Unanswered Questions of 2010

I was going to spend time in the sun in Puerto Rico, drinking colorful rum drinks while observing scientifically scantily clad tropical skanks. I decided to get sick instead so, here I am for the time being, thinking, but not very hard.

This is a good time to consider questions I would think I have a right to have answered but that have not been answered during the year. Here are the main ones:

Why hasn’t a single former or current global warming proponent come forward to point out that the following is absurd, violates rules of logic every bright twelve-year old knows:

Arguing that unusually warm temperatures (anywhere) are evidence of global warming and then arguing that unusually cold temperatures (in the very same places) are also evidence of global warming?

Where is Al Gore? What is he doing?

Why didn’t President Obama close the Guantanamo detention facility for suspected terrorists as promised? (I have an idea; I would like the president’s followers or former followers to force the administration to say why loud and clear.)

Why did I not hear loud protests from the Republican leadership about the administration’s growing tendency to impose through bureaucratic fiat what the president was unable to pass through a democratic process? Major instances are imposition of measures to limit alleged global warming and the FCC’s new intrusion in the perfectly adequate Internet.

Why isn’t anyone, Left or Right celebrating the fact that the Middle-East now has two democracies instead of one? After difficult birth pains, Iraq has a government achieved through perfectly democratic means including hard-headed negotiations. President Bush won his “war of choice” through and through. It’s worth mentioning it really loudly.

Incidentally: A French-Chinese consortium is likely to carry the first petroleum exploitation permit from Iraq. Some “blood for oil!” Leftists have no shame, no sense of decency. If they did, one of them at least would come forward and say, “Oops!”

Incidentally also: I still think that when the smoke clears, all American troops will have left the ground in Iraq but that there will be an American forward base somewhere in Iraqi Kurdistan. I sure hope so.

Why do the media as well as the Republican leadership maintain a wall of silence about the many facets of the president’s stubborn and mysterious secretiveness? Here is a list of the president’s acts of secrecy, “acts” by forceful omission, of course:

• During the presidential campaign, Obama released just one brief document detailing his personal health, while GOP opponent John McCain released what he said was his complete medical file totaling more than 1,500 pages. The Obama campaign eventually released some routine lab-test results and electrocardiograms for Obama.
• Obama refused to offer his official papers as a state legislator in Illinois and did not produce correspondence, such as letters from lobbyists and other information, from his days in the Illinois State Senate.
• Obama did not release his client list as an attorney or his billing records.
• Obama declined to release his college records from Occidental College, where he studied for two years before transferring to Columbia University.
• Obama’s campaign refused to give Columbia University, where he earned an undergraduate degree in political science, permission to release his transcripts. Such transcripts would list the courses Obama took, and his grades.
• Obama’s college dissertation, reportedly titled “Soviet Nuclear Disarmament,” has disappeared from Columbia’s archives.
• Obama did not agree to the release of his application to the Illinois state bar, which would clear up intermittent allegations that his application to the bar may have been inaccurate.
• Obama has not released records from his time at Harvard Law School.
• Note: During his campaign for president, Obama promised he would make his White House “the most open and transparent administration in history.”

This list comes from Chris Matthew, of all people. He is the liberal MSNBC commentator who said famously that he felt a tingle going up his leg when he thought of Barack. A case of man love gone sour.

The list is lifted from an article in Newsmax.

The Lame Duck’s Ass

The “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy is abolished. All in all, it’s a good thing. One, we don’t want our military to get used to lying routinely. Two, the hypocritical policy probably robbed us of talent. It was always a manpower issue. I am sorry our spineless Congressional Republicans allowed the Obama administration to frame it as a civil rights issue. No one has a right to serve in the military. There will be glitches in the application. It will be interesting to watch. The Pentagon will probably try to keep homosexuals from serving in the combat branches that have expressed the greatest hostility to the move. I predict this will give rise to lawsuits.

As I write, it looks like the arms limitations treaty with Russia will pass the Senate. It’s not as simple as the Administration and the Senate make it out to be. First, yes, we don’t need as many nuclear weapons against Russia as we have. How many we need against North Korea, Iran, and eventually, possibly China, was not discussed enough by the media.

Second, it was passed too quickly, exclusively to provide President Obama with a last-minute bi-partisan victory. Nothing of national interest would have been lost in telling the Russians, “Another month, please.”

