Sleepless in Midland

My favorite yard ornament got the Christmas spirit

It's Moulding Our Future, a beautiful sculpture by D. Haskew that's planted on a lawn at a private home here in magnificent Midland, Texas. The lad has been sporting a Christmas stocking cap on his bronze noggin this holiday season helping spread the Christmas spirit. As we approach the new year I expect the cap to come off soon. So here for your enjoyment is a photograph.

If you want sculpture like this of your own shop online here or here. To read more about the piece go here.

Merry Christmas, kiddo. And learn to spell.

Mega-maga-phobia: The fear of large capacity magazines

NBC's David Gregory and other gun opponents want to ban high capacity magazines, and people familiar with guns ask, "why?"

The theory is that the time it takes to change magazines would allow bystanders to tackle and disarm the shooter. That would assume the bystanders were within arms reach of the shooter, and yet the shooter emptied a full magazine and somehow missed them. Since all the advice we've been given about gun violence has at the top of the list to get as far away as possible, which also happens to be pretty good common sense, that theory assumes the bystanders were as crazy as the shooter.

What the gun opponents don't realize is that an empty magazine can be dumped and a fresh magazine inserted in one or two seconds. As for why gun opponents want them banned, it's a first step. Once that's done, it's on to another incremental step with the final goal of disarming the populace.

We talked about the magazines in a previous post. See High capacity magazine ban wouldn't make any difference.

Embarrassing story. A few years ago I had the crazy idea of trying to persuade a reporter to make a video showing how fast a magazine can be changed in a semi-automatic handgun to demonstrate the futility of banning high capacity magazines. Silly, silly me. People who have made up their minds will not assist in any endeavor to change those minds.

No need. There are plenty of videos already on Youtube demonstrating how quickly a standard magazine can be changed. Here are some that were linked in that previous post. As I stated there, the change takes less time than it would take to shout, "This is a gun free zone!"

First, AR-15 magazine change: here, here and here (this one is very fast).

Let's not forget the AK-47: here.

Murder methods in gun controlled Australia

While people in the U.S. grappled with their feelings about the mass murder that occurred in Newtown, Connecticut, a few weeks ago, invariably a sizable number of well intentioned but wrong headed people made emotional pleas for gun controls. And invariably attempts are made to compare the U.S. with jurisdictions with stricter gun controls. Australia comes up quite frequently. So let's look at crime in Australia to see whether gun control has controlled crime.

Australia instituted strict gun control laws following a mass murder in the 1990s known as the Port Arthur Massacre which generated a lot of publicity and the typical cry for more gun control laws. The lawmakers acceded to the gun controllers.

The crime rate in Australia has been on a downtrend for the past several years, but a claim can't be made that the gun laws caused the decline as the crime rate has also declined here in the country some call the gun capitol of the world.

Take a look at the two charts below, pulled from the Australian Institute of Criminology's Australian Crimes: Facts and Figures 2011:

Yes, the murder/manslaughter rate has been declining, just as in the U.S. But note one more thing. The percentage of murders by firearm has been falling, too, suggesting that murderers are finding substitute weapons. So it's very difficult to assign a cause and effect to gun control and crime decline.

In that regard, one more chart bears looking at. The one below comes from AIC.gov.au and shows how knife homicides have grown at about the same rate that gun homicides have fallen.

Bad guys will find a way.

Now the new fear in Australia is home invasions. An unarmed populace must be a tempting target to those who would threaten and steal whether the invaders are armed with a gun or knife.

- A future article at this blog will address the unintended consequence of Australian gun control -- the proliferation of illegal guns.

One Second After -- one scary book

My holiday reading consisted of the novel by William R. Forstchen titled "One Second After." The title was obviously a nod to The Day After, the made-for-TV cold war movie about the horrors experienced by survivors of a series of nuclear bomb strikes on the U.S. That movie surely caused nightmares across the country the day after it was broadcast.

