I Think That's What They Call a Duty-Hug

Look at the expression on Obama's face as he hugs Kathleen Sibelius.

It Takes One to Know One

Donald Trump: 

“All talk, it’s all bullshit.”

A Step in the Right Direction

The National Transportation Safety Board is fining General Motors $7,000 per day for GM's failure to respond to the NTSB's demand for information about GM's cover-up of their safety problems.

This is a great idea. At seven grand a day, US taxpayers will have their bailout money repaid in only about four millenia. Better than I thought it was going to be.

A note on the math: $7000 x 365.25 days = $2,556,750/year x 4000 years = $10,227,000,000.

That isn't quite all of what's owed, but it's close.

More seriously: It's way past time to put an end to crony capitalism (by both parties).

Good Thing They Canceled the Deadline, Huh?

CNN captured this screenshot this morning.

Chick-fil-A Sells More Chicken Than KFC

Not to revive last year's controversy, but it is interesting to note that Chick-fil-A has passed up KFC as the #1 chicken place in the US.

The days when fried chicken was synonymous with a certain white-haired southern gentleman are over, at least in the U.S. A new champion has claimed KFC’s long-held chicken crown: Chick-fil-A. 

The change atop the leaderboard appears undisputed: Yum! Brands ... which owns KFC and has for years prided itself as “the leader in the U.S. chicken [quick-service restaurant] segment,” removed that very phrase from the company’s most recent annual report. 

I wonder if CfA was helped by the controversy – I heard a few people say that they gave the chain a try as a result of it and were pleasantly surprised by the quality of the food. (I've never eaten there, so I'm in no position to rate the food). Apparently, though, CfA has been gaining for several years.

I'm sure KFC is still well ahead worldwide – there had a bunch of stores in the Philippines and they're all over the place here in Quito. CfA, meanwhile, has yet to cover the US.

Something I Didn't Know about Arizona

I never knew that the Vatican Observatory is in my home state.

Actually, the official headquarters of the Observatory is approximately where one would expect it – not quite in Vatican City, but nearby, at the Pope's summer residence, Castel Gandolfo. But all the heavy lifting is done in Arizona. The operational headquarters is at the University of Arizona (presumably, few of the observatory officials, mostly Jesuits, were among the drunks rioting in Tucson last night because the Wildcats lost a basketball game), while their telescope is atop Mount Graham just outside Safford.

Great Moments in the Annals of BS

I am a fan of good bullshit. There are few things I enjoy more than, for example, hearing a garbageman being described as a sanitation engineer.

As a fan, therefore, I want to offer homage to Gwyneth Paltrow. Though I've never seen any of her movies, she is well-enough known that even I have heard of her, and her recent addition to the world's supply of great BS will therefore no doubt bring forth additional gems, as her fans try to emulate her.

I refer, of course, to Ms. Paltrow referring to her divorce as a 'conscious uncoupling'.

What, you might ask, is conscious uncoupling? The point of good BS, I remind you, is that it doesn't have to mean a damned thing. In fact, it's better if it doesn't, since if it meant something it might lead to the bullshitter actually being held accountable for the meaning.

If you want to wallow a bit in obfuscation, however, there are entire websites dedicated to conscious uncoupling, according to Google. Here's a not particularly sympathetic article on the subject:

Paltrow helpfully followed up her initial announcement by posting a 2,000-word treatise on conscious uncoupling from Habib Sadeghi and Sherry Sami, a married couple living in Los Angeles. (Dr. Sadeghi is an osteopathic doctor who runs an “integrative health center” called “Be Hive of Healing,” pun presumably intended, and whose book Within: A Spiritual Awakening to Love and Weight Loss contains a foreword written by Paltrow. His wife is a dentist.) 

Sadeghi and Sami begin by explaining that given rapidly accelerating life expectancy, these days it’s unrealistic to expect that we’ll be able to stick it out until death do us part, which suggests we “ought to redefine the construct” of marriage. 