The text of the treaty contains language that prohibits anti-ballistic missile development. Those are the weapons that allow us a fair chance of shooting down incoming nuclear missiles. They are a deterrent, of course. The President and several members of the administration have said that this preamble language means nothing, that it’s just a sop to Russian feeling. I am not saying they are lying but I do ask:

Would they know if it were thought of as meaningful and binding by everyone else? This administration has accumulated a history of not understanding much about the world. Why would this be different?

Also, states, like individuals, should not enter into contracts they don’t intend to respect. Trust is the basis of civilized life.

If I had been a Senator, I would have told the President,” I am more for it than against it but I don’t want to rush. A couple of wrinkles have to be ironed – you called them wrinkles; maybe you are right; persuade me. Also, why not wait a couple of weeks and give the treaty the big muscle of backing by a Republican Congress?” (Don’t laugh at the thought of my being a Senator. Al Franken is. I am a lot smarter than he is and much better informed. I am even having funnier than he ison most days. This is not bragging. Most of us are most of the above.)

The Federal Communications Commission ought to be disbanded or starved to death. It just decided to take the thing that works best in America by a long shot and to regulate it. Its reason for existing does not exist anymore anyway. The original reason was that someone had to apportion limited broadcast space (that would be in the air). There is no shortage of whatever it takes to expand the internet. There is no shortage in sight. The three Democrat members of the commission (members are appointed) are all radical enemies of freedom of speech for conservatives. Kill them! (Not as human beings, as commissioners. I hope I am being clear). Conservatives should not even desire in their hearts of hearts to use the FCC similarly if and when they have a majority on it

It would be an excellent gesture for the Republican Congress to kill the FCC as one of its first actions. It would have high symbolic value to announce the transformation of the nature of government. It would be relatively easy to do because funding bills must originate in the House. So, don’t fund it. Try to make it retro-active. Let the commissioners operate from their kitchen tables if they wish. I would consider that progress at any rate. Rolling back the FCC to any extent would also provide great training; it would be an unlimbering exercise for the heavy lifting to follow. I refer to the destruction of PelosiCare, of course.

If all goes well, I will be spending a few days in the sun right after Christmas. So, this may be one of my last postings of the year. Yes, it’s true, I would rather swim in warm Caribbean water than write a few more pages for you. Shoot me!

Women: What’s To Love? (A Story of Adventure and Passion)

12/18/10

Here is a small secular Christmas present, a story you might have missed.

For Rad, in Singapore.

Women are annoying, interfering, bossy, and petty. (How many guys do you know who can nurse a small slight for ten or fifteen years?) Men who don’t believe these simple truths are rubes and patsies. By the way, those universal objectionable female features are why Mother Nature invented the poison testosterone. Women who don’t believe these self-evident truths have never had a sister, or a mother, or a roommate. Or else, they live in a mental 1970s feminist time-warp when women were such superior beings that they did not even need bras to combat the natural force of gravity. But, but, that’s not the whole story, fortunately. There is much to love in the creatures, if, if only you pay attention. Here is an illustration, rolled up in a tiny true story.

It’s a long time ago on the Caribbean coast of Yucatán. Cancún, the sprawling rowdy resort, is not even yet a greedy light in a developer’s eye. Only a few foreign skin-divers and a handful of itinerant pot-heads make it as far as that wild shore. My then-future-ex-wife (henceforth “TFEW,” pronounced as it is spelled) and I are driving slowly on a gravel road miles into the interior in our cool but sturdy convertible VW. We are not looking for anything in particular, just yielding to my constant exo-tropism, the tendency idly to look for something unknown in unfamiliar places. My companion is used to rough travel with no special purpose. She does not mind it as long as I am leading the way to nowhere. We both know Spanish, at least we are pretty sure we do.

We notice a hamlet in the middle of the dry jungle on one side of the road. It’s not much. A half dozen light thatched structures with no walls, colorful cotton hammocks strung between their supporting posts, more hammocks outside between coconut trees, a smoking fire with a big cauldron on it. It’s summer, the weather is good, not much more is needed. There are chicken pecking around indicating that this is more than a temporary camp. We are in a Mexican federal territory, not a proper state, so it could be the beginnings of a homestead, I think. A woman waves at us in a friendly manner. We might just as well stop. Besides, it’s late afternoon and I am ready for a glass of Nescafé.