"One Second After" is about what happens to the inhabitants of a small community in North Carolina following an EMP explosion high above the U.S. The effect was the destruction of everything electrical, sparing only components built before the circuit board became a part of practically every electrical item manufactured. With no electricity or hope of rebuilding the generators and replacing the lines, things went to hell in short order. With no trucks bringing in food, the severe rationing of available food stock brought on starvation. Medicine for the entire community was in short supply, anyone with a medical dependency suffered or died, and epidemics became deadly.

Oh yeah, large armed gangs roamed the countryside taking over communities to steal what food they might have and/or cannibalize the inhabitants.

"One Second After" ends one year after the event with a community of survivors transformed by the loss of 80% of its population.  But hey, it was a very good book.  Just scary.

So could something like that really happen? Many people think so. See North Korea EMP attack could destroy U.S. — now in which Peter Vincent Pry lays out credible reasoning that North Korea currently has the capability to deliver and explode an EMP bomb over the U.S.

For more information, see the EMP Commission Reports .  And Futurescience.com has some survival suggestions.

For more background see the Commission's first Executive Report from 2004 which contains the quaint suggestion the cost of improving our security over the "next 3 to 5 years is modest by any standard." Too bad we haven't done it. Further, "We must persuade nations to forgo obtaining nuclear weapons or to provide acceptable assurance that these weapons will neither threaten the vital interests of the United States nor fall into threatening hands." That the current administration seems more intent on taking guns away from the citizenry than protecting against this type of threat seems laughable in light of what the fictional characters of "One Second After" endured.

Season's Greetings

Greetings dear reader. I sincerely hope you have a very merry *________.

*Insert Christmas, Hanuka, Ramadan, Diwali, Rohatsu, Kwanza, or your religious or nonreligious holiday of choice.

Gifts for people you hate

Christmas is just a few hours away, and you've still got that one gift left to buy. You've procrastinated because it's for someone you don't particularly like but nonetheless feel obligated.

Here's the ticket: Gift Guide Roundup: The Best Gifts For People You Hate. (Via Newmark's Door.)

There are some good suggestions there, like a Thighmaster, a book on Scientology, or a self help book on personal flaws.

But the best gift ideas are in the comments, like a drum set for their kids or anything from Yoko Ono Fashions for Men.

Have fun shopping. Don't waste time, you can thank me later.

This is the event no reporter wants to cover -- right

Saturday afternoon I caught about half a minute of a segment on Fox news channel which turned out to be a navel gazer regarding the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut.

It began with the photo of a child, and the voice-over said, "This is the event no reporter wants to cover." Really? It sounded a little bit too sanctimonious when we recall that after the shooting reporters were tripping over each other to cover the event, get a scoop, interview someone who knew someone, and put as much on the air as possible.

It was the event every reporter wanted to cover.

Gay, Black, Jew at most risk for hate crime in 2011 -- FBI stats

The hate crime stats tell us something about what's going on in the country that might not be obvious. Determining what a "hate crime" is isn't easy. And many of us were against the passage of "hate crimes," because they were redundant. An assault would seem to hurt just as much regardless of the assailants frame of reference. But not being in one of the hate crime victim classes, I'm in no position to compare the pain.

In any event, here's how the FBI does it:

Because motivation is subjective, it is sometimes difficult to know with certainty whether a crime resulted from the offender’s bias. Moreover, the presence of bias alone does not necessarily mean that a crime can be considered a hate crime. Only when law enforcement investigation reveals sufficient evidence to lead a reasonable and prudent person to conclude that the offender’s actions were motivated, in whole or in part, by his or her bias, should an incident be reported as a hate crime.

The FBI has bunches of tables available for downloading, including stats per city -- see tables 13 and 14 -- but the easiest way to get started is at the summary page.

There we see that there were 6,222 hate crime incidents in 2011, and in those incidents there were 7,254 offenses committed. (They make a distinction between single-bias and multiple-bias incidents. However, there were only a handful of multiple-bias incidents, and their effect on the percentages would be insignificant.) Here are some of the salient stats:

• 47.9% of the offenses were caused by racial bias, and 72.0% of those were anti-black;

• 20.8% were motivated by sexual-orientation bias, and 57.8% percent of those were anti-male homosexual;

• 18.2% were caused by religious bias, and of those 62.2% were anti-Jewish.

