Latin Lesson from 4H

This weekend, my daughters participated in a 4H dog showing event, and one thing which caused some confusion is that there are "beginner" classes and "novice" classes--the later not being for someone novum or "new," but rather for a fairly advanced intermediate stage.

I think I'm going to gently suggest that the intermediate classes not be labeled as "novice" anymore.....  :^)

BTW, daughter #2 got reserve grand champion in her beginner's group, missing grand champion by just 2 points--she was at 174, the winner was at 175.  Not to brag or anything, but....the dog's early training was by a certain then-out-of-work quality engineer.  :^)

Simian warriors?

WorldNetDaily reports today that apparently some of our enemies are thinking about training monkeys to attack our troops with Kalishnikovs and such--following Stalin's desire to breed super-warriors who were impervious to pain and not terribly caring about the quality of their food.

There are any number of things that are...well....amusing here.   First of all, how exactly do you train a simian intellect to clean his weapon (OK, it's just an AK, but still) without killing himself, and exactly how do you get a simian intellect to figure out who is Taliban and who is a Marine?  I can see this going disastrously wrong for that reason alone!  Can you even reliably load, hold and fire a rifle without fully opposable thumbs?

Stalin's idea is even more hilarious for a simple reason; apes and monkeys generally subsist on a diet of fresh fruits, vegetables, and occasionally fresh meat.  Humans, on the other hand, can subsist for quite a while on basic bread and water.  So what's the closest thing to the ideal soldier?

The human, at least until you consider that leaders tend to catch flak when there are too many grieving widows and mothers out there.

So is the report true?  I'm guessing "doubtful."

Time to gloat

I dare say that today's spy swap of the 10 or so arrested in the United States for a few arrested in Russia demonstrates that yes, indeed, they were guilty of spying. 

I'm still not quite sure why spies are swapped instead of punished, but whatever.

Five whys and modern life

One of the more popular ways of resolving quality issues in manufacturing is called the "five whys" worksheet.  More or less, you start with your problem, and then ask "why did that happen?" up to five times to arrive at root causes on the shop floor, in design, and in quality control.  Inherent in the concept is that the problem will have partial solutions in all three areas, and that the initial "blamestorming" session will not generally get to the root of the problem.  Often, you find that the problem you're trying to solve isn't even your biggest problem.  For example:

Problem; the grass is long.
Why? No one mowed it.
Why? Junior slept the day away instead of mowing the lawn.
Why? Junior is recovering from the plague.
Why? Junior got it from a rat living at his school.
Why? The janitors can't be bothered to take out the garbage.

All too often, we simply blame the one who failed to mow the lawn without investigating the motivations of that person, and as a result, rhetorically speaking, we give Junior a whipping instead of finding a new janitor who will take out the trash.  For example, when bankers are blamed for making bad loans without investigating the incentives that Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the CRA created for them.

If you want good government and a good life, try and figure out who is reacting versus who actually tries to understand a situation.

Good news regarding the big oil spill

Bird rescue groups note only about 400 birds dead and dying with oil on them since the BP well started gushing 5000-50,000 barrels of oil per day.  Now it's not a good thing that 400 birds are suffering or dead, but it is remarkable that this FEW have been killed, even allowing for many not found.  Kudos to BP for their work cleaning this up, and razzies to our federal government for refusing to allow the most efficient means of cleaning up the oil spill to be used.

Why Iran will never win an Olympic Hockey medal

Or, for that matter, why they'll never get a Wal-Mart.  Why so?

They ban mullets.

Yet another reason....

.....that Americans need to pray is the "logic" of Congressman Pete Stark, who believes, apparently, that the national debt is equivalent to the national wealth.  If you doubt that Democrats cease to understand the implications of an accounting spreadsheet once they enter the corridors of power, take a look at the economic logic of this rocket scientist--yes, he is an MIT graduate.

An interesting bit of theology

I was reading in Psalm 37 this morning, and found an interesting phrase in verse 11:

but the meek shall inherit the earth

Yes, we 've read that somewhere else, haven't we? In fact, most of the Beatitudes have a link to something said in the Psalms. And so I wonder why Christ appears to have quoted the Psalms a lot--despite our day's tendency to treat them as "only poetry," it seems that He felt there was a lot of theological meat to them.

Apart from the obvious fact that they are also God's inspired Word, He also doesn't say much about why He quotes them so often. Is it a subtle rebuke to the Sadducees, who didn't recognize the canonicity of anything but the Torah? Is it a rebuke to the Pharisees, who claimed (wrongly) to know the Law, but did not have the heart of God, as David did?

