Uncle Obama Will Buy Them for You With Rich People’s Money

This is truly annoying. I didn’t make it to church. The car crapped out.

My sister and I go to church together, and we take turns driving. And she has not totally mastered the concept of punctuality. We usually get there about half an hour into the service. This week, it was her turn to drive, and the service started at 12:30, and I finally gave up and left the house at 12:53. I didn’t want to drive, because the car had been acting up, but I was stuck.

On I-95, the car acted funny, and the scary motor-shaped light came on, so I exited in the ghetto and limped to a car parts store, where I got water remover, octane booster, and fuel injector cleaner. I put the water remover in the tank and headed home. I’ll clear the car’s codes later, scan it, and see what happens.

I felt very sorry for myself, and on that basis, I decided to get some ice cream. I went to CVS. If you’re not familiar with CVS, you eventually will be. Remember Judge Dredd? In the future, every restaurant is Taco Bell? In the present, every drugstore is CVS, or soon will be. I know a CVS where I can stand in the front doorway and see another CVS.

The ice cream at the CVS had melted. Unbelievable. So I looked at the cookies. They had something called “CVS Absolutely Divine” cookies. Seriously. What an appetizing name.

They had several varieties. I did what I always do when confronted with possibly faux-premium stuff (like Edy’s and Ben and Jerry’s, which are full of fake crap). I looked at the label. It said “butter”! Hmm…

Bought a package and did the mature thing, i.e., started eating them in the car. They’re really good! I was amazed. Better than Pepperidge Farm, and probably half the price.

I’m thinking of patenting a bucket-like device attached to a strap. You put the strap around your neck, and the bucket rests on your chest and catches things when you eat in the car. I think this would be very elegant. Let me know if you would consider buying one.

Maybe to make the experience seem more familiar, I could make the bucket look sort of like a kitchen sink.

Sorry to Say

RE this week’s column: gold IS heavier than lead.

WAAAAAHHHHHH!!!

At this writing, the Dow is down about 50 points. Wow, that Obama recovery is really something. This morning the futures looked good. We were expecting a rally because of “overselling.” Now it looks more like underselling is what actually happened.

I saw a funny Youtube this morning. It showed clips of CNBC’s Jim Cramer, talking about the new exciting BULL MARKET! And if the person who put the Youtube together was honest, Cramer was saying these things in the fairly recent past. And he was not playing around. The bear market was OVER; no ifs, ands, or buts. And CNBC’s Rick Santelli was in the video, telling Cramer how wrong he had been. Cramer claimed otherwise, but the clips seem to prove Santelli right.

A Drudge-linked story says inflation is here, but it’s based largely on temporary peaks in energy prices. Look at oil prices now, and tell me January is meaningful.

It’s amazing how poorly Obama is doing. He’s not just average or mediocre. He is a full-blown train wreck, and not all of it is related to the economy. He can’t even do a competent job of appointing cabinet members. How hard is that? When it looks like you’re going to be elected, you tell your people to find good prospects. You give them a simple list of questions to ask, and one of those questions is, “Do you pay your taxes?” Everyone knows this. Remember how we ended up with the catastrophic Janet Reno DOJ regime? Bill Clinton’s top choice didn’t pay her taxes. The tax question is routine and obvious. If you don’t ask it, you risk hiring someone who causes the death of two dozen kids, because she has no idea how hostage negotiations work. We waited 444 days to get the Iran hostages out safely, and they were adults. After 51 days of trying to extract innocent children, Reno decided it was time for the tear gas and tanks.

Not all of Obama’s choices are tax evaders. Richardson paid his taxes but may also have paid off political supporters.

Suddenly Bristol Palin doesn’t look so bad. Although when I say that, I am trying not to think of her shameful Fox interview, which I’m sure you’ve all seen. And she’s a kid, not a governor or Senator or whatever.

Cartoonist Sean Delonas is in trouble for drawing a cartoon of a dead chimp, suggesting a chimp wrote the Porkulus Package. People say it compares Obama to a monkey. One problem: Obama didn’t write the bill. This is another one of his giant failures. He has no idea what’s in this bill. He broke his promise to post it on the Internet before signing it, and there is no possibility that he has had time to read it. I’m not sure the Internet is big enough to hold it. You know, I’m considering spending a low four-figure sum for a lathe, and I’m taking weeks to get it right, and it’s a relatively small sum which will have absolutely no effect on my future. Can’t we take weeks before we decided how to spend eight hundred billion dollars?

