We were booked on Delta to fly to Venice out of Atlanta on Monday, but Delta could not find a gate for their plane. We ended up in B107, and left there three hours late. That meant we missed all our connections the following day, and depended on the kindness of strangers. At the train station Bolzano a shuttle driver agreed to give us a ride to the airport, even as he was off duty. We offered him twenty euro, and he only reluctantly took it, hiding it under papers on his passenger seat. Our car rental agency was closed, so we needed to get to our hotel, but no cabs were available. Two police officers, the only other people in Bolzano Airport, called all over and finally ran down a cab for us. They were very kind. Europcar the next day downgraded our reservation to a tiny Fiat since we were late getting there. I have to duck my head to lower the visor.

White guy problems? I suppose. Delta, by way of apology, gave 200 of us a free snack, airline peanuts or tiny bags of chips.

But here is the interesting thing, and I have experienced this once before. Delta announced when we finally boarded that our faces would be our boarding passes. To get in the plane we stood for maybe a second before a camera that looked at our facial plates, recognized us from passport photos, and let us pass.

My facial work is far less sophisticated, but this reinforces my notion that no two of us look alike. Take that, all you Martin Luther King/Don King doubters.

Question: What do comedian Bob Newhart and baseball greats Babe Ruth and Tom Seaver all have in common?

Continue reading “Pop Quiz” →

Look up the “Quarry Fire” on any search engine, and you will be as up-to-speed are we are, that is, wanting a little more information. The best I can usually do is information that is 11 hours or one day old. When I use the Brave search engine, it rolls  its AI down from the top and is not reliable. Yesterday it said that the fire was at 9,000 acres and was definitely caused by arson. The fire is at 450+ acres, and arson is suspected. Authorities will only say “human-caused”.

There’s a somewhat wild area to the east of us, and last Wednesday at 9PM a deputy on patrol saw something on a steep trail, one that has switchbacks. He saw a 10×10 area of fire. By morning it was at 200 acres and growing.

We’ve had no rain, no lightening. How that 10×10 area came about is under investigation, and is, according to law enforcement, “very suspicious”. That’s all we know.

Continue reading “Life in pre-evac” →

I had a vague memory of an exciting idea some years ago. I watched a report where a Treasury official held up what he called a “Trillion dollar coin*.” He claimed he could use it to march across the street to the Federal Reserve, and pay down the national debt.

I ran with that thought, but did not understand what was going on well enough. I thought the Treasury official was merely making light of our monetary system. At that time I had not theorized deeply on things, but all by myself in subsequent years came to believe

• We could eliminate the national debt tomorrow, and nothing would change. Just eliminate it, draw a line through it with a #2 pencil, not pay it off. It’s all funny money.
• Budget deficits are political tools used to deny funding to some things while funding others. For instance, what I consider a noble cause, funding college education for well-performing students, would be denied due to “deficit constraints.” But a new war? We have tons of money, no restraints!
• Social Security and Medicare could be perpetually funded.
• The Social Security Trust Fund, an illusory “fund” at best, could be eliminated.
• Medicaid, which is in part funded by individual states, could be funded in full by the federal government. States are truly constrained by real budgets and would be relieved to be free of paying for Medicaid.
• Taxes on the public, merely a means of controlling spending and inflation, would continue. But the idea that the federal government is using that money to pay its bills is nonsense. The money just evaporates.

Continue reading “A trillion dollar idea” →

By: Steve Kelly

Newsflash! Property law in the U.S. is not rooted in the Constitution. America’s legal foundation for property law (possession), “anti-Indian law,” and the concept of nation-states is religious, not secular.

Where did this deep sense of entitlement, hierarchy, and dominion over unknown lands and its original sovereign peoples originate?

Continue reading “The origins of European dominion over the New World” →

The phrase used in the title above, Deus absconditus, is new to me. It means “the hidden God”, or “God who hides from me. I ran across it today in a book by Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I am borrowing it from her just as she borrowed the expression from Pascal.

