Special interests

 Words from President Obama  No Responses »
Sep 092010
 

A comment I posted after reading Daniel Henninger’s WSJ article, “A President’s Class War : Where on the income scale does Mr. Obama divide the country between us and them?“

There he goes again, talking about “special interests” as though special interests are bad. But all interests are special interests, including those of the President. Especially including those of the current President. There is no single, uniform, common interest. The government should promote the general welfare, but one doesn’t do that by denying the validity of special interests.

Cherish the diversity, Mr. President. It’ll do your outlook on life a world of good. Lose the bitterness, and you won’t have to cling to your failed government controls and regulations.

Tax breaks vs tax rates

 Control freaks, Tax policy  No Responses »
Sep 062010
 

There he goes again. President Obama is willing to give tax breaks to business but he can’t make himself cut tax rates. The poor guy (and those close to him) are like the old Soviet nomenkultura, as described by Michael Voslensky. They just had to have a “monopoly of decision making…on all important (and many unimportant) questions throughout the country.” (I just finished reading the book.)

One in Five

 Term limits  No Responses »
Sep 042010
 

It’s good to learn that people are again thinking about term limits for Congress. (Fox News Poll: 78 Percent Favor Term Limits On Congress) Without that, there is zero chance of cleaning up our economic and political mess.

But there is disturbing news hidden inside this Fox poll: One voter in five gives Congress a thumbs up.

Think about it. You walk down the street, thinking you are safe as long as you keep your wits about you, but lurking about you are people who approve of the job Congress is doing. How can you defend yourself against those numbers?

If it was only one person in a hundred, it wouldn’t be so surprising. Some of these members of Congress have mothers who are going to give approval ratings to their own offspring, no matter what. And these Congresspeople have friends and neighbors who will be loyal to a fault. The same goes for the hordes of staffers who work in their offices, and their mothers and close acquaintances. But that doesn’t account for a whopping twenty-two percent of the population, does it?

So where do these people come from? What can we do to identify them? Is there some sort of registry where we can look up on-line before blundering our way into an environment where they may be waiting in ambush? Are there distinguishing features we can use to tell them apart from the population as a whole? What sort of precautions do we need to take?

The love of learning

 Fourth Amendment, Free press, Limits on government power, Russia  No Responses »
Sep 032010
 

A couple of items in today’s news show that the love of learning has not completely disappeared in today’s society:

1. Vladimir Putin’s police conducted a raid on the offices of the New Times, an opposition magazine in Moscow. It’s part of what are called “investigative actions.” This desire to investigate could inspire a higher degree of intellectual curiosity than has been shown thus far by Barak Obama’s administration, which has been content to do no more than badmouth and marginalize its opposition news organizations.

2. Diana West reports on how back in 2003, Allen West, who is running for Congress in Florida’s 22nd District, fired a pistol near the head of an uncooperative Iraqi in order to get him to share his knowledge about assassination plots and ambushes directed against U.S. troops. He apparently realized that you can’t create an intellectually stimulating environment where you don’t have a free and open exchange of ideas.

SR500 air roaster – first results

 Coffee  No Responses »
Aug 232010
 

DSC 0345-10-08-23-0106

This is what’s left of my 3rd attempt at roasting coffee in my new SR500 air roaster that I got from Sweet Maria’s. I had never tried roasting coffee before. Now I have an idea of what roasters mean when they talk about “first crack” and “second crack.”

For my first batch, last Wednesday evening, I followed the manufacturer’s instructions exactly. The beans ended up a bit on the burnt side and oily on the outside. Whoever said you can’t get dark roasts with an air roaster? You can with this one. The instructions said to wait at least 3 hours before grinding and brewing, so I waited about 3 hours and 4 minutes. It was good, but there was a strange, burnt aftertaste that shouldn’t have been there. Surprisingly to me (though perhaps not to anyone else) that batch got better after it aged a day or so. But it’s all gone now.

I shortened the roasting time for the 2nd batch, and it ended up too light and too uneven. It’s drinkable, but not a favorite. Myra asked what the funny taste was. I haven’t offered her a 2nd cup.

She says I got it right on the 3rd batch (above). I got it by increasing fan speed and cutting the roast time not so much as for the previous batch. But as can be seen, it’s not as even a roast as it ought to be. Some beans are too light in color, and some are perhaps too dark.

