Turkey Time Again

(Updating last year's Thanksgiving post, because I think it is pretty funny and because, well, I can!)

The annual pardoning of the White House turkey has occurred. The birds, named May and Flower were given formal presidential pardons, a tradition started in 1947 by Harry S Truman. The new twist for this year: the guests of honor were driven to the ceremony in a flex-fuel truck. Yeesh. But they are on their way to Disney World to live out their lives in Disneyesque splendor. Since Thanksgiving is upon us, we here at Blue Crab Boulevard thought it would be a good idea to explore the varieties of turkeys available this year. Most people will eat domestic turkey:

Some will have an intrepid hunter in the family and get to eat some wild turkey: 

Some purists will insist on heritage turkeys, the almost forgotten breeds that reputedly taste better than the modern domestic turkey: 

Some will be unlucky enough to be served a tofu turkey:

If you are unlucky and get the tofu bird, we recommend a healthy serving of the other Wild Turkey to help kill the taste.

Regardless, have a very happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Note: Sadly, I am going to be yielding to tradition and actually will be roasting a turkey tomorrow. But maybe next year will have to be the traditional ham and oysters!

In the Virginia story, recounted yesterday by Bush, Capt. John Woodlief, a survivor of the Jamestown settlement's "starving time" who had returned to England, set sail from Bristol with 37 other settlers on the good ship Margaret to seek their fortune in the New World. After a violent storm blew them off course, they waded ashore Dec. 4, 1619 at what is now Berkeley Plantation. They opened their orders from their backers, which stated that they were to drop to their knees immediately and give thanks. Their landing date was to "be yearly and perpetually keept holy as a day of Thanksgiving to Almighty God."

No one knows if they had anything other than old ship rations to eat. Historians surmise that they might have supped on roasted oysters and Virginia ham. The settlers didn't stick around long enough to write it down or develop a tradition: They were wiped out in a Powhatan Indian uprising in 1622. From there, the Virginia Thanksgiving story faded from view, save for a handful of die-hard groups that have been hosting a celebration at Berkeley for decades.

Well, except for the fact that they just got there and didn't have time to kill a pig, much less cure a ham. But, heck, even if they are making the whole thing up, it's one more non-traditional tradition!

Follow The Flock

Maggie Gallagher, writing at Real Clear Politics, also notices the UNAIDS sudden correction - downward - of worldwide AIDS numbers. She also notices the creepy fealty that is being paid to the UN - despite evidence like this of that organization's basic unreliability. She wonders at it all.

The old, false U.N. numbers were the result of an obviously bad methodology, especially in India; prevalence rates among women in urban clinics were imputed to the population as a whole, thereby oversampling AIDS-prone prostitutes, addicts and people with multiple sexual partners.

So why did the U.N. scientists go with the bad data? According to professor Chin, U.N. officials were reluctant to admit fewer people were infected because that might translate into less funding to fight AIDS, which continues to devastate millions worldwide.

They fudged the data in order to inspire the masses to good actions, in other words.

As far as I can tell, the United Nations is like just about any other large bureaucratic institution — a mixed body of people and ideals that does some good and is at least as susceptible to corruption as any other human thing. But in Europe, faith in the United Nations is reaching biblical proportions.

Which is why when the U.N. secretary-general reaches for the language of science to establish an absolute truth (global warming is a human-caused catastrophe) grounded in an obvious falsehood ("we all agree"), I find it creepy.

The statements have the form of scientific assertions, but they are clothed in a spirit of dogmatic certainty that is alien to the culture of scientific endeavor. A climate science that cannot predict the weather a month from now may have strong evidence that global warming exists, is human caused and will be a catastrophe, but it cannot possibly have yet produced a proof about which "all agree."

The true believers mouth - by rote - the delivered wisdom of the Al Gores of the world. (Despite the fact that his movie has been proven to be wrong in court and despite his obvious economic interest in the acceptance of his theories.) They loudly proclaim that anyone who raises a question "doesn't understand the science." The vast majority of the true believers could not explain how the computers they use work or how energy is delivered to their homes. They do not understand how cell phones work or how a fiber-optic cable conducts data. They do not understand the technology that makes their lives so comfortable, but they claim to completely understand the science of a vast global system of almost infinite complexity so thoroughly that they can predict the precise global temperature at 8 PM on a Tuesday in May 40 years hence.

Anyone else see the problem here?