So in terms of hate crime victim-hood, a gay, black, Jewish guy is at the highest risk.

Some other interesting statistics --

• 63.7% were crimes against persons, and of those 45.6% were intimidation;

• 36.0% were crimes against property, and of those 81.4% were acts of destruction, damage or vandalism.

Finally, there's one hate crime category that's a head scratcher,

Crimes against society --
There were 20 offenses defined as crimes against society (e.g., drug or narcotic offenses or prostitution).

Apparently, offenders can be so biased against society that they use illegal drugs or have sex for money. Those hate criminals are a mysterious bunch.

Cool Computer Stuff -- reuse that old hard drive

I missed an opportunity to dispose of my old Windows ME computer at the Texas Recycles Day last month as I didn't find the time to take out the hard drive beforehand.

That particular endeavor happened today as an Xmas present arrived: A Sabrent HD enclosure with its very own cooling fan. The listed price is $26.99, and Texans get to pay sales tax for Amazon buys (thank you Gov. Perry). And that might be too pricey just to be able to have access to another 20 GB. But there's an obsolete word processor program on that drive that I have hopes of resurrecting to regain access to some old document.

In any event, the drive enclosure came with its own power cord and USB cable plus everything needed to put it all together. It was a snug fit, so it's a good thing the original jumper settings worked as it would be hard to get it back out to make any adjustments.

Anyway, this post probably won't mean much to anyone else but me. But I just wanted to share my enthusiasm for this cool way to recycle a hard drive.

UPDATE:  Photos added.

The great escape from Chicago jail

Make the jails more humane, they said. Put the cells high up in a skyscraper, they said. Put windows in it, they said. What could possibly go wrong?

It was like a plot out of an old movie -- a convicted bank robber named "Banks," 600 large still missing, makeshift dummies to fool guards, a tight squeeze through a six inch window, a 15 story slide down braided sheets, hailing a cab at 2:30am, a desperate visit to momma's for clothes, Feds offer $50,000 reward.

See photos of the sheet/rope at Barnorama.com.

Backgrounder for the movie: "Banks' prolific bank spree as the Second Hand Bandit -- so named for the discount clothes he wore to his robberies -- earned him headlines. He was an aspiring clothing designer when he started knocking off banks."

You can't make this stuff up. Quentin Tarantino, call your office.

Obama on track to get gun salesman of the year title again in 2012

It started as a joke after he got elected in 2008. Americans swamped the stores buying guns for fear of what he might do. So someone tagged him with the satirical title "Gun Salesman of the Year."

Gun sales died down after a while, but the market has caught fire again. With everyone's emotion at a peak after the Newtown massacre and Obama attempting to take advantage of it to fulfill the liberal dream of disarming the populace, shoppers are buying AR-15s like crazy. And so many internet users were trying to reach the Bushmaster website that it went dead while I was looking at it just minutes ago.

It's likely to be another banner year for gun manufacturers, and they have Obama to thank for it. It's the "regime uncertainty" principle, but this time it's playing out to someone's advantage for a change.

United States at night

NASA.gov has a cool composite night time photo on display at their site. It's a huge photo -- 6646 x 4430 pixels at 5.5 MB. Click to see it in full size. Click the thumbnail on the right to see it in 1200 x 800.

Everyone will want to look at his/her hometown up close. But after that, note a couple of things.

The first one is political. The Northeast sure is giving off a lot of light. Those are politically blue regions and likely to contain residents who are more inclined to believe in and advocate for the position that energy consumption causes global warming. Maybe all that light is anecdotal evidence that the man-made global warming theory is yesterday's cause.

The second is how the lights seem to make trails along the interstate highways connecting the big cities. This isn't an especially brilliant observation, and we've all known that an interstate highway can make or break a small community. But it's made obvious by all those glowing little spots along the paths between the big cities.

