The Supremes
I should put a question mark on that title. I am speaking of course about the highest court in the land, not the best girl band in Motown’s storied history.
It was an interesting weekend. A lot of pool time, and some most triumphant weather. I ran across a lot more of the story of what was happening at the Agency Annex in Benghazi, and why people were so desperate to bury the story. If you are interested, there are some interesting accounts of what Operation ZERO FOOTPRINT was up to.
I asked a colleague who may (or have not) directly participated in a similar evolution in a place and time far, far away, so I am going to suspend judgment on the matter. Depending on the level of credibility, we may be taking more about it.
There was more stuff coming out of the Supremes. The last two decisions of the session dropped this morning- the one about whether Public Sector unions can impose fees on non-members in Harris v Quinn. That and the Burwell v. Hobby Lobby and whether the Affordable Care Act’s provisions can force privately-owned companies to provide contraception products under their health care plans that they consider to be abortifacients.
This morning I was mulling over the possibility that US-provided Man Portable Air Defense Systems (MANPADS) had leaked out of Libya and been used against US helicopters in Afghanistan until ten, when the last two opinions of the session were to be issued by the High Court. I was trying to unscramble fact from fiction when the decisions popped up on most of the media I monitor simultaneously. News-and-Weather on the Eights was breathless. The Times of Gotham City was more dignified, saying they were going to actually read the decisions before reporting on them.
I am not that dignified, as you know, but will refrain from any detailed commentary about them beyond the fact that it looks like Harris and Hobby Lobby both prevailed in their arguments.
In the public sector union case, Pamela Harris is an Illinois healthcare worker who takes care of her son Josh at home. Josh suffers from a rare genetic syndrome. Pamela receives Medicaid funds to do so, and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) maintained that she functions essentially as a state employee, since the union has a contract with the State covering all home care workers.
Pamela works in her own home, and had no interest in joining the union. SEIU maintained that they were entitled to bill part of the Medicaid payment to cover collective bargaining costs. To not be able to do so, they contended, would result in Pamela “Freeloading” on other dues-paying caregivers. SCOTUS has already agreed with that contention in the Abood case in the 1977 docket.
It appears that Abood could be turned on its head.
In the Hobby Lobby case, no one understands the ACA anyway, so I have no idea what it means. Hobby Lobby does provide birth control as part of its health plan, but just doesn’t believe in post-conception birth control.
Whether this is narrow or broad in interpretation is beyond me. Most of the recent decisions by the court have been relatively narrow in scope, though almost uniformly opposed to the expansionist agenda of the Administration.
The usual conservative-progressive 5-4 split did not impact everything. National Labor Relations Board v. Noel Canning was unanimous in rejecting the proposition that the President could determine whether or not the Senate considered itself to be in session or not. They didn’t get around to determining whether the decisions made by the illegally-appointed Commissions since their appointments will stand or not.
I would think not, wouldn’t you?
I guess we will see what it all means as the week unfolds- or unravels, as the case may be.
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303
Monsters
I had the deer-in-the-headlight look yesterday. There is a lot going on, only some of which is mine to talk about and I will just have to leave it at that.
A splendid Friday evening lead directly to a mildly dissociative mental state Saturday morning, so when I was finished thrashing through the morning traffic and building a PowerPoint pitch out of the pictures to share, I was about done.
Kamil the Polish Life guard opened the pool gate a little before ten- but the sun was not over the pool and I decided to hold off on the swim until the sun started to warm the boundary layer. Accordingly, I found myself with some charging issues on the iPod in the water-tight case and reading the action-paced end to the latest trash novel of the summer.
Larry Correia’s fifth novel in the Monster Hunter series is called “Nemesis,” and continues the race to the climactic show-down over whether humans or unspeakable evil will rule the world. It is composed of nonsensical magical violent fluff, but grand fun if you like stalwart heroes, tough women and all sorts of gunfire directed at vile creatures from The Void.
Larry plays against type deftly in prose that veers between goofy and side-splittingly funny. The current story-line features (spoiler alert!) a continuing love affair between two werewolves. He gives a point-of-view hero in each book from the ensemble cast of characters, and the protagonist of this one is Agent Franks of the U.S. Monster Control Bureau. One name, like Beyoncé.
This isn’t a real subtle story. Franks is a man of many parts— from other people, that is. That’s right: he is Frankenstein’s Monster. The Agent is 300 years old, in this incarnation six foot five and all muscle. He’s nearly indestructible. Plus he’s animated by a powerful alchemical substance and inhabited by a super‑intelligent spirit more ancient than humanity itself.
Good thing he’s on the side of the US Government, though there is some controversy about which side the USG is actually on.
Franks has a contract with Dr. Benjamin Franklin stipulating that he will protect the Republic from all supernatural creatures in exchange for the USG not trying to make any additional stitch-together tailor-made soldiers.