This belief is not science. It is a faith, no, not even that. It is dogma, a prescribed doctrine delivered and learned by rote with no real understanding. Are there scientists who firmly believe in AGW? Certainly. Are there equally reputable scientists who do not? Yes there are. That is how science works. It is not forced into compliance with the faith. Or hasn't been since the Inquisition went into retirement. More and more, however, the true believers are looking more and more like Torquemada, aren't they?

There is blind acceptance of the "wisdom" of the United Nations on global warming. Despite repeated evidence of massive corruption, total ineptitude, fraud and manipulative behavior on the part of that organization. That is not even dogma. That descends into cult-like behavior. That is willful blindness to all of the evidence that this is an organization not to be trusted at its word. Willful blindness leads people into very, very bad decisions.

I have linked, repeatedly, to articles from all over that describe the obscenities being done to the earth in the name of "fixing" global warming. Rainforests incinerated, orangutans eradicated, humans put on glorified hamster wheels. All done in the name of saving the earth. It is not time to end the debate. It is time to have an intelligent one not ruled by a twisted dogma delivered by a false priest and facilitated through blind acceptance of delivered wisdom from a corrupt organization.

Tone Deafness

Joe Klein, one of the nutroots all-time favorite media chew toys, continues to try to warn Democrats that they are following the charge to the left at their own electoral peril. (Which is why he is the favorite chew toy.) His latest column warns that the Democrats are sending bad signals to the voters on two important issues: Iraq and the FISA/wiretapping issue.

….. Senator Carl Levin's proposal for a gradual troop withdrawal, starting now, is the right policy. Various Bush Administration officials — though none in the White House — have told me that a troop withdrawal is the best leverage we have for shoving the Iraqis into a national-reconciliation deal. But Levin made troop withdrawal a condition for continued funding of the war, which is a kamikaze mission. The bill couldn't muster the votes necessary to overcome a filibuster, much less the inevitable Bush veto. Indeed, with Iraq calmer for the moment, Democrats probably have fewer votes for ending the war than they did last spring. And their continued indulgence in these futile, symbolic gestures conveys a sense of weakness and incompetence. Whatever political value these votes once had — getting Republicans on the record in favor of continuing the war — has long since dissipated and may actually work against the Democrats if the progress in Iraq continues.

The Democratic strategy on the FISA legislation in the House is equally foolish. There is broad, bipartisan agreement on how to legalize the surveillance of phone calls and emails of foreign intelligence targets. The basic principle is this: if a suspicious pattern of calls from a terrorist suspect to a U.S. citizen is found, a FISA court warrant is necessary to monitor those communications. But to safeguard against civil-liberty abuses, all records of clearly nontargeted Americans who receive emails or phone calls from foreign suspects would be, in effect, erased. Unfortunately, Speaker Nancy Pelosi quashed the House Intelligence Committee's bipartisan effort and supported a Democratic bill that — Limbaugh is salivating — would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target's calls to be approved by the FISA court, an institution founded to protect the rights of U.S. citizens only. In the lethal shorthand of political advertising, it would give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans. That is well beyond stupid.

Well, yeah. It is. It will be a club used with great effect in the upcoming elections. Take that to the bank. Klein is already being attacked by the usual suspects and has responded on his Swampland blog.

4. This is all a partisan waste of time, fodder for lawyers and civil liberties extremists. There is broad bipartisan agreement on the following principles:
–It is necessary to monitor the communications of foreign terrorist suspects.
–It is necessary to get a FISA warrant to monitor the communications of any U.S. citizen or resident alien who engages in suspicious exchanges with a foreign terrorist target.
–It is necessary to protect the identities of innocent U.S. citizens or resident aliens who are swept up in the data-mining of foreign terrorists' communications.

You may disagree with those principles. I don't. Most members of Congress don't. Most people, I dare say, wouldn't if they were interested enough to listen to the arguments. It is essential to pass a bill that combines legitimate national security and civil liberties concerns–but that isn't happening because of blind, stupid partisan politics.

Klein is vilified by the left because he simply will not swear fealty to their agenda. Therefore, he is treated as an apostate. But he is talking sense here. Thankfully, the nutroots will do their level best to shout him down and force their direction on the Democrats. Thereby providing Republicans with ample clubs with which to tenderize their opponents. Welcome to this week's episode, Joe:

The Tricky Part

Glenn Reynolds points out quite clearly what the choices the Supreme Court has when it decides the Washington, DC gun ban case next year. Essentially, the three choices the court has only has one that most gun owners would find acceptable. The other two are ugly indeed.

* It can find that the Second Amendment doesn't really do anything - that it's merely a relic of an older era. But that's a rather dangerous approach: What other parts of the Constitution might be considered relics? And can a judicial approach that leaves a tenth of the Bill of Rights meaningless possibly be sound?

