The Blue Grotto

New Yorker Cartoon of the Day

I Would Describe This Book Recommendation as a "Carl Hiaasen Inside the Beltway"

Little Green Men

By Christopher Buckley (1999)

     If Carl Hiaasen switched from writing about South Florida sleazeballs to writing about Washington insiders (also sleazeballs), this might be the result.  It's pretty funny, and easily makes the cut for a good, light beach read for the summer months.

     John O'Banion is a smug Chris Matthews or Tim Russert-like political talk show host who golfs with all the big power brokers and gets invited to all the right dinner parties with his glamorous wife. 

     His life is turned upside down when he's abducted by "aliens" (a bunch of top-secret government agents who dress up like extraterrestrials to perpetuate a steady string of abduction tales for space-program funding purposes). 

     The funny bits of the book are the characters that are hilariously thinly-disguised versions of real Washington oddballs.  There's the fictional Vernon Jordan, the Katharine Graham, the Strom Thurmond, and my favorite, the Middle Eastern diplomat/power broker named Prince "Blandar."

.   

Greenspan Comes Out Of Retirement For One More Interest Rate Hike

June 25, 2007

WASHINGTON, DC — Confirming a rumor that first appeared in March on the FDIC Fan Forum message board, former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan came out of retirement Tuesday to raise interest rates on federal funds by a quarter of a point.

"You may remember this one from 1989," said Greenspan, barely audible above the roar of an estimated crowd of 20,000 gathered in front of the Marriner S. Eccles Building. "But before I start, I think I'm gonna need [current Federal Reserve chairman] Ben [Bernanke]'s help with this. C'mon up here, Ben."

Greenspan refused to comment on buzz that he was planning a five-nation comeback tour to stabilize international housing markets.

Abraham Lincoln Pro-Capitalism Quote of the Day!

    

     One of the most annoying falsehoods that anti-capitalist liberals like to lob out there is the view that the economic situation of a given American is a sort of static condition that determines the person's life from cradle to grave.  This dumb outlook misses the whole point of America itself!  It was certainly largely true in most of the world for century upon century, but not in America. 

     Here's what Lincoln said in an 1859 speaking tour, laying out the Republicans' vision:

     "The prudent, penniless beginner in the world labors for wages a while, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself, then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. . . .  Many independent men, in this assembly, doubtless a few years ago were hired laborers. . . ."

.

According to the U.N., the Darfur Genocide Is Caused By, What Else? Global Warming!

     A few weeks ago I wrote in despair that I thought the whole U.N. might be an elaborate comedy scheme in which someone would eventually pop up from behind a bench in Dag Hammarskjold Plaza and cheerily announce "You're On Candid Camera!" 

     The new U.N. General Secretary, Ban Ki-moon, said the other day that the genocide in Darfur is ultimately caused by global warming.  I take this assertion as proof that my hypothesis is correct.

.

The Darfur Genocide and Global Warming
By Fred Thompson
Thursday, June 28, 2007

Recently, the new UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said that the root cause of the current genocide in Darfur is … global warming. Now if you've been following the tragedy of the Darfur region in the African nation of Sudan, you know how absurd that statement is.

There's not room here for even a good summary, but let me make a few points. Sudan straddles the line between Christian African and Muslim Arabic cultures, bordering Egypt and Libya on the north. Bloody regional warfare stretches back centuries but, in modern times, the country has been in pretty much of a constant state of war since the 1950s. It's safe to say that millions have died in wars that are often aimed at control of the rich oil fields in the South. Today, however, the vastly reduced African Christian population isn't even involved. Two Muslim factions, divided along racial lines, are fighting for control of Darfur.

Now it’s true that the return of cyclical droughts has made agriculture and life more and more difficult for the people in the region. The impact of the weather, however, doesn’t approach the destruction that generations of warfare have worked on the land and the people. With peace and freedom, the economy of Darfur could have easily adapted to any climate change – no matter the cause.

