Fish Fear Me

Not Bad

I sometimes cringe when I see national news outlets do feature stories about Minnesota, especially in the winter. More often than not they seem to have a sort of "East Coast expedition into the exotic heartland" attitude that comes across as a bit condescending. So yeah, I cringed a little bit when this morning I heard Matt Lauer say that an upcoming segment by Tiki Barber was about ice fishing in Minnesota. It actually didn't turn out too bad though:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

They could have spent a little more time on the inside of the ice houses, because that is where you will find the sane people, but oh well. There's an open invite to any of you regulars that if you come up here in the winter(and the ice is safe, of course), I'll take you out ice fishing. And I promise that I won't sit you on a 5 gal. bucket outside, but in a nice and warm ice house. One that we can both fish and play a comfortable game of cards or two in. That's how you go ice fishing in Minnesota.

Predictions

A week from today the Twins will begin their last season in the Metrodome. Their new stadium, Target Field, should be ready for next year's opener. And just like the incredibly stupid decision to open the Metrodome without air conditioning in its first season, our civic leaders have made two profound mistakes with the new one that are going to come back to haunt us all. I'm not the first to say any of this, but I note it because it likely will be a classic example of how people can fool themselves.

The first mistake is the location, right next to, of all things, a waste to energy facility. Yes folks, we are building a stadium next to a 1000 tons a day garbage burner. Despite the soothing assurances of the powers that be, this cannot be a good idea. Ever. But we've gone ahead and done it anyway. When people pointed out this gobsmackingly basic bit of common sense years ago they were airily dismissed out of hand as misinformed. But earlier this year the county started to bow to reality when they approved $2.3 million to remodel the grounds of the garbage burner and mitigate the problem that never existed.  It includes, get this, "spritzers" for the garbage trucks so they can be freshened up after they drop their load of garbage. Yeah, that's going to work.

Sigh. My prediction: Disgust, anger, tremendous mockery from the rest of the country. New garbage burner at a different location at huge expense to taxpayers. Stupidity covered up by the StarTribune(if they are still around) and fading into obscurity. Idiot politicians keep their jobs.

The second issue is the lack of a retractable or partial roof of some sort. I know it would be very expensive to do so, and I don't think one is needed for a football stadium, but we are talking baseball here. In Minnesota at the end of March, beginning of April. If not for the WBC this year, the Twins would be opening the season today. Here's the weather forecast for tonight:

Tonight...Breezy. Rain and snow in the evening...then freezing rain and snow after midnight. Snow accumulation up to 2 inches. Little or no ice accumulation. Lows 25 to 30. Northeast winds 15 to 25 mph.

Who wouldn't want to go to a Twins game in that kind of weather? Would they even be able to play? This is not unusual weather for us, take a look at last year. And it's not just the first week of April or so. Our last frost of the season is typically around the middle of May. The first frost can happen anytime after mid-September. The first six weeks and the last three or four weeks every baseball season are going to be cold and if wet, miserable. That doesn't even include post-season play. We used to recognize this stuff, that's why the damn Metrodome was built in the first place. It's like some kind of mass retardation.

Sigh. My prediction: Disgust, anger, tremendous mockery from the rest of the country. Plans for some kind of roof changes at huge expense to taxpayers. Stupidity covered up by the StarTribune(if they are still around) and fading into obscurity. Idiot politicians keep their jobs.

Saturday Notes

Mom continues to recover well from her knee replacement surgery. She bent that leg past the 90 degree mark for the first time this morning at physical therapy. So far there have been no complications beyond a little swelling that happens with some patients. She is now scheduled to go home on Wednesday.

As of now the levees are holding for Fargo and Moorhead. The weather has bedeviled the forecasters and they have shifted the crest prediction a couple of times. As of this afternoon, some people are thinking that the river is now at its crest, or may already have crested. It looks like the temperature forecast has been revised downward a little bit, so that should help in halting some of the melt for a few days. It's going to be a long week and the confusion over the predictions is understandable though not very reassuring. There's a storm coming from the west now that is predicted to drop snow if it arrives, and not rain.It would be best if it missed altogether. We'll just have to see.