I won’t spoil the details, but there is a rogue element of the Special Task Force Uniforn (STFU) that is doing exactly that. As the blurb says, “Now all bets are off, and Hell hath no fury like a monster betrayed.”
(The legendary Eddie Constantine. Photo Wikipedia).
The entire story reads with a break-neck pace like the hot kiss at the end of a wet kiss- H.P. Lovecraft meets Eddie Constantine, all the way.
As the legendary French movie actor would say, sipping a single malt Scotch and confronting certain death: “Smooth.”
Anyway, I lurched to the end of Nemesis right around the time the iPod was fully charged so I could listen to “Radio Lab” on NPR while paddling around, which is always kind of surreal, and got my hour of cardio out of the way.
I know what I should have done. I should have grabbed my go-bag and headed to the farm straightaway. But I was chilled from the hour in the pool, and the sun was warm, and the pool was so mesmerizing in its attraction, and finally, as my trunks dried, I decided to read for a while longer.
Having completed the Monster Hunters series (Nemesis was just released this month so it is going to be a long drought before the next jolt of supernatural action) I looked at the library in the iPad. There was another horror novel I thought would go perfectly after Nemesis:
This one is ranked at Number 3 on the Amazon best-seller list, and I like good pot-boiling exposes as much as the next guy. By contrast, Secretary Clintons much-trumpeted biography “Hard Choices” is at Number 34. The Secretary does reach the top spot in the “women’s studies” and “gender” categories on Amazon.
One of the contentions in Klein’s book is that Secretary Clinton made no decisions during her time at State, hard or otherwise, since no foreign policy development was actually done at Foggy Bottom- it came from the White House and no other inputs were solicited.
There is a bunch of other stuff, too, allegedly right from the horses mouth, but if I had to distill it, this is a struggle between unearthly beings for the very earth on which we live.
Or at least the Democratic Party. I am troubled by the Klien does business, since all alleged quotes are unsourced, and they simmer with electricity (and profanity). I suppose, if true, no one in their right mind would tell the stories they do in this book without the (justified) fear of retaliation. I don’t know how to evaluate the un-sourced and incendiary direct quotes, which could, of course, be manufactured from whole cloth like Agent Franks.
Bill and Hillary are depicted in a generally favorable light, sort of like the Monster Control Bureau, while the Administration is more akin to the STFU. I don’t know. It was a hypnotic read, and I was done before the sun really got all the way down.
I took another plunge to close out the afternoon and began to think about what to cook for dinner. Obviously I was not going to get to Croftburn Farms market to procure local food, and made some decisions. One of them was to not read anything more about politics. I decided to go back to fantasy where it is safe. I am thinking about what is next. I considered Laurel K. Hamilton’s “Guilty Pleasures,” but my eye was caught by Kim Harrison’s “Dead Witch Walking.”
I liked the cover better. I’m a guy, right, and the image featured no one in politics I am aware of. I will let you know which of the books about monsters reads the best at poolside. Kim is on the New York Times best seller list, I think under “politics.”
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303
Buffalo Night
(Clockwise, Upper Left to Right: Jon-without avec pommes frites and his zeppelin-sized humanely raised, hormone-free slow cooked thinly sliced Steamer Round of Beef on Kate Jansen kemmelweck roll, garnished with deep-fried olives, fresh-grated horseradish and caramelized onions. The usual suspects. Pommes Frites with gravy. The long bar. Photos Socotra).
Saturdays are hard- particularly the last one of the month, since Buffalo Night at Willow precedes it and the crowd is always large and raucous, awaiting those fabulous Beef on Weck sandwiches. We have the core group, of course- Mary and Jim, Jon-without and TLB, John-with the Admiral and his vivacious bride, and B-man and AM (always there for BoW night) and Jerry the Barrister and L&M who were photo-bombing the crap out of Antonio and Dante. There may have been a couple more I can’t properly recall. We had a minor riot and a great time.
(Sauteed Brussels Sprouts with bacon, Jerry the Barrister’s Beef on Weck, Larry the photobombed with Antonio and Dante; Boomer behind BoW and taters the bar. Draft beer is Lost Rhino).
Consequently, I am sitting here lost in the President’s weekly radio & internet address and the crash of a mighty airship.
I should be getting organized to get in the pool, get some exercise as soon as Kamil the lifeguard opens the gate and get on my way down to the farm. Instead, I was lost in the LZ-129 Hindenberg disaster due to an unfortunate metaphor by a friend, who apparently heard a report about the President’s campaign-style visit to Minneapolis on Friday. I don’t know about all that- something about traveling first class on the Zeppelin, but I always remember that Dad used to tell us about seeing the magnificent flying machine in stately transit to the landing facility nearby at Lakehurst Naval Air Station. Hindenburg’s sister ship, the Graf Zeppelin, flew a million accident-free miles before she was scrapped in 1940, and right up until the first blue flames began to lick out of the stern, Hindenburg didn’t have anyone hurt, either.
