Of beaches, booze, bans and Burke

We seem to be on a kick of late regarding cultural norms.

Here's B-Daddy commenting on the ridiculous booze ban at the beaches in San Diego and the resulting efforts to skirt the law:

Today we are less mindful of our behavior overall and are filled with resentment at all manner of constraint. The result is that each new constraint is met with more resentment and attempts to break out of stultifying straitjackets on behavior. It is as if most adults have entered a never-ending adolescence and the only authority remaining is the policing power of government. It is a recipe for disaster. It makes me a criminal when I drink my one or two beers at the beach. It displaces the responsibility for maintaining societal norms from individuals to the government and that is untenable. Contrary to popular belief, a strong sense of shared morality does not subvert freedom, but makes freedom more possible, because we need fewer laws to maintain order in society. (And don't get me started on what those shared values are; Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and Atheists agree on all manner of morality, including the impropriety of indecent exposure and public drunkenness.)

In a sense, with respect to Nanny State America, we've got no one to blame but ourselves. Our inability to police ourselves by displaying a modicum of restraint and probity results in further encroachment into our daily lives by the authorities.

We've been to the beach plenty of times during the summer and particularly Mission Bay on the 4th of July, so we understand and sympathize with those in favor of the booze ban. However, the blanket ban is excessive and reflects poorly on us as citizens that we cannot seem to enjoy a few adult beverages on the sand without going overboard.

B-Daddy has more Burke-ian wisdom, here.

A preview of coming attractions

Let's just file this one under, "Things that would've been nice to know before the bill was passed":

Emergency rooms, the only choice for patients who can't find care elsewhere, may grow even more crowded with longer wait times under the nation's new health law.

That might come as a surprise to those who thought getting 32 million more people covered by health insurance would ease ER crowding. It would seem these patients would be able to get routine health care by visiting a doctor's office, as most of the insured do.

But it's not that simple. Consider:

_There's already a shortage of front-line family physicians in some places and experts think that will get worse.

_People without insurance aren't the ones filling up the nation's emergency rooms. Far from it. The uninsured are no more likely to use ERs than people with private insurance, perhaps because they're wary of huge bills.

_The biggest users of emergency rooms by far are Medicaid recipients. And the new health insurance law will increase their ranks by about 16 million. Medicaid is the state and federal program for low-income families and the disabled. And many family doctors limit the number of Medicaid patients they take because of low government reimbursements.

_ERs are already crowded and hospitals are just now finding solutions.

Rand Corp. researcher Dr. Arthur L. Kellermann predicts this from the new law: "More people will have coverage and will be less afraid to go to the emergency department if they're sick or hurt and have nowhere else to go.... We just don't have other places in the system for these folks to go."

Kellermann and other experts point to Massachusetts, the model for federal health overhaul where a 2006 law requires insurance for almost everyone. Reports from the state find ER visits continuing to rise since the law passed — contrary to hopes of its backers who reasoned that expanding coverage would give many people access to doctors offices.

(italics, ours)

Feel free to substitute "cautionary tale" for "model" in this context.

Much like the Gulf oil spill, Obamacare will certainly prove to be the federal government's next slow-motion disaster.

Independence Day 2010

"...born and unborn."

It's up to each and every one of us to stand on the shoulders of giants in order to preserve this union.

Giants such as John Adams in this speech to the Continental Congress prior to adopting the Declaration of Independence.

From the HBO miniseries John Adams:.

Summer time reading

Kicking off this glorious 4th of July weekend with an excerpt of Walter Russel Mead's essay, "The Top Ten Lessons of the Global Economic Meltdown".

4. The old left is dead.

Not even a global economic crisis can breathe new life into the world of Marxian socialism. Not only have most European countries moved to the right since the crash; the developing world has not seen any serious revival of ‘proletarian socialism’ in response to hard times. The world’s surviving ‘communist’ regimes continue to hold power by claiming credit for the successful management of increasingly capitalist economies. If you look hard, you can find a noisy fringe calling, say, for the nationalization of the banks or other old left responses to the crisis, and there are lots of places where people are protesting government austerity programs, but there is not a single free country in the world where serious political parties argue that socialist transformation will cure the economy’s ills. Increasingly, the politics of resistance and protest come from the right (and that isn’t always a good thing).

We're not sure what Mead meant by that last statement but in the essay there is a link to the Tea Party movement at "from the right". Stay tuned to see where Mead takes this as within the context of that last sentence, saying fiscal responsibility and limited government as being "from the right" is somewhat ham-fisted and inartful.

Your (semi-)daily World Cup update

OK. We're lazy. Sue us.

We're almost out the door for the Germany vs. Argentina match so just consider this an open thread to express any and all opinions as seen fit.

