"Google-ing It" is so old school

Story here in yesterday’s fish wrap documents the increasing use and dependence (?) of drivers upon GPS devices that are now standard features in many new cars today. Though we own a hand-held device, we only recall having to use it once to bail us out of trouble in off-road territory in the eastern Mojave. And speaking of trouble, that’s precisely what drivers who use GPS as a primary navigation device find themselves in as street names change, businesses close or relocate and the technology therein does not refresh real-time.

Besides all that, we’re pretty convinced that the use of the in-car GPS as primary navigation device is a clear violation of Man Law… those esteemed principals that provide the foundation for this planet’s malesmanship.

So, we’re throwing this out there: is dependence on one’s in-car GPS as your primary navigation (ahead of looking at a map, googling, or…. yes, asking for directions) a violation of Man Law?

(And we definitely want to hear from our female readers on this)

Things look different at 7 in the morning.

We deleted a post from yesterday. It recounted an incident from work which was hastily conceived, clumsily written and in the end, not really post-worthy. It left open too wide of an interpretation... wide enough to be outside the scope of this site to which we always attempt to apply a degree of taste and common sense.

Its in the Stars

… and speaking of High Holidays, this weekend sees a rare convergence of Easter and the first round of the NCAAs making it just a little higher than normal. We’re taking tomorrow off to ummm… honor this occasion so blogging may be light or heavy depending on our mood.

Either way, we'll be hanging on Sunday with B-Daddy and his family. We greatly admire and appreciate B-Daddy's family preacher, Pastor J's ability to apply the significance of the resurrection as a foundation to the whole of Western Civilization. Ground Zero Day, indeed.

Were 7-1 as of this posting this afternoon. Mongo can vouch for our good word.

So, that would explain it.

10 very good reasons why we/you don't read our/your/anyone else's blog.

H/T: Foxfier

Reaganesque....? Believe It.

Because we spent approx. 18 hours in airports and planes the past couple of days, we were unable to see the Obama race speech and all the accompanying commentary surrounding it which is a good thing because after watching it in its entirety on YouTube this evening, we did have a few unfiltered thoughts:

Overall, we thought it was good but it fell short of the mark and certainly did not have the broad sweeping impact that Romney’s religion in America speech did (but guess which one will always be referred to more often down the line?).

Why did it fall short of the mark? Well, for one thing it was too long. He starts off well keeping to the arching themes of race in this country’s history and giving what we felt was a very strong repudiation of Wright’s words and rhetoric. However, Obama starts drifting half-way through his speech, using his call for racial reconciliation as a jumping-off point for better healthcare, education, ending the war in Iraq, etc., etc.… campaign stumping that should have been placed on hold for this occasion.

He then goes on to rationalize the bigotry exhibited by some blacks on real injustices visited upon them in the past and at times, in the present. Fair enough (don’t necessarily agree but…O.K). But then, mystifyingly, he turns around and rationalizes white bigotry on affirmative action and welfare which, in his opinion, formed the foundation of the Reagan coalition. This is pure hooey, of course, and does not even dignify a response.

While listening to all this rationalization for plain old bad behavior without a straight-up unqualified condemnation of the same, a quote came to mind made by Rosalind Carter when speaking of (speaking of…) Reagan that we will apply to the subject at hand: “Obama make us comfortable with our prejudices”. He does. Because he didn’t just come out and say bigotry and racism was inexcusable, he made us feel a little more comfortable with some that we may harbor… its not really our fault, after all….just look at history.
.
We will commend him, though, for recognizing part of the greatness of this country is that it is not “static” with respect to progress whether its race, gender or religion. This is a theme pro-Western Civ types like us have been making for years especially with respect to Islam: “yeah, some of our history is not pretty… freely admitted… but we always reserve the right to be smarter and better than we used to be”.

We may have more later but that was what made the strongest initial impressions. Good but not great. Certainly, with all the hoopla surrounding this dust-up the opportunity for greatness was there so we’ll just call this a long single rather than a home-run.

P.S. The nagging suspicion remains…. He wants to use the "crazy uncle” argument but how can you break bread with that same crazy uncle for over 20 years without cracking him upside the skull? Obama says that we all have people in our lives that we love yet have disagreements with but, my g#d, those types of disagreements. And, worse, he never gives any evidence that he challenged Wright on any of his rhetoric over those 20 years. Nice speech but actions do speak louder than words so we don’t believe he is quite off the hook on this one.

Fire the Dog!

