Nicholsclan.com : a dimension of mind...

This past week, national pundit-at-large G.W. Bush asserted that the "catastrophic success" of a swift military victory in Iraq helped produce the still-potent insurgency. (reference) Ignoring the lunacy of the implication that if only the military had been more slow and methodical about the invasion that the insurgents would have been more welcoming, I love the phrase "catastrophic success".

Literally, the phrase means that we got what we wanted and it was a disaster. That's a surprisingly accurate description of what occurred. More surprising when you consider that this catastrophe is the cornerstone of the rationale the GOP is using for why G.W. should be re-elected. He got us into this quagmire, we are right where he expected us to be, and dammit, he'll get us out if we leave him in office. After all, he's already "turned the corner."

This is not the American way. I don't care if you are an NFL coach, a military general, or a top corporate executive. If you lead a group to disaster we promptly give you lots of money to go quietly into retirement and insert some other guy for us to follow out. Maybe that's not a bad idea. How much could it possibly cost us? It has to be cheaper than the alternative.

So... you think you like ice cream? Ever said, "Any flavor will do?" Then you may want to postpone any trips to Japan in the immediate future. Why? You really wanna know? Then click here and be sure to click the "NEXT" buttons to see all the flavors.

This explains a disturbing amount about my employer and probably yours as well. That is, unless you're self employed at which point I guess a bit of therapy may be in order.

Care for your Bush-bashing in daily doses?

Ahhhh... nothing starts the day like a randomly priced cup of coffee. You see, every morning I'm in the office I pop down to the snack bar two floors below and fill my monster mug with hot coffee. So far, pretty typical, eh? Then I go to the cashier (it's always one of the same two girls) and I pay. But what I pay seems to range freely from 70 to 90 cents. I paid 86 cents this morning. I've paid 70, 75, 81, 86, 90, and maybe a few others I've since forgotten.

So being scientifically minded, I'm trying to determine whether this is truly random or whether there are other factors. The mug is the same, the product is the same, the cashiers are the same. I've ruled out time of day and day of week which I think covers all the obvious stuff. I'm down to looking at whether I pay more when I'm wearing green shirts, or get a discount if I say "hi".

Maybe they should run a lottery. If I can correctly guess what they would have charged me, then it's free. I'm also wondering what would happen if I asked the first cashier to wait and went to the second to see if I could get a better price. Or maybe I should just go back to bringing my Thermos.

Apparently all the Olympic events are not televised. Do the math, this is 10 per athlete! 20 if we assume they are pairing up. What happened to abstinence before the big game?

My company is soooo cheap...

Go on, bite! Ask, "How cheap is it?"

My company is so cheap I have to share a network connection with the guy in the next office. Really! It's been going on for months. He's a consultant and is only here "temporarily" (to the extent that 5 months is temporary). They said he doesn't need a network drop, so they won't pay to have the one in his office activated.

Now the guy tells me he's leaving, and I'm pumped! But that's wrong. I really like the guy. But at a deep emotional level I just want my own damn network connection. It doesn't seem like so very much to ask.

Here's a story you won't see Anheiser Busch using in their ads anytime soon. I guess this wasn't your average bear.

If you have a little time to kill, spend it here. This is a very interesting and mostly non-partisan view of how facts get spun creatively to politicians' advantage. Now I'm sure most of the readers here are smart enough to have already figured most of these out for yourself, but the scary part is that lots of those other door knobs out there are clueless - and they still get to vote.

So a couple of the girls at work corner me this morning and ask me what "gingham" means. I confessed upfront to being a little fuzzy, but offered that I thought it was some sort of light material, typically with a pattern.

They informed me that it was a checked pattern, often found on material, but the pattern was what was "gingham". They then went on to explain that I was being recorded in their survey of men who do and don't know what gingham is.

Apparently there are three buckets:

Those who know (damn few apparently)

Those who think they know but are, in fact, as wrong about this as they are about everything and are the reason women think men are dumber than table legs in the first place (I got put here)

Those who admit to not knowing but rationalize their ignorance by claiming it's useless information anyway (these are the same guys who can usually list all 3,264 sponsors of any given NASCAR driver).

So hanging my head in shame I slink back to my cubicle and seek solace in a dictionary. It turns out gingham is very specifically a yarn-dyed woven cotton fabric. The typical pattern is just the natural result of weaving different colored threads, but ginghams can be in solid colors. It's all how you dye it.

