Party Crasher Craze Becomes Constitutional Crisis

If only the architects of the U.S. constitution were still around:

The White House on Wednesday invoked the separation of powers to keep Desiree Rogers, President Obama’s social secretary, from testifying on Capitol Hill about how a couple of aspiring reality television show celebrities crashed a state dinner for the prime minister of India last week.

How did they crash
the White House bash?

The Congress wants to know,
but the President says "Whoa!"

Team America, World Bank

I think that we need to bail out Dubai.
"Too big to fail" is the reason why.

They're running slightly low on cash,
but we can print some in a flash!

77 Love Sonnets

I read through 77 Love Sonnets by Garrison Keillor, a recent book which actually contains 81 of his 14-line creations.

Did he settle on the title, announce it, and then feel compelled to sneak in 4 more?

Not all, in fact, are love poems, but a solid chunk are, with a good dose of eros included. You can read 3 of them over here, along with a nice review. The last of the 3 will give you a feel for the way he deals with bodily passion.

He has a great gift for writing rhyme and meter in a conversational style, so it seems like you're reading normal sentences that happen to come out in verse by some strange coincidence. He's also an accomplished storyteller, and each of these poems is structured with a beginning, middle, and end. You're not left wondering what a poem means - even though you might be left wondering what his personal life is really like!

This book is an example of an interesting genre - formal verse that gets published because the writer is famous for something else. You won't find the poetry establishment lining up to praise this book. He's not pursuing the goals that interest them.

Will he sell more books than an academic poet?
You know it!

Perhaps She Was Oblivious With Grief

It might be funny if it was a cartoon, but it's real people:

Police say a Virginia woman was struck and killed while taking flowers to a roadside memorial for her granddaughter who died in a crash at the same spot a week ago.

It's a recent trend,
to mark every public place where someone met their end.

I'm not sure if the markers are there to warn,
or whether they're more of a way to mourn.

This one was surely not
a safe spot.

Seismic Vineyard

Wall St. Journal has an interesting story about a California winery that sits directly over the San Andreas fault line. They get a lot of scientific visitors.

A jagged crack splits the office floor and runs through the warehouse between the fermentation tanks and the aging barrels. An outer wall is warped. A doorway is barely usable. A long concrete ditch is distorted.
...
DeRose is known for rare, old vines and its "dry-farming" technique, which forgoes irrigation to produce small batches of robust reds, particularly Negrette. "There are only a handful of Negrette vines known to survive in the entire world," says wine guide Calwineries, in its entry on DeRose.

My son made a comment which I will simply reproduce for "my" rhyme:

Come for the fault line,
stay for the fine wine.

Albino Alert

Nightmarish:

The mistaken belief that albino body parts have magical powers has driven thousands of Africa's albinos into hiding, fearful of losing their lives and limbs to unscrupulous dealers who can make up to $75,000 selling a complete dismembered set.... Wealthy buyers use the parts as talismans to bring them wealth and good fortune.

Today I am thankful that no one is hunting me for parts!

Magical beliefs can lead to harm -
like having someone chop off your arm
for use as a charm.

Two Video Controversies

There are now 2 video controversies involving people allegedly responding inappropriately to Midge Hough.

She's a health care reform activist, and in both videos she recounts the recent death of her uninsured pregnant daughter in law.

She believes that if more affordable care had been available, the young lady would have lived. She says the final medical bill was over 1.5 million dollars.

In the first video, the governor of Illinois looks like he's ready for a nap while she's talking. A political opponent put out the video.

In the second video, she says people are laughing at her at a town hall meeting, although you can't actually hear any laughter while she tells her story. A still photo of one guy smiling is shown. Health care activists put out the video.

In a time of political intrigue,
beware of compassion fatigue!

Otherwise the video editor's art
may paint you as a person without heart.

International Thankgiving Competition

The Canadians have Thanksgiving in October.

For some reason, we in the U.S. are forced to wait until November.

Is that fair? No.

But I have a compromise in mind
which I hope all will find
perfectly nice:

Let's celebrate twice!

Where Did I Put That Carnivore Cookbook?

How much is enough beef jerky
when you need to stuff a turkey?

Sad End

Do you remember that poor U.S. Census worker who was imagined to be the victim of right-wing violence?

He was found, naked and dead, in the hills of Kentucky, with a rope around his neck and one word, "fed", written on his chest.

But the police have decided it was staged. By the Census worker. He killed himself.

Sparkman also had recently taken out two accidental life insurance policies totaling $600,000 that would not pay out for suicide, authorities said. One policy was taken out in late 2008; the other in May.

In an act of insurance fraud,
with a plan that was slightly flawed,
he tried to hide
the fact of suicide.

TSA and Non-Photo-ID

Our local Fox News crew sent people to fly out of the 2 Chicago airports - and they sent them without picture i.d.

Did they get turned away
by TSA?

On every occasion, these Fox employees were allowed through security without a hitch as long as they showed that the name on their boarding pass matched the name on a couple of credit cards.

This could come in pretty handy here in Illinois, where you often have to surrender your driver's license for a moving traffic violation - which might even occur on your way to the airport! The ability to fall back on a credit card was cool.