Two years ago, we had the good fortune of being able to attend the 1st round games of the NCAA tournament at Cox Arena here in San Diego and back before we started blogging on the internet, we were still doing it, we suppose, via email which of course didn’t make us appear very tech-savvy but allowed us to spam our intended recipients on whatever subject whether they wanted to hear from us or not.

Anyway, we were so tickled by the experience that we wanted to share it with friends. Here is that email from March of '06:


A quick 'blog' on my excellent adventure to the NCAA Tournament 1st round
games at Cox Arena yesterday:

One of the most disturbing trends in American culture I've witnessed is the
discussion being given to making the day after the Super Bowl a national
holiday. If you haven't heard any of this "discussion", consider yourself
lucky. Its downright embarrassing. Even broaching the topic of a
national holiday to sleep off hangovers is a leading indicator of how this
nation is slouching towards a soft, dull and flaccid Euro-existence. As a
Chief Engineer once related to me: "Self-inflicted wounds are no excuse for
non-performance, cadet."

........ but a national holiday for the first round of the NCAAs? - now
we're talkin'! Seriously, there are no two better days on the calendar,
sports or otherwise, than that Thurs. and Friday in mid-March that mark the first round of the men's basketball tournament. Don't believe me? Look
at all the stories in the news about the general freak-out in the business
world over crashed computer networks due to employees streaming videos of
the games during work hours. How is that not a phenomena? How is that NOT
a good thing?

Anyway, I've been fortunate enough to attend 3 first round NCAA
events over the years. Once out in Arizona and twice here in SD at Cox
Arena. Call me shallow, un-broadened, "in a bubble", whatever..... can't
say I've had a better time here on God's green earth than spending
gloriously sunny spring days in Arizona and Southern California, sitting
inside for 9-10 hours watching 4 straight basketball games.

And its not just the hoops, of course, but the whole atmosphere.
Every one is aware of the pageantry of college hoops... the bands, the
cheerleaders, all the excitement inherent to college athletics but for me
it goes even deeper. These tournament events have been like old home week
for me. I literally bump into all the SD hoops homies who I have played
against at PB Rec, Crown Point, Mission Beach or any of the various rec leagues
I've participated in over the past 16 years here in San Diego. Its
definetely a trip. A lot of these formerly over-educated, under-employed
beach-dwelling "herbal" connoisseurs have got all growed-up and
respectable-like with families and yes, even full-time jobs.

On a semi-related demographic note: this event is decidedly white, male,
middle/upper-middle class. If you wanted to eliminate a large chunk the
"investor" class in the SD area, you would be well-served to plan
"something" for this event.
...... and speaking of that particular "something", we indeed did have a
bomb scare at the Arena. Apparently, there was "noise" on the internet of
a potential terrorist act at one or multiple tourney sites. One of the dogs
brought in prior to the games sniffed out something in a hot dog cart.
They cleared everyone out of the Arena and brought in the ATF Bomb Squad.
Turns out the dog sniffed out a box of plastic forks. Nice work, Rin'.
But better safe than sorry, right? The masses took the delay well,
returning to their cars to (re-)initiate tail-gate ops until everyone was
readmitted about an hour and a half later.

I'd say something about the games themselves but you can read about
them in the paper. Incidentally, I was able to sit in the first row on
the baseline for Illinois/Air Force game. The size, strength, quickness
and intensity that I saw from that perspective vs. my usual nose-bleed
perches was simply amazing. Almost frightening. Flash-backs of Scott
Williams (U. of North Carolina and later Chicago Bulls) dunking on my head in
hi-school summer league went flashing through my head.

Sorry, this wasn't so quick afterall. Hope everyone's brackets are
in good shape - Happy St. Pat's Day and thanks for letting me share the
love.

Many thanks to B-Daddy for minding the store and for providing some excellent analysis on the Fed's intervention into the credit crisis and the 2nd amendment case being heard before the Supreme Court.

Hang On To Your Hats

B-Daddy here. Brilliant though he may be, I'm not sure this man knows what he's doing. He is Ben S. Bernanke chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, aka the Fed. The Fed's rate cut today was greeted by cheers on Wall Street as the S&P 500 soared over 4% today. (See how that sounds so much less dramatic than "the Dow soared by 420 points," good to keep things in perspective.) However, I am very, very nervous about the return of inflation. My traditional inflation harbinger is the price of gold which closed up $1.70 an ounce today at the previously unheard of price of $1004 an ounce. The price of gold has spiked from an historically high mid-600s in early 2007 to over $1000 an ounce today. There is a nice chart here. The price of oil, another commodity is way up as well. Parallels to the 1970s abound.