Tom at Sweet Maria’s suggests that with the SR500 one should roast smaller batches to get more even roasts. Using the manufacturer’s measure, each batch is a litle more than a quarter-pound. If Tom is right that a 90 gram batch is about right, that means I can divide each one-pound bag of green beans into five equal portions.

At one time I wondered if I really wanted a roaster that couldn’t do more than 1/4 pound at a time, but now I’m glad I got the one I did. If I did bigger batches, it would take me too many days to drink them up and I wouldn’t have the fresh roasted beans which are the whole point of roasting one’s own. 90 gram batches ought to be about right for our household.

I got the 8-pound sampler with the roaster. My first experiments have been on the coffee labelled “Rwanda Gkongoro Nyarusiza”. The cup I had this afternoon had a bit of fruity taste to it. I went back to read Tom’s label on the bag: “…restrained acidity, sweet citrus, rose, tea-like flavors, floral brightness, medium body, dried orange peel.” Well, I can’t make all those specific tastes, but it did have a pleasantly surprising fruitiness that I hadn’t noticed on previous cups, or even on any other coffee.

Wanted: Superman to operate Leviathan

 Limits on government power  No Responses »
Aug 202010
 

The Weekly Standard had a little too much fun with Todd Purdum’s lame defense of President Obama in Vanity Fair. Not that there is anything wrong with Obama-bashing per se, but sometimes it causes the practitioners to take their eye off the ball. Like this time, under the heading, “Excuses, Excuses“:

Todd Purdum explains in Vanity Fair that Washington is “broken.” The presidency is under too much pressure. “The modern presidency … has become a job of such gargantuan size, speed, and complexity as to be all but unrecognizable to most of the previous chief executives,” Purdum writes.

…And there’s not enough time in the day for the president. Well, you’ve heard all this before. It’s the too-big-for-one-person excuse first trotted out decades ago to minimize the stumbling and bumbling of Jimmy Carter. It didn’t boost Carter’s approval rating, nor is it likely to jack up Obama’s. But come to think of it, that excuse has the ring of truth. The presidency was a job too big for Carter—and it may be for Obama as well.

Obama may be too inexperienced, and Carter may have been a malicious fool, but George W. Bush wasn’t exactly Mr. Competent, either. And do we really want a president who can master the monster our government has come? Wouldn’t that require someone of Stalinist powers and Clintonian inclinations? No, the presidency ought to be a job that can be handled by any of hundreds of honest and talented persons in the country.

Instead of using the current situation as an excuse to point out the relative incompetence of President Obama, we should instead be using it to point out that Purdum is right. Government is too “gargantuan” and “complex,” and it needs to be scaled back in size and scope so it doesn’t live or die by whoever is at the top. It needs to be able to function when the top office is occupied by those who are not quite the best and brightest among us.

Authority to compel a plan

 Hammurabi-Handedness, Health care reform, Regulation  No Responses »
Aug 052010
 

My comment on Katherine Hobson’s blog article at the WSJ titled, “Institute for Safe Medication Practices: Drug Shortages ‘Unprecedented’”

Since the author had a chance to talk to this Michael Cohen, I wish she would have asked more questions about this “authority” that he thinks the FDA should have. Who would be compelled to do what? Who is supposed to be responsible to whom for a “plan?” After all, it’s not clear how a “plan” could help with any of the causes that the article lists. There are a whole lot of unanswered questions that need answers before we think about giving the FDA more power; otherwise it’s just another power grab.

Imagine

 Bash the Messenger  No Responses »
Jul 232010
 

In calling for internet censorship, CNN newsreader John Roberts said,

“Imagine what would have happened if we hadn’t taken a look at what happened with Shirley Sherrod and plumbed the depths further and found out that what had been posted on the internet was not in fact reflective of what she said.”

Imagine, he said. But it doesn’t take much imagination at all. There are any number of topics where the MSM have declined to take a close look and “plumb the depths.” That’s how President Obama can get by with some of his wild conspiracy theories, e.g. about how the economic crisis came about.

Think about what might happen if the MSM did investigate ObamaCare or the financial crisis, or the latest bank nationalization act. That’s something that requires a feat of imagination.

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