Posts from — February 2013

That we now have a resigned Pope [dowager Pope, retired Pope, Pope emeritus ??] and will be sequestered.

This means that two groups of grumpy men will gather in two location [the Vatican and Washington] and make some totally political decisions. At least the Clan of the Red Beanie have a ‘man’ on hand to deal with the fire, as fire is probably too advanced for them to understand the concept. Congress isn’t trusted with fire, so no worry there.

The whole concept behind the ‘sequester’ was to force a deal, and now that there has been no attempt to actually do that, maybe we can stop with the stupid gimmicks and just deal with these manufactured crises when they occur, instead of just kicking them down the road for raw political reasons.

Boehner wants everyone to forget that budget bills have to originate in the House, and is trying to pass the buck to the Senate and the Executive. Maybe he should consider becoming Speaker emeritus, and let someone else deal with his circus ,,, caucus.

While I was out picking up plumbing parts today, Here & Now had a segment titled, What The Next Pope Is Up Against.

Charles Sennott, a founder of Global Post, wrote about the transition to Benedict after the death of John Paul for the Boston Globe. He thinks that the Catholic Church is at a crisis point on a par with the conditions that led to the Reformation.

My take is that John Paul stacked the deck with conservatives during his Papacy, Ratzinger among his choices, and concentrated on stiffening the institutional structure to stop changes. When he became Pope, Benedict continued the process, at one point that he essentially saying that obedience to the Vatican was more important than expansion of the Church.

What has resulted is a bureaucratic culture that values form over substance when it comes to problems like the pedophilia of some of the priests. That was treated as a PR problem, not a moral problem, which angered a lot of people. The hierarchy thinks that the laity should just accept Vatican pronouncements and be quiet.

When they started the ‘investigation’ of the American Nuns, that was the final straw for a lot of Catholics that I know. The whole thing was so disconnected from the reality of what was going on in the Church, that a lot of American Catholics have just left.

At this point we know that the next Pope will definitely be male, but whether or not he will be a Catholic depends on how people define Catholic, because the Vatican leadership has made it plain that they no longer believe in the original meaning – universal.

Australia is about to take another weather hit with Tropical Cyclone Rusty slowly coming ashore in the northwest with 200+ kph [125+ mph] winds and the potential to dump 2 feet of rain near the coast. The sucker is really nasty because is just creeping along which means it will take seemingly forever to get by any area.

[The BBC report does all of the conversions for you.]

It’s not the wind, it’s the water, and this thing has both in spades…

In other news from the BBC Chuck Hagel was confirmed by the Senate as the Secretary of Defense, as McCain and Graham claim they weren’t really filibustering him.

Their newest shiny object is the fact that the DHS has released a lot of undocumented people from detention in anticipation of the ‘sequester’. Keeping people in prison is expensive, and the people released were not considered a threat, so DHS is saving money. The Republicans are having a hissy fit because their actions are having consequences they don’t like.

Duncan has been telling them how to fix the problem, simply repeal the law. Congress can’t pass the buck to the President because they have laws on the books requiring the President to spend the money they appropriate. There is also the fact that the Supreme Court has already ruled in the ‘Line Item Veto’ law, that Congress can’t transfer its power to the Executive branch.

Congress is where the amount of money spent is determined, and Congress should get to work. Congress might find if they worked 5 days a week and didn’t take a week off for every Federal holiday, they might get something done. Congress spends more time at ‘recess’ than a kindergarten class.

Charlie Pierce manages to brighten my week with his headline for his piece on the grounding of the F-35. If you don’t get it, I’ll explain in the comments.

Oh, Charlie is wrong about the F-35 not flying. Before the latest grounding, they were flying in the area. I would note that they were taking off and landing using a pattern that has the aircraft over water most of the time. If there’s a problem, they don’t want to crash into private property. I have seen flights over the bay and the Gulf. OTOH, with enough thrust a pig will fly, so that isn’t much of an accomplishment.