* It can find that the Second Amendment doesn't grant individual rights, but only protects the right of states to arm their militias (or "state armies," as some gun-control advocates put it). This would make the DC case go away, but at some cost: If states have a constitutional right, as against the federal government, to arm their militias as they see fit, then states that don't like federal gun-control laws could just enroll every law-abiding citizen in the state militia and authorize those citizens to possess machine guns, tanks and other military gear…..

….* Finally, the court can find - in accordance with the views of law professors as diverse as Harvard's Laurence Tribe and, well, me - that the Second Amendment supports an individual right on the part of law-abiding citizens to possess firearms of the sort that are in ordinary use. As with other rights, such as freedom of speech, this is subject to reasonable regulation that stops well short of a ban.

In many ways, the last option is not much more than leaving things pretty much as they are but will affirm the Second Amendment as an individual right. If the court picks the first option, I rather suspect there will be more than a little backlash by the electorate. Overturning the bill of rights by judicial fiat would be a disaster for this nation. (I hope they are not even considering anything like that, by the way.)

Let Them Eat Rat Cheese

Normally, I pay as little attention as possible to Heather Mills, the annoying woman who married Paul McCartney. But she kind of went off the deep end the other day, being quoted as saying: "There are many other kinds of milk available. Why don't we try drinking rats' milk and dogs' milk?" Was it an attempt at a joke? Well, it isn't really very funny and she has been acting more than a bit odd lately. Who knows? But the Telegraph has more than a bit of fun with it today. They point out that the last high-profile mention of rat's milk was in the cartoon television series The Simpsons.

Heather Mills McCartney has become the most high profile ambassador for rats' milk since Springfield mobster Fat Tony tried to feed it to Bart Simpson and his classmates.

In that episode of The Simpsons, Fat Tony's underhanded plan was foiled after it was uncovered by Homer.

They then point to yet another elaborate hoax website, The Federation of Rodent Cheesemakers. Somebody with far too much time on their hands has come up with a 'history' of rat cheesemaking and and offer to sell said cheese - except that health codes prohibit them from actually shipping the cheese - so they offer to eat it for you.

Please note that due to health and safety restrictions this cheese cannot be shipped out. However, we will eat the cheese for you and send you a personalised email describing the entire gastronomic experience in lavish detail.

My guess is that this is some artist's bit of web-based performance art. The company that put the site together works with quite a few artists.

Making A Wrong A Right

The US Army has already tepped in to the case of a wounded soldier who was asked to return a portion of his enlistment bonus (original post here.) Jordan Fox will NOT have to return any of that money. The wording from the Army spokesman would appear to confirm that what I surmised was correct. This is a case of an overzealous REMF bean counter and the Army is going to rectify this as soon as possible.

KDKA contacted the Pentagon. Investigators there took a look. A military spokesman told KDKA's Marty Griffin the bill sent to Fox was a mistake.

Griffin asked Army Spokesperson Major Nathan Banks if the government was taking on Fox's case.

Banks said via phone, "We are. We are … definitely working it out. We have seen where the problems have been made, the system, and we're just making - you know, give us the opportunity to make a wrong a right."

Major Banks says Fox will not have to pay back his bonus. Fox says "fine," but he wants more.

"Hopefully this will turn into change for not only me but many other soldiers that have lost limbs, you know, become permanently deaf," he said. "I hope to see a change for everybody."

The Pentagon will not comment on allegations that thousands of other soldiers just sent home from Iraq and other invasions, including Afghanistan, will not receive these sorts of bills. They cannot comment on those cases.

I'd point out, again, that there is one report and the 'allegations' of thousands is really supposition. Extrapolating a trend from one data point is, frankly, stupid. We do not know at what level this error in judgment was made, but I would not be surprised if it was at the company level. (My son ran into company level pay problems that took a long time to get sorted out - and an appeal up the chain of command to get the company-level bean counter off of top dead center.)

I'm sure the Army will rectify this - and let the bean counters who caused the problem know exactly how much they appreciate the black eye given to the military.

The Tragedy Of The Commons

John Stossel points out a little known bit of history about the Pilgrims and Thanksgiving. The colony nearly starved in the beginning because they tried to live communally. They only began to thrive when each family began tending their own crops for their own good.

When the Pilgrims first settled the Plymouth Colony, they organized their farm economy along communal lines. The goal was to share everything equally, work and produce.

They nearly all starved.

