(Legendary Child Star Jackie Coogan, eking out a living in his last great role as creepie Uncle Fester in The Addams Family.)
I have been up at Refuge Farm this morning since way early. I discovered it is raining, to my vast surprise, since I had heard the weekend was going to be nice. Accordingly, the cushions were left out on both the front and back porches. Crap.
I had intended to move a bunch of stuff between house and garage to thin out the confusion of the Great Room and make some room for the guests who are going to lily-pad their way through Culpeper on their way north from Florida to points north. I will shortly not have the availability in the Capital to host anyone- oh well, it is part of the disorganized process yesterday’s disjointed story attempted to depict.
The first thing I saw in the email queue this morning was a note from a pal far away who who lost a spouse of several decades a few months ago. My pal veers through the process of loss in the human way: from fortitude to dismay and pained bewilderment. I wrote back immediately, trying to stay engaged and supportive, but that started the too-early morning with thoughts on the nature of self, and fate, and the penetrating pain of loneliness.
Those are topics well suited to the pre-dawn.
Plowing through the rest of the messages brought politics to the fore, as it always does, balancing the claptrap agitprop of the New York Times with some of the conservative coalition rants. And there was a link to the promo teaser of what the President is going to announce in the brief time he is in Washington between Official Visits to Europe and Africa to Further the Interests of the United States in his 14 limos and fleet of military aviation assets.
The First Family is going along again, too, apparently to get ready for an extended stay on Martha’s Vineyard when they get back. I like the fact that the President takes the family along. I wish I had been able to do that on official travel.
Still, every time I hear the ubiquitous phrase “for the children,” I check my wallet. Apparently we are going to save them again, come this Tuesday.
The President is going to make a major address on Climate Change at Georgetown, and announce a raft of new executive orders to be carried out by the thrifty ideologues at the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy, eliminating the need for the involvement of those knot heads in Congress.
I get a little foggy on my “how a bill becomes law” thing- civics was a long time ago- but I get the nagging feeling that this is not how things are supposed to work in a Constitutional Republic.
Plus, it is pretty evident to even the most casual observer that the alarmist computer models have gravely overstated the likelihood that the temperature is racing out of control. In fact, the global temperature has now stalled for between fourteen and twenty-three years, depending on which observed measurement database you prefer.
The alarmists prefer the models, since they are not dependent on anything except the assumptions you load on the front end. Garbage in, garbage out. There is something really wrong with the whole belief system.
Much as people wish to make events like tropical storm Sandy and the cyclones of Spring some sort of evidence that the climate is out of control- there are actually fewer hurricanes and this is a quiet year for tornados. Don’t believe me- read the report penned by Sebastian Lüning and Fritz Vahrenholt describe recent tornado activity as being in “great doldrums.” Helps to read German, but not necessary.
Here is the money chart and a link to the report:
It is pretty exciting. The Washington Post reported with a straight face this morning that new “rules likely will drive up the cost of electricity.”
I always thought the progressives were in favor of affordable energy for the working stiff- since it makes life better here. But we are as well off as any humans in the history of homo sapiens. It is much more important to the developing world, since without it they won’t.
But I guess that message got lost in the new State Religion of doing things for generations yet unborn- like running up their credit cards.
It reminds me a little of the old story about child actor Jackie Coogan. If he is remembered these days, it is for his last big gig as Uncle Fester in the TV show “The Addams Family.” He was big in the early days of the film medium, though.
Jackie charmed audiences in Charlie Chaplin’s 1921 classic “The Kid.” Age and entropy will out, though, and by the mid-1930s his career had slowed considerably. As a legal adult in 1938 he attempted to win back his $4 million of his childhood earnings from his mother and stepfather, who had been living the high life at his expense.
We get inured to number like that in these decadent times, but figuring constant dollars from 1935 on, that $4 million represents the equivalent of a tad over $68 million today.
You can imagine he was a little upset when he realized what Mom and Pop had been up to.
By the time the case was settled the amount had dropped down to approximately $250,000, of which Coogan received only a portion. There was such a scandal that Congress actually did something about it, passing the “The Coogan Act, or, the Child Actors Bill,” which put the earnings of child actors into escrow funds.
As with anything in Washington, though, there were plenty of loopholes. The legislation only covers actors working in California and, in reality, applies to income only from TV series and motion pictures and not TV commercials. Then, just as now, the Congress could not legislate on things they could not imagine and did not yet exist.
Which actually is about what the children who serve as props to all these nonsensical things will find out when we get there, or at least they do. Hopefully we will be gone and they won’t be able to get at us when they find out what we have done to them.
Of course, it will still rain, and there will be storms, just as there always have been. The difference between then and now is that Jackie Coogan actually did get something in the end. His share of the measly $250,000 is worth- surprise! Would be worth more than a cool million in today’s dollars.
By way of contrast, our kids- actually, our grandkids- are going to get stuck with a whopper of a tab in their constant dollars, some broken wind-mills and the legacy of a theory that does not work in the real world.
And their lights may not work. Care to ask them now how they like the dark?
Perhaps we could have Uncle Fester ask them. That would quiet them down for sure.
Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com