“Our biology and psychology aren’t set up to be with one person for four, five, or six decades,” they write. So there’s the science. Now for some New Agey jargon: “Life is a spiritual exercise in evolving from an exoskeleton for support and survival to an endoskeleton,” they write in a section entitled, “Intimacy & Insects.” They mean by this, basically, that you have to look within yourself for support and strength and healing, not to others, or, one can infer, to any kind of external deity. 

Finally, they get to the part about how to uncouple consciously and “avoid the drama of divorce.” You shouldn’t think about it in terms of your marriage having failed, because (a) as we learned, the expectation that it would last was based on an outdated construct, and (b) this is actually going to be a positive experience if you just let go of old notions and approach it in terms of building up your partner’s spiritual endoskeleton. “To change the concept of divorce, we need to release the belief structures we have around marriage that create rigidity in our thought process,” they write. The “belief structure” that marriage should be for life “is too much pressure for anyone.” 

Conscious uncoupling will bring “wholeness to the spirits of both people who choose to recognize each other as their teachers.” What’s more, conscious uncoupling “prevents families from being broken by divorce and creates expanded families that continue to function in a healthy way outside of traditional marriage.” 

They conclude that by “choosing to handle your uncoupling in a conscious way . . . you’ll see that although it looks like everything is coming apart; it’s actually all coming back together.”

To which I can only add, “Bravo – a truly marvelous piece of bullshit.”

The Commercial Side of a Political Crisis

A Russian supermarket chain is selling its stores in the Ukraine.

It's a pretty small deal (they had only twelve stores in the country, and the price is estimated to be in the $5-10mil range).

X5, Russia's second-biggest retailer and part of billionaire Mikhail Fridman's Alfa Group, is selling its Ukrainian stores to local privately owned supermarket chain Varus, a spokeswoman for the Ukrainian company said on Wednesday. 

She gave no details, but Ukrainian newspaper Capital reported earlier that the deal could be worth around $5-10 million. It had been in the works since October, but the crisis over Crimea may have quickened the pace of talks.

Although the deal was in the works for several months, I can't help wondering how much the price dropped in the last few weeks.

Our Government at (Not) Work

Allow me to rant a bit on one of my recurrent topics – governmental incompetence (US government, in this case). On Jan 27, I applied for a new passport at the US consulate. While I was doing so, I also applied for a passport card (a wallet-sized card that can substitute for a passport in certain circumstances, and can serve as a good form of ID). When I paid, I was told the passport would be ready in about a week and the card in about a month, and that I would receive an email.

Sure enough, an email arrived on Feb 4, telling me that the passport was ready, and that I should allow another 15 to 20 working days for the card. Since I wasn't in a hurry for the passport, and didn't want two long cab rides to the consulate, I waited almost six additional weeks instead of three or four; today I went to the consulate and got my passport – and was told that the passport card is not ready.

It takes SEVEN WEEKS to print a @#$% card!?!? Or, to be more precise: to NOT print a card. No private business could survive with that level of customer disservice.

And while we're on the topic of governmental incompetence (international, this time), I think the Malaysians are setting a new standard.

May God Save Venezuela ...

... Jimmy Carter's on his way.

Excising a Cancer from MLS

Great news that MLS has bought out the ownership of Chivas USA. They will take over running the team until new owners can be found.

The former owners were committed racists (and committed incompetents) who were an embarrassment to the league. The team was composed almost exclusively of players who were Mexican or of Mexican ancestry, they ran the franchise as a farm team for Chivas de Guadalajara, and they apparently tried to purge non-Mexican office employees. Numerous lawsuits resulted.

Getting rid of such people is a great step forward for MLS.

Why Would People Stay in Places Like NY and IL?

Climate probably has something to do with the migration patterns shown here ... but I don't think it's totally coincidental that Texas passed up New York a decade or so ago, and Florida will pass it this year -- and both have no personal income taxes.