So while I still wasn't correct either, I'm taking minor pride in bringing down the list-making women. And yes, I recognize that this is also the sort of behavior which causes women to think men are just stupid... but hey, I'm a guy. I can't help it.

Sometimes you find things enroute to seeking other things. Last night was one of those times. I ran across a $25 Savings Bond which my great-grandparents had given me as a birth present in 1961. I had pretty much forgotten the bond even existed, but finding it got me to wondering what it might be worth.

Of course there is a web site which will tell you the current and future value of savings bonds. So I get there and find that this particular bond stopped earning interest altogether after 40 years. Unfortunately for me, that was a few years ago. But the good news is that the $25 is now worth $201 and change.

That seemed pretty cool. But after a fashion, it just got me to wondering again. An 8x return seems pretty good, but there's 40-odd years of inflation baked in there as well. What would $201 today be worth in 1961 dollars? Turns out it's only about $35, which sounds paltry. But this was a time when gas was a quarter/gallon and you could buy a decent house for under $20k. It might be more useful to go the other way. The bond originally cost $18 to purchase in 1961. That $18 today is about $101.

So the good news is that my ancestors weren't cheap. That's a substantive gift. The bad news is that in 40 years I only doubled the money. Not too exciting from a financial perspective, but then again, a damn sight better than the stock market has done this year!

Hey, thanks Mom!!

And the G.W. gem of the day is...

Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.

Said by our Quayle-esque leader on Thursday at a signing ceremony for a $417 billion military spending bill.

And as long as I'm picking on him, why haven't we launched invasions of Iran and Sudan? Iran has a verifiable nuclear program exceeding any capability even suspected in Iraq. And Sudan has certainly demonstrated abuse of it's own people to rival Saddam's worst days. Based on our stated strategy of pre-emption, don't we have to go to Iran? And if the now touted reason for going to Baghdad (freeing those oppressed people) is valid, then shouldn't we be going into Sudan as well? What are we waiting for? At the very least shouldn't the Administration be justifying why we aren't going in? Given our extant policy, doesn't the burden of proof shift around that way? Or maybe I'm just guilty of actually listening to what the Bushies say and thinking the words are meaningful. Silly me...

It's been awhile since I waxed political, however, the following Charlie Reese column was sent by a friend, and I just had to share. There's still time to get some summer reading in.

Charley Reese:
Books keep pouring off the presses on the subject of why George W. Bush should not be re-elected. I got four in my mailbox recently. Bush might be the biggest boon to book publishing since Harry Potter.

The most serious of the four books is The Bubble of American Supremacy, by George Soros. The most superficial is Bush Must Go, by TV personality Bill Press. The most left-wing is The Book on Bush: How George W. (Mis)leads America, by Eric Alterman and Mark Green. It is also the most tedious. My God, but progressive writers do need a sense of humor. The best of the bunch by far is The Bush Betrayal, by one of my favorite writers, James Bovard. Bovard is a scrupulously accurate researcher of facts. His philosophical framework is the same as that of Thomas Jefferson.

Press, Alterman and Green are mad at Bush for being too far to the right for their socialist tastes. Bovard points out Bush's betrayal of conservative and libertarian principles. Though far more leftist than Bovard, Soros also points out Bush's betrayal of the principles of an open society. Bovard, however, in addition to being a fine writer, has not allowed the mess in Washington to plunge him into pessimism. He can still see the humor in much of the mayhem, goofiness and outright stupidity that characterizes so much of government bureaucracy.

His tactic is to quote Bush or Bush's step-and-fetchers and then simply point out the great gap between what Bush and his people say and what the facts are. These gaps are so many and so deep that one can fairly conclude that nothing Bush ever says should be taken at face value. Like Bovard, I deeply resent a phony conservative politician who talks one way and acts exactly the opposite. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney might fairly be called reactionaries, but they are not conservatives in the traditional sense of that word.

Being a big spender, a despoiler of the environment, a fearmonger, an ally-alienator, a reckless warmonger and an imperialist does not qualify for the title "conservative." Practicing secrecy and deception and displaying an open contempt for the Constitution and international law are likewise not the characteristics of a conservative. As Bovard says: "Dying for Bush's lies should not be considered a lofty cause. ... Bush is still expecting to be cheered and revered for his courage in 'making a tough decision.' It is as if the more Americans who die for Bush's folly, the more undeniable his greatness becomes."