For the cartoon to reflect on Obama, he would have to have authored the bill. That bit of logic, like most others, is lost on the openly anti-Semitic Al Sharpton, who encouraged blacks to riot in Crown Heights, leading to the brutal murder of Yankel Rosenbaum. Sharpton thinks the cartoon is troubling. I guess Delonas needs to atone by drawing a cartoon encouraging chimps to kill Jews. Or portraying Jews as chimps. Or something. Cartoons like those would be just fine by Sharpton’s standards.

If you check Youtube, you can find videos of real secular prophets: people who knew the economy was doomed, and that Obama would make it worse. One example is Peter Schiff. He was a Ron Paul supporter, which means not all of his Eggos have popped out of the toaster, but he pointed out something chilling. He said the boom we experienced after 2001 was based on excessive borrowing and inflated housing prices, which gave consumers economic leverage that was not based on real income or assets. Whee. Does that mean what I think it does? It seems to mean the real economy–the one we would have, had we not mortgaged the entire country–has been tanking for almost a decade, and now we’re just getting the bills. Which are bigger, because we prolonged the “boom” by borrowing.

Nothing is worse than borrowing money in anticipation of higher income, and then getting lower income. And when the lower income is partly caused by the borrowing…it’s like M.C. Escher economics.

I wonder if Escher is available to be a cabinet member.

Schiff says to buy guns and ammunition. I guess you could call that “bearish.” My response? Way ahead of you, bucko. Let me know if you find a place that will sell me Claymores.

“Carter 2.” That’s what the smart money was betting on, but it looks like Obama is going to make Jimmy Carter look like Ronald Reagan. Or, if you’re a partisan who can’t admit Reagan’s greatness, Abraham Lincoln. I compared Obama to Gilligan the other day, and I’m still going with that metaphor. Although you could also compare him to Lucille Ball, trying to keep up with the machine at the candy factory. I won’t compare Biden to Vivian Vance, because Vivian Vance tried to help Lucy, while I’m pretty sure Biden has been chloroformed and stuffed in a closet.

What we need in the Oval Office is a guy like Fred Mertz. An old bald veteran who will pull his huge pants up way too high, spit in his palms, and get the job done.

I think Biden still can’t believe his luck. Judging from reports about the process by which he was chosen, Obama’s people were frantically making calls to anyone they could think of, and they got Biden on the line, and they said, “Vice President or Secretary of State?” And after Biden threatened to find out who their parents were and turn them in for making prank phone calls, he chose the job which would enable him to have the highest profile while doing the least. So he’ll be Ed McMahon or Hank Kingsley, which is about as hard as being a stuffed penguin, and Hillary has to bust her hump being Doc Severinsen.

BDS sufferers won’t remember this, but George Bush didn’t start out this way. He looked pretty good for a long time, and to rational people, he still doesn’t look as bad as BDS would suggest. Obama is doing so badly, he’s not going to get a hundred-day honeymoon, and this, from the press that used to suckle him to sleep and leave mints on his pillow.

I may buy a little gold. You never know.

I really wanted to get a lathe and a mill, but I seriously think that if I wait a month, someone who has lost a business will actually pay me to take them.

Learn From Other People’s Pain

I am skimming a story about the Stanford fraud scandal. Looks like Mr. Stanford is a student of Bernie Madoff. The claim: he took money from investors, paid too-big returns to the first ones in, and in doing so, spent the money invested by those who came along later.

Hey, is he the guy who designed Social Security?

It’s a remarkable business model. It’s even better than taking millions of dollars and paying yourself a huge salary to publish a group blog no one reads.

Not that anyone has ever done that.

The thing that struck me about this was that it confirmed what I suspected when the Madoff scandal popped up. I was talking to my dad about it, and I said I wondered how many other Madoffs were out there waiting to be flushed into the open. I knew the odds were against Bernie Madoff being the only Ponzi broker on Wall Street. And sure enough, here’s a new one.

Does this mean I’m a genius? Yes. Well, no. I wish it did. It means that in middle age, I have finally begun to understand human nature, and to profit by my understanding.

Whenever I have a moment like this, I think of an old Saturday Night Live character, the superhero “Middleagedman.” He ran around with his sidekick, Beer Buddy, solving life’s problems by applying wisdom obtained via sitting around and watching the world. You know the kind of thing I mean. Example: never get an aisle seat on an airplane unless you like being bumped by drink carts. And when you make a reservation, make sure you ask if they’re trying to stick you in one of those seats that don’t recline. Old people know this stuff. In fact, that’s pretty close to Middleagedman’s theme song, which went, “MIDDLEAGEDMAN….he knows a lot of stuff!”

