter (though for the past forty years Borepatch has tended to draw the tale out at every opportunity), it happens that a half full can of lighter fluid, placed just right over a flame, turns into one dandy flame thrower (kids, please do not try this at home or you may never hear the end of it).  Ergo, the whole thing was entirely Borepatch's fault: he was stupid enough to play with me when I had a half full can of Gulflite and an open flame.  I rest my case.

Thankfully, I can get some solace from the fact that I will at some point no longer need to listen to this old worn out yarn because Borepatch is much older than me and will continue to be his whole life.  So I'm sure he will pass before I.  Except for that whole only the good die young thing...

Corzine was "stunned" to discover the money was missing



According to the Boston Herald:

Corzine said he was "stunned" to learn that the firm could not locate hundreds of millions of dollars in client money in the days before the firm’s collapse, and said he had no idea where the money had gone.

Why is it I am reminded of one of my favorite quotes from Casablanca, one of my favorite movies? Captain Renault turns to Rick and says: "I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here." Then one of the waiters comes up to the good Captain and hands him a wad of cash which was his winnings.

Wonder what former Senator Corzine got as his winnings.  My guess is that it is a bigger wad than Captain Renault's.

High unemployment rate, but...

Something strange is going on.  I grew up in the great State of Maine.  Back then (OK, maybe 'way' back then) some of the best jobs around were in the paper mills.  My father was a college professor, but many of my friends' dads worked in the mill the next town over.  And they made more than my PhD father did.  They lived well, provided for their families and were more than productive members of society.  But then a lot of bad economic factors started to reduce and often shutter the mills.  I bought into the conventional wisdom that we shouldn't even try to compete with Indonesia or wherever for those jobs.  Let them go for the lower wages, enjoy the cheaper products and put our hard workers to work in more productive jobs where we had the competitive advantages of large and concentrated capital and an educated work force.  Everyone made out despite the disruption because Indonesians brought up their standard of living and our workers made more money making, for example, jets which only an economy like ours could produce.  The Indonesians earned the money to buy and use jets, we got cheaper paper products and our workers made more money working at a higher level of skilled employment (more value added equalled higher wages).  Then I saw this article in the Bangor Daily News.  It basically said that Maine's paper mills were producing paper at all time high levels, but they couldn't find enough skilled workers.  With 9% unemployment rates.  Huh!?  I thought it must have been a local micro-economic quirk that lead to the phenomena.  It turns out, however, that this kind of headline is not unique.  Saw a more general article in the Journal not too long ago, too.  Makes me wonder if maybe the progressive elite that are governing us perhaps are buying a little too much of their own b.s. about the green jobs revolution.  Or shovel ready boondoggles for friends and fundraisers--I mean projects.  Maybe we should have just deregulated a little and provided some access to capital for companies that offered REAL jobs.  But then, they are smarter than me, so what so I know.

Pujols signs with the Angels

$250 Million for ten years.  At 31 years old.  Sounds an awful lot like the unmitigated disaster of a contract the A-rod signed when he had just started his decline. 

Bye, bye (and good riddance) Euro

Let me get this straight.  You are going to take a bunch of countries and peoples that pretty much resent and hate each other, have invaded and killed one another for millenia, have tremendous disparity in culture, work ethic and wealth and put them all together under one currency.  Without the reserves in place to make sure the currency will stay viable.  And no power to enforce measures against member states to keep their fiscal houses in order in return for belonging to that currency.  Yeah, what could possibly go wrong with that?

America as a petroleum exporter

I don't know abot you, but I was shocked to read in the Wall Street Jornal that the US was just about to become a refined petroleum products exporter.  It gets better.  With the price of crude oil skyrocketing over the past couple years, it has now become profitable to explore and extract our own vast energy resources.  That's right, our own.  Everyone always knew we had oil and natural gas, it just wasn't worth it to get it because the Middle East and a few other places had reserves that were really easy (read "cheap") to get the oil from.  So if we or anyone else started to invest in extracting the more expensive stuff, the oligopoly would just crank up production and lower the price.  Except wars erupted, nuts got nukes, reserves start to dry up and revolutions came with the spring daisies.  So now we have un-ignorable incentives to go get our own energy.  Turns out we actually have more reserves than anyone thought and it looks like the future is once again pretty bright for our energy independence.  My only question is why the current batch of bozos in Washington are wasting our money and their time on boondoggles like they gave their buddies at Solyndra instead of expiditing (not tabling) new pipelines?