Why? When people can get the same return with a small amount of effort as with a large amount, most people will make little effort. Plymouth settlers faked illness rather than working the common property. Some even stole, despite their Puritan convictions. Total production was too meager to support the population, and famine resulted. Some ate rats, dogs, horses and cats. This went on for two years.

"So as it well appeared that famine must still ensue the next year also, if not some way prevented," wrote Gov. William Bradford in his diary. The colonists, he said, "began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery. At length after much debate of things, [I] (with the advice of the chiefest among them) gave way that they should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves. … And so assigned to every family a parcel of land."

The people of Plymouth moved from socialism to private farming. The results were dramatic.

Stossel links to a discussion in Wikipedia of The Tragedy of the Commons, a well understood concept of why communalism fails.

The metaphor illustrates how free access and unrestricted demand for a finite resource ultimately structurally dooms the resource through over-exploitation. This occurs because the benefits of exploitation accrue to individuals or groups, each of whom is motivated to maximize use of the resource to the point in which they become reliant on it, while the costs of the exploitation are distributed among all those to whom the resource is available (which may be a wider class of individuals than that which is exploiting it). This, in turn, causes demand for the resource to increase, which causes the problem to snowball to the point in which the resource is exhausted.

This idea ties back to another article I posted about from the Washington Post. Mark Winne, the former director of Connecticut's Hartford Food System and a 25-year veteran of food bank programs pointed out why food bank problems do not work. The lines never end. No matter how much you give away, the demand increases. This is exactly the same principle in action. People can share in the bounty but have to give little or nothing in return. Eventually, the system collapses.

As the Wikipedia entry discusses, there is still disagreement of the meaning of 'the tragedy of the commons', but it can be seen in action time and again through history. Even though the Amana Colonies probably flourished for a longer time than most communal experiments in America, in the end the same pressures split them.

By the 1930s, the communal system in Amana had generated stresses which it chose not to resolve. Many community members found the rules associated with communal living to be petty and overly restrictive. Regulations governed most aspects of daily life including dining, dress and leisure activities. Many young people wanted to be free to play baseball, to own musical instruments or to bob their hair in the new style. Families wanted to eat together at home rather than in the communal kitchen dining rooms. Although members received an annual spending allowance, many people felt theirs was inadequate and were frustrated by their inability to enjoy more material goods. Increasingly the elders were unable to enforce the rules.

The same dynamic was at work.

Ruth Marcus Dismantles Paul Krugman

Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus cheerfully dismantles Paul Krugman's "don't worry, be happy" political pontification about Barack Obama and Social Security. I linked to that New York Times embarrassment when he went off on Obama for proposing a tax hike to help save Social Security. In it Krugman essentially took the position of, "Crisis? What crisis?" and called Obama a 'fool' and a 'sucker' for falling for the inside the beltway (read Republican) fantasy of a imminent collapse of the system. Unfortunately for Krugman, Marcus can quote an expert on the crisis that is looming: Paul Krugman.

In liberal Democratic circles, the debate over Social Security has taken a dangerous "don't worry, be happy" turn.

The argument has two equally dishonest components. The first is to deny that Social Security faces a daunting financing problem — one that will be much easier to fix (and less onerous for the low-income retirees that the head-in-the-sanders purport to care about) sooner rather than later. The second is to mischaracterize the arguments of those who advocate responsible action, accusing them of hyping the system's woes.

One prominent practitioner of this misguided approach is New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. "Inside the Beltway, doomsaying about Social Security — declaring that the program as we know it can't survive the onslaught of retiring baby boomers — is regarded as a sort of badge of seriousness, a way of showing how statesmanlike and tough-minded you are," Krugman wrote last week. "In fact, the whole Beltway obsession with the fiscal burden of an aging population is misguided."

Somebody should introduce Paul Krugman to . . . Paul Krugman.

"[A] decade from now the population served by those programs [Social Security and Medicare] will explode. . . . Because of those facts, merely balancing the federal budget would be a deeply irresponsible policy — because that would leave us unprepared for the demographic deluge, with no alternative once it arrives except to raise taxes and slash benefits." (July 11, 2001)

Krugman was for a crisis before he was against it, apparently. This is more than embarrassing; this is humiliating. Krugman is show to have not only ideological blinders on, but to have frankly negated much of his own writing - one set of writings or the other. Positions can and do change over time, but Marcus cites article after article from not all that long ago that argue passionately for the need for an immediate fix to the system. Frankly, that exposes Krugman as the worst form of hypocrite: one who knows full well he is one. I asked who the fool was when I commented on Krugman's column last week. I think Marcus has proved it rather definitively.