There’s a company called Bottom Line that sells this kind of wisdom. My dad bought a book from them. It’s full of tips other people came up with after lots of misery. It’s sort of like the book of Proverbs, without the religious aspect.

Let’s see. Never give a friend a big loan. Up to maybe three hundred bucks, you’re cool. Above that, you will never see it again, and you will lose the friendship. Never date a woman with children unless their father is dead or in an iron lung. Never date a fat woman who just lost a hundred pounds, unless you wouldn’t mind if she gained it back. Roughly 95% of people who loudly proclaim that they will never desert you in a crisis…will desert you.

This is good material. Save it.

Avoid preachers who talk about God helping you because you give them money, but who rarely mention God helping you for helping the poor. Never, ever leave your kids with a male babysitter or day care attendant unless you want them to be molested; men who love being around kids are generally not normal. If you’re a woman and your boyfriend likes to dance more than you do, ask a male friend if he seems gay. Men generally dance only because they have to, and women have absolutely no gaydar. You might spare yourself an STD later on. If he ever talks about your shoes and seems to know what brand they are, run.

This is gold, I’m telling you.

Shun fantastic deals on used stuff, unless the sellers are clearly idiots or in financial trouble AND they are willing to produce ID and sign receipts. Never wait until Friday afternoon to go to any place where you will have to wait in line; the post office and banks are the worst. Do not EVER let an attractive woman stay with you and your wife for more than one night, especially if it’s a friend of your wife’s and she just had a painful breakup. If you’re a man and your girlfriend flirts with your friends, dump her. Women use men they’re not crazy about to help them meet better men.

Never date anyone who carries a dog everywhere. Never date anyone who tells you everything her friends and relatives have told her in confidence. She does the same thing to you, in spades. If you’re already in such a relationship and you want to find out the most embarrassing thing she has told her friends, pick a fight with one of them and see what she says.

Don’t buy a Chrysler product. Just don’t. They have been crap since about 1972. You can make an exception for a Viper.

Men: never wear a wig. Some of the newer hair transplant surgery methods are pretty good, but there is no such thing as a good toupee. Look at Burt Reynolds and William Shatner. Is that how you want to be remembered? Ladies: do whatever it takes to remove your facial hair, even if the results aren’t that great. Remember this rule: the worst wax job in history was more attractive than the prettiest beard.

If you have gas in public, go stand near the fattest, ugliest person you can find. Everyone will think he or she did it.

If your girlfriend asks you annoying, prying questions and says you should have no secrets from each other, ask yourself whether she tells you as much about herself as you tell her about yourself. Women like to collect information to use against you later. If your boyfriend likes to tell you what to do, it may not be because he feels protective; he may be an Ike Turner in the making.

Never date a man who drives a black car with the windows tinted black, especially if he himself wears black. In his mind, he is about 12 years old, and he will make you suffer. Never date ANYONE who wears black all the time. It’s not chic, and it’s not indicative of depth or intelligence or sophistication. It’s pretentious and creepy. People who wear black all the time crave admiration. Or they’re in the Viet Cong, which is even worse.

A man who is nasty and brutal to other people will treat you the same way sooner or later. Generally, people who mistreat others will eventually give the same treatment to people who trust them.

Never date someone because you feel sorry for them and think you can help them. There is no such thing as a fixer-upper or mechanic’s special.

Man, I wish someone had told me all this stuff years ago.

When you start a charcoal grill, use tons of fluid, assuming you’re a fluid guy and not an electric-starter guy. Get it done the first time; don’t play around so you have to keep adding fluid later. Don’t buy a time share. Don’t buy a boat in partnership with your best friend whom you would trust with your life. Never even think about buying a new boat. Always used.

Never buy small tools; I think I may have mentioned that once or twice in the past. Make them at least two sizes bigger than you think you need. And when it comes to expensive tools, try to buy used. Let someone else eat the depreciation.

In the summer, heavy wool socks are cooler and dryer than thin cotton socks. Some of the best meat is the cheapest; you just need to know how to cook it. When you’re out of mosquito repellant but oddly, you have fresh basil, rub the basil on your skin. Mosquitoes hate it.

Don’t date a person you find physically unattractive. It won’t work.

For digging shallow holes, a sharp hoe is about ten times as fast as a shovel. Never cut down a tree with an axe. It’s not the right tool. Use a saw. Do you think lumberjacks cut trees down with axes? Maybe the stupid ones do. The ones that accept sandwiches from strange, plastic-faced kings who pop up beside them in bed.

I’m not really sure what axes are for. Saws cut much, much better, and axes are useless for splitting wood. A long time ago, I worked for a guy who ran a tree service. He had all sorts of tools in his truck. But if memory serves, he didn’t have an axe. We never had a use for one.

