The Economist is Late: And Clueless

The Economist is supposed to get here on Fridays.  Didn't get here until today, Tuesday.  Cover story is about Greece.  "Europe's Future is Greeces Hands".   Real title" "We don't have a clue.  They went to press before Sunday's Greek referendum but they reported some Friday poll results hinting that the Greeks might vote yes.  Well, now it's Tuesday and we know the Greeks voted a big NO. 
   They go on to speculate that the big NO means Greece will leave/get kicked out of the Euro zone and this will bring the whole Euro zone down.  They don't say how or why.
   What might happen, is countries that need to do a little money printing to meet payroll, might bail out of the euro.  Right now the Euro is a hard currency, they don't let countries print Euro's to cover budget deficits.  The only thing a Euro zone government can do to cover budget deficits is to borrow on the Euro wide money market.  But when a country does a Greece the market stops lending to them.  Greece is demonstrating what happens when the lenders cut you off.  The banks close, the store shelves go empty, merchants stop accepting credit cards, tourists stop coming, and the economy grinds to a halt throwing everybody out of work.
   Some of the other soft countries may decide to ditch the Euro and run their own currencies.  

The Law and the Supremes

Social glue underlying Western civilization is a belief that Law exists, a body of rules to point to righteous action, and to forbid sinful action.  And the law is the same for every citizen and cannot be changed to benefit the wealthy, the powerful, and the well connected.  Except for a few criminals, people obey the law because they believe in it.  Courts and judges exist to fit the law to the specific  case before them, and to clarify vague passages. 
   In America, the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, John Marshall in the famous case of Marbury vs Madison, decided that he and his court had the right to cancel Congressional laws if they contradicted the Constitution.  We let Marshall get away with this arrogation of power,  judicial review is NOT in the Constitution. 
   This session of the Supremes has seen the concept of judicial review expanded to the creation of nationwide gay marriage, and the rewriting of Obamacare to make it more palatable.  Nowhere in the Constitution does the word marriage even appear.  Changing the plain wording of a law is a new one.  Clearly the Supremes have demonstrated that the Law is merely what they (5 of them) say it is.  This is a big step down from Moses bringing stone tablets down from Sinai, just a few unelected lawyers can now engrave anything they like on the stone tablets.
    As voters, we ought to be looking for a president who will appoint better justices than the flakes we have now.
    The other thing we ought to do, is insist that all Supreme court rulings be unanimous.  Right now we have 5 to 4 decisions, where four of the nine top lawyers in the country write dissenting opinions calling their colleagues kooks.  We would have fewer outrageous decisions if we required all nine justices put their names to them. 
    We should also remember those disastrous Supreme Court decisions.  Dred Scott triggered the Civil War.  Plessy vs Ferguson was a disgrace that dishonored Jefferson's words "All men are created equal".   The Supremes have done some good over the years, but they have also done some bad.  To see them arrogating yet more power to themselves is scary.  

US foreign policy: No More Failed States

Most of the world's land is divided into countries. which maintain order, suppress piracy, terrorism, banditry, drug running and the operations of serious criminals.  In some places the country has failed and then really bad people set up shop and do crime.
  For example, Afghanistan.  The Russians invaded in the last 1970's which screwed the place up badly.  With US support the mujahdin fighters finally drove the Russians out in the later 1980's.  After this astounding victory, things fell apart.  The victorious mujahadin split into factions and were unable to form a government.  We Americans, now that the Russians had been bloodied, went home.  Washington lacked the stones to straighten the place out.  Civil order disintegrated, Islamic terrorists, the Taliban, took over most of the land, and Osama Bin Ladin cut a deal with the Taliban that allowed him the set up shop in the Afghan backwoods.  From this secure base, Bin Ladin planned and executed 9/11.
   Moral of the story, when the country becomes a failed state, a wild land, bad guys move in and do bad.  The East African pirates operate out of Somalia, a failed state.  ISIS operates out of the ruins of Syria and Iraq.  Conclusion: we cannot allow failed states to fester.  We have to do some thing to straighten them out before we loose more skyscrapers full of people. 
 