I bought the ticket, the set belongs to me! -- Kramden vs Norton

"The Honeymooners" just came in as the 2nd funniest TV comedy of all time in at a poll reported by NYPost.com.

One of the cable channels is running the old Honeymooners shows in the early AM, and I've been recording and watching them. And they really are funny. A viewer can actually have some real laughs at those shows, unlike the comedies of today which sometimes don't even earn a smile at their best.

One that played the other night showed how the Kramdens and the Nortons celebrated Ed Norton's birthday. Ralph and Alice took Ed and Trixie out to a movie for the evening. A night at the movies was the cheapest thing Ralph could come up with, and he managed to place all the credit on that decision on Alice. But that just led up to the big joke.

Cut to the movie theater entrance. The foursome exit the theater pushing a big TV set that Ed won by holding the lucky ticket. Since Ralph purchased the tickets his reaction is predictable. But the buildup is true comedic art. You can see Ralph moping around in the background, barely holding back his rage at the unfairness of it all. You can see the joke coming a mile away, but Jackie Gleason's timing is terrific. And they pull off a very funny joke.

Watch it to see if you agree. Youtube link.

the NRA -- liberals worst enemy

The left takes advantage of every opportunity it gets to vilify gun owners. And the murders at Newtown, CT, have presented them with a crisis they don't want to waste.

Gun groups are probably already organized and ready to combat the false narratives that will surely come forth about guns.

The NRA gets a lot of heat for its aggressive defense of 2nd amendment rights. Even gun owners get tired of it at times. I was an NRA member some time ago, but their relentless pandering for money got very annoying. However, they have provided a service to gun owners by attacking even the slightest attempt to restrict gun rights. They aren't the only ones doing it, and their work along with other pro-gun groups has paid off.

To see what would have happened had defenders of gun rights not been so aggressive look at cigarette smokers. The attack on smoking started out with just a few innocuous rules. Smokers said, "OK, we can live with that." Then came another, then another. And before long smoking was banned in airplanes, rental cars, office buildings, bars and seemingly everywhere. The war on smokers was over and smokers lost. Now you see small groups of them, outcast, shivering on cold stoops, smoke wafting about their heads.

The camel stuck his nose under the smokers' tent and upended the whole thing.

Oh, that's different, you say, because smoking is bad for you. The same argument is made about guns, and without aggressive resistance, expect the same result.

Addendum: Watch Louie Gohmert explain the need for 2nd amendment protection to Chris Wallace on 12/16/12.

Newtown shooter was a coward -- could have been easily frightened

Not only did he choose the most defenseless targets he could find, Adam Lanza shot himself as soon as he knew the cops were coming. See Gov.: Gunman shot self as 1st responders closed in.

The guy was deeply disturbed, but a proper diagnosis is something for the shrinks to excavate from the rubble of his pathetic life. However based on what the reporters are saying, he was not a brave person. When he heard the police, his fear kicked ink, and he checked out.

But it took the arrival of the police. And as the saying goes, when seconds count, police are just minutes away. So with that in mind, and while lawmakers get ready to slap some new emotion driven laws on us, let's do some speculating. If anyone at the school -- a teacher, a janitor, a visitor -- had advanced toward him pointing a gun the carnage might have ended earlier.

Mass shootings -- if you want to ban something ban news coverage

Well, maybe not ban news coverage entirely, just the breathless wall to wall coverage we get now.  All we needed was a perfunctory announcement then only the relevant parts as they come out.

As it is now, the networks obsess over these things. Yesterday, if you watched any TV news programs, the world stopped except for the mass killing of children in Newtown, Connecticut.

The call for new laws is loud and clear with liberal President Obama sending a message:

And we're going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics.

That's a gun-control dog whistle to give him cover and get his followers going.

John Lott and others say that the writings left by most mass shooters indicate that their motive is twofold. One is to commit suicide. The other is to get as much news coverage as possible, perhaps to get noticed in a world they perceive as ignoring them.

So if anyone wants action, focus on the news coverage and how to deny killers what they want.