The woman appears to be in her mid-fifties because her hair is all steel-gray and her face wrinkled. With constant exposure to the tropical sun, she might be younger than she looks, perhaps in her late forties. Although she wears the white embroidered frock, the huipíl, of Maya women, the color of her hair and that of her skin, even tanned, as well as her large body size, mark her as a non-Maya, as someone from the interior of Mexico. Excitedly, she invites us to sit down in some of the hammocks. It turns out, she had the water on already and she has Nescafé. Alright, I think! Life is good!

The gray-haired lady is cordial with both of us but she is talking mostly to the TFEW, as you would expect. She asks her questions about her, and me, and us. She babbles like a talkative woman who has not had anyone to talk to in days, or weeks. Evidently, we are the most interesting humans to cross her path in quite a while. Several times, she mentions how she regrets the absence of her old man, her “viejo.” who is working in the forest. I am sorry too. I wish he were here to complete the tableau; my camera finger is itching.

This is a pleasant way to laze away the afternoon. The Nescafé tastes as fine as instant coffee with lots of sugar and no milk ever does. There seems to be enough food to share with us in the lady’s big cauldron. I first, I think it’s chicken, or maybe parrot with onions; actually, there is good chance it’s iguana, a big iguana. Well, we will be hungry pretty soon and I am sure the lady could use a modest infusion of cash. We are beginning to think about asking for permission to hang our own hammocks for the night.

At some point, I become aware that the conversation has changed in tenor. This woman wants something but I will be damned if I know what. It’s not money, evidently. She is not vulgar; Mexicans seldom are. In its own way, Mexico is, or used to be, a well-ordered society: Beggars beg; that’s their job. Others don’t beg, period. Then, the TFEW reaches into her big, carry-all purse next to her for something or other. She catches the woman looking inside the purse sideways with a searching eye.

“What are you looking for,” asks the TFEW with curiosity.
“Well, forgive me, I was wondering if you had, you know, something, you know, to soften the skin.” As she says this, the gray-haired lady makes a motion of rubbing something into the inner sides of her thighs. That’s what I think I see at any rate but I can be prudish sometimes.

We are on our way home to California, and, before that to the big Mexican cities of the interior where there are stores. The TFWEW gives the gray-haired lady the last of her tubes of Nivea. The woman beams and kisses her on both cheeks.

Seconds later, there is a shout from the forest. “ Mi viejo, my old man is back,” exclaims the woman with evident satisfaction. And there emerges, machete in hand, a handsome, short stalwart Mayan man. He has broad shoulders and his calves look hard beneath the knew-length pants. His skin is a smooth chocolate brown, his thick head of hair is jet-black. He puts me in mind of a strong horse whose exterior shine tell of its radiant health. As he approaches, I notice his large, powerful hands. He looks to be twenty-two or twenty-three, twenty-five on the outside. Her “viejo,” no kidding!

I told, you, there was something to love about women in spite of everything. It’s their tenaciousness, their will never to give up, ever, even against all odds finally to win victory where it matters most!

© Jacques Delacroix 2010

Are We Saved Yet? Is Harry Reid a Sleaze-Bag? What to Know About Taxes in Four Short Statements.

MY RADIO SHOW IS SUNDAY FROM 11 am TO 1 pm ON KSCO SANTA CRUZ 1080 AM. IT’S ALSO ACCESSIBLE FROM THE INTERNET. CALL ME TO TELL ME THAT I DON’T KNOW WHAT I AM TALKING ABOUT. OR TELL YOUR LEFT-WING SCUM FRIENDS TO DO SO. IT WILL BE FUN!

There is going to be no tax hike at all come January. I was pretty sure there wouldn’t be, or not for long. I am still annoyed about the price we had to pay, unnecessarily to my mind: an absurd 13-months extension of unemployment benefits.

I am wondering if sleaze-bag Harry Reid 2,000- page last-minute, porky Omnibus Spending Bill was not just a silly threat to make sure Republicans did not dare the President at the eleventh hour. They might have told him: No thank you; we just want a one sentence law that says: “No tax hike.” The dying Democratic leadership may have had nightmares about this. Yet, the leftist leadership of the Democrat Party is just crazy and shameless enough to have given a last obscene spending bill the old try.

