Comic Relief, or Why Beauty Pageants Are Generally A Really Bad Idea

The simultaneously unforgettable and unrecognizable performance by Cindy Elizondo in the 2000 Miss Texas Pageant of Chopin's Scherzo No. 1 in B minor, opus 20.

The really scary part is the enthusiastic applause at the end!

Who needs to learn scales and arpeggios when you can just go ahead and learn big impressive literature?

Reich's Syndrome: Delayed Indignation/Buyer's Remorse

So, what's a prominent liberal with a brain supposed to do these days?

After all, Robert Reich drank deep of the Obama Kool-Aid.  Hell's Bells, he even helped set this bunch set up shop during the transition before heading back to that Valhalla of liberal thought, UC Berkeley. (And, parenthetically, aren't these just the very best days to be working in the University of California system, where the students are rioting at the thought of having to begin to pay for their educations? Well, at least he gets to see all his sacred ideas come to fruition before his eyes...)

Now, finally, it dawns on him that Prez Hopey-Changey, the Great Himself, has no intention of doing anything except continue and expand on the great financial scam.

He's developed Reich's Syndrome, brought on by myopia, the propensity to believe anything preposterous as long as it is propounded by a charismatic Democrat candidate, the utter inability to heed warnings or reason, and the refusal to acknowledge that mathematics exists.  Symptoms include a severe case of buyer's remorse, delayed indignation, and the utter inability to mouth four simple words: Damn, I wuz wrong!  

One common way in which Reich's Syndrome presents is the sufferer's propensity to write self-righteous articles about how bad it all is, carefully avoiding placing the blame directly at the feet of the people he helped put in power, and pressing for even more governmental expenditures and control over the everyday lives of the citizenry.  After all, those four simple words just can't be uttered, even to oneself in the mirror in the morning.  It's just too painful, you know... Better just to double down and tack left, full speed ahead.

No known cure, but quarantine and ridicule are known to prevent its spread.

Sympathy for the patient is unwarranted, and ill-advised. 

I Just Love Denninger!

Really, truly.

He mounts the podium, states that math is the voice of God, and rails against the idiots who have denied that obvious truth.

If you don't read him, begin here, with today's latest post.

The best moment is:

And by the way, those who try to claim that this was "impossible to foresee" are lying.  Fraudie and Phoney were running with leverage ratios of anywhere from 80:1 to 200:1, depending on how you computed it.  At 80:1 you need just a bit over a 1% loss to go bankrupt, and at 200:1 you need only a 0.5% loss.

There is no business in this land that is safe to lend to at these leverage ratios, nor is there any reasonable expectation in any business that you will never suffer a loss of JUST ONE PERCENT - yet such a loss was and is sufficient to bankrupt the firm long before they were taken into conservatorship.

If only some brave soul who sits behind a desk that makes decisions would hear and heed him.

If only some brave book publisher would find a way to make him sit down and edit it all together in a form that can live on our shelves.

Makes Almost As Much Sense As The Health Care Bill

Now we know who Harry and Nancy hired to draft the language of those tomes!

Too Many Blessings To List

It's Thanksgiving Day, 2009. I'm in my armchair with a glass of sherry. My extraordinary wife is busily cooking and cheerfully gossiping with our houseguest, a young lady we have helped raise for the past decade.
I could never have imagined ten years ago just what an accomplished and poised young lady she would become. The credit for all that goes to my extraordinary wife.

I'm fifty-ish. A little over twenty years ago, I wasn't at all certain I'd live to see thirty-five, and wasn't even certain I wished to. (A long story, not worth telling, much less reading.) I wake up every day surprised and grateful to be alive, much less happily married and sipping sherry on Thanksgiving Day.

The list past that stretches past the horizon.

So, Happy Thanksgiving. The world seems to be in the charge of idiots, but the Potentate of Time trumps them all.

Ruh-Roh! (Part Deux)

So, while we're cooking, baking, and happily imbibing, the news comes in that all is not rosy in, of all places, Dubai.

It appears they may be on the brink of default of their sovereign debt.

Now, someone please explain to this country boy how an Arab Emirate, up to its keister in oil and cash since 1970, manages to dig itself into this sort of hole, and is likely to drag a bunch of people with it. The list of banks that hold its debt includes some familiar names like Lloyds and RBS. Well, that makes everything OK, since they have a history of being well-run, and certainly have made provisions for this sort of black swan event.

Or not...

It's interesting to watch the reaction in the European markets. For them, it's just another day in the salt mines.

The purchase (and delivery, by golly) of 300 tons of gold by the Indian government now seems oddly prescient.

Tomorrow morning's open in New York could possibly give new meaning to the term 'Black Friday'....

Bloomberg Futures Here.

Now, what happens when all those shoppers wake up to Good Morning America and see what happened while they were stuffing down the turkey?

This could be interesting.

Awards for Genuine Achievement

To provide a contrast to the Nobel Committee's decision regarding the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, here is the list of the newly-announced 2009 winners of the Rhodes Scholarship, awarded to outstanding students to enable them to continue their work at Oxford.

You'll have to download the pdf of the winners' bios, but I assure you, it will be an inspiring read.

This group makes the Green Shoots nominee list.

Lee Westwood Wins Dubai--One For The Good Guys

Westwood wins by six, posting a course record 64 on his final round. 

McIlroy ends in third after beginning the final round with the lead.

Both deserve applause for inspiring, classy performances, in the best tradition of sport.

Another reason I love golf, and the European tour especially:  This week also saw a presentation to Peter Vardon, Harry Vardon's 83-year old son, in gratitude for his father's life and accomplishments. 

If you've ever gripped a club with any kind of overlapping grip, you continue a tradition begun by Harry Vardon.  And that was just one of his contributions to the world.

But back to Lee and Rory--I can't wait for Augusta! I think we're in for a show, maybe along the lines of Arnold and Jack.

It Would Be Madness, If It Weren't Extortion

National Public Radio, of all outlets, shares a litigation outrage with us.

Here in this country more than half our sugar comes from beets. From a beet crop that is almost entirely genetically modified. Organic farmers and food-safety advocates are suing to keep that crop out of the ground this coming spring.

It gets more ridiculous from there. The evil 'genetically modified' beet is resistant to Roundup(an approved and widely used herbicide), which allows for lower cost and higher yields. How completely evil!


The report details how a small group of organic growers hopes to prevent the planting of the entire crop via litigation.  Of course, until the defendants come up with a payoff that will mollify the plaintiffs' shocked consciences.

I think it's called the 'GoAway Number'; that magic number that makes plaintiffs take their money and  go away.

The environmental movement has become a literal racket, in which every industry, every development for energy, industry, mining or agriculture becomes a target for litigation.  And the subsequent GoAway Number.

Avacado farmers in California were devastated by a judge ruling that smelt upstream mattered more than their farms.

A badly needed by-pass around Nashville is years overdue and over budget, and congestion in Nashville grows, delayed by a bogus lawsuit over 1000-year-old Indian grave sites.  The judge asked one question: Can any of the plaintiffs prove any descendant relation to any of the bones under discussion? Answer: No. A settlement was then reached, a GoAway number was decided upon, and the road remains uncompleted these years later.

The unemployment rate in this county, where the terminus of that road is located, is well north of 10%.

The industrial parks set aside in anticipation of its completion feature wide tracts of weeds.

It would be madness, if it weren't extortion.

But, Tim Geithner Says We're Doing Better, So It Has To Be True

This has to be the most impressive chart I've ever seen created.



And Timmy seems shocked and outraged that people would be unhappy with him...