If only they had used helium instead of the highly combustible hydrogen to keep the ship aloft…well, maybe the President can salvage something out of this. I don’t know.
Metaphors aside, this morning I was eating some sautéed Brussels Sprouts and bacon I brought home from the restaurant before a last magnificent plunge in the cool waters. It was a delightful change of pace with the eggs, and in the mail came the recipe above. I would rather be cooking than thinking about the latest development in the scandal-de-jour. This one is not the crashed computers at EPA, which I think was Thursday (the IRS computer thing is so last Wednesday) but back to the VA scandal which had a stunning development released after everyone left town Friday night. This will surprise you- is actually worse than we thought.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Rob Nabors wrote a report that he had found “a corrosive culture” and inadequate resources contributed to the debacle, which I think used to be cited as the model for how the government efficiently apportions care. Nabors said maybe a thousand Vets died.
Who’d a thunk it? Hahaha.
So, it was a relief to see a note from Marlow down in Key West where things make complete sense. He saw it in one of the local mullet-wrappers and passed it along. It is a foolscap recipe from none other than Papa Hemingway, truly a hard-drinking man for all seasons. He called it “Wild West Variations on the theme of Ground Beef.” I don’t get a lot of recommendations from Nobel Laureates, except of course the President on Saturday morning. Here is something like what I tried last weekend at the farm:
Cooking is more fun than actually having to think, you know? All this stuff other stuff just makes my head hurt.
If you are interested, I will transcribe it for the Cloak and dagger Cookbook- which I swear I am going to get to one of these days.
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303
Collaboration Horizontale
Sorry- I couldn’t resist using that phrase this morning. I ran across it when doing some research on the massive Allied force that landed in Normandy seventy years ago. There was so much to talk about then- the roundness of the number of the year and the diminishing number of the veterans who participated being the story of the anniversary- that I didn’t get around to it.
Antony Beevor is an excellent war historian, born the year after his father returned from The Big One. His mother “Kinta” Beevor was a talented writer (“A Tuscan Childhood”) and that gift clearly runs in the family. After an education at Sandhurst and a hitch in the 11th Hussars, he started his career as a popular historian with accounts of the flash-bang of what the young men of both sides had to do to survive. His masterful “Stalingrad,” was followed with the incredible Gotterdammerung of “Downfall: Berlin 1945.”
His prose is lively and engaging. He moved on to something else in his tome “The Second World War” to talk not so much about the military campaigns but about what happened when the Generals were done and the Politicians returned to sort out the new world order. The motion of whole civilian populations- the wholesale ethnic cleansing of places like Prussia of their German population- reflected the political will to end centuries of ethnic strife.
Beevor has been criticized for some of the statistics he uses to describe what happened to those vast numbers of DP’s- the ubiquitous “Displaced Persons” of Europe. He is particularly hard on the conduct of the Red Army in occupied Deutschland, which based on the personal testimony of my pal Elsbeth, rest her soul, seems quite believable.
But he also found the conduct of the liberated French to be problematic, particularly the readiness of many French people to settle scores by denouncing neighbors and rivals as collaborators and particularly the head-shaving of Frenchwomen accused of collaboration horizontale with the German occupiers.
I was struck by the starkness of the phrase. It came to me again in the dazzling advance in Iraq of a hitherto obscure bunch of Sunni jihadis from the war-next-door in Syria. I mentioned the fact that it seemed we already had a defacto new Sunni state running from Aleppo in Syria to just north of Baghdad, which itself was now a Shia rump state. The bold Kurds, non-Arabs, asserted themselves by securing strategic Kirkuk, and have essentially rendered themselves independent.
(The ethnic lines of demarcation in the War of Arab diversity. Kurdistan is a blob centered on northern Iraq, and encompassing the NE of Syria and a chuck of Eastern Turkey.)
The argument goes that this is the parallel to what happened in Europe in 1945. Punched out after two enormous bouts, the people were scourged from places they had lived for centuries. There are no longer Sudeten Germans. Some formerly German towns in Poland now have Ukrainian names. The Tito-delayed homogenization of Bosnia-Herzegovina happened in the aftermath of the Cold War. And now it appears to be in progress in the old Ottoman territories divided up by two French and British diplomats on the back of an envelope in 1919.
The Sykes-Picot borders established new states without much rhyme or reason a century ago. And now things are sorting themselves out in spectacularly brutal and bloody fashion. I have heard the argument that “We tried modern methods in the Middle East to create peace, perhaps it is best to let the old ways work themselves out. It is, after all, a local solution.”