Dad's old high school and mine both made it into the state basketball tournament this year. Dad's school, Plainview-Elgin-Millville lost last night in the semifinals for that class. My school, Washburn, has made it to tonight's final for class 3A. Go Millers!

Do new bulbs save energy if they don't work?  Well, I guess so, since they actually don't use any energy then. I've had mixed results with compact fluorescent bulbs. I don't believe the ratings that tell me that X fluorescent is equivalent to Y incandescent. Maybe it's just me, but it seems that if you want the same amount of light as an old style 60 Watt bulb you need to get the fluorescents rated as equivalent to 75 Watt. I've also had two out of six that didn't come close to lasting as long as they should have. Like three months each is all. The fixtures they were in are pretty open top and bottom, so I don't think it was the heat issue the article mentions. I think they were just crappy.

Jeff George: I would have led Minnesota Vikings to Super Bowl title. My initial response to that was a sarcastic "uh-huh". So was my second...and third. He does bring up a good point about the Vikes QB situation though. QB is their biggest problem in making a serious run for a championship. Aside from, perhaps, Childress. He's not the worst coach in the world, but I'm skeptical that he has what it takes to go all the way. Anyway, all sorts of rumors have been swirling the last few weeks. A few days ago Charles Robinson reported this intriguing little tidbit:

Before Tampa was involved in a potential three-way trade for Cutler, Minnesota was actually the first team to become engaged in talks for the quarterback. McDaniels acknowledged Tuesday that another team had inquired about Cutler prior to Tampa Bay’s interest, but he declined to name that team. A personnel source confirmed it was the Vikings. According to two league sources, the Vikings would have shipped draft picks to Denver for Cutler, and Denver would have turned around and sent picks to New England for Cassel. However, the deal fell apart early on, after some elements in the Minnesota coaching staff weren’t entirely sold on Cutler.

Huh. As others have noted, the only element of the coaching staff that counts is Childress. He seems content to start the season with Tarvaris Jackson at the helm and Rosenfels as the fallback. I'm not buying it. As much as I hate his whining, Cutler was the type of move the Vikes have to make if they are going to put it together this year.  Maybe they still will, but I think they would have done it back then if they were going to. Maybe, just maybe, the whole thing is a conspiracy to finally get Brett Favre into a Vikings uniform. Aha! Nah, but I find the thought pretty amusing.

Down Swinging

Brutal:

The Red River of the North rose to a level never seen in recorded history this morning, fueling fears that a catastrophic failure of flood defenses could occur.

The river's level stood at 40.48 feet at 8:15 a.m., surpassing the previous record of 40.1 feet reached 112 years ago, and continued its rise to a crest that could reach 43 feet by Saturday afternoon.

The National Weather Service calls the situation "increasingly dangerous" because the river's rise "shows no sign of slowing."

Even if the levees and the sandbags used to extend their height are not overtopped, they will have to withstand as much as a week of heavy pressure until the river starts to recede. River forecasters are in unknown territory here:

The National Weather Service's new crest forecast, which put the projected crest in a range between 41 and 43 feet, caught emergency officials leaders by surprise. "Record flows upstream of Fargo have produced unprecedented conditions" on the river, according to the weather service, adding that the Red "is expected to behave in ways never previously observed," the weather service said.

The weather forecast for the area is sun and temps in the low to mid-thirties this weekend, followed by chances of snow next week. The main threat, the crest, is already in the pipe, so to speak. The sun is high enough now though, that there will likely be significant melting over the weekend. If those slight chances of snow turn into rain of any significance then Fargo/Moorhead may see even more than the forecasted week of river levels over 40' I would think. The ground is still frozen there, there is nowhere else for the water to go. The strain on the levees and dikes would be extreme to say the least. Not that it isn't already, but the risk of failure will increase each day the water stays that high. It is possible that the cities will survive the crest only to be flooded days later.

I do not underestimate the spirit of those people and that if they go down, they will "go down swinging". I'm hoping and praying that it won't come to that, but it's looking grim. The one upside here is that this is not a situation where loss of life is predictable, or even likely at all. "Just" the misery of homes and businesses flooded and filled with muck.

A word or two for those who might choose to comment about the wisdom of these people living where they do(not that the handful of regulars here would): Now is not the time. I don't want to hear about it at this moment. A tremendous amount of work has been done since the 1997 flood to address the problem and it is turning out to perhaps not be enough this year in some areas. There will be plenty of time to address that later.