On the contrary side, it's not all that simple. When I was being recruited for a job in Texas in 1988, one of the big selling points they used was the 'no income tax' bit. It wasn't a major factor in the decision to move, but it definitely sounded good. Then we got there and I found out that our property taxes in Austin, for a house of the same value, were roughly double what they had been in Phoenix.

Car Alarms

One downside of living in Ecuador is the @#$% car alarms.

I probably had not heard as many car alarms in the preceding ten years or so as I've heard in the month I've been here. I have come to the conclusion that either I live in the most crime-ridden neighborhood on the planet, with a car stolen every three minutes or so, or the local car alarm installers are incredibly inept -- they must set the alarms to be so sensitive that the alarms go off if someone sneezes within twenty yards.

There were two alarms in the time it took me to type the preceding paragraphs (admittedly, I'm a slow typist).

Kids and Great Music

Here's a video of a flash mob performance of Beethoven's Ode to Joy (or Himno a la Alegria) in a public square in Spain.

What I especially liked about it was the pleasure little kids were taking in the music (I loved the boy, at about the 3:40 mark, who had climbed up on a light pole to see better and is holding on by one hand and conducting the orchestra with the other – though I imagine his mother didn't approve).

Little kids can appreciate great music if they are exposed to it. If all they ever hear is crap, then that's what they will live their lives with.

The Speaker May Finally Be Listening

I was wondering if the Republicans might kick John Boehner to the curb over the immigration issue. I wrote a few days ago about how stupid I thought it was to even deal with the subject this year.

Throwing out the Speaker doesn't happen often, and it was certainly the longest of long shots, but it was interesting to speculate about. In any case, it looks like Boehner has gotten the message.

Given the negative political implications of dealing with immigration right now, as I wrote before, as well as the president's open unwillingness to enforce laws he doesn't like, Boehner really had no choice but to back down.

Hopefully, a new congress will deal with the issue next year, in a more sensible manner than the current Senate did. I'd like to see a strong effort to enforce existing laws, including stiff sanctions against employers of illegals; followed by an easing of restrictions and streamlining of processes to allow many more skilled immigrants, and then finally some sort of amnesty for most illegals who have been in the US for long periods without breaking other laws.

Resolving Historical Issues in Court

Bolivia is suing Chile at the International Court of Justice, seeking to overturn the results of the War of the Pacific (1879-1883), and regain access to the Pacific Ocean (most of northern Chile belonged to Bolivia before the war).

Most commentary I have read says, not surprisingly, that Bolivia doesn't have much chance of winning. I suspect that there's even less chance that Chile would pay any attention to such a ruling.

But, on the off-chance that the ICJ rules for Bolivia, I wonder what the next such case might be: Perhaps the Romans could be ordered to pay reparations to Carthage?

PS: I wrote almost a year ago about the practice of countries (Bolivia was one example) using old grudges and other nationalistic tricks to distract their populace.

Immigration -- Why Now?

From The Fix by Chris Cillizza in the Washington Post:

If the 2014 election is a referendum on President Obama, Democrats are in deep trouble. 

That’s according to a new state-by-state study of Obama’s job-approval ratings released by Gallup that puts his disapproval rating at over 50 percent in 10 of the 21 states where Democrats are defending Senate seats this fall. In many of those states,Republicans have recruited strong candidates and are preparing to spend big bucks to win the six seats they need to regain the majority.

When even the Washington Post is admitting that President Obama's unpopularity could well bring down the entire Democratic Party this fall, why in hell would the Republican Establishment want to change the focus of the public to immigration (or anything else)?

It makes perfect sense for Democrats to try to change the subject from Obama and Obamacare to ... well, to whatever – marijuana,  the Republican War on Women, income inequality, anything, anything other than Obama and Obamacare.

But why should Republicans try to help them out of the mess they've created? But that's what the Republican Establishment seems to be trying to do.