Today, I hope the media are just lying to me about the alleged new spirit of non-partisanship in Washington. At this point, I think the best non-partisanship is when the other guy has shed his last drop of blood. Don’t misunderstand me, I do want a two-party system. I just want another second party, a rational one not fixated on cramming down our throats what Europe is right now vomiting.

Here is what we need to remember about taxes:

1 All taxes are bad for the economy. Private parties almost always invest more wisely and more productively than most government agencies. Some taxes once in a while are spent on projects that benefit the economy. That’s very rare. Yet, the Internet got federal support in its initial stages. The benefits we derived from its existence were not planned; they are the unanticipated consequences of the a modestly funded defense project.

2 Under the Constitution, taxes are levied to raise revenue to pay for government services. In fact, everywhere, including in this country, tax monies are also used for social engineering. One of the oldest and most successful of fiscally-based social engineering is the deductibility of mortgage interest. There is no doubt it facilitated home-ownership by ordinary people, even given the 2008 meltdown. Contemplate this! Gives me pause.

3 It’s hard to know if leftists are lying cynically or if they are a little stupid about that which is counterintuitive. The preponderance of evidence is that, in a developed country, lowering the tax rates increases government revenue. There are several reasons: lower taxes promote private economic activity thereby enlarging the tax base; tax payers cheat less when tax rates are lower, etc. You don’t need to understand why to see the evidence. The sequence is very close in time: Lower tax rates, take in more in taxes. I am serious: I don’t know if politicians who maintain otherwise are dishonest or dumb. I make it a rule never to underestimate stupidity supported by collective belief.

4 Taxation is the most common form of violence. Of course, in this country, we tend to decide on taxes and to levy them according to a legitimate process. What makes the process legitimate is democratic decision-making. Nevertheless, taxes involve the threat of violence and, in case of resistance, the serious violence of being forced into jail where you may not do most of what you want and you may be forced to do what you don’t want to do. Of course, it’s better to decide on taxes democratically than not. Keep in mind though that the most scrupulous of democratic processes usually allows for the will of nearly half the population to be trampled underfoot. Reminder: In most situations, if your position receives 50% of the votes minus the vote of a single person, you lose. (Yes, if there are 20 million valid ballots cast and your side gets 9, 999, 999, you failed.) That’s the moral reason why various assemblies have super-majority dispositions regarding taking and spending citizens’ money. Incidentally, that’s the very disposition the voters of the great near-bankrupt State of California removed in the last election. Yes, I live in the land of ethical morons!

Republican Sobbing

I am flummoxed by the last-ditch attempt to pass an alleged “tax” package. It looks like it will contain fair amounts of pork, as if the tea party-impelled Republican Party had no won a major electoral victory a short time ago. The quid-pro quo involving another – unfunded – extension of unemployment insurance passes neither the test of economic rationality nor of fiscal prudence, as if…. (See above). It’s also of dubious morality at best because there are good reasons to believe that long unemployment only prepares people for longer-term unemployment. In the meantime, in my area, with unemployment at an official 12%+, jobs are going begging. Those are mostly bad jobs admittedly but you either agree that a bad job is better than no job or you don’t. There is no in-between. In the meantime, house-cleaners with little English gross $20 and hour and, in most cases, their gross is also their net. And no, this is not a sly anti-immigrant statement and no, I don’t think that’s overpaid. Just delivering standards of comparisons.

Perhaps, I am missing something but I still don’t understand why the in-coming Republican House majority could not present the president on January 10th with a two sentence tax-cut maintenance bill and dare him to veto it, and let the Democratic Party take the consequences, on its right or on its left-end. Either way, I win. Think about it. I am betting, of course, that the Senate contains enough rational Democrats to stay out of that fight. You can always make tax cuts retro-active, it seems to me. Perhaps someone will explain to me what I am missing here.

Let me say it again: The goal is to finish it off President Obama and his leftist camarilla because that’s the most clear way to say “Enough” to the European grand plan that is so manifestly failing in Europe. The last thing we need or deserve right now is bi-partisan politics

To make matters worse, my wife advises me that Rep John Boehner, he putative nest majority leader cried on television, again, for the second time at least. The man is only 62. That’s too early for testosterone levels to have dropped to the level where is has become and old lady. And that’s not even kind to old ladies. I have known some who wee tough as nails. Here is a message for Rep. Boehner:

Mr Boehner: I am older than you are but the only time I tear up is when I see a really nice woman’s bottom sashaying into the distance and I realize I will never see it again.