Worried about 1st amendment rights? Apply that same level of worry to the 2nd amendment.

Fly the unfriendly skies -- Cathay Pacific Airways stewardess' union orders members to quit smiling

Cathay Pacific Airways tried to cut costs by granting workers a 2% raise plus a bonus equal to one month's salary. But the Flight Attendants Union wanted a 5% raise, so they ordered members to quit smiling at customers.

Yeah, that's pretty funny.  But there was to be more than just no-smiles, they also planned to "work-to-rule." That's union parlance for a work-slowdown by not doing anything more than the minimum required by the work contract. Never mind that the company was operating at a loss. Source and excerpt:

"This could include not smiling at passengers, not providing certain types of beverages - such as alcohol - or stop serving meals," he said. ... "In a nutshell it means passengers will still be able to reach their destinations except they are paying a five-star price to get a three-star service," [union secretary] Tsang said.

Via.

The surprise to most of us is that union members were doing more than the minimum anyway. But this is far away Chinese Hong Kong, so there may be some cultural differences.

As for an American application, maybe those union thugs who were beating up people in Michigan the other day can take a lesson, turn it down a few notches, and punish their political opponents by not smiling at them. They still wouldn't get their way, but they might serve their cause a little better.

What, the end of the world? Again?

On December 21, I think. It's the Mayan calendar, you know. Here's what I don't understand. If the Mayans were so good at predicting the future, how come they didn't foresee their own extinction and do something to stop it?

Another thing. Don't you just hate it when the end of the world is coming up in a week and you've already done your Christmas shopping? Dang.

PolitiFacts is too biased to be believable

The reason why msm political bias is so pernicious is that it trickles down throughout the downstream media before it can be corrected.

The case in point was the way Yahoo trumpeted the headline that Mit Romney had won PolitiFact's Biggest Lie of the Year in Yahoo's stream of interesting/useful/entertaining news items. It has since been removed, but it appeared in the number one spot yesterday and early this morning. The article is still online at Romney earns PolitiFact’s ‘Lie of the Year’ for Jeeps made in China, but it doesn't jump out at you like before.

Maybe that's because Tony Lee poked a hole as big as a Jeep Grand Cherokee in the analysis at Politifact Calls Factually Accurate Romney Jeep Ad 'Lie Of The Year'.

As for the biggest lie of the year, they should have looked at Barack Obama's claim that he called the Benghazi killings a terrorist attack from the beginning, with a timely assist from CNN's Candy Crowley, in a Presidential debate of all places. Astonishingly, PolitiFact did not even put that lie in the running.

Romney lost the presidential election, and he is not likely to try it again. So it raises questions.  Why do they keep trying to pick on him?  Furthermore, do all those newspaper people serving PolitiFact care that they are mere tools for Democrats?

Mainstream media appalled at petitioners for secession but yawn at call for violence from Democrats

Remember when President Obama won his second term and citizens were signing petitions for their states to secede? The mainstream media were quick to lecture and condemn the signers. Never mind that those who signed the online petitions were merely trying to send a satirical message knowing full well that a petition directed at Obama could never possibly get anything more a curt response from an Obama minion.

So now unions in Michigan -- good friends with Obama and facing new laws that give workers a *choice -- respond with a violent assault on conservative film maker Steven Crowder. A Michigan state representative threatens there will be blood. And Jimmy Hoffa predicts civil war.

All of this makes the secession petitioners seem pretty tame. But the mainstream media want to ignore it, and the downstream media will follow their lead with Fox News the only one reporting what the networks ignore.

And once again President Obama will have out maneuvered his political opponents with the sun in their eyes and the media wind at his back.

*Choice -- a word loved by liberals in other contexts is now an unholy wrong when it gives workers a right to control their own paychecks.

More guns less crime, continued

There's a good article at TheAtlantic.com on gun control by Jeffery Goldberg titled The Case for More Guns (And More Gun Control) which covers what looks like all the hot issues in the gun control debate.