Exit question: Do we pull for Germany as a matter of heritage or Argentina because their coach, Diego Maradona is... well, let's just say that win or lose, if we picked up the paper tomorrow and found out Maradona was arrested in his hotel room with 4 strippers and a mound of coke on the coffee table, we would not be surprised.

It's all family viewing from here on out, though:

Here's Maradona's infamous "Hand of God" goal against England in the quarters of the '86 World Cup.




And against that same England in the same match, his "Goal of the Century".

Radio KBwD is on the air

While we were all of 10 yrs. old and we first heard that opening riff come crackling over our transistor radio from somewhere deep behind the Orange curtain at KEZY AM 1190, it was pretty much the coolest thing we thought we could ever hear.

How cool? Let's let Youtube commenter dwdrums40385 explain:

imagine you are having a dream and you are in canada, there is snow, you here a moose takin a piss off in the distance and this song starts jammin, it just makes me want to shoot that (effing) moose

Yeah. Something like that.

Ladies and Gentlemen, from Delaware, USA, it's George Thorogood doin' that Diddley beat for "Who Do You Love".

Bad habits are those of other people

So, what does your favorite author say about you?


Awesome. We really don't care if others are smoking around us. Don't indulge, ourselves, but we're at the point in Nanny State America where we take a measure of voyeuristic pleasure in this now-subversive activity*.



* You'll have to scroll to the bottom of the linked post for the revelation.

H/T: Instaglen

Quotes of the malaise

We had been thinking of the following even before B-Daddy goaded us into it proving feeble minds do think alike:

In the discreet white-collar realm, men and women are interchangeable, doing the same, mind-based work. Physicality is suppressed; voices are lowered and gestures curtailed in sanitized office space. Men must neuter themselves, while ambitious women postpone procreation. Androgyny is bewitching in art, but in real life it can lead to stagnation and boredom, which no pill can cure.

Meanwhile, family life has put middle-class men in a bind; they are simply cogs in a domestic machine commanded by women. Contemporary moms have become virtuoso super-managers of a complex operation focused on the care and transport of children. But it’s not so easy to snap over from Apollonian control to Dionysian delirium.

Nor are husbands offering much stimulation in the male display department: visually, American men remain perpetual boys, as shown by the bulky T-shirts, loose shorts and sneakers they wear from preschool through midlife. The sexes, which used to occupy intriguingly separate worlds, are suffering from over-familiarity, a curse of the mundane. There’s no mystery left.

.
.
...............

In retrospect, I believe I was cheated. When I was a kid, adult behavior consisted of men and women dancing close to the sounds of Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole, and practicing sophisticated rites of wooing and seduction. The string arrangements were lush and romantic - Dad played Jackie Gleason and Gordon Jenkins albums that fully defined the style. Then came rock and roll, freedom from parentally-imposed restrictions and the celebration of being young. (In some ways my parents became co-conspirators in the movement: In an effort to make me more representative of my generation, Mom bought me a hot green Nehru jacket that I refused to wear. She also tried talking me into wearing my hair like the Dr. McCoy character in Star Trek, and threatened to take me to a barber with a illustrative photo for guidance. "Don't you want to wear your hair like JFK?" she'd ask. I kept my buzz cut - it was easier to remove playground sand from at the end of the day.)

The pacifism, idealism, altered awareness, Eastern mysticism and the relaxed grooming standards my peers adopted during my teenage years confused me, and by the time disco arrived when I turned eighteen, I was deeply disappointed. Sure, culturally we were becoming dominant, but what we had was empty and nowhere as mysterious and promising as the postwar adult culture I had observed when I was younger. Driving was nice, of course, and signing my own cut slips from class was a liberation of sorts, but what happened to the mystique of being an adult? Where were all the other members? What's more, opposition to the war in Viet Nam puzzled me. Wasn't this part of the admission to the club I had been exposed to as a child? How on earth could one talk about their war days, as my parents' friends had, if there weren't any war days?

You know something is amiss when a sexual libertine as Camille Paglia and a 50-something cultural traditionalist blogger from Southern California recognize the same dysfunction from somewhat divergent view points.


Back in junior high we had to take a class called "Man in Demand". It was a Scripture-based how-to manual for masculinity, nobleness, strength of character and discipline. Given our upbringing, it was totally redundant material. However, 30 years on where we've progressed to the point that not only have we elected our first black President but our first female one, as well, we believe the good Baptists that ran the school knew what they were doing.

When 99% effectiveness isn't good enough

Current federal EPA standards dictate that any oil separating device must be good for 15 parts per million. As a practical example, if you have a fishing vessel or merchant ship, you will be generating oily waste in your engine room as a result of running your machinery plant. The oily waste that collects in the bilges of the ship can be processed by an oily water separator and the effluent discharged overboard (50 miles from shore) as long as it meets that 15 ppm standard.