Now they'll probably have a "crackdown".

Darn Fox. They had to squeal
and ruin an excellent deal.

Robbing Young Peter To Pay Old Paul

Economist Robert Samuelson spells out the inter-generational wealth redistribution involved in the House version of the Health Reform Bill:

Now comes the House-passed health-care "reform" bill that, amazingly, would extract more subsidies from the young. It mandates that health insurance premiums for older Americans be no more than twice the level of that for younger Americans. That's much less than the actual health spending gap between young and old. Spending for those age 60 to 64 is four to five times greater than those 18 to 24. So, the young would overpay for insurance that -- under the House bill -- people must buy: Twenty- and thirtysomethings would subsidize premiums for fifty-and sixtysomethings.

As a 50-something, I'd like to add:
THIS IS BAD!

Why should the young and healthy
pay for the old and wealthy?

Next I'll Find Out That Bears Have Bathrooms

You may have heard the rhetorical question: Is the Pope Catholic? It's a way of saying "Yes!"

But it turns out it all depends upon what "the" means. Because there is a long-standing Pope of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria.

Do only Catholics have a Pope?
Nope!

Pumpkin Pie Shortage

In a massive failure of the free market, there is now a shortage of pumpkin pie filling!

Libby's, which has corenered most of the pumpkin filling market, blames the weather.

It's my opinion that this is a good thing. Pumpkin pie is obviously something most people don't really like - since they only eat it on ceremonial occasions.

This shortage is a wonderful excuse
to cut the pumpkin pie tradition loose.

Common Sense

Merlin Jetton led a very interesting discussion about common sense last night, which began with Aristotle's use of the term.

He meant something different than we mean. Aristotle noticed that despite having separate senses, we nonetheless end up with an integrated experience of the world, that all the data streams, in effect, are tied together.

When we look at a ball and hold it in our hands, we actually perceive its roundness through both sight and touch, but unless we stop to reflect, we usually don't notice that we have 2 grounds for thinking it's round. And if we lean forward and sniff the ball to discover how it smells, we don't usually have to "think" about where the smell is coming from - we "just know" it's the ball.

The modern meaning of common sense is sometimes described as "what everyone can agree about," but I don't think that can be right, since you often hear people say of academics: "they're smart but they lack common sense".

If academics can "lack common sense", then not everyone agrees can agree about it - just "sensible" people agree.

I wonder if the meaning is in fact related to Aristotle's meaning. I wonder if by "common sense" we now mean "judgments that clearly tie back to perception", as opposed to judgments that look like flights of fancy.

Rand didn't always like the way other people used the term, but she often used it herself with a positive meaning. She gave 2 different explanations of what it was:

That which today is called "common sense" is the remnant of an Aristotelian influence, and that was the businessman's only form of philosophy. ("For the New Intellectual", 1961)

Americans are the most reality-oriented people on earth. Their outstanding characteristic is the childhood form of reasoning: common sense. It is their only protection. But common sense is not enough where theoretical knowledge is required: it can make simple, concrete-bound connections—it cannot integrate complex issues, or deal with wide abstractions, or forecast the future. ("Don't Let It Go", 1971)

There may be a way to tie these 2 passing comments into one theory.
But, at the moment, that leaves me feeling leery.

Ugly Climate

I've looked a bit at the hacked/leaked snippets from the UK Climate Science place.

I don't want to judge the scientific discussions. Independent scientists with the right training should do that.

But some of these snippets sound too much like petty politicians plotting to suppress their opponents.

I'm not a climate scientist,
but I'm a student of spin.

I wonder whether these people grasp
the sort of mess they're in?

Cool House

Our house boiler is not boiling.

The problem seems to be that too much water is coming into it. I think maybe it's just the water valve.

We've got a steam guy coming tomorrow to take a look.

I could try to fix it myself, but I'm going to take a pass.

Boilers must be approached with care.
And duct tape might not work for this repair.

Soft Power

Our President's trip to China did not seem to go well.

President Obama is leaving China without any definable concessions on things such as support for tougher sanctions on Iran or currency exchange rates.

They gave no sign of budging
despite rhetorical nudging.

Lone Terrorist

I'm seeing an implicit sort of argument lately - that the Fort Hood killer was not a terrorist because he acted alone.

Is that a key part of the definition? Do you need a conspiracy to qualify? Is a 2-person conspiracy - like McVeigh and Nichols - enough?

Also, if you're crazy, is that grounds for disqualification? Because I'm betting a lot of suicide bombers have a nutty streak. I'm hoping they get their own DSM entry soon: Explosive Suicidal Ideation.

Whether there's more than one person to blame,
the goals and the means are the same.

Quantum Love Song

Take a glass of water. Empty half of it. Repeat indefinitely.

At some point you get down to a single molecule of water, and the loop stops.

What if time itself is like that?

Quantum time is the analogue of classical continuous time (or ordinary time) yet with the fundamental difference of being discontinuous, having a minimum approximate duration equal to 10-44 seconds, the Planck time.

You can see the possibility for love poetry focusing on this peculiarity:

Does time arrive discretely
in instantaneous blips?

Let me spend it sweetly
in the tasting of your lips.