He makes a solid point that gun control advocates are motivated more by ideology than safety as the research supports the conclusion that guns make people safer, not more dangerous. Further, gun control advocates contradict themselves, especially on the subject of concealed carry on campus. For example, he reports how Colorado state legislator Clair Levy says on the one hand, university campuses are the safest places in the country. Yet on the other hand, campus life must be so inherently dangerous that the introduction of even licensed guns could mean mayhem.

And he touches on a point I've made. It's too late for gun control. The only guns that would be controlled would be those owned by people who obey the law. Gun owners without regard for the law will keep theirs. The effect will be more guns in the hands of criminals and fewer guns in the hands of honest citizens who might have otherwise been able to use them for defense against those criminals.

That point was made by some interesting research conducted by James D. Wright decades ago which Goldberg touches on. Regarding that, see this 1986 summary of Professor Wright's paper based on a survey of 1,800 convicted adult felons. Link and conclusion:

Implications for Gun Policies
Findings from the survey suggest the following:

- Controls imposed at the point of retail sale would not be effective in preventing the acquisition of guns by serious adult felons because these felons rarely obtain their guns through customary retail outlets.

- Since theft of guns is a predominant means by which felons procure firearms, the 30 to 50 million handguns currently possessed by legitimate private owners represents a potentially rich source for criminal handgun acquisition. An effective criminal gun control policy must therefore, of necessity, confront the issue of firearms theft. At a minimum, there should be programs to educate the gun-owning public about the importance of adequately securing their guns.

- Among the most predatory felons, gun ownership and carrying is seen as essential because they fear what the prospects of an unarmed life on the streets would mean for their physical safety and security. For this group of most serious offenders, enhanced sanctioning policies would be unlikely to pose must threat; for them, the cost of being caught unarmed in a dangerous situation would be many times greater than the cost of a few years in prison.

- For less predatory felons, however, sentence enhancement policies do seem to have an important deterrent effect, since a sizable majority of the felons who do not use guns in crime cite "stiffer penalties" as a very important reason for their decision not to carry firearms.

- Finally, the survey findings suggest that, at least for the serious adult felons included in this sample, certain commonly proposed gun-banning measures could have strongly undesirable consequences, resulting in the substitution of more powerful and more lethal firearms. Gun-banning policies may be responded to differently by other types of offenders, however, and could represent a more effective deterrent to firearms use by juveniles, non-felony offenders, and other types of criminals.

Those felons are 26 years older now, but the logic they used then is likely valid today.

It's trite but true. Outlaw guns and only outlaws will have guns.

Addendum: Readers of this blog know that negligent gun discharges have been addressed numerous times here in the past. Another topic of interest to me which hasn't been addressed yet in this blog is the subject of stolen handguns. Anything that isn't locked down in a vehicle can be easily stolen. So a handgun stuffed in the console or under the seat can suddenly have a new, less reputable owner. Maybe in the coming year I can get some data on this and report about it on these pages.

Obama Style

Nothing says Christmas in Washington quite like a performance of Gangnan Style by a South Korean performer who is now back-tracking from hostile remarks toward Americans.

Hey, he apologized, didn't he? Obama was of the same state mind at the time of Psy's anti-American remarks, so he certainly didn't need that apology. But Obama knows the value of famous fans, so none other than the President of the United States himself was supposed to be in the audience at the filming Sunday night. Don't be surprised if we learn Psy and the president had a meeting.

Meantime, while we wait for Obama to apologize to Americans for what he's done to the country, enjoy this Obama Style parody.

Nomination for worst TV commercial of 2012

It's an ad for Suddenlink Internet. Viewer see two adolescent boys who find an aerosol can of Easy left behind by the cable guy.

"What should we do with it?" "Let's get girls to pay attention to us." "Yeah!"

The boy holding the can sprays them both, and presto! They turn into horses. Girl comes in and exclaims, "Ponies!" Commercial ends. Viewers scratch heads.

What exactly is the message here? Boys using Suddenlink internet will turn into animals? Girls like boys transformed into domesticated beasts of burden?

Click to watch it on Youtube.