Man up, Republicans or there will be a third party that really tries to implement policies that match the wishes of he majority of the American people. We are watching you. It’s not going politics as usual.

Language Learning; Barack: The End? (No connection.)

I have been absent from this blog for too long. In part it’s because I am taking care of my two-year-old grand-daughter who quite deserves the time investment. I am watching how she is putting words together and discovering grammar in her own mind. I did not have the leisure to do this when my children were at the same stage. Listening to her, I believe more than ever that trying to add a different language to the mix while she is mastering one (English) would be a risky mistake. Register this: I do not believe it’s harmless to expose small children to two languages before they have gained a good command of one. Of course, this goes against tenacious common local belief. Local belief does not hold much water with me because I am bilingual and local belief is not. I mean by “bilingual” that I am able to do everything, including my old job, in both English and French. I don’t mean only that I can find my way to the bathroom. It takes about ten hours to learn to do this in ten languages. That’s a stupid way to spend one’s time. So, if you wish to argue with me about this, don’t tell me about your neighbors’ kids who are “perfectly bilingual,” or your uncle’s friend who “knows six languages.” How the hell would you know?

If you want to argue with me on this, you will have to do it bilingually, on this blog. And since Spanish and French are the most studied foreign languages in California, I expect you to use one of these two in addition to English. (Yes, I also know Spanish but I don’t claim that I could teach sociology in Spanish, for example.) Now, I feel better! I have been biting my tongue too long on this issue of foreign tongues.

Now on to the national political scene. I have said several times that I don’t think President Obama can move toward the political center because he has only one playbook, a liberal-socialist playbook. The current mano a mano between the president and the left of the Democratic Party may yet prove me wrong. It’s about the president yielding to the Republicans’ demand for the continuation of tax breaks for everyone in return for extending unemployment benefits (again). The left side of the Left insists on punishing the very rich, and damn unemployment!

Is this one of those times when I hope I have been wrong? Do I hope Barack Obama will do a Clinton and turn to the center of the spectrum? Not really. President Obama is such a clear, almost flamboyant symbol of the American Left that I want him politically destroyed. There is no one else who can take his unfortunate place on the burning pyre, from a signaling standpoint. For ordinary Americans to really believe that they have buried the statist, big government, invasive project of the Left, it is necessary that Barack Obama be a one-term president. I hope he will end ignominously, the better to demonstrate the termination of that particular view of the world. For similar reasons, the French beheaded a king in 1789. They couldn’t really feel they had a democracy until they had done it. And the French king was not even a bad guy. He was an accomplished lock-maker in his private life. Same here; again, I have no animosity against the Mr Obama. To tell the whole truth, I feel a little sympathy for him now that he is going down. I think he is a little guy with a good heart who walked way out of his depth to the wrong end of the swimming pool. By the way, whether the new Republican House house finishes him off or his own party makes little difference. I do have a slight preference toward his own party tearing him apart in broad daylight. But that’s because of something dark lurking in my heart of which I am not especially proud!

Protectionism and Job Loss: Part Nine of a Nine Steps Series (And Last, I Think.)

This is the last installment of a series of nine short essays in which I attempted to explain a topic that is both important and misunderstood by many intelligent people: protectionism and its obverse, free trade. The first two installments were posted on November 10th 2010. You can identify every essay in this series because the word “protectionism” is somewhere in its title.

When economic actors, people and organizations, switch from doing what they don’t do very well to what they do better, production increases everywhere, the pie gets bigger. There is no injustice involved, just a general rise in the standard of living.

For such virtuous change to achieve maximum effect, there must be economies of scope and scale. It’s not always obvious in big countries such as the US which has a large internal market (many people most of whom are rich by world standards.) It’s pretty clear when you think of small prosperous countries such as Switzerland. How efficient would Nestlé be if it made chocolate only for eight million Swiss rather than for hundreds of millions of consumers worldwide? And would the smelters of Luxembourg do a good job making steel only for the half-million Luxembourgers?