I think that we have been fooled by the lack of consumer goods price inflation that past Fed easy money policy did not have the deleterious effects it has had in earlier years. While consumer prices stayed steady from the late 90s on, due to global competition, we had a stock market bubble followed by a real estate bubble. I think the cause of both bubbles was that the price of money, i.e. the interest rates, were held artificially low, and so the risks of these investments were not properly evaluated by investors. Exacerbating bubbles are the bad behaviors that they encourage. The Fed intervention in loaning money to JP Morgan to purchase a failing Bear-Stearns will only exacerbate this mess by encouraging bad behavior (this is called moral hazard by my favorite Brit magazine, sounds so much better.) The Fed is dipping deep into its reserves to effect bail outs of financial firms because Bernanke is concerned that a collapse in the financial sector will lead to a lack of liquidity that would trigger a 1930s style depression. I disagree, but who am I? I also think we are learning the wrong lessons from the 1929 collapse where clumsy Fed handling of interest rates by raising them quickly triggered a stock market sell off. Ultimately, though, most economists agree that the stock market crash was not the proximate cause of the Great Depression. Directly intervening with specific firms in the economy is an untested method of monetary policy. They seem to be making it up as they go at the Fed and that makes me very, very nervous. So hang on to your hats, this could be a very wild ride.

Update #1. Understanding how the housing market subprime loan mess has caused such widespread financial upheaval is difficult. The New York Times, amazingly, does a pretty good job of explaining in this article.

You thought you voted for a conservative?

B-Daddy here. Many of us bought into the idea that the man at left is a conservative in the Goldwater tradition. However, the actions of his administration once again give the lie to this notion. The man pictured at right is the Solicitor General of the United States, Paul D. Clement. He filed a brief with the Supreme Court arguing against an individual rights interpretation of the 2nd amendment that the Second Court of Appeals used to strike down the D.C. gun ban. Why does this matter? Because if the D.C. law is declared unconstitutional, per se, then the burden of proof will be on government, where it always should have been, to show how regulation of gun ownership does not interfere with a fundamental right. Ironically the Goldwater Institute opposes the administration interpretation as well. Their criticism is far more eloquent than mine:

"This brief addresses the government’s failure of principle and logic in this case. The United States’ brief (hereinafter “Gov’t Br.”) argues correctly that the Second Amendment protects a fundamental personal right to keep and bear arms, but then fails to acknowledge and advocate the simple and necessary conclusions that follow from that premise."

However, Bush, either through disorganization or apathy has allowed his Solicitor General to file a brief that argues for a more restrictive interpretation of the 2nd amendment. Amazingly, Vice President Cheney has signed on to an amicus curiae brief that argues against the position of the administration's own official. Unbelievable.

Like his signing of McCain-Feingold, or NoChildLeftBehind or caving on steel tariffs, or generally just letting pork run amok, this administration has not been all that conservative. No wonder people are abandoning the Republican label.

Not quite as "post-racial" as advertised.

We’ve been having some fun reading the “diaries” over at the Daily Kos. So much so, in fact, we are going to rename this section of Kos, the Pretzel Factory. Want an example? Read here for the reason for Obama’s pastor’s maniacal outbursts. Its your fault. If you happen to be white, that is.

KT makes an excellent point, here, regarding why we shouldn’t dismiss the good Reverend’s behavior as “it’s a black thing, you wouldn’t understand”. In fact, this defense is rather curiously-applied stereotyping in itself.

This whole episode got us to thinking (no… we didn’t “pull” anything), if Reverend Wright is what passes for leadership in the “black community”, should it be a surprise that a large segment of the black population views itself as being in a permament underclass status.

Programming Alert

...and speaking of bureaucratic inefficiencies... despite the gallant and repeated efforts of not one but two government travel offices to scuttle our travel plans, we will be getting on a plane this afternoon for a 11:30 P.M. arrival in Virginia. We should be back on Wednesday but until then B-Daddy will be at the wheel.

A lot to get to when we get back. Yesterday was rather post-heavy with the NCAA tournament selections and all but if you are just catching up with things here on the internets please check this out. We didn't want it to get buried in all our March Madness. We'll be picking up more on the education/home-schooling thing later.

Independence!

If you haven't been watching, you've been missing out. Stumbled upon this while we were surfing around Daily Kos. Paul Giamatti does John Adams.

Outstanding thus far. We're going on travel tomorrow so we'll try to see what we can see in the next few days.

Despite the obvious, we still believe the whole story of our nation's independence is undertold. As tonight's episodes made clear... the suicidal endeavor made no practical sense, whatsoever.