"I don't care how old you are, you've never seen this in the valley."

If you are inclined to spare a prayer for the folks in the Red River Valley, now would be the time to do so:

Confidence in Fargo and Moorhead cracked Wednesday when the National Weather Service revised its crest predictions, raising the crest by a full foot. If the river does, in fact, reach 41 feet, that would eclipse the 1897 record level of 40.1 feet in Fargo and the 39.57 feet reached during the devastating 1997 flood.

Officials in Moorhead, MN are concerned enough that they issued a voluntary evacuation advisory today for the southern part of the city.

Winter decided to return and it's a mixed blessing at best. On the one hand, what hasn't melted yet will stay frozen for a little while longer. On the other hand, freezing temps are turning sandbags into bricks and making it more difficult to raise levees even further in light of yesterday's forecast update. And that 8" of new snow didn't make getting around any easier I'm sure. Check out this picture gallery at the Strib. Freezing and flooding. What a bitch.

Surreal Moment of the Day

The whole column here is pretty surreal, but this part seems particularly so to me:

From Mexico, America is receiving needed instruction about fundamental rights and the rule of law. A leading Democrat trying to abolish the right of workers to secret ballots in unionization elections is California's Rep. George Miller who, with 15 other Democrats, in 2001 admonished Mexico: "The secret ballot is absolutely necessary in order to ensure that workers are not intimidated into voting for a union they might not otherwise choose." Last year, Mexico's highest court unanimously affirmed for Mexicans the right that Democrats want to strip from Americans.

I was a Teamster when I worked part-time at UPS a long time ago. There I saw firsthand, when we voted on a new contract, exactly how intimidation works. The situation then was a part-time versus full-time worker dispute, with the full-timers backing the union leadership and wanting the contract ratified. Us part-timers wanted to reject it. I had a few people get in my face trying to get me to vote yes, but I also had a secret ballot and easily voted no. That was a contract and not an organizing process, but the same principles apply. You take away the right to a secret ballot and intimidation will skyrocket, maybe on both sides. Anyone who says otherwise is in denial.

 

The Art of the Factual Lie

Update: Odd, but now when I try to click the first link below I get a 404 error. If I cut and paste the url...: http://thinkprogress.org/2009/03/23/bachmann-armed-and-dangerous/

...I can still get there. Same browser and IP. I'm sure it's nothing. Anyway, fyi.

----

In some circle of Hell the old Soviet masters of propaganda must at least have the satisfaction of knowing that they may be gone, but they have the likes of Ali Frick carrying on their work:

Bachmann: ‘I Want People…Armed And Dangerous On This Issue’ Of Cap And Trade

After a nifty bit of selective quoting(emphasis hers):

Instead of merely opposing the legislation, however, Bachmann compared Washington, D.C. to “enemy lines” and urged her supporters to become “armed and dangerous” and fight a “revolution” against cap and trade legislation:

BACHMANN: And really now in Washington, I’m a foreign correspondent in enemy lines. And I try to keep everyone back here in Minnesota know exactly the nefarious activities that are taking place in Washington. […]

I want people in Minnesota armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax because we need to fight back. Thomas Jefferson told us, having a revolution every now and then is a good thing, and the people — we the people — are going to have to fight back hard if we’re not going to lose our country. And I think this has the potential of changing the dynamic of freedom forever in the United States.

She comes up with this conclusion:

Apparently “traditional American values,” which Bachmann insists she represents, include endorsing the armed overthrow of our own “enemy” government.

Yeah, right. Since Frick posts the audio of the conversation she is most likely well aware that her excerpt snips out this little bit of context that fits right between her two paragraphs:

But you can get all the latest information on this event, this ...a must go to event  with this Chris Horner. People will learn...it will be fascinating. We met with Chris Horner last week, 20 members of Congress. It takes a lot to wow members of Congress after a while. This wowed them.  And I am going to have materials for people when they leave.

And instead of that last paragraph ending with United States, it actually ends with this:

...and that's why I want everyone to come out and hear. So go to bachmann.house.gov and you can get all the information.