Is it a way of bringing in the heart of God to the discussion among those not of the Pharisees or Sadducees? A way of communicating that the entirety of the Tanach is indeed God's Word? A way of communicating the unity of God's Word, as Pslams are quoted next to Torah, history, and Prophets? A hint for Protestants to come 15 centuries later as to the best way to worship in song?

Or perhaps, a bit of all the above. Whatever He was thinking when He quoted Psalm 37:11 in the Beatitudes, we could do little better, I think, than to read and meditate on a Psalm today.

A bit of fun

My children have been taking care of my neighbor's dog, and as children sometimes do, they lost the key to his house while the dog was locked inside. We called the neighbor about the possibility of finding another key or calling a locksmith, and were surprised to hear our neighbor say "you know, you can open these locked doors with a credit card. Yes, our neighbor basically told us to break into his home.

Even more hilarious; he works at the federal prison here in town.

Dog is fine, and thankfully I'm not writing this from behind bars.

Here's a great scientific investigation

Evidently Michael Mann, fabricator of the infamous hockey stick graph, has been exonerated of the fourth and final charge of academic dishonesty by a group of his peers. What did the investigation consist of?

Glad you asked. According to the Fox article:

So the panel asked Mann five questions, spoke with his boss, and interviewed three other climate scientists. Case closed.

Translation:

Well, we asked him and his buddies a few questions, and they all said he was innocent!

They're going to have to do a little bit more thorough work than this to make me believe they're actually doing due diligence.

Here's the union mentality for you....

....right here. Evidently, the new head of the United Auto Workers spent a lot of time growing up in a bar in Detroit (apparently, schools, parks, and movie theaters were not available to her?), and argues that if someone is smart enough to put a bolt on a car, they're smart enough to be sitting at the table of the board of directors making decisions impacting the entire business.

Now while I'm one who firmly believes that the rank and file often have some great ideas, and that management isn't always comprised of the brightest bulbs in the chandelier, the fact still remains that the guy who does a great job putting lug nuts on an F150 may not in fact have anything resembling a clue about how to run the company. This is especially the case when he belongs to a union that apparently does not understand that the cost of retirement benefits for autoworkers is indeed one of the things which caused the bankruptcies of GM and Chrysler.

Maybe Ms. Estrada spent a little too much time at Leroy's U.S. Star Bar when she was a kid.

This says it all about Washington, DC

21 people are dead in a drug gang shootout in Mexico near the Arizona border, and the response of those running our nation's government is to propose comprehensive immigration reform and sue Arizona for daring to suggest that we ought to be deporting criminal illegal aliens. It is as if on February 15, 1929, the Mayor of Chicago had suggested that what really needed to be done was to reduce the number of regulations on used furniture salesmen.

Happy Canada Day, eh!

Today marks 143 years of Canadian independence, so hoist a cool one and eat a few donuts in honor of our neighbors to the north, eh. Don't try to give birthday spankings, though. If you're lucky, they'll check you into the nearest boards, and if you're not, they'll remember our 234th Independence Day is just three days away and return the favor.

Slight modifications have been made to today's posts in honor of the festivities, eh.

And an awful joke; back in 1867, Canada was going to get its independence, but they didn't have a name for the country. They asked around, and finally an old trapper from Manitoba came with a solution. They would draw letters out of the hat, and that would be the name of the country. Having no better ideas, they agreed, and invited the trapper to pull the letters.

Bands played, flags flew, and finally the trapper came out in a new tuxedo. All Ottawa was silent as he drew the letters oot of da hat;

C, eh

N, eh

D, eh

Here's another gem

....from Paul Greenberg of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a reminder that human evil reminds us that there is indeed something far beyond this world to which we must answer. There are still some educated journalists out there, and Greenberg--in his spot-on imitation of C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters--is certainly one of them, eh. Well done again, Paul.

Say what, eh?

Evidently the CBO has released a report saying that the national debt will reach 62% of GDP this year. OK, let's check this out:

National debt: 13 trillion dollars

GDP: about 14.6 trillion dollars, according to government statistics. (not billion, correction courtesy Pentamom)

Now I don't know what kind of math the CBO is using here, but with the arithmetic I learned, that's not 62%, but rather close to 90%. So what's going on, eh?

My assumption here is that the parameters given to the CBO ignore the portion of the national debt held by the government, which is a patently dishonest way of calculating the load--unless we've got plans in motion to repudiate the portion of the national debt held by government--e.g. the Social Security trust fund.

It's an object lesson; the "nonpartisan" CBO only calculates number using the methods prescribed for it by a clearly partisan Congress and a clearly partisan White House. Pelosi in, Reid out, eh.