That is as true as the saying that “suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.” It is a repugnant thought to an old Cold Warrior, but perhaps the time has come to cede the spotlight on the world stage to those who still believe they have the moral certainty to lead. Apparently we do not.
I have one caveat to all this. We are a generous people, but under no circumstances should that compassionate inclination draw us into the mass migration of tens of thousands of refugees from the Shia-Sunni war come here. Perhaps we could find a solution to the hemorrhage of refugees across our southern border first.
The old Bush Doctrine was to fight the jihadis over there, so that we would not have to fight them here. I am no xenophobe, but I do believe that there is no percentage in importing the seeds of that violent religious war to our shores.
I guess it is to those ends that Secretary Kerry is requesting a half a billion dollars to train and arm the Syrian “moderates” in an attempt to- I don’t know what. Roll back the gains of the people we armed already? Apparently he thinks there is a counterweight in Syria to the al Qaida franchise of ISIS.
I think that is a pervasive theme in what passes for our foreign policy these days. I don’t think there are any moderates left in this picture. Picking through the warring factions for the closest approximation to the Young Republicans seems like folly. It is the war we abandoned in a sort of victory defeated by the weapons that we funneled to the rebels who became ISIS.
It is a tough call on what can be done now that things have been so completely bungled. They say the Administration has no good choices. Maybe the answer is to just walk away. We could already be accused- and I think justly- of violating General Powell’s Pottery Barn rule. We broke it, we bought it. Instead, we shrugged and walked away.
I don’t have a great answer for this and do not want to go back personally, or by proxy. But it really is beyond the pale that we can also be accused of Collaboration Horizontale with the very men who would cheerily behead us.
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303
Le Deluge
So, the usual suspects were gathered at the apex of the Amen Corner at Willow: Old Jim in the anchor chair, Chanteuse Mary flanking him, Jon-without and TLB looking radiant, me and New Steve on the distant end. There was also an assertive woman from the Refuge Department of F&W who insisted on talking across a triangle to New Steve, but they are lightweights, and left the field, though not before causing Jim to beetle his brows in irritation.
We drifted off into discussions of soccer- footie- arguably one of the great contributions of the British Empire to mankind. Never before has there been an international forum where carnivorous primate behavior can be displayed with relative impunity. The ISIS version would doubtless feature the ritual beheadings of the losers after the 90th minute.
There was some discussion of whether to watch the match today- at Willow, drinking at noon? Or whether to ignore the whole thing. There did not appear to be any consensus, and at my 90th minute at the bar, decided to go home. I think I kissed Mary and TLB and shook Jim and Jon-without’s hands, though it might have been in a different order.
We are past the high tide of daylight and now commencing the long slide to what I imagine will be another brutal winter. I need to figure out where I will spend this one. The light was mellow, and the humidity was welcome. Kamil the Pole had the pool duty, and Doc was out in the water with her grand-daughter in the pool.
That is a topic which has been of some interest to me personally as I prepare for the idea that there will be another generation in the family shortly.
Lee is a vivacious little girl. I have watched her grow from infant to enthusiastic swimmer on this very pool deck. The two were wrapping up their session, delayed for some reason, and I chatted with Doc through the wire of the pool enclosure.
“There was plenty of time left for a quick dip,” I said. “With the unsettled air mass over the region, the radio has been predicting thunderstorms all afternoon, but it looks like it is going to be serious. I did my cardio earlier, so this is going to be a plunge for pure refreshing pleasure.”
We exchanged waves and I went into the unit and got back into my trunks and brought a drink with my towel out where Kamil was sitting at his table by the gate and the adults talked while Lee splashed and played with the big inflatable penguin that is permitted only during the week when the complainers are not around the pool.
Looking at the clock, Doc suggested that Kamil could close the pool early and get on with things before the rains came, and I pointed out that “idiots like me would sometimes roll home in desperation from other things to get that last plunge in before the clock hit 2100. But, since I was there, and properly attired, maybe we could just get the whole thing over and let Kamil get on with his evening?”
I winked at him across the table and he nodded in stoic agreement.
To cope with the natural evaporation from the old-school pool, the guards top off the water level in the evening by turning on the big spigot at the deep end. The cascade of water is spectacular, and one of my favorite things to conclude the day is to jump in and back-stroke into the rushing foam. The pressure is visceral and powerful enough to push you back unless you go full tilt into the vortex.
“Doc, do you think Lee is ready for something really exciting?”
Lee looked up from the inflatable penguin expectantly as Kamil got up to walk to the stairs down to the basement and turn on the pump. I put my drink down and stripped off my t-shirt and stepped out of my flip-flops and padded barefoot down to the deck on the deep end of the pool as the spigot belched white foam and then started blasting water like a fire hose. I jumped in, refreshed at the shock of not-quite-cold water contrasting with the warm moisture of the atmosphere. Lee hopped off the penguin and swam down near me.