So lets put that second paragraph back to what Bachmann really said and see how it reads(emphasis mine on what Frick cut):

But you can get all the latest information on this event, this ...a must go to event  with this Chris Horner. People will learn...it will be fascinating. We met with Chris Horner last week, 20 members of Congress. It takes a lot to wow members of Congress after a while. This wowed them.  And I am going to have materials for people when they leave. I want people in Minnesota armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax because we need to fight back. Thomas Jefferson told us, having a revolution every now and then is a good thing, and the people — we the people — are going to have to fight back hard if we’re not going to lose our country. And I think this has the potential of changing the dynamic of freedom forever in the United States and that's why I want everyone to come out and hear. So go to bachmann.house.gov and you can get all the information.

Listen to it yourself from the source if you like. The first paragraph starts at about 11:10 in the audio.

So the upshot is, horror of horrors, that Bachmann wants to arm her constituents with information. Well crap, if we start doing stuff like that then people might actually start reasoning their way into political stands. And that friends, is as deadly to Think Progress and ilk as sunshine is to vampires. I actually don't like Bachmann's rhetoric very much, or some of her positions, but at least I could argue about that without twisting her words. I think I fully agree with Bachmann on climate change and energy taxes and I would be happy to defend her against Frick here, but there are no arguments to defend against on those points here, just vapor that seems to say that the problem with Bachmann's positions are that they simply exist.The powerful argument of the junior high school student.

Is Frick a liar manipulating the fools who lap up this bullshit, or is she just incompetent? I can't say for sure, but the fact that she also made the full audio available seems to point to the former. In any case, it's a classic case of how a website can turn average but gullible people into useful idiots. Look at some of the comments there, they actually believe from that post that Bachmann is encouraging armed insurrection. Treason! It would be freakin' hilarious if it wasn't so pathetic.

Those long dead Soviet hands must be so proud.

"Kick Me"

Another corporate jet saga arises:

Embattled bank JPMorgan Chase, the recipient of $25 billion in TARP funds, is going ahead with a $138 million plan to buy two new luxury corporate jets and build "the premiere corporate aircraft hangar on the eastern seaboard" to house them, ABC News has learned.

The financial giant's upgrade includes nearly $120 million for two Gulfstream 650 planes and $18 million for a lavish renovation of a hangar at the Westchester Airport outside New York City.

Hey come on, those are just stimulus jobs!

Kidding aside, it is a remarkably tone-deaf thing to do when there are millions of people and most of Congress ready and willing to pick up pitchforks at the slightest provocation.To be fair to JPMorgan Chase the plan has probably been in the works for some time now, it's just coming to light at an unfortunate time. It might be wise for both the bank and Westchester Airport to put things off for at least a little while until things cool down. Maybe the timing is such that it's really not feasible to do so, but it's not clear from the story.

Also lacking from that article is any examination of the economics factor, which is almost always missing from stories like these. I've had the "privilege" of flying in a corporate jet a few times. A company I worked for in the 1990s got one that seated six I think, or it could have been eight. I don't remember.  Anyway, there were two reasons for that jet: The obvious perk for the very senior execs and a cheaper and more efficient way to move the lesser worker bees like me to and from out of town facilities. We all know that the former is real, but the second also was true under certain circumstances.

On several occasions I tagged along when it became known that some of the bigwigs would be traveling to such and such plant and there were open seats. In other cases, departments would put out a call like "Hey, does anybody else need to visit Winnipeg?". If the plane couldn't get at least five employees with a valid need to travel then people flew commercial. The break point I remember being told was over four. Less than five it was almost always cheaper to fly commercial. The point is there can be valid cost reasons for larger companies to have a corporate fleet. It may not always be just about executive perks, though I'm fairly sure that is always a factor.

I hated flying on that plane by the way. Oh, the convenience was great. Heck of a nice way to travel in that regard. I couldn't keep every story I had ever read about small jet crashes from popping into my head though. I would imagine getting strewn across some cornfield and a headline of "Six Local Execs Killed in Muncie Crash". Hey, it happens. Putting that many employees on a single plane is tempting fate as far as I'm concerned. It was paranoid probably, but I'd rather have flown commercial.