Greek Debt vs American Debt

We have one thing going for us that the Greeks don't.  We can print as much US currency as we please.  We can always pay off our creditors, we just print enough currency and hand it to them.  The Greeks cannot print Euros.  They have to find the money the old fashioned way, from taxes.  I was in Europe some years ago, back when the Euro was being invented.  Chatting with European businessmen on the train, I learned that none of them understood the power of a central bank.  When they talked about the Euro, they all liked the ability to do business across national borders, without the risks and hassles of currency exchange rates.  In the time between striking the deal, and delivery of product and getting paid, a change in the exchange rates could turn a good deal into a loosing deal, zap, just that easy.  When the deals could be done in Euro's  the currency exchange rate risk is gone.  Everyone agreed that this was a good thing.  And they all agreed that getting the Germans to run the bank was a good thing too, every European thought the Germans were good hard money men who would avoid inflating the currency. 
   None of them seemed to understand the power to print your own money, should things be a little tight around payday is awesome.  And now the Greeks are finding out, they don't have enough money to meet payroll, or make their debt payments on time, and the rest of Europe is tired of bailing them out.
   We are seeing the hurt getting laid on the citizens of Greece.  We don't know how much hurt gets laid on the rest of the EU.  The Europeans fear a massive financial meltdown.  The Americans don't see a problem.  Greece is a small fraction of the EU's GNP,  and even if they default on all their loans, it's pretty much chickenfeed compared to the total EU GNP.  The TV newsies are talking up the crisis because that's what TV newsies do. 

Smithsonian unfair to house cats

A Smithsonian website ran this article about presence/absence of house cats and coyotes.  The gist of it is, coyotes act as a predator of house cats, and in woodland with a coyote population you don't find house cats out catching birds.  The survey is based on placing numerous camera traps in DC area parks like Rock Creek.  A real wilderness situation that. They go one to mourn about the predation by cats upon birds, which they deem as terrible.  The site links to several more anti-cat pro-bird articles.  As a cat person I am appalled.   Far as I am concerned, any bird so slow and unwary as to be caught by a cat deserves to get eaten. 
    More interesting questions, totally un addressed by the article:  How do coyotes keep the cats out of Rock Creek Park?  Do they catch them and kill them?  Do cats sense the presence of coyotes (smell perhaps?) and stay away?   Does a house cat have a chance against a coyote, perhaps by climbing trees?  For that matter did their camera traps look up at likely spots in trees?  
    Anyhow, it is clear where the Smithsonian's sympathies lie.  Good objective scientific attitude there.  Probably took their science training from the global warmists. 

Economist Cover Story: "The right to die"

Sub title:" Why assisted suicide should be legal"  Must be  a slow news week.  You would think that Grexit would make a better cover story this week.  Clearly The Economist is in favor of assisted suicide.  I remember debating this topic back in high school, and that was a LONG time ago.  The arguments, pro and con, haven't changed much over all that time.  No dramatic case has been in the news lately.  I wonder what brought this well worn topic to the top of the Economist's stack this week?
   The Economist reports that things are going well in the few places that do have legal assisted suicide.  Although "well" is a somewhat subjective term.  In actual fact, assisted suicide will become legal if and when the legislatures or activist judges make it legal. 

Department of Environmental Services

Lowering water quality for fun and profit.  They been at it for years.
Yesterday Marsha Graham, our volunteer water commissioner, was going house to house, on foot, in the hot sun, delivering a two page DES nastygram.  Apparently someone detected some amount of lead in the Mittersill water some time ago.  DES was too innumerate to mention the amount of lead detected, nor the permissible amount of lead.  Like most bureaucrats, DES is offended by numbers.  They also failed to mention the name of the laboratory that performed the test, and when their equipment was last calibrated against NIST national standards. 
    Mittersill water was quite good up until a couple of years ago when DES insisted that we replace our pumphouse.  The old pumphouse had been working well for 40 years, but that wasn't good enough for DES.  They forced us to build a new pumphouse, only a couple of hundred feet from the old one.  The contractor screwed up something in building the new pumphouse, and it throws enormous amounts of plain old mud into our water, so much so that the  water runs brown from the tap.  Two years later and the water still runs brown.  It wouldn't surprise me to find that amount of mud in the water makes the test for parts per million of lead read high. 
   Other indications of scientific ignorance at DES.  They think that pH and alkalinity are different things.  They aren't, pH is an objective measurement both acidity and alkalinity. 
   Thanks again DES for all your help and support over the years.