Say what?

If you want a great reason to enact revenue tariffs to rein in the abuses of international shipping, the sad case of the collision of the container ship Dali ought to give you a good one.  It appears that the ship had been having major electrical issues for a while, but the owners decided to go to sea anyways.   

Interestingly, the ship has redundant power generation capacity with four diesel generators and a bow thruster, so what apparently went on is that whatever electronics control those generators had difficulties.  Redundant, but not redundant enough, and it suggests that ship safety needs to go a step closer to what we're trying to do with airliner safety--but maybe failing there with Boeing these days, of course.  

(sad to say, we have some suggestion that the intestinal fortitude of some regulators and inspectors needs an upgrade as well....from personal experience doing quality and reliability work, it can be hard to be the guy saying "no" to people who are several pay grades above you)

On the light side, I'd suggest sending the Dali to the Kerch strait and see if it can do the same trick again.  Slava Ukraini!

Good luck with that

Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador says that if "his conditions are met", he'll stop illegal immigration.  Those conditions?  Amnesty for illegals here, $20 billion in annual subsidies, and an end to sanctions against Venezuela and Cuba.  Of course, left unsaid is that if ten or twenty million illegals get green cards, that's going to put the demand to leave Mexico through the roof.  Lopez Obrador can more more stop illegal immigration to the U.S. than he can control the cartels that are destroying his country, if even he wants to.

My counter-proposal would be continued sanctions against the countries that have stolen billions of dollars in assets from U.S. citizens and companies, no annual subsidies, and a 5% revenue tariff on all goods coming from Mexico, with the funds obtained to be used to install and maintain a robust border wall and drug interdiction, along with robust punishment of the coyotes who are driving the illegal immigrant and drug trades while raping countless thousands of illegal immigrants in the process.

Let's check it out

After a terrorist attack in Moscow, it was somewhat natural at this point to suspect someone from Ukraine, but of course, the accused gets to talk back, and boy howdy,  does Mykhailo Podolyak, speaker for President Zelensky, lay it out.  If his sources are correct, basically every security system was turned off to allow this to happen.

One thing Mr. Podolyak didn't mention; the building had sprinklers, but went up in flames as if the pipes were filled with oil.  As with so much out of Moscow, I smell a rat here.  Hopefully the Russian people catch on to the particular rat I'm thinking about and stomp him.

This one should get some "corrective action"

In Livonia, Michigan, a 12 year old boy ordered a "virgin daiquiri", but was served the alcoholic version instead.  Despite the fact that the young man only drank part of it, he apparently woke up with a splitting hangover.  How so?  Well, the daiquiri is one of many sweetened drinks with a typical alcohol content below 20% that does not "burn" as it goes down.  

I can see a couple of corrective actions here, one for the family, and a few for the restaurant.  For the family, it's probably a good idea to not order the "virgin" type of drink, because somebody back in the bar is going to eventually get confused and include the booze.

For the restaurant, there are two major corrective actions.  First of all, give the drink another name so the wait-staff doesn't confuse it with the alcoholic version, and second, take a very close look at how strong the bartenders are making them.  To get to the level of excessive drinking that would cause a hangover, a 75-100 lb boy of that age would need 3-4 shots of rum in the drink.  Given that the lad didn't drink the whole thing, that means most likely 5 shots of rum  (or more) was in the drink, which is over twice the strength of a standard daiquiri.

And that means that the "Outhouse Steakback" was squandering a fair amount of money on extra rum (at least if it wasn't total rotgut stuff), and was also risking having patrons hitting the roads with a couple of sheets to the wind.  Four to five drinks gets a 210 lb man (like myself) to the legal limit for driving, and....let's be honest....the daiquiri is very often a woman's drink.  A woman of 140 lbs is going to be at about twice the legal limit with that dose of alcohol.

I'm all for the responsible use of alcohol, but quite frankly, this isn't it.  Hopefully the family and the restaurant learn their lessons before someone gets seriously hurt.  Getting to know lawyers (and the police) on a professional basis is no fun.

Happy Spring

My second daughter made sure that she sang this song when she was visiting Honduras, and saw a large flock of the winged vermin in a church square, much to the horror of her boyfriend.  Her boyfriend's father, when told, noted that he had thought he was usually the weird one in the room....

Happy Spring!

 

Side note; this podcast/videocast says a lot of things about how young women are all too often "aging like milk."  If you've got teen daughters, they might be blessed by this.  I've personally seen some putting way too much effort into their appearance this way.