Trouble Brewing

Towns and cities along the Red River on the Minnesota/North Dakota border are bracing for flooding that could approach or even exceed the levels of the great flood of 1997. A long winter and and lots of snow had changed to a relatively dry spring that forecasters had hoped would ease the threat this year. Two inches of rain in the area yesterday and another inch forecast for today will almost certainly put that hope to rest.

After the huge flooding 12 years ago a number of improvements were made to dikes in the area, but officials and residents are scrambling to build emergency levees and add to and shore up the existing dike system. They are cautiously optimistic right now that all will hold and we won't see the evacuations that were needed in 1997. One good thing is that the National Weather Service seems to be more on top of the situation than they were back then when their updated warnings came too late to help local officials.

The situation doesn't seem to have shown up on the national radar yet and the article has no mention of FEMA, but I hope for President Obama's sake that they are paying attention. Hopefully they won't be needed, but the last thing he needs right now, or the residents in the area obviously, is for them to drop the ball.

About That Light At The End Of The Tunnel

Victor Davis Hanson asks:

Why are so many Americans so depressed about things these days? It is perhaps not just the economy.

 I think the answer is clear: all the accustomed referents, the sources of security, of knowledge and reassurance appear to be vanishing. Materially, we still enjoy a sumptuous lifestyle in comparison with past generations—and the world outside our borders. America remains the most sane and successful society on the planet.

But there is a strange foreboding, a deer-in-the-headlights look to us that we may be clueless Greeks in the age of Demosthenes, played-out Romans around AD 450, or give-up French in late 1939—with a sense it cannot go on. Why? Let us count the ways.

Dr. Hanson goes on to list five things that I generally agree with, his points #3 and #4 being partial exceptions. But I wonder if what he describes are really just symptoms and if perhaps he skips over the real disease in the second paragraph, where he writes "America remains the most sane and successful society on the planet". I think that "most sane" is an overly generous description of how our political leadership, the leadership that we Americans have elected(ahem), is acting, and has been acting for the most part for some time now. I would happily concede "least insane" to get to the bigger question though, if that helps.

That larger question: Is what we are seeing today, at least mostly, really just the inevitable and predictable result of the infection of public discourse and policy by post-modernism? The more I think about behavior that is commonplace now, behavior that I've chalked up to arrogance or a lack of integrity, the more I think the answer is yes. Perhaps what underlies that arrogance and lack of integrity is a philosophy that says reason is a plague and that truth and reality are just human constructs that can be discarded at will.

Look at how many of the issues that we face today are the result of not simply bad decisions, but the purposeful denial of reality to serve another "truth". First and foremost is the mortgage mess that has sparked the current economic crisis. That is not an accidental result of a bad decision, it is the unintended consequence of a deliberate policy that denied a truth we all know was learned long ago: Don't lend huge amounts of money to huge numbers of people who may not be able to pay it back.

A close second is the notion, as Dr. Hanson points out, that we can double and triple federal budget deficits to an unheard of scale each year for the next decade and not have it lead to financial disaster. How can it not? And yet the denial train keeps rolling along.

Throw on top of those thirty years of increasing federal level involvement with education, you happy with those results? How about on energy policy and this nation's increasingly strained ability to meet our petroleum and electrical needs, at the same time hiking food prices by subsidizing the processing of food into fuel. Happy about that? Just wait until the religion of climate change gets its hands on a cap and trade carbon regime, that's just bound to work out spectacularly well.

The common thread that runs through the debate on all of those is a profound refusal to acknowledge reality as it is today, and the predictable consequences of policies that are based entirely on ideology and wishful thinking. What really makes me uneasy right now is that I see no sign that our political leadership has learned any lessons from their dismal performance in the last decade or so. In fact, they are not only not backing down, they seem to be doubling down, like someone trying to drink their way sober.

Reality is coming folks, no matter how much we in our pitiful arrogance want to wish it away. That light at the end of the tunnel, the socialist nirvana of milk and honey for all that some promise, is instead a train bearing the full weight of unintended consequences and our past, current, and future hubris. Don't kid yourself by thinking that you can escape by "going Galt", but there is another track we can switch to and there's still time. It's called reason, and we need everyone who can to speak up now and stop those who would instead accelerate us down the insane track we are on.

Yes we can!