“Here is how it works. It is sort of like Disneyland, only there are no lines.”
“Disneyland?” I nodded, treading water. Then I flipped over on my back and swam toward the torrent.
I can’t tell you how good it feels to hit the colder water of the flood. I found the point of max resistance and stroked as hard as I could for perhaps a minute before I let the pressure force me away. Lee looked on with amazement. “Is that cool, or what?” I said, breathing a little hard from the exertion. She nodded gravely, and swam cautiously to the stiller water on the sides of the torrent. She tested the pressure with an outreached hand, and then stroked bravely into it.
She didn’t last long that first time, and was swept away shrieking in delight. I swam back and arced into the plume again. We exchanged places in the flood four or five times, me becoming a little weaker from the exertion as Lee gained confidence in her ability to negotiate the torrent.
I drifted back toward the ladder, and told her I was done, but would not get out until she was done. She took one more trip to the rapids and then allowed the water to push her back toward Doc, who looked on from the shallow end. I climbed out and toweled off, feeling like a million bucks. Doc collected the penguin and assorted floats and equipment and her pool bag. I put my short back on and bumped fists with Kamil at the pool gate.
“Best life guard ever,” I said. He nodded modestly in reply as Lee, Doc strode out the gate with the enormous Penguin toward the back door to the building.
“See you tomorrow, Doc. And nice work, Lee!”
She laughed with joy, and I walked back to my patio to finish my drink as Kamil started to lock the place up just a little early. Just ahead of the thunderstorms, I thought, as the flash of distant lightning lit the now dark sky.
Life is good. When I was done with the drink and the rain was starting in earnest, I went back in the unit to watch from a dry place. I saw on the computer that my Turkish correspondent is skirting the edge of propriety, talking about the Turkish hostages in Mosul. I wrote to ask what she thought about the de facto partition of Iraq into Kurdistan, Sunnistan and Shiastan. “Will Erdogan manage the torrent of events?” I wrote. “Will he accept a Kurdish buffer state?”
She wrote back to say that it was pretty weird, and she didn’t know.
Outside, the wind picked up and the thunder boomed.
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303
Man Eaters
(World Cup Football is not for herbivores. Photo Rueters).
I as interested to discover that cannibalism is alive and well in the FIFA World Cup. I was sitting in a packed Willow yesterday afternoon around cocktail hour. Old Jim was clearly irritated by the crush of Fish & Wildlife people who kept bumping him as he attempted to drink his long-neck buds.
Worse, the kitchen lost his order for a Cod Slider, though his spirits buoyed as the level of the beverage in the brown long-necked bottles diminished.
I was drinking happy hour white- chardonnay this time rather than sauvignon blanc- and my older boy is in town on business, and he stopped by to have dinner with a couple who I had watched grow up from the age of five.
The Admiral was there, we talked about the restructuring of the military intelligence community after the Cold War when we could hear ourselves talk, and Barrister Jerry regaled us with tales of the Five Guys Hamburger chain, which now has 1100 outlets, up a bit from the original five locations here in suburban DC.
There are four locations now open in London, and lines around the block for the all-American product.
Jerry went with the Norwegian Salmon, and Robert in the kitchen made it up to Jim by delivering not one but two sliders. In between bites, Jim opined that there was more interest in the World Cup this year than there was when the series was held in America.
In between that, and other wild assertions, we looked at the old-fashioned televisions above the bar. When the cannibalism started, the crowd was riveted.
Uruguay’s Luis Suarez took a chunk out of the shoulder of Italy’s Giorgio Chiellini about a minute before the decisive goal that propelled the Latin American team over the Italians, 1-0.
The ref missed the bite, which apparently was sparked by a cheap shot by Chiellini. Or something. The television showed a clear and distinctive horseshoe pattern on the shoulder, and this is apparently not unusual. Press reports this morning. Earlier in his career, the 27-year-old Suarez was suspended in the Netherlands and England for biting
opponents.
“Not a frigging big surprise,” growled Jim. I heard hundreds of people took odds that he would bite someone in the World Cup.”
After the excitement died down, some wagers on the US-Germany match were advanced. The pivot, of course, was what happens in the event of a draw. There has been discussion that the NATO Allies were going to invoke Article 5, which states that an attack on one is an attack on all. Should the two nations invoke the mutual non-aggression pact and opt to play to a tie, both teams would advance to the next round. Ghana (accused of match fixing) and Portugal (still smarting from the Peninsular Wars) would be eliminated from the second round competition of 16 teams.
Apparently this is considered bad sport, though it makes eminent sense from a political standpoint. Both countries have sharply rejected any suggestions of a deal, just as Germany and Russia did a few years ago before playing Poland to an even division.