Regardless of how one feels about immigration reform (and I am in favor of reforming our laws to make legal immigration easier – though I differ with the Establishment in my skepticism about whether new laws will be enforced any better than the old ones were) – again, regardless of that – from a political standpoint, bringing up immigration now is totally insane.

Micromorts

I learned something new today: There is a unit of measure of the risk involved in activities – a micromort is equal to a one in a million chance of death.

This Wikipedia article notes that each of us faces about 39 micromorts on any given day of our life, though this is based simply on an assumption of a seventy year (25,000+ days) lifespan. Such a measure includes natural death, of course, so the greater value is on measuring the increased risk of various activities.

The linked article lists the degree to which we would have to engage in certain activities to achieve one micromort of risk. For example, drinking half a liter of wine is said to carry with it one micromort of risk of death from cirrhosis of the liver (I've read that drinking wine in moderation has certain health benefits, so I wonder if those benefits might counter this increased risk). Smoking 1.4 cigarettes also has one micromort of risk, which would mean each pack is worth about 14.3 micromorts (with no known offset). So back when I was smoking two packs a day, I was racking up over ten thousand micromorts a year.

In terms of accidental death connected with various means of travel, we learn that the following equal one micromort:

• 6 miles by motorbike
• 17 miles by walking
• 10-20 miles by bicycle (sources differ)
• 230-250 miles by car (sources differ)

It's interesting that travel by car is far safer (in terms of distances) than walking or biking – though, as with wine, those activities have health benefits that I suspect more than offset their dangers.

Two activities that I have sometimes engaged in are also mentioned. Scuba diving has a risk factor of 4.7 micromorts per dive, while skydiving is worth seven micromorts per jump.

The next time one of my smoker friends gets on me about jumping from planes (which I have done, alas, only a few times, due to the cost), I need to remind them that five of the cigarettes they smoke equal one jump.

A New Definition of 'Worldwide'

I was looking at tablets on eBay -- I'm not at all certain I'll buy one, but I was browsing out of curiosity (somewhere in Phoenix or Chicago, someone has a charger they don't recognize -- it's mine; and I have a tablet with no charger).

Anyway, I saw this one, which looked like it might meet my needs, and which, the seller says, can be shipped worldwide. With a few exceptions:

Shipping to: Worldwide 

Excludes: Africa, Asia, Central America and Caribbean, Middle East, Southeast Asia, American Samoa, Australia, Cook Islands, Fiji, French Polynesia, Guam, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, New Caledonia, Niue, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, Wallis and Futuna, Western Samoa, Bermuda, Greenland, Mexico, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Albania, Andorra, Austria, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Republic of, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Gibraltar, Greece, Guernsey, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Jersey, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Malta, Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, Norway, Poland, Romania, San Marino, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Svalbard and Jan Mayen, Switzerland, Ukraine, Vatican City State, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas), French Guiana, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay, Venezuela

That's quite a list of exceptions, isn't it?

If you look at the dropdown menu that lists the few places to which they do ship, it appears that they define 'worldwide' as the US and Canada, parts of western Europe, Brazil, and New Zealand.

Ebay ought to police their sellers a bit and impose some standards of honesty. Lies of this sort will damage the credibility of the whole marketplace.

How Many States Could There Be?

This is an interesting map exercise. The idea is that there could be as many as 124 states if all secession proposals ever advanced had been completed (also, if we had added Cuba and several pieces of Mexico, and all outlying areas had been given statehood).

Most of these, of course, were probably only semi-serious proposals. I recall the idea of Baja Arizona being floated a few years ago, but other than a few lefties at UofA I don't think anyone even paid any attention to the idea, much less supported it.

On the other hand, while I don't know how the locals feel about it, I've always thought a State of Delmarva makes a lot of sense, geographically at least. Dividing a relatively tiny peninsula into three pieces strikes me as pointless.