You know, I think I may start a self-help cult. I wonder if I could hire Tom Cruise away from the Scientologists. It’s amazing that I know all these great things, yet somehow fail to apply most of them.

Anyway, the Wall Street scandals probably won’t end with Madoff and Stanford. Middleagedman knows all.

Explain Yourselves

While I’m dealing with pet peeves, can someone tell me when the English decided to rewrite the rules of subject/verb agreement?

I just read a headline I cannot understand. It says “England refuse to force follow on as Windies are bowled out.” WHAT? WHAT? “Bowled out?” “Windies”? Am I hallucinating?

Must be a cricket story. I refuse to click. Oops, I mean “Steve refuse to click.”

Anyway, it’s an example of what I’m complaining about. “England” is a singular noun, and the writer treats it like a plural noun.

This ungrammatical BS is a new thing. It has to be. The Bible mentions a lot of nations, and it was written in England, and it doesn’t say things like “Israel also WERE had in abomination with the Philistines.” Look for yourself. Here’s another one: “Egypt WAS glad when they departed: for the fear of them fell upon them.”

Stop it, English people. Or else pretentious Americans who say “cheers” instead of “bye” and write “colour” instead of “color” will start doing it, too.

Picture Barack Obama Falling Out of a Palm Tree

Can I point something out, just to keep my hairline from receding? Here it is: there is such a thing as a logical fallacy which is, in and of itself, a fallacy. Sort of.

Very often, web denizens toss out Latin phrases which are names for recognized logical fallacies, and then they sit back all smug, thinking they’ve won the argument. Which never happens on the Internet regardless of how right you are, unless of course you’re me. Even then, I’m the only one who agrees that I’m right, which doesn’t matter, because I’m right about that, too.

Here’s the particular fallacy I’m thinking about: argumentum ad hominem. It means you attack the person instead of the man. The inverse or converse or whatever of this is “appeal to authority,” which means you cite some big bloviating authority and claim his apparent agreement with your sniveling blog comment makes you right.

You know what? Ad hominem arguments are often–maybe usually–totally valid. Maybe not in the strictest technical sense, but in application. And like Mr. Spock used to say, “A difference that makes no difference is no difference.” Which isn’t actually true, but let’s go on.

I’ll give you an example. Charles Manson walks into your house with a severed head in his hand, and he says, “You should put all your money in soybean futures, because the Chinese are going to outlaw oral contraceptives, and they’re going to need a lot of tofu.”

Now, you realize right away that this argument is crap. Why? Because you’re an expert on soybeans and the Chinese birthrate? No. Because Charles Manson is an idiot, and nothing he says should be taken seriously. Implicit in your reasoning–which is perfectly sound–is a heavy-duty ad hominem argument. A logic professor might get his sexually ambiguous drawers in a knot and point out that Charles Manson’s argument could be correct, and that you haven’t really refuted it. Who cares? You’re right, and you have better things to do than argue with Charles Manson.

Appeal to authority works the same way. Today I put up Youtubes of Jim Rogers, one of the world’s most successful and sophisticated investors, as evidence of Barack Obama’s economic foolishness. And I impugned the Obamessiah’s crazy approach to fixing the recession by pointing out that he is not a skilled investor.

Jim Rogers is an authority on money. My imaginary logic professor can whine all he wants; anything Jim Rogers says about money automatically carries weight. His reputation may not prove he’s right, but it makes listening to him much, much smarter than listening to Barack Obama.

The legal system recognizes the fact that a person’s qualifications determine the weight of his statements. Am I appealing to authority again? Maybe, although like Bumble said, “The law is a ass. A idiot.” If you look at the Federal Rules of Evidence, you’ll find that they heartily endorse argumentum ad hominem and appeal to authority. For example, only people whose credentials are proven extraordinary are allowed to testify as experts. On the other hand, a person who can’t prove his credentials is shut out not because of the validity of his testimony, but because of his nature.

We also have ethical rules that reflect the same basic idea. Example: usually you shouldn’t represent codefendants in a criminal case, because they may come to have adverse interests. Then when you argue on behalf of one, you may let the other one down. So you’re supposed to push your clients to hire separate attorneys, OR, much more importantly, to sign a paper saying they know the risks and still want to give you all their money. That’s actually true; I’m not saying it the way the bar associations like to see it presented, but it’s correct. You can represent two people with conflicting interests as long as you inform them and get them to agree. Anyway, without consent, you are presumed to be ineffective when arguing on their behalf, not because of the merits of your arguments and decisions (which probably don’t exist at the time the conflict arises and therefore can’t be evaluated), but because of your position as an advocate for both defendants. The system PRESUMES you will do or say something stupid.