So, it stands to reason that any barrier to import limits severely the benefits of switching from mediocre to good or from good to excellent. But, the basic rule of international trade is reciprocity. (It’s a little more complicated than this in everyday life but the complications do not affect the basic soundness of my reasoning.) Countries’ governments say to each other: “ If you impede the entry on your territory of stuff made by my economic actors, I will impede access of my territory of stuff made by yours.” This is no bluff. So-called “trade wars” erupt frequently, involving different kinds of tit-for-tat. The most notable thing about every round of tit-for-tat is that it impoverishes everyone. See above.

Trade barriers, different ways of impeding access, come and go. Although it’s difficult to find a coherent argument in favor of any trade barrier, governments will often yield to interest groups and provide “protection” from imports for this or that good. They do so usually not because of some abstraction such as the “national interest,” but because of political necessity or to distribute political favors. Two interesting remarks about this poisonous practice. First, more democratic governments should be expected to be more likely to yield such favors. Second, by “protecting” domestic producers, they also lower the standard of living of domestic consumers. Naturally, the two categories of consumers and domestic producers overlap somewhat which only underscores the absurdity of protectionism. Incidentally, developing and enforcing trade barriers requires a large technical and inspection apparatus. The more trade barriers, the larger the government relative to the national economy.

All this being said, it’s clear that the removal of trade barriers will cause job losses in the affected sectors of the economy. It’s also obvious that some of those who lose their jobs will not find equivalent or better jobs. Here, individual fates diverge in small but humanly significant ways from collective well-being.

Let’s take the case of Canadian vintners. Yes, they exist. Would I make up anything so absurd? Do I have sufficient imagination? As you might imagine, Canadian wine-producing firms exist inside a network of government protectionist measures. If they were left to their own devices, most would soon be swept away by the wines of thousands of producers from twenty different places, from California to South Africa. Now, imagine that the Canadian vintners lose their muscle with the Canadian federal government and that all the protective measures are withdrawn within one year.

Under such a scenario, two things would happen. First, as I have explained step by step, many Canadian resources, including labor would eventually be switched to more productive endeavors. Because of this switch, Canadians in general but also the whole world would be a tad richer. But no one would expect the switch to be instantaneous. There would be some social dislocation, for sure.

The second consequences would be, starkly, that some people working in wineries and in wine-related businesses would lose their jobs. The fifty-five year old wine-maker of a small British Columbia winery with thirty years experience in the same winery would almost certainly have to retire. It’s extremely unlikely that he would qualify for one of the many advanced jobs open in the new, and now marginally more productive Canadian economy. An old wine-maker will not become say, a software writer, under almost any imaginable circumstance. Instead, the middle-aged wine maker will either become unemployed or he will have to take one of the lower-end jobs freed by the escalators described before.

Free trade, and opposition to protectionism have acquired a bad name, I think in part because of economists’ reluctance to face squarely this particular human implication of such policies.

I defend free trade while recognizing the wine-maker’s painful problem by pointing to the overall, collective consequences of protectionism: It’s always an economic disaster. We know this from two different sets of observations, First, other things being equal, countries that follow national policies of free trade grow faster than those that don’t. That’s true equally for poor countries and for rich countries. Similarly, when countries that have implemented protectionist policies open up even a little, they experience a quick surge in their GDP. Second, there is no part of the world where unemployment figures track free trade’s ups and downs. As an example, the sudden upsurge of unemployment in the US 2007-2009 had nothing to do with any increase in imports. This tells me that the sad middle-aged Canadian vintner’s case does not account for much of unemployment.

Other things being equal, I think it’s better to be unemployed in a relatively more prosperous country that in a poor one. The benefits are more generous, and the next job opportunities richer and more varied. Training programs are also more common and more accessible in richer than in poorer countries. And capital to start one’s own business is normally cheaper and more accessible, the more prosperous the country. I will go further: Economically, it’s better to be unemployed in a rich country than employed in a poor country. (I understand there are non-economic downsides to unemployment. This is another topic I can’t deal with here. A single thread, the economic thread, is difficult enough to follow.)

In conclusion to this whole series on free trade and protectionism in nine small steps: protectionism remains the royal road to collective poverty and it does not do much for anyone, not even for those who stand to lose their jobs when national borders open.

Murderous Political Correctness

Occupying the front page of my local paper yesterday and most of it today: an inmate’s spectacular escape from Sheriff’s custody. (The newspaper is the Santa Cruz Sentinel.)