A thought on "trans rights"

As a former competitive runner, the things that occurred to me first regarding "trans" competitors in women's sport are:

• That larger, stronger men will take opportunities and podium places away from women.  Only about 2-3% of the performance differences between men and women are due to testosterone; about 10-30% difference remains.
• That larger, stronger men will injure female competitors due to size & strength.
• That people who are not trans at all will use the "opened" locker rooms to harass and violate female competitors.
• That spectators will not buy tickets to, in effect, watch "men in drag".  Part of the attraction of women's sports is that it is a woman doing the sport, after all.

Expending on the third point, it strikes me that when MTF trans people in various stages of transition are allowed into women's locker rooms--or FTM trans people in men's locker rooms--what is implicitly being told to the "cisgender" residents of those locker rooms is that they no longer have a right to decide which naked individuals of the opposite gender they might see, and that they also no longer have a right to decide which individuals of the opposite gender might see them naked.

Put differently, "trans" activists are in effect telling us that if the perpetrator is trans, "flashing" or being a "peeping tom" is no longer a crime if the crime occurs in a bathroom or locker room.  One might wonder whether every flasher or peeping tom whose name is rightly on Megan's List ought to have his crime downgraded to "mere" indecent exposure if this precedent holds.

Makes sense to me

As I contemplate the firing of head basketball coach Juwan Howard at that school in Ann Arbor, I am compelled to remember the inauspicious way he started his tenure; by suggesting that the school re-hang banners that were taken down because the school had been forced to vacate all of its wins because their athletes were taking payments from boosters.

Hail to the Cheaters, I guess.  But more seriously, Howard's tenure at Michigan was a mess, and he threw away a golden chance to rebuild their basketball program.  The alumni network and support of fans at Michigan has few rivals in the NCAA, and hence it really takes some doing to end up 8-24.  

A Dying Nation?

Apparently, the number of disabled males in Russia has risen by over half a million men, including 290 thousand men of age 18-30.  Now part of this could be ordinary industrial accidents, and part of it could be young men deliberately injuring themselves to avoid military service, but all in all, it indicates that (yikes) Ukrainian estimates of dead and maimed Russian soldiers are somewhat conservative.  

Definition of beauty

 The lovely lady above is Faye Schulman, a Jewish member of the Resistance against the Nazis during World War Two.  She apparently survived the war (with a bullet wound) and had a loving family with children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.  Want to learn more?  See here. 

I love the camoflage of the fur coat she's wearing, and am personally curious about how she apparently got hold of a Thompson submachine gun.  Might have been a cast-off from the Red Army, which didn't like them much.

Definition of Chutzpah

Christine Blasey Ford, having seen all of her eyewitnesses deny her version of events, and having been found to have lied about a fear of flying under oath, and having been found to have lied about why her house has two front doors, writes a book in which she claims that Justice Brett Kavanaugh is not an honest person.  

Although obviously Anita Hill got away with about the same thing regarding Justice Thomas, I would still hesitate to accuse one of the nation's most eminent lawyers of such things when my own accusations against them had been thoroughly thrashed on national TV.  It would seem to be a quick way to end up on the left side of the courtroom in a civil or criminal libel action.

An insider speaks up

Now as a Spartan, I should either hate Nick Saban because he took his talents away from East Lansing, or perhaps I should note that the man could really have been successful if he'd stayed, but this interview by CNN is something I really like to see.  More or less, though Saban can be said to have benefited from a lot of the power politics of college football, he enunciates a traditional view of college athletics and sportsball, that it's not just about winning games, but also about developing young men into functional adults.

Lots of work to do there to achieve that, as the current system seems to be weighted on the side of big money programs more than it ever has been.  We won't be able to go back to true amateurism, and haven't been there in my lifetime, really, but we can hopefully get away from a system that all too often sends young men and women out into the world without a meaningful degree, but with Cadillac tastes and horrendously sinful habits from the experience of college sportsball.  

Sad, but true

The newspaper of record notes that it is hard for Hamas fighters to abstain from raping infidels during Ramadan.   OK, this is technically a joke, but after last October 7, they all deserve it richly, and it reminds me of something I learned about T.E. Lawrence (a.k.a. "Lawrence of Arabia") after watching the epic movie; one of the things he noticed and experienced is that both Ottoman and Arab men were prone to homosexual activity, just as American soldiers and Marines in Afghanistan noticed a century later....