I heard this morning they have already paid out $78,000 euros to people who bet Luis would go carnivorous. I know that Americans are going to wind up liking this game.
And speaking of numbers, the Bureau of Labor Standards admitted they sort of screwed up the Gross Domestic Report numbers for the first quarter of this year. It is down not 1%, but almost 3%. I listened hard, but I did not hear anyone mention that Socialism doesn’t seem to work.
Maybe next quarter. This economy is a man-eater, you know?
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303
For Something Completely Different
There is tremendous good news this week. The United States Climate Reference Network is operational, and the folks who run it at the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration. Actually, it has been operational since 2008.
It is some of the better money the taxpayers have provided the climate community. It is is a network of climate stations developed by NOAA to provide future long-term homogeneous temperature and precipitation observations that can be coupled to long-term historical observations for the detection and attribution of present and future climate change.
The USCRN provides the United States with a reference network that meets the requirements of the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS). The network consists of 114 commissioned stations in the contiguous United States, 6 stations in Alaska, and 2 stations in Hawaii.
It has a lot of great features. The sites are placed in pristine locations and are far more advanced in the types and frequency of data collected. Uncertainties due to poor siting or urban encroachment are eliminated from the data stream, which will preclude the necessity of activist scientists from “adjusting” historical temperature measurements.
Funny thing about that- the older temperatures always seem to be adjusted downward, while modern data gets the reverse treatment. Just a coincidence, I am sure.
Data from the USCRN is used in operational climate monitoring activities and for placing current climate anomalies into an historical perspective. The historic perspective naturally is limited to six years with the network, so just because there has been a mild cooling trend identified through the limited record doesn’t mean much- and I would say the same thing if there was a mild warming trend.
The satellite era of measurements- the only place we get synoptic coverage of ice mass at the poles, sea-level rise and all that- only goes back to 1978.
The USCRN will be able to show us unadjusted trends. Won’t that be comforting? We might actually have an accurate way to measure whatever it is that is happening. And then accurately compare it to what happened before.
What a concept.
There is other stuff to talk about this morning, but like, who cares?
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303
The Living Is Easy
I arrived at the Farm without a story- or rather, the knowledge that I had chores to do, which is the very stuff of life, but unremarkable, given the dimensions of the challenges we confront overseas and here at home.
So I decided to ignore them and got out of the Emerald City early and headed down see if I could cut the pastures and lawn at Refuge Farm before things got out of control. The Turf Tiger tractor was reportedly fixed, and if I could get it to start, I could start to explore the mysteries of large-scale cutting. Maybe even break it again.
It was only a one-trip afternoon to the local Lowe’s Home Improvement Center.
Unlike the places up in Fairfax, this is a relaxed sort of place, plenty of helpful staff to assist, and the new battery for the tractor was a breeze to find. I loaded up a Huskvarna weed-whacker, a flagpole kit for the back porch and an industrial size rake for the clippings.
Swapping out the old battery was a breeze, and the tractor roared to life with a gratifying belch of unburned oil. The sixty-one inch cutting deck just barely fits through some of the gates, and it was fun wheeling around the front yard, cutting to three and a half inches in the front yard. Once complete (and with a couple un-nerving collisions on the small trees and the satellite dish pole) I roared down to look at the pastures and decided that things were close enough to being out of control that it was worth my time to attack them.
I adjusted the cutting deck higher- this isn’t lawn, after all, and plowed in with gusto, trying to avoid the rock outcroppings that would bend the spindles that connect the cutting blades to the drive belts. It took only about 45 minutes to get both pastures and the lunging ring knocked down as I gained confidence and speed on the Tiger.
With the pastures looking uniform, I headed back up and made some passes through the island in the middle of the circular drive and trimmed around the front fence and out to the road, where I trimmed the County’s portion of the property.
Disengaging the blades, I drove merrily back down to the barn and put the beast to sleep with the trickle charger on the new battery. I knew it was five o’clock somewhere, so I walked back up to the house and mixed a beverage and drove over to the Russians to inspect the garden.
Natasha’s truck patch is well in progress- in addition to the herb garden by the back door with fresh dill and thyme, she has impressive rows of potatoes, beans, lettuce, eggplants, zucchini, cucumbers and beets. They have added two additional bee hives- they have three Queens and have attracted a swarm of locals. There are five rows of grape vines now in the soil, with an impressive trellis network with turn-buckles and come-alongs to keep things nice and tight.
It is impressive, and the farmhouse is looking fantastic. They are talking about chickens next.
It is summertime in the country. For me, the living is easy. The Russians are working hard, though. Next summer for the garden at my place. I don’t know about chickens, though.