A 24-year old country jail inmate, six foot-seven (six feet tall plus seven inches), and weighing in at 275 pounds is taken to the hospital for a routine exam. The inmate is being detained in jail to answer to charges of robbery and kidnapping. The hospital procedure involves removing his cuffs. This was known in advance. He is accompanied by a single sheriff’s deputy. As soon as his hands are free, the inmate’s grabs the deputy’s Taser and gun. The deputy gets Tased but not shot. The inmate shoots at stander-by, or maybe a civilian who tries to intervene. Fortunately, he misses before he runs away. Afterwards, he terrorizes several households including one occupied by an old couple that does not speak English. He also breaks into a child-care center. There, he obtains a teacher’s car keys by a putting a gun to her head. He gets captured after several hours.

The next day the sheriff, and the city chief of police who cooperated in the criminal’s capture, are full of self-congratulations about a job well done. In addition, the sheriff
does not have enough warm words for the good, effective conduct his Tased and disarmed deputy did in trying to prevent and in responding to the inmate’s successful escape and subsequent reign of terror. Read this sentence again!

Ok, Now, you know almost all of this moderately interesting story. Another example of incompetent law enforcement, you say. What else do you need to know? OK, the story does not say how tall, heavy, or muscular the overpowered sheriff’s deputy is. It was not reported at all. I don’t care. Here is another, more relevant piece of information: The Tased sheriff’s deputy is a woman.

The sheriff puts a female deputy- I don’t care how big and strong – in charge of a dangerous, huge, young male inmate who was scheduled to be unshackled.

No member of the officialdom and worse,of the local newspaper staff and its editorial team, find this fact worth commenting on. (They don’t.) I must say that the newspaper was honest enough though to report that some members of the public did make remarks about this.

Hello, here is one thing I and my sisters knew with perfect clarity by the time we were seven or eight: Most males are much stronger than most females. Here, you go; I said it. Shoot me!

Political correctness is not only stupid, it does not only narrow our horizons, atrophy our brains, it’s downright dangerous for the general population, including old couples who are staying home and toddlers. I will say it again:

Political correctness is criminal.

I Don’t Mind Gridlock

Today, the President declared, “The American people did not vote for gridlock.” meaning that the vox populi demands bipartisanship. Some of the Republican leadership seems to be going along already. I think they are wrong. I suspect they are misunderstand the culture change wrought by the tea party movement and approved by million of others at the ballot box.

President Obama is not just President and unelected leader of the Democratic Party, he is also the commanding officer of the left-wing, progressive, authoritarian, America-hating wing of that party. He lead a marginally legal coup d’etat that has already partly succeeded. He set out to transform American society to increase the power of government and he came through in several ways, some of which are going to be difficult or impossible to roll back: The huge increase in the national debt he engineered will not go away. We already hear that the Republican leadership is not sure it even wants to cancel all of Obamacare.

It seems to me the election six weeks ago gave the Republican lawmakers a clear, single mandate: Finish off Obama and his team of radical activists. This does not require by-partisanship, obviously, on the contrary. Between now and the end of the year, there are no problems that need be tackled right away, not even the prolongation of the so-called “Bush tax cuts.” There is nothing that the President wants to do right now that cannot be done, say January 10, when the new Republican House of Representatives is in session.

In the meantime, the Republican leadership should deny the losing, self—centered, borderline foo-foo president any victory. He should be denied what he wants at every turn, the better to expose his helplessness and his single-minded and simple-minded vision of the world. I am not promoting this because I am hateful or vengeful. I actually feel sorry for the man now. He looks like a little boy getting caught driving his Daddy’s car. I am in favor of this strategy of denial because the single most important task is to make sure he does not have a single chance to try again in 2012. I don’t even mind if our actions results in the election of another, more centrist Democratic president. A secondary cause is to expose the hard-left Democratic members of Congress so the Republicans will regain control of the upper house in 2012.

We are a long way from where we ought to be: reasonably small government, resumption of vigorous economic growth, reduction of the national debt, a dignified and rational foreign and military policy. This country will make little or no progress on those issues with a second Obama presidency. He has to go. Nothing is more important. If it serves these objectives, gridlock is fine.

Wikileak: Once more, I am underwhelmed. I did not learn anything new, fortunately. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised to discover how active and how fairly realistic our State Department is.