Pointing out recognized logical fallacies (or, more often, what you mistakenly think are logical fallacies) doesn’t really win arguments most of the time. It’s a cheesy way to help you avoid arguing in the first place. It’s a cop-out, unless it’s so obvious that your objections are valid that you can be excused. I think most logic, in the real world of soft and unknown variables, is ultimately fuzzy. Things like intuition and emotion aren’t always unproductive. Sometimes they get you to the truth faster than your puny reasoning skills. It’s a lot more convincing to stay in the game than to hop up and down screeching “TU QUOQUE!”, which nobody even understands.

It’s like another cheap tactic, which always makes me chuckle. You post this: “SOURCE? LINK?”

Right, I’m supposed to spend a week Googling, in order to back up, say, my assertion that peas are better for you than rat poison, or my claim that Canada is bigger than Thailand. How much did you research in order to come up with “SOURCE? LINK?” You didn’t research at all. That’s the whole reason you typed it. You’re lazy, and you know putting people on the defensive is easier than making a real argument. Isn’t it? Well, isn’t it? Prove it’s not. SOURCE? LINK?

See what I mean? No matter what the other person is saying, you can always say “SOURCE? LINK?” Even when it’s clearly inappropriate.

Argument is overrated, anyway. As a means of getting to the truth, it scores pretty low. I mean the kind of argument that involves short, informal exchanges. Like debates. When two people argue and one wins, very often, all it proves is that he argues better than the other guy. O.J. Simpson told me that. No, he didn’t, but he knows it. He tried to push it a little farther than he should have, but it worked for him against Chris Darden and Marcia Clark. I think the best way to get at the truth is for people to put their pitches in written form, in great detail, and let other people look at them. This way, they get to think more about what they say. They don’t get flustered and lose arguments because they’re too mad to think.

Anyway, Barack Obama is the Gilligan of economics. Time will prove me and Jim Rogers right.

Roger That

The Dow is sliding again today. It’s interesting; the lower the index goes, the more serious a three-digit loss seems. At 12,000-14,000, it didn’t seem like a big deal to lose 500 points in a day. Now it looks a lot worse. There are only about 15 500-point days between the current index level and zero.

Obama’s socialist policies, which, oddly, George Bush agreed with, are already killing us. And the pain is only beginning. Socialism doesn’t work. Socialism doesn’t work. I can’t say it enough. It didn’t work in good times. It is bizarre that people have decided it will work in bad times, when capitalism is more important than ever.

Obama is not a financial guru; he’s a hack politician who has never defied his handlers and Illinois-machine patrons. It’s amazing that he succeeded in billing himself as the agent of change, because he is the personification of reactionary liberalism. I can’t think of a politician who is more opposed to change. He’s giving us exactly what a pre-Reagan liberal would have given us in 1976: pork, big government, excess regulation, debt without reward, and paternalism. Obama is a leftist; therefore, all his ideas about prosperity are diametrically opposed to what works. If he knew anything about wealth, he’d be a successful investor, but he is not. He survives on high income and sweetheart deals. When you have those things going for you, you don’t learn anything about investing. He’s in the same class as people like Britney Spears. We shouldn’t be listening to them. We should be listening to people who have proven they can invest.

Case in point: Jim Rogers. If you don’t know who he is, you might as well quit reading now. Here are a couple of recent interviews.

Jim Rogers is rich. He will die rich, in all likelihood, and it won’t be because he was a powerful politician to whom people funneled money. It won’t be because his fame as a rock-star politician allowed him to sell five million copies of a self-worshiping autobiography. It will be because he knew what he was doing.

Look what he’s telling us. Let the bad businesses fail. Let the bad executives be fired, so they can be replaced by competent executives who will lead their companies to success. Don’t pile up debt with bailouts that prolong the agony and make things worse. And he’s telling us America is going to keep declining for a good long time, so he’s betting on continued losses in our most respected stocks. And he has moved to Singapore. He says moving to Asia now is like moving to New York in 1907.

What can I tell you? Jim Rogers is shorting blue chips, and we’re both shorting Obama.

Reason not the Need

People keep asking me why I’m not building anything with my tools. Or they ask me what it is that I plan to build. They don’t get it. I’ll provide the answer. I am building a SHOP.

Here’s what I want. When I get an idea about something I want to build or do, I want to be able to walk out into the garage and see that I have the tools I need to do it. You can never really reach this point, but you can get very close to it, unless you plan to build your own space station or make your own surface-mount circuit boards or silicon chips.