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303
The Weed Agency
(The “spellbinding mock history of the Department of Agriculture’s most secretive and vital agency.” A novel by Jim Geraghty. Photo Amazon).
I was looking around for a trash book to read after I pounded down the Monster Hunter’s International series earlier this month. I have a stack of great suggestions from my reading pals- but stumbled into a little gem of a book by columnist Jim Geraghty. He calls this romp through the Federal Bureaucracy “The Weed Agency.” I am about politicked out at the moment- I think you may have a vague sense of that- hahaha- but this one rings true and is a light and fun read, even with the footnotes.
The scope covers almost all my time in the Executive Branch Departments, Offices and Agencies, and the events ring true and just as surreal as the real thing.
The little-known USDA Agency of Invasive Species — founded by President Jimmy Carter — would like to reassure you that they rank among the most effective and cost-efficient offices within the sprawling federal bureaucracy. I was reminded powerfully of the inexorable nature of the institutions when a pal wrote me about the latest activities of the brand new Consumer Protection Agency this morning.
You know, the one chartered under the astonishing mess we call Dodd-Frank. That was supposed to fix the “two big to fail” financial industry, and was crafted by the ethically challenged Rep. Barney Frank (got his lover a plum job at Fannie Mae) and the eminently bribable Senator Chris Dodd (sweetheart loans from Nationwide Mortgage) in the magical time when we got all sorts of legislation crafted mostly by lobbyists of varying stripes, and which arguably were not read by anyone in their entirety.
The Affordable Care Act is the other, possibly more memorable experiment in non-governance.
Anyway, the first thing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau did was scoop up the credit card numbers of most Americans to protect us better. Maybe they intend to scrutinize our purchases and make helpful recommendations for us. I thought it was curious at the time, the first thing on the agenda being to protect us by finding out a whole lot of information on us that I would prefer to keep between me and Google.
Anyway, I thought maybe they came to their senses or something as I had not heard much about them in a few months. Turns out they have been as busy as The Weed Agency. Last week, citing authority contained in Dodd-Frank, it passed a “rule” giving itself the power to shut down businesses through a cease-and-desist process. Important targets of the new rule are- get this- “Porn Stars, get rich quick schemes, and gun dealers.”
A “rule” is like a law. The regulators have to put it out for comment, but like the EPA, I don’t think they are listening, and there is no apparent way to stop them from doing it. The Feds published 3,659 new regulations last year, so they have been busy kids.
No one knows the precise cost of all the regulations- some try to bound the impact; the people who like expansive regulation say it amounts to a few dozen billion dollars. Skeptics put the number with more precision at $1.83 Trillion bucks.
Considering that the 2012 Gross Domestic Product was $15.8 Trillion. That is more than ten percent of the whole shooting match just to pay the bureaucrats.
Now hold your horses: I am not one who says there should be no regulation. There are plenty of areas where there is a real and compelling need for the Government to ensure that airplanes fly in the right places, the highways meet standards, and the food is pure. And wouldn’t it be nice to actually regulate those bastards on Wall Street who are still too big to fail and who are still getting richer than Croesus through manipulation and crony greed.
But here is how it really works. Remember the parade of agencies that visited a little manufacturing concern owned by a citizen with the temerity to apply to the IRS for tax-free status for an organization dedicated to the integrity of the ballot box? IRS, of course, but then BATF, OSHA and the FBI paraded through. It was clearly an attempt at intimidation, and I was proud of the woman who owns the place for standing up to the system.
But it much of the regulatory burden is not intentional political harassment. It is just a cloying, dragging burden.
Another pal wrote to tell me about one of his childhood pals. He went into the family business, which was financial planning. His dad left him the company. It was a small concern, but successful and that is the way the family liked it. They have a total of 7 people in the firm, but for all intents and purposes it is a one-man band. Following the imposition of Dodd-Frank, he found himself in a totally new inspection regime.
He has now been inspected 6 or 7 times since 2009. Each time the regulators show up, he has to basically shut down for a week or two; having only 7 people it is impossible to do what the Feds insist and actually work as well.
So far, they have charged him with significant violations of the regulations:
Failure to have a fully vetted equal opportunity employment plan (he hasn’t hired anyone in more than 20 years),
Failure to have a program for maternity leave (the only woman who works there is his mom who comes in some times to simply stay busy – she doesn’t get paid – she is 80+ – maternity isn’t one of her major concerns)
Failure to have a proper evacuation plan.
Conducting “false and misleading” advertising, to wit: the original sign his father had put up in 1939 had his name and the banner: “Member of the Regional Stock Exchange.” That exchange ceased to exist several years ago when it was swallowed by NASDAQ.
The sign was on the wall in the office. He had to take it down, and he was fined for the other grave violations. Since we pay for the salaries of the drones who fined him, they are fining us, too.