Why, then, would the new UN Secretary General blame climate change? I think it’s pretty obvious.

Blaming the Islamic government and groups that have manipulated events in Sudan will get him nothing but enemies. Blaming global warming, however, is basically the same thing as blaming America. America is by no means the only major source of greenhouse gases, but we've taken the most political heat. The reason is that congress rightfully balked at ratifying the Kyoto international climate treaties during the Clinton presidency.

There is simply no downside to blaming America, because Americans don't punish their ideological foes. From the UN, we don't even require sanity sometimes. And there might even be an upside to blaming us, since there are Americans who suffer from such ingrained feelings of guilt, they’ll support increased aid to both the UN and Sudan.

There is a lesson to be learned here, though. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is arguably the most powerful man in the international community today. We know he's unwilling to blame those who actually gave the orders to commit genocide in Darfur. And apparently he's happy to shift the blame for ongoing deaths to those living peaceful, productive lives in the West.

Now hopefully we can work toward international cooperation with regard to environmental policies that make sense. It’s not very encouraging though when the head of the world’s leading international body uses climate change as an all purpose excuse in order to avoid hard realities.

Fred Thompson is an actor and former Senator. His radio commentary airs on the ABC Radio Network and he blogs on The Fred Thompson Report.

Blue Grotto Fashion Do's and Don'ts: Design & Architecture Category

     This "Don't" is a fine specimen of what Malcolm Muggeridge once called "quite exceptional architectural confusion." 

     I was driving around the northern end of Eleuthera with some friends last week in the Bahamas, and this beauty sits right near the tip in a pretty remote patch.  It is, sadly, visible from parts of the perfect little island where I was staying.

     You gotta hand it to the cheeseball who built it, though, because it pretty much guarantees that he'll never have to worry about ever acquiring any neighbors in a million years. . . .

   

New Yorker Cartoon of the Day

World's Fattest Town Makes, Consumes World's Largest Mozzarella Stick

 

Word of the Day: Farrago

Farrago

Pronunciation: f&-'rä-(")gO
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -goes
Etymology: Latin farragin-, farrago mixed fodder, mixture, from far spelt -- more at BARLEY
: a confused mixture : HODGEPODGE

.

     "What Miss Whittleseys came up with, instead of a cogent report on the cooperative movement in the Punjab, was the merest farrago - a scrapbook, a shambles."

.

"King Henry VIII Would Have Traded Half His Kingdom for Modern Plumbing, a Lifetime Supply of Antibiotics and Access to the Internet."

     This is just an amazing article.  I think you'll enjoy it.

     Here's the quote I like:

You can fly from New York to Tokyo partly because someone figured out how to build an airplane and partly because someone figured out how to insure it. I'm writing this on a personal computer instead of an electric typewriter partly because someone said, "Hey! I wonder if we can make computer chips out of silicon!" and partly because someone said "Hey! I wonder if we can finance startups with junk bonds!"

.

A Brief History of Economic Time

By Steven Landsburg

June 9, 2007 (Wall Street Journal)

Modern humans first emerged about 100,000 years ago. For the next 99,800 years or so, nothing happened. Well, not quite nothing. There were wars, political intrigue, the invention of agriculture -- but none of that stuff had much effect on the quality of people's lives. Almost everyone lived on the modern equivalent of $400 to $600 a year, just above the subsistence level. True, there were always tiny aristocracies who lived far better, but numerically they were quite insignificant.

Then -- just a couple of hundred years ago, maybe 10 generations -- people started getting richer. And richer and richer still. Per capita income, at least in the West, began to grow at the unprecedented rate of about three quarters of a percent per year. A couple of decades later, the same thing was happening around the world.