This is why I don’t know what to say when people tell me I have to have a job in mind before I can choose a tool. What I have in mind isn’t a particular job. I want to be able to handle a reasonable range of jobs. “What do you plan to do with the tool?” isn’t a smart question. What you should ask is, “What do you think you might want to do over the next thirty years?”

You can reach a point where you can make a smoker, a door, a metal fence, a table, a humidor, a steel rack for your yard tools–or any number of other handy things–without leaving the house. You can fix it so you can raise your own car and put a new exhaust system on it or replace your brake pads. I don’t think that’s much to ask from life. You can blow twenty thousand dollars, total, and be set for life, except for odds and ends. Is that really too much to spend? Let’s see what a decent fishing boat costs. Haven’t I done this before?

Okay, I pulled up a boat on Boat Trader’s site. It’s a Boston Whaler. I wouldn’t have a Boston Whaler; they ride rough. The design is obsolete, and they’re very ugly. But it’s a quality boat, and the price is representative of the class. The one I’m looking at is a 2001, and it’s 26 feet long, which is really the minimum size for fishing in Miami. Asking price? About forty thousand. Let’s check the fuel capacity. It’s 200 gallons, or $500 per fill-up (unless you find a marina that doesn’t overcharge). The electronics suck. If you don’t have a fishfinder that works reliably to 2000 feet, you bought a toy. You don’t need radar here, but you need a real (i.e. $2000) GPS and a good radio and an EPIRB. Figure four thousand to put all that together. Figure, conservatively, ten thousand for decent rods and reels and tackle. And let’s not even talk about maintenance and repairs.

You also have to store the boat. If you trailer it in your yard, you’ll never use it, and you’ll have to buy a pickup and trailering stuff. The only realistic way is to find an in-water marina. At worst, a marina with racks and a forklift. That will cost you.

Compared to fishing, tools are a bargain. And when you fish, you get nothing of concrete value in return. And the skills you learn are completely worthless. You’re not going to fish in the open ocean to feed your family; there is absolutely no way to come out ahead. You can fish from shore and catch things like grunts and snook, but on the whole, you’d be better off raising chickens. But no one ever looks at a little 26-foot open fisherman and says, “You must be CRAZY, spending all that money!”

I have a project in mind right now. I have to sort through my table saw blades. I have no idea what I have. I have to make two cuts with each, to see what the kerfs look like and check the finish they leave, and then I have to mark them and make a list of their characteristics. Then I have to get them off the Rubbermaid stool where they now live. So I plan to make a steel thing I can hang on the wall, on which I can hang the blades like weights at a gym. I figure I’ll need three or four spindles on a piece of square steel tubing. I already have the tubing. I haven’t checked the size of the arbor holes on the blades, but I may be able to use my surplus electrical conduit to make spindles. It’s more than strong enough.

Imagine trying to do this in a house with no tools. Forget it. It’s a simple task which should take two hours with my limited skills, but if you don’t have a welder and a dry cut saw or some other decent cutting tool, it would be impossible. For me, it’s a pleasant two hours. For you, if you don’t have tools, it might as well be the construction of the pyramids. You can’t do it.

People keep saying, “Gee, you can buy the thing you want to make.” Sure, and I can eat at McDonald’s three times a day instead of cooking my own food. The point isn’t to get stuff, or even to save money. The point is to be able to make stuff.

If I wanted to play golf (thank God, I don’t), would you tell me I could watch golf on TV instead? Would you tell me to pay someone else to play golf for me? Of course not. And you wouldn’t tell Tiger Woods to walk to the hole and drop his ball in the cup, just because it’s faster and cheaper. The process, not the result, is the destination.

To be Read by the Light of a Coleman Lantern

Kim du Toit still has some copies of his book, Family Fortunes, available for purchase. At the low, low price of $5.95, this is the biggest bargain since the U.S. bought Alaska for $7.2 million and secured the future rights to Sarah Palin.

Two Things

Do me a little favor.

My family is negotiating to sell a piece of property. A bunch of us own it together. I was not all that happy about the decision to sell it, but for various reasons, it may be a good idea. That all hinges on the price, of course. If the buyer thinks the economy is going to recover quickly, we may get a good price. I think our economic problems haven’t really started yet, and that real estate is going to continue to fall, and that cash is a good thing to have at this time.

Would you mind saying a prayer that God would watch over the negotiations and give us a good result, whatever that may be? I would truly appreciate it. I’m not sure selling is the right move, but if we do sell, we need to be paid fairly, and we need guidance with the disposition of the proceeds. These days I am trying to remember that my money belongs to God, and that when I spend or invest it, I should ask myself if I’m doing something of which he would approve.