“Pascal uses a nice term to describe the notion of the creator’s once having called for the universe, turning his back to it: Deus Absconditus. Is this what we think happened? Was the sense of it there, and God absconded with it, ate it, like a wolf who disappears round the edge of a house with the Thanksgiving turkey? “God is subtle,” Einstein said, “but not malicious.”

Continue reading “Deus absconditus” →

Note to readers: Petra is not associated with this blog in any way other than to be an occasional commenter. I asked her a while back if she would allow me to reprint some of her work, and she agreed. This piece from July of last year is long, so park yourself or read it in increments. It incorporates everything I have thought (and much more) about the events of 9/11/2001 in a logical fashion with links to everything. That’s far more work than I can or want to do.

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I just noticed an issue of National Review in which I had left several flags to re-review later. The issue is July of 24, and all of the flags landed between pages 14 and 15. I am not going to repeat their writing here, though it is surely better than mine. I just want to react to their words.

The AR-15. I am going to repeat what my son-in-law told me years ago. He drew a picture of a basic 22-caliber rifle, and then attached a long handle to it, and maybe a telescope. But the key to the matter of the weapon being dangerous or misused was this: It is not automatic. One press of the trigger releases one round of ammunition. Holding the trigger down will not fire more rounds. The impression that people have from the news is that the AR-15 is a machine gun, but machine guns are illegal.

NR reviewed a Washington Post compilation of its multi-stage investigation of the AR-15, citing a former colleague Kevin D. Williamson that the WaPo series is “scientifically illiterate, error-ridden, propagandistic, and willfully misleading.” NR notes that WaPo even confused bullet velocity with rate of fire. WaPo, of course, won a Pulitzer for the series, as the AR-15 is a popular target for the left.

Caitlin Clark of the University of Iowa scored more points in basketball than any other player, male of female, in NCAA history. She will be paid $76,535 as the number one pick of the Indiana Fever. The WNBA makes about $200 million in annual revenue, compared to $10 billion for the NBA. NR uses this opportunity to take a shot at unions in general, sports unions in particular. They conclude that Clark’s $28 million shoe deal with Nike along with many other endorsements only goes to show that unions reward mediocrity, while markets reward excellence. Actually, I side with NR on this matter.

MIT will no longer require diversity statements from potential faculty hires. I was not aware of the practice, of course, but find such statements, along with other virtue signals (like public apologies) to be degrading. I think it is perfectly all right for a human being to be prejudiced in some manner, as in believing that blacks are not as smart as whites. It’s such a general belief that cannot be disproven, but eventually as we age and if we pay attention to the world around us, we will find so many exceptions as to force the belief to be abandoned. It’s a complicated world. 

The Boy Scouts of America have changed its name to “Scouting America”, this to allow for new policies such as allowing gays to be troop leaders and to welcome girls who identify as boys to belong. I don’t care about any of that. I think that forcing children to wear uniforms is not cool, and robs them of individuality, or at least attempts to do so. But I did once belong to Boy Scouts, for a short while. Two things made me quit: One, a disapproving look from my older brother, whom I idolized, as I put on my BSA uniform one night prior to going to a meeting. The other was a meeting where the scoutmaster said we should conclude the evening by playing games. He asked for suggestions, and I ever the smart ass said “How about ring around the rosie?” Later one of the big shot older scouts took me aside and warned me that “We don’t talk like that around here.” I think I just faded away from scouting, with no encouragement to continue from any quarter, for which I am grateful. 

AI dating apps for women: I have never used an app to get a date, mostly because when I last dated before meeting my wife, 29 years ago, there were none. I simply found someone I liked and asked her out. Since almost all relationships eventually fizzle on their own, I would suggest that my success rate was about as high as anyone currently swiping left or right on Tinder. NR’s take is that it used to be common for parents to find a spouse for their children, which, oddly, is mostly not frowned upon and is still practiced in much of the world. I will close with NR’s poignant final words on the subject:

“[We’re now] in an era of online porn and loneliness. If AI can make sense of modern dating, we’ll have to admit it can do something humans can’t.”