The local tv news anchor just gave a teaser for an upcoming story “Police ticket man for rocking out to John Denver.”
Leadership
Somehow it already feels like ancient history, but the reader perhaps remembers the hubbub surrounding the book Game Change when it was published eight days ago. Harry Reid was quoted talking about Obama’s lack of a Negro dialect. Sarah Palin is also depicted negatively in the book.
Reid’s response was to stand up and admit he said what he said. And he apologized.
Palin’s response was to simply state that the book was full of lies.
One might look at the two responses and draw conclusions about who is leadership material.
On the other hand, both of them responded in the way that their politics required of them. Politics required Reid to man up and apologize. Politics requires Palin to just declare the book to be lies. (Maybe they are lies. I don’t know).
With 63% of precincts reporting, the Republican Brown is defeating the Democrat Coakley in the Massachusetts senate race 53% to 46%. It is not looking good.
Now the Democrats are faced with the question of what to do with health care reform. Are they leaders or are they craven cowards to the political breeze.
TPM alerts us to the early leap by Indiana’s Bayh to cowardice.
The irony is that if the Dems listen to the lesson of Massachusetts and fail to pass health care, they will lose a lot more this fall then they will if they stand tall and pass the bill. They already voted for it.
If Coakley does indeed lose, it probably means the end of Cap and Trade. With luck the global warming deniers are correct.
Will we get leadership or politicians?
A Little Knowledge…
John Durant is a meat eater. The New York Times has an article on his return to a caveman diet. My understanding is that the New York Times will soon require money to access content, so I will quote:
The one thing that Mr. Durant worries might spook a female guest is his most recent purchase: a three-foot-tall refrigerated meat locker that sits in a corner of his living room. That is where he keeps his organ meat and deer ribs.
Mr. Durant, 26,…is part of a small New York subculture whose members seek good health through a selective return to the habits of their Paleolithic ancestors.
Or as he and some of his friends describe themselves, they are cavemen.
The caveman lifestyle, in Mr. Durant’s interpretation, involves eating large quantities of meat and then fasting between meals to approximate the lean times that his distant ancestors faced between hunts. Vegetables and fruit are fine, but he avoids foods like bread that were unavailable before the invention of agriculture. Mr. Durant believes the human body evolved for a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and his goal is to wean himself off what he sees as many millenniums of bad habits.
These urban cavemen also choose exercise routines focused on sprinting and jumping, to replicate how a prehistoric person might have fled from a mastodon.
This diet is based on our cave dwelling ancestry. Fair enough. But it ignores evolution. One of the first things I notice here is that a given organism is successful if his or her genes are passed on. Among cavemen, this would require a lifespan of thirty years maybe? Also it is my understanding that there is a pretty good body of evidence that red meat is really not good for us (but I’ve not researched this, so don’t take my word for it).
As soon as I saw the article I remembered reading something about evolution and human’s diet. It was at John Hawk’s Weblog; a post entitled You are what your ancestors ate, part 1. In this post, Professor Hawk briefly discusses “reporting on an interdisciplinary conference on recent human diet evolution”. He quotes from an article in Science*. I give you the same quote:
The agricultural revolution favored people lucky enough to have gene variants that helped them digest milk, alcohol, and starch. Those mutations therefore spread among farmers. But other populations remained more carnivorous, such as the Saami of frigid northern Norway, whose ancestors herded reindeer. Among Saami ancestors, genes to digest meat and fat efficiently were apparently favored. One gene variant, for example, makes living Saami less likely to get uric acid kidney stones — common in people who eat high-protein diets — than are people whose ancestors were vegetarian Hindus and lack this gene variant, says geneticist Mark Thomas of University College London (UCL).
In other words, there has been more than enough time for humans to adapt to an agrarian civilization.
I guess it’s possible that Mr. Durant is descended from the Saami of northern Norway.
Finally, credit where credit is due, I found the New York Times article from the discussion about it at Althouse.
* The article is by Ann Gibbons. It is unavailable without paying.
History Repeats Itself Whether It Is Remembered Or Not
In the summer of 1982, I was managing a Domino’s Pizza store that served a small college campus. I had taken over the store right after the college had dismissed for the summer, so business was a bit slow. One of the first things I did was to chart the weekly sales.
One Monday in July the supervisor arrives with a bit of burn going on. He pulled me aside and asked me if I knew that the week just ended had had the lowest sales of any week so far that year. I just smiled and asked him to follow me to the office where I directed his attention to my sales chart. The week just ended had had the lowest sales of the year every year the store had been open. My sales were higher than the year before (as they had been every week), but not higher than the week before. I had no idea why that particular week was historically bad, but it was.
That one moment made charting the sales worth it.
In the off year, the political party in power loses congressional seats. There may have been an exception or two, but that’s it. The day the democrats achieved sixty votes in the Senate, anyone who knew anything knew that they would no longer control sixty seats after the 2010 elections. All of the media talking heads know this. But why mess with a good story?
There is a bit of drama in Massachusetts in the battle for Kennedy’s senate seat, but other than that the only “newsworthy” items concerning political power in the senate reflect the difficulty the republicans face:
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/01/mass-retirements-not-so-fast-dems-say.php
But in the end, the Democrats will lose seats. It is the way it is.
I’m Back.