Also, don’t forget Mish, who is depending on your prayers in Israel.

Thanks.

My Bet: the Dance Will Continue

I have questions for my fellow conservatives.

If the government barges into a private business that doesn’t take government money, and it tries to set a limit on the CEO’s pay, that’s interference with the right to contract, and it’s (at least currently) unconstitutional. But if your company is a failure, and you greedily rush the trough when Uncle Sam offers to take other people’s money and give it to you, so you can escape the justice of the free market and avoid the consequences of your incompetence, and Uncle Sam tells you that you have to have a salary cap, how is THAT interference with the right to contract?

It’s not.

In fact, it IS a contract. Uncle Sam gives you money, and in return, you agree to a salary cap. And such other conditions as Uncle Sam chooses to impose. For example–and I think it’s a shame this hasn’t occurred to Obama–the government might make you go to work every day in a chicken costume.

Conservatives hate welfare, or at least we hate giving welfare handouts to people who don’t deserve help. We are constantly clamoring for oversight, and we love yelling that the government needs to put conditions on welfare money. I have to ask, then: if the government is giving welfare to companies which are unquestionably undeserving, why shouldn’t it put conditions on the handouts?

It should. That’s the very least it should do.

It’s an embarrassment, the way some conservatives are complaining about the caps. It shows they can’t tell the difference between independent private businesses and charity cases.

The executives affected by the Obama salary cap have a lot of gall, complaining that they’ll have to suffer with the paltry sum of $500,000 per year. In a capitalist country, they’d all be out of work. That’s where they should be. They’re just going to continue running their companies into the ground. If they were capable of succeeding, they would have done so already. Guess what the salary cap for successful CEOs is? THERE ISN’T ONE. If you want unlimited compensation, all you have to do is turn a profit. If you can’t do that, shut up.

The bailouts will prolong our economic problems, because they will keep inept people in control of major businesses, and they will also permit overpaid workers to continue charging too much for their work. They’ll also hurt good businesses by preventing them from taking the places of their failed competitors. In a healthy economy, bad companies fail, and good companies take their places, and everyone is better off. In the Bush-Obama socialist utopia, we keep bad companies alive and prevent good companies from replacing them. It’s like having the opposite of an immune system. We are generating antibodies to success and attacking it without mercy.

If Bush and Obama were running the NFL, Terry Bradshaw would still be starting quarterback for the Pittsburgh Steelers. In an iron lung, if necessary. Ben Roethlisberger would be working at a gas station, because his youth and superior ability would not suffice to overcome the NFL’s discriminatory and counterproductive retention policies.

It reminds me of the comic strip business. What do you see when you look at the comics page? Dead people. Or at least their work. You see Peanuts and Li’l Abner and BC and so on. The artists are dead; some have been dead for decades. It’s disgusting and pathetic, but it’s also tradition.

Some of the dead people are clearing out; I think they finally got rid of Beetle Baily, for example. But there are still a good number of strips by dead people on the comics pages. Why is this a problem? It’s not, unless you’re a cartoonist. It makes it harder for talented new people to make it. It’s as if movie distributors were cluttering up screens with old films like City Lights and The Jazz Singer, to the point where the studios had a hard time marketing new work.

The only cartoonist I know of who has had the guts to complain publicly about the dead people is Stephan Pastis, the guy who draws Pearls Before Swine. He openly makes fun of bad strips that have no business on the funny pages. I’ll bet there are a lot of dead-cartoonist heirs who hate his guts, because he is threatening their meal tickets.

I guess that’s irrelevant to discussion of the bailouts, except that it illustrates what happens when competition is impossible. We lose good products. We punish people who try to create them, and they quit.

The execs are complaining now, but my depressing knowledge of human nature tells me that won’t last. Why? Because the thing every bureaucrat and desk jockey hates more than anything is the free market. The thing they love more than anything is job security. And bailouts equal job security, for people who, by all rights, should be unemployed. We will see a contest between two primal drives: greed and the desire to be taken care of. I believe the desire to be taken care of will win. The general public hasn’t bought into it completely; we still favor capitalism by a slim margin, probably because many of us are not doing as well as we want, and we think capitalism gives us a chance to do better. But people who are already in cushy positions have a different view. They are desperate to keep what they have. It’s like musical chairs. If you’re sitting down, you don’t want to hear the music start up again.

