Say It Ain't So!

The Cutty Sark is storied Clipper ship, built in 1869.  She's a piece of history that you can touch, as she's been carefully preserved (though not without some ups and downs) all these years.

But in a tragic story of Hollywood-meets-history, the Cutty Sark is about to become a joke.  A bad joke:

In her years of cutting ribbons, Her Majesty has had to smile politely at many brave new mistakes. But few can compete with this clucking, Grade A, Bernard Matthews–class turkey. One of Britain's most precious maritime treasures now looks like it has run aground in a giant greenhouse.

Read the details here. I thought the English had more sense than this...

Flight From California...

Debbie and I will likely be amongst the droves of people leaving California – once the most coveted destination state of all.  This article does a good job of summarizing why so many have left California, and why so many more – like us – are considering doing so...

Awesome People...

Two videos showing incredible feats.  There are only a few in here that I would even consider...

Please Tell Me This Is A Hoax!

Not Your Ordinary Politician...

Found on the Intertubes...

No commentary required:

Profit is a Good Thing?

An educational video on the power of profit, with Professor Walter Williams presenting.  Perfect for the “progressive” ninnies you might know who are attracted to profit about as much as we're attracted to a steaming pile of vomit...

Global Warming in Oz...

The Australians are getting increasingly skeptical about global warming for some reason.  It might have something to do with the utterly failed predictions of the warmists.  For example, in 2005 they predicted that the reservoirs supply Sydney's water might be dry within two years.  The actuality?  Sydney's reservoirs are now at record levels, with more than two and a half times the water they had in 2005, and without enough remaining capacity to contain floods like they've experienced over the past three years.

Oops...

Steyn on the Secret Service Scandal...

As always, Mr. Steyn delivers a slightly different perspective with his trademark wit:

Cartagena’s most famous “escort” costs $800. For purposes of comparison, you can book Eliot Spitzer’s “escort” for $300. Yet, on the cold grey fiscally conservative morning after the wild socially liberal night before, Dania’s Secret Service agent offered her a mere $28.

Twenty-eight bucks! What a remarkably precise sum. Thirty dollars less a federal handling fee? Why isn’t this guy Obama’s treasury secretary or budget director? Or, at the very least, the head honcho of the General Services Administration, whose previous director has sadly had to step down after the agency’s taxpayer-funded public-servants-gone-wild Bacchanal in Vegas.

All over this dying republic, you couldn’t find a single solitary $28 item that doesn’t wind up costing at least 800 bucks by the time it’s been sluiced through the federal budgeting process. Yet, in one plucky little corner of the Secret Service, supervisor David Chaney, dog-handler Greg Stokes, or one of the other nine agents managed to turn the principles of government procurement on their head. If the same fiscal prudence were applied to the 2011 Obama budget, the $3.598 trillion splurge would have cost just shy of $126 billion. The feds’ half a billion to Solyndra would have been a mere $18 million. The 823-grand GSA conference on government efficiency at the M Resort Spa & Casino would have come in at $28,805.

Chaney-Stokes 2012! Grope . . . and Change! Red lights, not red ink.

Go read the whole thing...

A Window into the Entitlement Mindset...

If you'd like to peer into the mind of those who feel entitled, you'd be hard-pressed to find something better than this video of New York Times union members whining about proposed changes to their pension plan.  They're better than the rest of us, you see.  They're entitled to their defined benefit pensions, and business realities be damned.  These are the people who are trying to kill this country.  That's not, of course, how they would word it – but it certainly is how I would...

“If I Wanted America to Fail”...

This is an awesome piece, with a devastating punch line right at the end.  It would be wonderful if every American watched this just before heading to the polls this November:

Incarceration Rates...

I read an article the other day that mentioned an interesting factoid: the U.S. has a higher incarceration rate than any other country in the world.  I'd seen this before, but hadn't checked into it.  So yesterday, just poking around a bit, I did a little research and came up with this list of incarceration rates by country.

I find this simple list quite sobering.  The U.S. incarcerates (jails or imprisons) 730 people out of every 100,000; a rate of 0.73%.  By itself, that number doesn't really convey very much.  But consider this: Finland – a very modern society – incarcerates just 59 per 100,000 – twelve times fewer than the U.S., and Japan incarcerates even fewer.  Or this, from the other side of the spectrum: the repressive despots of Burma incarcerate just 120 per 100,000 – a sixth the U.S. rate.

Amongst the other countries with high incarceration rates (though none are particularly close to us): Russia, Rwanda, and Belarus.

I know that drug-related incarcerations account for a high fraction of our inmates: between half and two-thirds, depending on who's doing the estimating.  But our incarceration rate is so high that even if you removed two-thirds of them, we'd still be in the top 15% of all countries.

I don't really know what this means, other than that there's something about our society that is in fact quite different than the other countries we think of as our peers.  My long time readers will know that I favor legalization of drugs (I know, I'm a radical – but I have trouble seeing any actual value in the “war on drugs”).  But even with the effects of drug-related crime removed, there's still a very large difference that comes from other causes.  What those are, I haven't a clue.  It's clearly not as simple as our freedom to buy firearms, because other countries with liberal firearms laws have low incarceration rates.  Most likely there isn't any simple explanation. 

A look at U.S. incarceration rates over time (the graph at right) shows that our incarceration rates have been quite high at least since 1925.  With the onset of the war on drugs, the rates increased very quickly.

I'd like to learn more about the causes of our high incarceration rates, so I've started a search for reliable sources of information.  Drop me a line if you know of any, please...

A Clever Twist on the Prisoner's Dilemma...

There's a game show on British TV that's based on the Prisoner's Dilemma.  They've modified it very slightly, by allowing the two contestants to talk briefly with one another before they make their choice.  Here you can see one contestant make a very clever move to greatly enhance the chances of a good outcome...

A History of English, in 10 Minutes (more or less)...

Quite a Sunday...

Yesterday our burn permit and the weather finally came together – and we made a great start at taking care of our (giant) brush pile (the result of our pine trimming project of last summer).  We burned more than half of it yesterday, using our little Kubota tractor to move piles of brush to near the burn site, and then the chainsaw and muscles to get the brush onto the pile.  The wood is very dry, so it burned hot and nearly smokeless, giving off huge amounts of heat.  By early afternoon, we could do no more – time to put the fire out, and clean ourselves up.

Then we went out to dinner at Descanso Junction, and had ourselves a fine meal.  They've recently added a new entree to their menu: pork “steaks”, wrapped in bacon, and topped with gorganzola crumbles.  Last night they served that up with homemade chicken noodle soup and sauteed baby spinach.  Oh, my.  That was so good...

After dinner we decided to head up to the Stonewall Mine Road in Cuyamaca State Park.  It's a short drive from Descanso, and we'd seen large numbers of deer there recently.  The deer population has been greatly depressed ever since the 2007 fires, but they're finally coming back in numbers.  Last night's viewing was the best we've ever had in the park.  We spent a delighted hour watching a herd of more than 30 animals grazing in the large meadow just south of Stonewall Mine.  There is more genetic variation in that herd than we're used to seeing; we suspect that the deer have been brought in from various other places to re-establish the herd.  There were very few deer around last year, so it's hard to imagine how the herd could have grown so fast over the winter without outside help.  Toward the end of our time there, the entire herd was within a couple hundred feet of the road.  We drove very slowly right through the herd, deer on both sides of us, some within 50 feet of the car.  They don't seem to be scared of the cars, but they're very skittish when people are walking.

A very satisfying Sunday for us: a hard day's work, followed by a spectacular dinner, followed by a beautiful evening of wildlife watching.  Woo hoo!