Bovard's suggestion, in case we are misfortunate enough to have Bush for four more years, is to greet his grandiose delusions with catcalls and laughter. Bush, he says, is as qualified to talk about freedom as Bill Clinton is to talk about chastity.

An enormous factual database exists documenting the folly of the Bush administration not only in these books but in others that have been published. Clearly the job of president is over Bush's head. He has proven himself to be dangerously incompetent. He has surrounded himself with ideologues totally disconnected from reality. The Pentagon's Paul Wolfowitz, considered the architect of the Iraq War, showed in recent testimony before Congress that he had no idea how many American lives had been lost. So much for this administration's concern for the troops.

Bush's re-election depends entirely on willful ignorance. He might well ride the sea of ignorance right back into the White House. It would not be the first time Americans have chosen the demagogue over the competent. But if you intend to vote for Bush, you should at least read the record and not depend on the Republican propaganda machine. The current Republican Party's almost total reliance on character assassination, guilt by association and outright distortions of the truth remind one of what was going on in the 1930s in Europe.

Greetings from somewhere over South America. It's been a grueling 30 hours in Argentina, so it's time to go home.

One final high note of the trip was dinner last night. We went to a highly recommended steak house called La Cabana Las Lilas. Loosely translated, they tell me it means "The Purple Farm House". That sounds all well and good, but it's a converted tannery on the water front in downtown Buenos Aries. And it ain't purple. Nonetheless, the food is out of this world. Probably worth the trip all by itself. The appetizers included lots of different kinds of breads and sauces along with roasted veggies. We then had something called proveletta which is a local favorite. It amounts to grilled provolone cheese coated with olive oil and spices. It's crunchy on the outside and melted in the middle. It's quite yummy, but when I said I could probably make this at home I was cautioned that it's very hard to do because you never get a hot enough fire. That sounds like a challenge, so should any of you get invited to dinner you may want to bring a fire extinguisher, or at least a current copy of your medical insurance card. Then they brought the meat. Big angry hunks of very rare lightly seasoned free range beef. Melts in your mouth. I'm hungry again just thinking about it.

And hungry's not a good thing to be right now as they are about to serve dinner on the airplane. It's just not going to be the same.

At first blush, Argentina reminds you a lot of Spain, just with more cows. Probably less cows than India, but they are put to more productive use. Cows are big here. As you walk down the street people are trying to drag you into stores for one of two purposes. They either want you to wear cows or eat them. You can get most anything in leather here from bikinis to saddles. Curiously, they are sold in the same shops. That frightened me a bit and I was afraid to ask too many questions.

We also saw a whole lot of really really dead and really really rich guys. There is a cemetery which is walking distance from here which is really cool in a "Tales from the Crypt" sort of way. It's laid out like a tiny village with little marble house lined streets. Each mausoleum has an alter and an uncomfortable number or caskets in it. And yes, often you can see the caskets. Eva Peron (Evita) was there, but she didn't look much like Madonna. Very weird.

Oh, and I'm even for all the potatoes I didn't eat in Ireland. I sort of messed up my lunch order at the cafe` and wound up having potato salad followed by a huge baked potato. (Are all you Atkins dieters jealous?) In my limited defense, it really sounded much different from that on the menu. Curiously the potato salad was served as a bowl of diced potatoes with a layer of onions, a few hard boiled eggs on top of that and a big dollop of dressing to finish it off. I wasn't even entirely sure what it was until I mixed it up. Tonight I think I'm just ordering the slab of beef. I've had enough starch for the day.

I'm alive and well in Argentina. Don't cry for me...

I'm off now to have a look about and find more blog fodder. Stay tuned...

Ahhh... there's nothing quite like business class. Except maybe first class, but let's take one upgrade at a time. You see, I splurged and spent some miles on a comfy plane ride. It's not like that cheap nickel & dime outfit I work for would have paid for this.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to have a free drink and help the 70 year old lady sitting next to me fill out her customs forms. It seems her son is sending her to Buenos Aires for her birthday. And I only mention that to get my Mom's hopes unreasonably high. But she's got a few years yet, maybe she'll forget...

Hey, if fishing is a sport then why not this? I'm feeling more athletic already. Not to mention really looking forward to my workout.