Meanwhile, my buddy says that there is nothing that they are doing that gives him any confidence at all that anything they are doing would allow them to detect a Bernie Madoff or give any hope that they would recognize a new and different investment bubble before it burst.
He spent one whole day with several of the guys trying to tell them procedurally how someone could cheat the system and hide it from them given current practices and rules and inspections; they sat and took notes, completely in over their heads.
And he doesn’t get to write off the 40 or so lost man-days of labor each of these inspections cost him. Oh well- the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is on the alert and taking care of us.
It is more fun to read The Weed Agency, since it is funny, and the rest of this is not. What Geraghty’s book showcases is a closed little world in which federal budgets steadily expand each year, inexorable and remorseless, where careers are built by upon the skill of rationalizing astronomical expenses, and where “the word ‘accountability’ sends roars of laughter through DC office buildings.”
Hahaha- it is not just a summer read. Like the bureaucracy, it is one for the ages.
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303
Flip-Flops
(Krispy Kreme-brand hybrid grass flip flops. They help to lower temperatures by creating organic sinks for carbon dioxide and permit the top of the wearer’s feet to tan naturally and evenly).
All the needles were pegged this morning. I had to turn the news-and-weather-on-the-eights streaming off the computer. Even the news that I was not stuck in the lane divide on I-270 with ten thousand other commuters didn’t boost my spirits. I switched over to the all-classical station, which normally serves to sooth the beast.
Not so soothing this morning, though I have to say that it looks like a perfectly serviceable day out there. Summer is here. I have thrown the moccasins of Spring into the closet and pulled out the flip-flops for the rest of the season.
I guess what set it off was a discussion with a former government colleague about the nature of email communications, and the way that things could happen to make a record of official government transactions disappear. There actually is a way that could happen, even though it is highly unlikely. I mean, the same people who lost the hard drive(s) and the data insist that I keep copies of my Goodwill donation receipts for six years on penalty of law, so they must know something about retention.
The law is pretty clear about it, too. Just in case you forgot, here is one of the relevant citations:
44 U.S. Code § 3106 – Unlawful removal, destruction of records
“The head of each Federal agency shall notify the Archivist of any actual, impending, or threatened unlawful removal, defacing, alteration, or destruction of records in the custody of the agency of which he is the head that shall come to his attention, and with the assistance of the Archivist shall initiate action through the Attorney General for the recovery of records he knows or has reason to believe have been unlawfully removed from his agency, or from another Federal agency whose records have been transferred to his legal custody. In any case in which the head of the agency does not initiate an action for such recovery or other redress within a reasonable period of time after being notified of any such unlawful action, the Archivist shall request the Attorney General to initiate such an action, and shall notify the Congress when such a request has been made.”
My buddy laughed. “Words,” he said. “Just words. This is about unlawful destruction. In this case, it is in the interest of the Government for that to happen, so, ipso facto, it is not illegal. If it was, you can be sure that the Attorney General would be all over it.”
I looked at him in amazement. “You are right, of course. My bad.”
Once you get over that whole law and order thing, the situation is fine. I could feel the gauges start to come back down to the safe-to-operate range. Everything is fine, just fine.
Despite what the polls say, I do think that we are pretty well embarked on the whole legacy thing. Another pal chimed in during the usual back-and-forth that you have to go back to the Treaty of Westphalia three centuries ago to get to such a fundamental re-wickering of the international order. That is some sort of achievement, no kidding.
I mean, seriously, this is a tectonic shift in borders and order that erases the consequences of the two Great Wars and the collapse of empires. It sets the stage for a confrontation between the two major sects of a religion that has more than a billion adherents.
What is even cooler is that both sides may have access to nuclear weapons shortly- even if they possibly don’t have them at the moment. The Saudis can borrow one from our pals the Pakis if they need one. The Iranians will gin up one of their own, this year or next.
This is no longer the bi-polar world of the Cold War, in which the bureaucracies of the chilly semi-belligerents had a sort of incentive not to vaporize themselves. This is one with people who mutter about the 12th Imam in public on the one side, and people who think that lopping off heads and arms is appropriate public conduct on the other.
It is not just happening overseas. We appear to have unilaterally opened our borders to anyone with the inclination to come and stay. We have empowered our bureaucracy to basically do whatever it wants. This is fantastic, like I mean, fantastic.
This is beyond cool. I spent all that time in my life worrying about what could happen, sweating the small stuff. Now it is actually happening. We no longer have to worry about anything, because we are actually going to see the consequences of what we have done.
And it is summer, and we don’t have to wear a coat or anything. I don’t think I have had this much fun in my life. Heck, who thought you could wear shorts and flip-flops to the end of civilization, as we knew it?
Unreal, you know? No, wait. It actually is real. Too freaking cool.
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303