We are living out Ayn Rand’s worst nightmare. A world in which competition, which is our strength, is considered destructive and dangerous. If Ellsworth Toohey were brought to life in the flesh, we would probably elect him President. In fact, we may have just done that.

Hard times push people in one direction or the other. The right direction, or the direction of socialism, which is a secular religion which assures that hard times never go away. Under FDR, we veered too far to the left, and it damaged our system and prolonged our misery. Maybe Obama will finish his work and drive us so deep into Marxist territory we will never find our way out.

Like I’ve said before, welcome to the Second World. Liberals think Western Europe is paradise. I hope they’re right, because our standard of living is probably going to be just like Europe’s. And I don’t mean Switzerland.

Anyway, the salary caps were to be expected. When the government began investing in failed businesses, every intelligent and insightful person on earth realized the government would come to control those businesses.

Of course, the CEOs who are taking the hit were not intelligent and insightful. If they had been, they would not have destroyed their companies.

Grinder Frame

This is hilarious. You have to see this.

That’s the body of the frame for my belt grinder. It’s an old real estate sign sandwiched around two pieces of scrap exactly 1 1/2″ thick, which happens to be the thickness of a typical grinder toolbar.

Can you believe that? I used two tools. The bandsaw and the impact driver. Took me maybe 25 minutes, and I’m slow.

Everything but the screws is scrap. And I had way too many of those screws anyway.

I haven’t firmly attached the top member, because I’m not sure what shape it will have to be to take the stuff for the tracking mechanism, and I also want to be very sure of a good fit against the toolbar.

Come on, tell me that’s not funny, compared to welding and cutting and grinding all day. I seriously think this will work. Why wouldn’t it? It already has, for someone else. Even if it doesn’t, it’s great fun. I love that bandsaw. It’s slow, and the cuts are not quite as good as table saw cuts, but it produces one fourth as much dust, it’s extremely safe, it’s easy, and you don’t have to wear any protective gear. A mask might be a good idea, but very little dust flies up where you can breathe it. Okay, okay. I should wear goggles or something, because tools are crazy, and this thing will eventually find a way to get me. I’ll worry about it next time.

R.I.P.

Andrea Harris’s cat Squeaky has passed away.

Go say something in her comments.

Web Phenom Keeps on Delivering

You have to see the new Rick Astley video. Click to play.

Get These Precious Materials Back to the Courthouse…for the Children!

I have been listening to CLE (continuing legal education) CDs my dad checked out from the courthouse library. Here is what I have learned. Apparently, there is a law called the Unified Premarital Agreement Act. I think they also said something about child support, but I’m not sure. Wow, how much I have learned from this fine material which the bar has forced me to obtain. I really do play the CDs, and I exaggerate when I talk about how little I’ve learned, but most of this stuff is pretty dull, and there is no possibility that I will ever use it in practice, and it’s not very easy to focus on. Why on earth am I listening to material on family law? Why would I practice family law, when there are so many fine bridges I could jump off instead?

This stuff has to go back tomorrow. I was worried about it. I realized this meant I had to listen to two CDs per day for the remainder of the time period. Yech. Then this morning I remembered…I can rip CDs.

So I am now turning these materials into MP3s which I can enjoy listening to over and over. Oh, rapture. I can return them to the courthouse at my convenience, and when I’m done, I can delete the files.

I heartily advise all attorneys who read this blog to check their local law libraries for materials that can be checked out. I’m saving like $600 by not buying the garbage the approved CLE providers sell. Why pay to participate in a farce?

I have to wonder. Why don’t CLE providers sell books instead of useless CDs? If I had a book, I could read it and absorb at least some of it, and I would have the book to refer to later, if–crazy as it sounds–I found it useful. Also, I read much faster than most people, so I could get my CLE done faster.

I am sure the do-bees and hypocrites would send me emails full of pretend outrage, if they knew I was criticizing our near-holy obligation to do CLE. It’s amazing how righteous lawyers get, when they have an opportunity to grandstand. If you’ve never seen it, you really need to. We make Torquemada look like Larry Flynt. “The sacred halls of justice.” “I am enraged and disgusted as an officer of the court.” “Duty.” “Honor.” “Apple pie.” “Hopey-changiness.” “For the children.”

Funny talk, from people who only practice law because it pays well. Tell these guys they have to work for thirty grand a year from now on, and then see how many of them are excited about law and the sanctity of our professional obligations.

The truth is, I think CLE is wonderful. I mean REAL CLE, though, not this junk. I mean the research lawyers do when they prepare cases, and I also refer to things like printed treatises, which are invaluable. But listening to some self-promoting doofus tell bad lawyer jokes while getting credit for his own CLE? No thanks.