Moving is a disruptive activity. It made sense that I didn’t get to blogging while we were actually in the process of buying and moving. But we have been living here now since late October and I am only now returning to the blog. We now live in a beautiful, old home in Fort Wayne, Indiana. I imagine there will be a few posts about the house in the near future.
Our computer died while we were getting ready to move. So we live in a new (96 year old) house, with new computers, new isp, and now a new year.
Along with all that we purchased a new bed and had it delivered as soon as we had possession of the house. We brought up a card table and a couple of folding chairs and then we spent a couple of days here cleaning before the move (not that the house needed much cleaning, the previous owners left it clean). That first night we retired to the bedroom and turned out the lights.
But the room did not go dark.
We’ve lived in the country for the past twenty years. At that house, when the lights are turned out at night, the room goes dark. Eventually the eyes adjust and one can barely see by what starlight makes it through the window.
But not here. Here the room is still lit as the light from the streetlights comes threw the shades. A dramatic difference.
It is no big deal. We can sleep almost anywhere. But it was startling.
I immediately thought of my father.
I grew up in the same house my father grew up in. While growing up, I never even knew which room was Dad’s (Dad wasn’t much about telling stories of his past). Then one day Mom made a comment about Dad not being able to sleep in a totally dark room because he grew up sleeping in a room with light from the streetlight coming through the window. Based on that bit of info, I have since assumed that Dad’s room was the room by brother had and that I moved into the day he left for college (kind of rude of me, really).
This is what I remember. I can not swear every detail is true.
Happy New Year to all!
Trig
When Sarah Palin burst upon our consciousness, she brought her family along, including the baby, Trig.
The grandfather says Trig is named after his great uncle, a Bristol Bay fisherman.
I vaguely remember reading this explanation of the name at the time. I gave no thought to where the name might have come from beyond that.
On page 405 of Coming Into the Country, McPhee is discussing the cabins of Dick and Donna.
The shanty that Dick and Donna use on stopovers in Eagle is only a little up from squalid…Their fish camp down the Yukon can be discouraging, too – a dirty, fetid, lightless cabin astink in aging salmon. These more manifest habitations long ago earned Cook a reputation as a sloven – among people who have never been here. This secluded cabin (his home of homes) is neat and tidy – in fact, trig.
Upon reading this, I immediately thought about the Palin baby. Visiting dictionary.com I find the following definitions:
neat, trim, smart, or spruce.
in good physical condition; sound; well.
to support or prop, as with a wedge.
to act as a check on (the moving of wheels, vehicles, etc.)
That is a complicated four letter name. With luck the ironies will shift and multiply as he grows.
Good Money
The Secret Service examined the four one hundred dollar bills that the bank teller identified as counterfeit and declared them to be authentic American currency. Several days later, the money was credited back to Debby’s account.
So the suspicion of fakery resulted in a seven day loss of $400.
Better than a permanent loss of $400!
Cash Not Always Accepted
Today we bought a house! Debby and I have been trying to sell the house we are in and buy a house we love. After much back and forth involving various amounts of miscommunication, the buyer we thought we had for our house backed out.
We love the house we found and Debby figured out how to buy it even without selling this one, but financing changes were required. So there was plenty of negotiations with the bank and it was all worked out. Time was short. The realtor was concerned that the sellers might not accept another delay of the closing.
The problem is that the money has to be there. And it turns out that the bank would hold even a cashier’s check for a couple of days. There was no alternative but to get cash. Debby went to the bank and withdrew the cash.* They put it in an envelope for her. She drove to Fort Wayne and presented the cash to the bank.
The teller examined each bill.
Debby now has a receipt for the $400 that the bank has determined may be counterfeit and is delivering to the Secret Service.
Fortunately, the dollar amount Debby was given was approximate and the $400 was not necessary to close.
Unfortunately, we just might be out $400.
Something wrong with that picture!
The bank informed Debby that there have been other cases of counterfeit hundreds in Fort Wayne recently. In examining the bills, the teller was focused on the date. I suspect that the bank has been informed to be on the lookout for bills of a certain date and that some of Debby’s bills matched that criteria. It is possible that the Secret Service will authenticate the money. At least, we hope so!
If it turns out that those bills are counterfeit, then that means that one cannot be sure that the cash a bank gives out is in fact legal currency.
*This was not tens of thousands of dollars. Just several hundred to cover the last bit needed.
Time to Do the Time
Roman Polanski raped a 13 year old girl. He accepted a plea deal. He pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor.
Then he skipped out prior to sentencing.
That was 32 years ago.
It is long past time for Mr. Polanski to face a judge and accept his sentence.
I’ve seen much written about Polanski’s art and how he shouldn’t have to suffer over something that happened so long ago. This is absurd on its face. He did the crime, his art is irrelevent.
I understand his victim has said that she does not want the criminal charges pursued. The criminal justice system does not exist to serve the wishes of the victims. Often a convicted criminal is sentenced to a punishment that the victim consideres woefully inadequate. With any luck, Polanski will be an example of a criminal sentenced to a punishment that the victim considers excessive.
It Doesn’t Hurt…
…as long as I only pat my lower back. Click the Mike Pence tag for my earlier posts on this subject.
Mike Pence has not made any announcements that he is running for president. But now he is in the top five!!!
The recent Values Voter Summit included a straw poll for 2012 and
Huckabee won with 29%.
The momentum builds.…
:)