I hate to say it, but I'm seeing a pattern here.

A modest proposal for dealing with "trans" athletes in women's sports

The sad reality is that it would still take up a roster spot that ought to be held by a woman, but the NHL tradition of the "enforcer" comes to mind when contemplating "trans-women" participating in womens' soccer, basketball, hockey, and the like.  The "enforcer", ideally a starting safety for the football team or a power forward, would stay on the JV team unless the varsity team was playing against a team with a trans player, and would only take the pitch/court when a "trans" player was out there.  His only job would be to stymie and isolate the trans player so that the girls could actually play.  

And yes, if the trans person hurt one of the ladies, the enforcer might be called upon to commit a couple of hard fouls or hard picks.  

Some study on "trans" issues

I do not have the time to go through all the footnotes and track down all of the references this paper refers to, but it's a very interesting summary of the state of transgender "medicine".  One interesting thing I learned is that a lot of the "innovators" in this area have some very troubling connections, including the fact that after performing an early sex reassignment surgery, Dr. Erwin Gohrbandt did pioneering, and criminal, hypothermia work.

In Dachau.

All in all, the sense I get from reading this is that first of all, those "doctors" engaged in this enterprise are not paying nearly enough attention to the likelihood that "trans" identity is merely a symptom of deeper underlying mental health problems.  Going a bit more broadly, I'm not sure that a  lot of mental health practicioners understand this, either. 

Other observations; the document has a fair number of reports from transition "doctors" of detransitioning, which indicates that the real numbers for regret are probably a lot higher than advocates of transition surgeries would like to admit.  The document also has a fair amount of evidence that these "doctors" are doing some "interesting" things to get things paid for by insurance (i.e. insurance fraud), that many practicioners are rubber stamping requests for surgery on minors, that many practicioners are fudging required wait times, and a lot more.

Looks like my comments about the state of psychology were, if anything, very optimistic and over-gracious to a broader scope of medical professionals, and they need to grasp a very basic principle;body parts in the specimen bag do not grow back, and they do not reattach.  So you want to make for darned sure that it's the right path before you amputate.

Imbecilical moments in marketing

Doritos, apparently having learned nothing from the Dylan Mulvaney/Bug Light fiasco, has hired (and gratefully fired) a trans "influencer" who has admitted in public to tendencies of pedophilia.  And who, quite frankly, has a serious case of the uglies by any (male or female) standard.

Weird me, I'd thought that it's better to do marketing with people whose lives one might like to emulate, and I would at least hope that the proportion of hideously ugly pedophiles who are willing to admit that in public is small.  

The bright side of this is that hopefully Doritos is helping traditional Spanish food culture by showing their product to be morally, as well as nutritionally, bankrupt.

A dish for Festa Della Donna; Chili Verde

    In preparation for the Festa Della Donna, I made some carne asada with a dollop of chili verde last weekend.  Let's just say it wasn't a good weekend for weight loss, and both recipes are courtesy of a coworker of mine from Sonora state.  ("Il Dioses de la carne")

The carne asada was straightforward; take chuck steak sliced 1/2-3/4" thick, marinate with salt & pepper and lime juice for about a day prior to cooking.  Grill over a smoky mesquite fire until it's done to your taste, allow to rest 10 minutes, slice, and serve.

The chili verde also involves the grill.  Take 2-4 medium tomatillos, 2 jalapeno or serrano peppers (remove seeds unless you're a glutton for punishment), half an onion, and half a bulb of garlic.  Throw vegetables on a grill, grill until lightly charred, and then blend them together with half a tsp of salt.  Enjoy the burn on your lips and in your eyes.

On the light side, with two four daughters now married, we realized that if we help our sons-in-law celebrate Festa Della Donna correctly, we could soon be celebrating Festa Della Nonna (grandmother's festival).

Festa Della Donna

Or, as it's called far less elegantly in English, "International Women's Day".  Now I'm going to say something you might not have expected; despite the apparent feminism of the day, I'm thinking that this March 8, we'd do well to celebrate it.  Let's buy the ladies in our life a mimosa (either the flower or the drink or both, really), cheer for womens' sports (Will Thomas, you're not invited), and celebrate real femininity.

And guys, don't worry about the imbalance--Pi Day and Festa Bistecca e Pompino (again using Italian for obvious reasons) are coming up on the 14th.  Or maybe, just maybe, celebrating real feminity is a way to encourage the belle donne in our lives to celebrate real masculinity.