[You could just say "neigh." Robo-ed]

Where all those donated old clothes end up

Every year the Texas Size Garage Sale takes place in Midland, Texas, and it has always been a great place to find good, used, useful stuff.

There are always racks and racks of old clothes for sale. And there was talk of a team who came in and purchased pallets of old clothes and hauled them off in trucks. The speculation was that the clothes were headed for Mexico. But that's probably a thought crime by today's standards.

Here's the answer. Somewhere between the garage sale and their next retail selling point they undergo a name change from "used" to "vintage," and buyers snap them up at high prices. See Urban Outfitters Buys Yard Sale Clothes In Bulk And Resells Them To Hipsters As 'Vintage'.

Hmm. Remember the Occupy movement? I picture those hipsters as a good market for this sort of Occupy chic.

There. From thought crime to thought fun in just a few short paragraphs. Redemption!

Hillary Clinton's first campaign ad for 2016 -- what, too soon?

As if the TV show "Political Animals" wasn't enough, Hillary Clinton now has a high quality video ad out to convince viewers how great she is.  Watch it at this Youtube link.

Various dignitaries from around the world extol her virtues in the video, like Salem Fayyad, Prime Minister of the Palestinian National Authority. Benjamin Netanyahu got a lot of face time. Even John McCain made an appearance -- surely he would have preferred being beaten by Hilliary in 2008 than by the person who could be remembered as the worse president ever.

My favorite part was where Madeleine Albright exclaimed, "she has a laugh that is completely infectious." Infectious like dengue or Ebola?  Naw, just annoying.

Absent from the video: Ambassador Christopher Stephens.

Via the Week via Mental Floss.

20 years old -- Texting had a birthday

Has it been that long? They grow up so fast.

December 3, 1992, was the date the first text message was supposed to have been sent -- Neil Papworth was the sender, "Merry Christmas" was the message. However, Matti Makkonen is credited as the actual inventor of the mobile short messaging service.

An SMS exchange with Mr. Makkonen appears at BBC, and in response to a question about txtpk, he answered: "No, I don’t hate them. Actually sms can also be seen as a way for language to develop. More symbols, less characters."

Build a machine, and humans will evolve around it.

Ricism -- using race to protect an incompetent

President Obama was blasting critics of Susan Rice recently. He tried to paint Republican as either sexist or racist for criticizing Rice because she spread the fabrication that the murders of the U.S. ambassador in Benghazi resulted from riots over a bad movie.

The "racism" word has been thrown around so cavalierly that it has lost its punch. In fact, much of it is simply race baiting.  So let's coin a new word, "Ricism," meaning the inappropriate use of "race" and its variants to protect a political appointee who may be incompetent.

As for Susan Rice, Bret Stephens wrote a blistering assessment of her record in the 12/4/12 Wall Street Journal titled Failing Up With Susan Rice - Benghazi was not her first African fiasco. In it Stephens describes how Rice coddled African dictators, botched efforts to make peace between Ethiopia and Eritrea, encouraged the see-no-evil approach to genocide, and, by the way, encouraged avoiding the use of the word "genocide" because of the possibility it might influence Democrats' election chances.

Should anyone want more on Susan Rice, see 30 Reasons Why Susan Rice Should Not Get Promoted.

Republicans see through her, but we all know who won the election. And elections have consequences.

Gold and inflation

Many people watch the price of gold as an indicator of inflation. And I believe Alan Greenspan did too when he was FED chairman. At any rate, gold is thought to be an inflation hedge, and TV ads have been peddling it for years on that basis.

Currently, the price per ounce is $1,695.10, according to Kitco.com , after a choppy election month. And it's down from an all time high back in September, 2011, of around $1,900.

The last big spike in gold prices was in1980 with a peak at around $850. Applying the BLS inflation calculator, that would put an ounce of gold at $2,386 in today's dollars.

So that tells us that if gold really is an inflation indicator, inflation isn't as bad as it was back in the 80s when Paul Volker tightened the FED screws so much to crank down inflation that it sent bank CD rates to around 16%. And going to the BLS again we learn that the CPI in October of this year increased at an annual rate of a mere 2.2 percent.