Then it got even better. By the 20th century, per capita real incomes, that is, incomes adjusted for inflation, were growing at 1.5% per year, on average, and for the past half century they've been growing at about 2.3%. If you're earning a modest middle-class income of $50,000 a year, and if you expect your children, 25 years from now, to occupy that same modest rung on the economic ladder, then with a 2.3% growth rate, they'll be earning the inflation-adjusted equivalent of $89,000 a year. Their children, another 25 years down the line, will earn $158,000 a year.

Against a backdrop like that, the temporary ups and downs of the business cycle seem fantastically minor. In the 1930s, we had a Great Depression, when income levels fell back to where they had been 20 years earlier. For a few years, people had to live the way their parents had always lived, and they found it almost intolerable. The underlying expectation -- that the present is supposed to be better than the past -- is a new phenomenon in history. No 18th-century politician would have asked "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" because it never would have occurred to anyone that they ought to be better off than they were four years ago.

Rising income is only part of the story. One hundred years ago the average American workweek was over 60 hours; today it's under 35. One hundred years ago 6% of manufacturing workers took vacations; today it's over 90%. One hundred years ago the average housekeeper spent 12 hours a day on laundry, cooking, cleaning and sewing; today it's about three hours.

As far as the quality of the goods we buy, try picking up an electronics catalogue from, oh, say, 2001 and ask yourself whether there's anything there you'd want to buy. That was the year my friend Ben spent $600 for a 1.3-megapixel digital camera that weighed a pound and a half. What about services, such as health care? Would you rather purchase today's health care at today's prices or the health care of, say, 1970 at 1970 prices? I don't know any informed person who would choose 1970, which means that despite all the hype about costs, health care now is a better bargain than it's ever been before.

The moral is that increases in measured income -- even the phenomenal increases of the past two centuries -- grossly understate the real improvements in our economic condition. The average middle-class American might have a smaller measured income than the European monarchs of the Middle Ages, but I suspect that Tudor King Henry VIII would have traded half his kingdom for modern plumbing, a lifetime supply of antibiotics and access to the Internet.

The source of this wealth -- the engine of prosperity -- is technological progress. And the engine of technological progress is ideas -- not just the ideas from engineering laboratories, but also ideas like new methods of crop rotation, or just-in-time inventory management. You can fly from New York to Tokyo partly because someone figured out how to build an airplane and partly because someone figured out how to insure it. I'm writing this on a personal computer instead of an electric typewriter partly because someone said, "Hey! I wonder if we can make computer chips out of silicon!" and partly because someone said "Hey! I wonder if we can finance startups with junk bonds!"

Which contribution is more important? By one rough measure -- the profits earned by the innovator -- they're about equal. In the late 1980s, Microsoft earned economic profits of about $600 million a year, while Michael Milken, the inventor of the junk bond, earned an annual income that was just about the same.

Some good ideas even come from economists. Julian Simon came up with the idea of bribing airline passengers to give up their seats on overbooked flights -- and gone were the days when you relied on the luck of the draw to make it to your daughter's wedding. Economists first suggested creating property rights in African elephants, a policy that has given villagers an incentive to harvest at a sustainable rate and drive the poachers away. The result? Villagers have prospered and the elephant population has soared.

Engineers figure out how to harness the power of technology; economists figure out how to harness the power of incentives. Our prosperity relies on both.

Mr. Landsburg's latest book is "More Sex Is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics" (The Free Press, 2007).

How About This One?

 

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) - Hogzilla is being made into a horror movie. But the sequel may be even bigger: Meet Monster Pig. An 11-year-old Alabama boy used a pistol to kill a wild hog his father says weighed a staggering 1,051 pounds and measured 9-feet-4 from the tip of its snout to the base of its tail. Think hams as big as car tires.

If the claims are accurate, Jamison Stone's trophy boar would be bigger than Hogzilla, the famed wild hog that grew to seemingly mythical proportions after being killed in south Georgia in 2004.

Hogzilla originally was thought to weigh 1,000 pounds and measure 12 feet in length. National Geographic experts who unearthed its remains believe the animal actually weighed about 800 pounds and was 8 feet long.