McClatchy is providing links to the White House’s judgement on the effects of the ‘sequester’ on the individual states and the District of Columbia. You might want to check out your state, because it is fairly certain that no deal is going get done in time to stop the stupidity. The ‘sequester’ is no different than the scene in Blazing Saddles where Sheriff Bart takes himself hostage. What no one in the Village imagined was that Congress would actually ‘shoot the hostage’.

The real impact is not going to be felt for a month, when the Federal workers get furloughed. Then you are going to see the certainty of the US falling back into recession, as demand takes a big hit.

Washington is just interested placing the blame on the other party, not in actually fixing the problem.

After a brief respite from the rain during the day, it is back tonight with a double dose of lightning, that is driving my UPS nuts. The great electrical grid that we have does a lot of fading during lightning, and the UPS feels obligated to beep about it.

I have had to cycle my modem a half dozen times as the DSL also has a tendency to drop out during storms.

Apparently they are handing out prizes for lying tonight … oh, I’m sorry, it is for cinematic achievements, which are artistic lying. I understand that people actually mount campaigns to influence the voters for these awards. There is apparently some correlation between winning one of the statues and how much money is made.

There is a ‘scientific’ study out that purports to claim that human female talks more than human males because of a specific substance, Foxp2. This is a problem because there is no scientific evidence that females talk more than males, and multiple studies that show that there is no difference. You should never try to mix science with stereotypes.

Whoops, I think I need to shut things down, because it is getting difficult to think with all of the beeping from the UPS.

Sad news, Ray Cusick has died. His major contribution to popular culture was designing the Dalek fifty years ago. The Daleks are the great campy villains of the Dr Who series that look like steampunk versions of R2D2.

We’ve been getting a lot of rain lately, that the northern tier are seeing as blizzards, but nothing like what’s going on in New South Wales. There are few if any climate change doubters left in Australia as a result of the disasters they have had the last few years.

I mentioned writers in an earlier post in a somewhat disparaging manner, but I admire people like John McKay, Badtux, and Rook who are working on books, as well as Keith and Mustang Bobby who have actually finished projects. Real writing is dependent on individuals driving themselves to finish their chosen project. It’s a lot of work that rarely pays minimum wage by the time everyone else gets their cut, so people are doing it because they want to.

Once again, the U.S. military grounds F-35 fighter jets. This time it was for cracks in an engine component of an F-35 in California.

A couple of weeks ago the Marine variant was grounded locally within days of being delivered because it wasn’t working correctly.

It is going to be a decade before you will be able to fly a factory-fresh F-35 with any confidence it won’t drop out of the sky. That’s assuming there is anyone left who wants to buy the aircraft.

The BBC reports that UK loses top AAA credit rating for first time since 1978:

Chancellor George Osborne said the decision was “a stark reminder of the debt problems facing our country”.

“Far from weakening our resolve to deliver our economic recovery plan, this decision redoubles it,” he added. “We will go on delivering the plan that has cut the deficit by a quarter.”

As the UK slips into its third recession since the global meltdown, Messrs Cameron and Osborne will triple down on their austerity program which will continue the downward spiral of the British economy. This is because their only other option would be to actually follow the policies that helped to end the Great Depression, i.e. increase government spending to make up for the shortage of private sector demand. It doesn’t seem to occur to Mr Osborne that public spending on the Olympics helped the economy to grow, and when that spending stopped so did the growth.

Via Susie, CBS is reporting that the Feds have raided The Scooter Store.

My Mother likes old TV westerns, like Gunsmoke and Bonanza, so she often has a channel called TVLand on her set when I stop by. I called the channel Medicare TV because all of the ads seemed to be related to things for people on Medicare.

One of the most annoying advertisers is The Scooter Store which sells motorized wheelchairs, telling people that the equipment will be paid for by Medicare and Medigap insurance companies ‘at no cost to you’. My gut reaction to the ads was this is a scam, and I have been vocal enough about it, that my Mother mutes the TV when one of the ads comes on so she doesn’t have to listen to me rant about it.