Idiots whistling past the graveyard

Please don't get me started on the joke that anthropogenic carbon based global warming has become. When I first heard the theory I thought it was intriguing. Then I started to research it. The only problem was that the science didn't really line up very well with the theory. Simply put, the carbon based global warming theory goes as follows: We put more carbon up in the atmosphere. Radiant energy of many frequencies from the sun hits the earth and reflects back out. But instead of going off into space, the radiant energy excites the carbon based molecules. Excited molecules is the definition of heat, so the atmosphere is getting warmer. However, apart from issues associated with trying to model or even accurately measure something as huge and varied as the earth's atmosphere, I started to be bothered by the molecular physics behind the theory. Carbon is a lousy insulator of radiant energy. It only excites at a narrow band of frequencies. The scientific analogy my simple mind can understand is a cup of water in a microwave: Water is a great insulator of radiant energy because it efficiently excites at a wide band of radiant energy frequencies. So the microwaves heat up the water. But take the water out of the cup, and it barely rises in temperature. Carbon is like the cup. Plus, if you double the carbon, you only get about half as much insulating ability. So to avoid these little scientific inconveniences, the global warming alarmists came up with all of these complicated feedback loops to make their model work to show more warming based upon more carbon. I always go with the simplest explanation first. Like more energy from the sun or more water vapor high in the atmosphere (both of which are easily measurable and are great explanations for any little bumps in temperatures during the 90's before it started to level or decline over the past decade). Then Climategate hit. And hockey sticks got busted. And the UN reports turned out to be bogus and based on un-vetted articles. And now more, and potentially worse, emails come out between the "accepted" scientific experts. Heck, even Cananda is officially dumping global warming.  But apparently none of that bothers the good Senator Boxer.  But don't worry folks.  The science is settled.

Real or fake Christmas tree

Or maybe I should admit my bias up front by rephrasing the question as "Christmas tree of hunk of metal and plastic"? I got into a discussion with a couple of friends yesterday about this very issue. Then last night I went home, started a fire and enjoyed watching tv while inhaling the wonderful aroma of freshly cut pine. Argument over. Game, set, match.

I think we need to communicate better

And by "we" I mean our elected leaders.  To the rest of the world.  As is obvious from other posts, I was thinking about Pearl Harbor today.  It was a horrible miscalculation by the Japanese.  They may have underestimated how America's incredibly mighty industrial production machine could respond to the sneak attack by cranking out more military weaponry than the rest of the world put together.  Since the beginning of mankind.  Personally, I doubt they miscalculated how much America could do if it wanted to.  I think they miscalculated whether America would do everything it could until the Japanese were destroyed as a military (and imperial) power.  Osama did the same thing.  In fact, history is littered with similar figures (hope Osama said hi to Saddam when he saw him in Hell).  As I thought about it, the problem became very clear.  We (America) are not communicating our will to use our might sufficiently clearly to the right audiences.  We have before, such as when the Great Communicator Ronald Reagan told Gorbachev to tear down that wall.  And it worked.  The old Soviets not only knew we could beat them, Reagan did a good job of communicating that we would beat them.  The rest is history (largely written by us since we won).  I am going to vote for the best person to communicate with the rest of the world.  Not sure who, yet.  But he sure won't need a teleprompter.

Be a skeptical paranoid

Especially when reading about anything you did not experience first hand.  It is not that I recommend never reading historical accounts.  A great deal can be learned from them since mankind rarely invents new ways to fail, we merely implement the failure in different ways.  Nonetheless, always remember that any account you read in the press is going to be colored (tainted, spun, slanted--take your pick) by the author and the publisher.  The same can be said doubly for an historical account.  History is written by the victors to serve their own purposes and, of course, to make them look good.  Since it is Pearl Harbor Day, that brings us to Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the Japanese leader of the horrific and illegal raid on the peacetime American naval base in Hawaii.


Yamamoto was a fascinating man.  He was the hero of the battle of Tsushima during the Russo-Japanese War, long before he was the architect of the worst attack on American soil until 9/11.  He was also the leading voice in Japan against going to war with the United States.   But we won and we got to write the history.  Don't get me wrong.  He still killed over two thousand unsuspecting US servicemen in an unquestionably illegal, immoral and despicable act of military aggression.  Had he not died by having his plane shot down by a P-38 while doing an inspection of the Solomon Islands in 1943, I have no doubt he would have been executed as a war criminal.  Still, the fact that he lead the opposition to war with the US makes me think because that fact is rarely reported.  So do yourself a favor and always be a skeptical paranoid.  Even when reading my blog.  Maybe especially so.

A little thin skinned, aren't we?

So.  On Monday Mitt ripped Obama for going on vacation with the continuation of the payroll tax reduction in limbo.  At least for Mitt, he actually had a good line: "I just think it’s time to have a president whose idea of being ‘hands on’ doesn’t mean getting a better grip on the golf club."

And today Obama announces he is going to stay in Washington while Michelle and girls head to Hawaii.  But don't worry, Mitt's comments had nothing to do with it.  The Whitehouse said so. 

I Lied

Turns out blogging is addictive.  I couldn't stay away.  Plus I had to get something out there in the public domain.  Kind of like Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.  Harry Morgan died today.

 December 7th.  Pearl Harbor Day.  And he played an old war horse on M*A*S*H.  Get it!?  Come on people, don't be fooled into thinking it was just a coincidence.

Enough

That's it.  I'm out.  I waited until after lunch and I'm still not rich and famous, so to heck with this blogging thing.

Second Post

Jeez.  I've been blogging for five minutes now.  I expected to be beloved, excoriated and marginalized by now.  And quite possibly retired.  Any suggestions about what I'm doing wrong?

Getting Started

Always wondered how to do one of these things.  Disturbingly easy.  No wonder everyone with an internet connection has now become an expert with an opinion.