Ben Berneke is less interested in inflation than the unemployment rate, and he's been priming the fiscal pump for years with little to show for it, because he can't offset the burdens Obama has placed on the economy. Rising wages would precede inflation, but as long as unemployment is high, wages won't rise. So the effect is that inflation is held in check by low levels of employment.

As for the price of gold, when market participants think the price will go up, they buy. When they think the price will go down, they sell. But something else was happening back in the late 70s and early 80s when the gold price peaked that time. There had been a revolution in Iran, and American hostages were being held by the Islamic radicals who took control. The nation was focused intently on developments, and a TV show, Nightline, was even created to cover it. It would be ironic if some situation developed with Iran or Islamic radicals elsewhere that drove the price of gold up again.

The bariatric room

Yesterday the expensive new nine story patient wing of the Midland Memorial Hospital held an open house to display the new building. The rooms had pretty much what one might expect in modern hospital rooms, including computer monitors with Windows XP logos roaming around the screen.

However, the most striking thing about the rooms was the attention paid to bariatric patients. "Bariatric" is the polite word to describe someone with an energy retention system so efficient that the stored energy becomes a burden. The less polite word would be "fat."

Each patient room had double doors and a Guldmann lift to get the patient up out of bed. There were no demonstrations yesterday, but this Youtube video shows how one works.  And the photo on the right shows one hanging in the background.

The standard rooms had GH3 units with maximum lift of 250 kg / 550 lbs., each powered by its own 24v NiMH rechargeable battery. Then there was one room on the tour map called the "Bariatric Room." That one had a GH3+ unit with maximum lift of 350 kg / 770 pounds. That lift was powered by two batteries.  See a closeup below, right.

It's "goodbye sore back" for the beleaguered hospital staff.

Bonus -- if anyone needs a suggestion for a new year's resolution, here's mine: Keep the weight below 550 pounds, 770 tops.

P.S. I thought Microsoft was going to quit supplying updates for the XP operating system. Oh well, if the system gets a virus, what better place for treatment than at a hospital?

How did the CBO conclude that paying people not to work would create jobs?

Answer: They didn't. They pulled numbers out of the air.

The other day the morning paper contained a short unsigned Associated Press filler piece titled, "Report: Extending jobless benefits creates jobs" in which AP says the following:

Washington -- Extending the current level of long-term unemployment benefits for another year would add 300,000 jobs to the economy, according to a report from the Congressional Budget Office.

The Washington Post elaborates:

The report notes that extending unemployment insurance is a particularly effective form of stimulus when the economy is still struggling. That’s because jobless workers who receive benefits are extremely likely to spend the money right away. So, the CBO estimates, if Congress extends all the programs, GDP will likely be 0.2 points higher and employment will be 300,000 higher at the end of 2013 than if Congress does nothing at all.

[They are referring to the CBO report of 11/28/2012. Click Unemployment Insurance in the Wake of the Recent Recession to get the CBO summary, and download the full PDF here.]

One not so minor problem: The economy is much too complex to make predictions like that and expect them to come true. And another contributing factor that can't be measured is the rampant fear present today that things will only get worse.

The report says that the CBO estimates that if unemployment benefits are extended the payoff to the GDP will $1.10 for every $1.00 of budgetary cost in 2013. And they don't admit it, but that's just a wild guess. Researchers are all over the map on whether or how much government stimuli influences the GDP.

Valarie Ramey has analyzed the research on the effects of stimuli on GDP, and she reported in a podcast interview by Russ Roberts with her last year that the effect varied from about $0.80 to $1.20 increase in GDP for every $1.00 the government spent. Download or listen to that interview at econtalk.org.

For Mr. Roberts' own 2010 evisceration of CBO estimates, see CBO estimates. And for the Heritage blog take, see Unemployment Benefits: No Free Lunch.

In any event, here's some good news for the unemployed. The CBO currently has four job openings. Go for it. Their standards really can't be very high.