At the direction of Congress, Medicare is restrained from providing necessary medical equipment in anything approaching an efficient manner. Most of the time they are required to lease equipment from private companies when it would be cheaper for the government to just buy it in bulk and issue it as required.

Before this case is over, I expect to hear that The Scooter Store defrauded Medicare out of millions of dollars, at a minimum. I hope they haul in some of the doctors who wrote unjustified prescriptions for people who should have been walking for exercise, instead of sitting down all the time.

Friends?

Stay away!

[Editor: Mini-Sox and company are annoyed at all the activity next door to my house, and have transferred ‘operations’ to Mother’s house. He is not happy to see me. The common interpretation of Robert Frost’s Mending Wall about fences and neighbors may not be right.]

Friday Ark

People are wondering why the price of gas has jumped. Juan Cole notes that WaPo says Gasoline Price Increase Mysterious, Ignores US blockade of Iran Oil!

A rise in prices is always blamed on supply and demand, and sometimes that is the reason. As long as the US continues to block the sale of Iranian oil, the price you pay at pump is not going to come down. Add to that the reality that the increase in oil production in the US is all being exported because prices in Europe and Asia have risen even higher than US prices. The US doesn’t buy Iranian oil, but Europe and Asia do, so those are the markets most affected.

Those are also the markets where the refined products from the Canadian oil sands will be sold, not the US. That’s what TransCanada told its partners in the proposed Keystone XL pipeline.

The CBC reported yesterday that a John Kerry speech is ominous for the Keystone XL pipeline:

In yet another potentially ominous sign for TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline, John Kerry used his first major address as secretary of state on Wednesday to make an urgent call for comprehensive action on climate change.

Notice the linkage? The CBC notes that oil sands and the pipeline are bad for climate change, which is true if you look at what it takes to extract the bitumen from the oil sand, and what it takes to refine it. I would also note that TransCanada does not have a stellar record on building or maintaining pipelines.

I’m trying to finish what I agreed to do on this house but every time I get to actually do some serious work towards that goal someone asks me to look at something.

I understand that accidents happen at a job site. You are working away and a tool gets away from you, what I don’t understand is why people insist on making a major motion picture script out these problems. I just want to see what is broken so I know what will be required to fix it. I don’t care how it happened, or a long exposition about the circumstances that might have been contributing causes to the event, just tell me what’s broken.

The latest thing was a bathroom sink and vanity. It was an old and ugly vanity that I would have personally trashed if I had to live in the house, but it was totally functional when I first checked the plumbing. I just want to fix it. I don’t want to open a criminal investigation into the cause of the ‘death’ of the sink, it will have to be replaced regardless. My only concern is having a working sink in the bathroom, so I can get back to fixing the drain the carpenter busted in the kitchen….

I’m sure that Lindsey Graham would approve of this action:

MINSK, Belarus A Belarusian court has handed out a two-year prison sentence to a border guard who failed to protect the ex-Soviet nation from foreign teddy bears.

Belarus Supreme Court said Monday the guard has been convicted of failure to report an intrusion of a light plane that dropped hundreds of teddy bears decked out in parachutes and slogans supporting human rights over the tightly controlled country of 10 million. The court wouldn’t give his name or rank.

Belarus’s President Alexander Lukashenko is the kind of leader that the GOP wants for border issues. He is a forward thinking leader. For example he the kind of leader who provides the state media with the election results before the election is held, so there is no uncertainty.

I assume it is not pledge week in Norway. The BBC reports that Norway’s NRK broadcasts 12-hour wood burning programme

It may be a slow burner but will it fire up the audience? Norwegian public TV is broadcasting a programme showing a crackling fireplace – for 12 hours.

The NRK woodathon features firewood specialists providing commentary and advice on subjects such as chopping, stacking and burning the wood.

The transmission, entitled Hel Ved, also features music and poetry.

They obviously believe in educational television at NRK, but this is a bit extreme for my tastes. The thought of a group of Vikings gathering around a television and taking notes on wood chopping techniques caused me to think of this video, for some reason.