How to quantify 15 ppm? You'll have to trust us on the math with this one but picture a 55 gallon drum. Now picture dropping a half-teaspoon of oil into that 55 gallon drum of water. That's approximately 15 ppm.

So, why do we bring this up? It is because the federal government is treating this 15 ppm standard as sacred and because of bureaucratic inflexibility it is unnecessarily hindering the spill clean-up effort.

After making a brief stop in Norfolk for refueling, U.S. Coast Guard inspections and an all-out publicity blitz intended to drum up public support, a giant tanker billed as the world's largest oil skimming vessel set sail Friday for the Gulf of Mexico where it hopes to assist in the oil-cleanup effort.

The Taiwanese-owned, Liberian-flagged ship dubbed the "A Whale" stands 10 stories high, stretches 1,115 feet in length and has a nearly 200-foot beam. It displaces more water than an aircraft carrier.

Built in South Korea as a supertanker for transporting oil and iron ore, the six-month-old vessel was refitted in the wake of the BP oil spill with 12, 16-foot-long intake vents on the sides of its bow designed to skim oil off surface waters

The vessel's billionaire owner, Nobu Su, the CEO of Taiwanese shipping company TMT Group, said the ship would float across the Gulf "like a lawn mower cutting the grass," ingesting up to 500,000 barrels of oil-contaminated water a day.

But a number of hurdles stand in his way. TMT officials said the company does not yet have government approval to assist in the cleanup or a contract with BP to perform the work.

And do you want to know why they haven't received government approval. Because the vessel's oil separating ability does not meet the 15 ppm standard?

TMT also paid to fly in Edward Overton, a professor emeritus of environmental sciences at Louisiana State University, to get a look at the massive skimmer.

Overton blasted BP and the federal government for a lack of effort and coordination in their dual oil-spill response and made a plea to the government to allow the A Whale to join the cleanup operation.

"We need this ship. We need this help," Overton said. "That oil is already contaminating our shoreline. We've got to get the ship out there and see if it works. There's only one way to find out: Get the damn thing in the gulf and we'll see."

(italics, ours)

Mr. Overton doesn't understand how things work with the Obama regime. You pass legislation willy-nilly to find out what's in it. However, in the face of a slow-motion environmental disaster, every single "i" must be dotted and every single "t" must be crossed before any effective action can be taken.

Obama's Gulf oil spill is becoming replete with these stories of oil containment/capturing/processing items that just aren't quite good enough for the federal government's liking.

Go on over to Left Coast Rebel, here, where KOOK has another heart-warming story of actor Kevin Costner and his brother who have developed a centrifugal separator that has been denied usage in the clean-up effort because they too just don't measure up.

Team Obama: When 99% effective just won't do.

Summer time reading

Again, for your perusing pleasure, an excerpt from Walter Russell Mead's outstanding essay, The Top Ten Lessons of the Global Economic Meltdown:

3. The rogue states are parasites.

It may seem unkind or gloating to say so, but the point needs to be made: the pathetic pretensions of regimes like the ones in Iran and Venezuela to some kind of world leadership have been cruelly exposed. The governments of these countries are parasites on the global economy and far from representing alternatives to the global model, they are entirely dependent on capitalist success. When the global capitalist system is booming, the price of oil goes up and Venezuela and Iran have the cash for subsidies at home and adventures abroad. When the hated global system goes bust, Venezuela and Iran go broke. The leadership of these countries are like adolescents criticizing the bourgeois habits of the parents they sponge off. Both Iran and Venezuela have immense potential to help shape world civilization and culture in the twenty first century, but to make that contribution they will have to use their oil wealth to join and help shape the world system, rather than using it to feed the egos and illusions of their leaders.

Oil isn't the only thing fueling that ego. Western useful idiots like Oliver Stone and Sean Penn do their part as Chavez seizes businesses and silences opposition press, TV and radio as his soup kitchen Socialist dream begins to crumble all around him.

Trailer for Stone's documentary on Chavez and other South American statists, here.

Your daily (not World Cup but rather) football update of the day

No matches until Friday so we're in the clear to blog about the other football.

Were he alive, Walter Payton would probably be wondering just what all the fuss was about regarding the "wildcat" formation since he was doing it 25 years ago.

Actually, it appears that injuries to its quarterbacks forced the Bears' hand to insert Payton at quarterback rather than any specific game plan.

And though it resulted in an interception, check out the heave by Payton at the 4:50 mark. About 54 yards by our estimation. Not too shabby for one of the greatest running backs of all-time.