January 4. 2010 by Dick.

A Florida writer celebrated on Friday: “It’s a cold, gray, drizzly New Year’s Day,” she wrote. “It can only get better from here, yes? Crossing fingers.”

“It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.”

We started the decade with the biggest salvo yet fired in the least conventional World War ever fought.

Hundreds of Muslims have since blown themselves up to terrorize thousands of their neighbors, most of whom were also Muslims. (Somehow the MSM overlooked the hundreds of Christians who blew themselves up to terrorize thousands of their neighbors, many of whom would also be, well, Christians.)

On the other hand, explosive bolts hold the Space Shuttle to the launch pad. The Shuttle will be the final entry in the Cash for Clunkers program this year.

After a couple years of layoffs and firings and RIFs, about 12 more people have jobs in January, 2010, than did in January, 2000. They all work for the government; private-sector employment declined for the period for the first time on record. And, before you do the liberal happy dance, understand that we don’t have 12 more people in these United States than 10 years ago; we have 26 million and 12 more people in these United States than 10 years ago.

On the other hand, Bret Favre came out of retirement, retired, came out of retirement, retired, and got yet another new job with a different employer. And he did all that last year.

Adobe, like Microsoft, learned the real key to keeping customers happy: change the file format of your major product to force people to upgrade.

On the other hand, the Veteran’s Administration application for benefits is only 23 pages long.

Adjusted for inflation, my little house here in South Puffin is worth about the same as it was in 2000. Maybe a little less.

On the other hand, the new $1.5 billion Yankee Stadium replaced the house that Ruth built in 1923. The Yanks cut costs where they could, though, and the new space is only the second most expensive stadium in the world behind the $1.57 billion new Wembley Stadium in London.

Thanks to inflation and cutbacks, our family income has dropped every year since 2000. Part of that is the ever increasing cost of health “insurance” but the reality is Anne kept getting cut back and my business was flat for several years and is down now.

On the other hand, Wile E. Coyote has never gotten a raise nor filed an insurance claim.

And it doesn’t look as if we can retire unless Anne simply never finds another job and is forced to accept retirement as her full time gig. Our retirement accounts, like those of every other American, suffered from the bank meltdown and the government theft of General Motors. I had 1,000 shares of GM. Guess who owns it now? The market is wandering around above $10,000 now, but stocks like Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Metlife, Manulife, Morgan Stanley, and Toronto Dominion Bank will never come back.

On the other hand, Capital One founder and CEO Richard Fairbank received $73,182,560 in compensation in just one year of the decade.

It has been a decade that I hope we can skip repeating.

On the other hand George Santayana, father of the Law of Repetitive Consequences, was an optimist. Besides, I do have some good recipes for Soylent Green.

Happy New Year.

Actually, I’m also an optimist. We need to make this a better decade and we can do it. After we throw da bums out of all their lairs, all we need do is change the nature of crooks and politicians. But I repeat myself.

Posted in History, Society, Politics & News, PC, Random Access | 5 Comments »

December 28. 2009 by Dick.

The ups and downs of the decade. We made a bunch of great closeout deals but this column has room for only a few. Here are the top nine of 2009:

The downside: We may not have changed many of the Old Guard of pols but we surely did change how they do business inside the Beltway. They no longer throw billions of We the OverTaxedPeople’s dollars at problems.
The upside: Now they throw trillions.

Hoo wee. That’s change we can believe in!

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The downside: President Obama (praise be his name) stole General Motors from its rightful owners (that would be small stockholders like thee and me) and put Ed “I Came from the Phone Company So I Don’t Know Anything about Cars” Whitacre in charge.
The upside: Thanks to the soybean lobby, your new Chevy Condescension will be the first model to come with tofubags instead of the dangerous and expensive airbags as well as the new OnStar-by-AT&T. Rumors that OnStar service will also be available on your iPhone have not proven out.

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The downside: Democrats were appalled when President Obama nominated Senator Judd Gregg, R-NH, as his Secretary of Commerce. The U.S. Department of Commerce fosters, promotes, and develops business and industry. Democrats called Senator Gregg “too pro-business.”
The upside: Caroline Cartwright of Great Britain was arrested for noise levels that ranged between 30 and 40 decibels, with some squeaks “being 47 decibels” during sex. Bird calls are generally 44 dB.

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The downside: Congress passed without reading a $787 billion “stimulus package” that, instead of stimulating We the OverTaxedPeople who provided the money, all went for swine flu shots to bankers. Vermont had a looming two hundred million dollar budget deficit so the Democratically controlled legislature there decided to spend three hundred million dollars of its portion of that G.R.A.F.T. Act windfall to “stabilize” its budget. Since that wasn’t enough, the Democratically controlled legislature also raised taxes by $24 million dollars in order to make up for the revenue shortfall.
The upside: The Nobel Committee awarded the Peace Prize posthumously to Michael Jackson.

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The downside: The Environmental Protection Agency ruled that political science trumps actual science as a danger to human health and to the environment.
The upside: Millions of people flocked to Al Gore’s house in the Belle Meade neighborhood of Nashville where his Christmas decorationsand the upturned smiling faces were photographed from the International Space Station.

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The downside: Just two years ago, world leaders of 193 countries pledged to reverse the course of climate change in Denmark this year. When the hot air cleared in Copenhagen this month, there were two inches of snow on the ground, two pounds of faked “global warming” emails, and $200 billion dollars in a Global Relief fund. Guess who they want to pick up the tab?
The upside: Each world leader flew to Denmark in one or more private airliners thus reducing the worldwide surplus of Jet A and Jet A-1 petroleum-based fuels.

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The downside: In a strange coincidence, the International Olympic Committee also meeting in Copenhagen voted not to award the 2016 Summer Olympics to Chicago for fear that a fire in former Governor Rod Blagojevich’s hair might undermine the new “pay to play” Olympic game category.
The upside: The one billion dollar Cash for Clunkers program which cost three billion dollars left an estimated 643,000 1974 Ford Pintos on Illinois and Michigan highways as entry level vehicles for migrant farmers and high school students.

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The downside: The Environmental Protection Agency said it will increase the percentage of ethanol in gasoline to 15% by next June. Ethanol producers and most newspapers say the higher blends will increase fuel economy, create more jobs in the industry, and increase government payments to ethanol producers by $787 billion.
The upside: The Social Security Administration announced that since Congress will lock fuel prices at $4.599 per gallon through 2012, the Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) can remain fixed at 0% for the same period.

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The downside: The U.S. economy has shed 15.4 million or more jobs including those once held by Rufus, Biff, and my wife, Anne.
The upside: The $787 billion “stimulus package” has created an estimated 643,000 brand new jobs (roughly identical to the number of saved 1974 Ford Pintos). All the new employees are dedicated to maintaining the White House website that tracks new jobs.

We have, as a nation, spent the entire decade unwilling to learn from our mistakes. Change We Can Believe In! certainly changed all of that and we are this >||< close to ObamaCare to prove it.

You can’t make this stuff up. Happy New Decade, everyone!

Posted in Government Motors, What? Are They Nuts?, ObamaCare, History, Global Warming, Newspaper "Science", Banking, Science (not-so-real), Politics & News, Society, Business, Cars, Random Access | 3 Comments »

November 2. 2009 by Dick.

It pleases me enormously that my nearly 20-year old granddaughter is not embarrassed to call me Boppa. She does it not only in public but even on Facebook.

“Boppa” has a history.

Wilbur Groendyke Dunning was Bill to his family of four other brothers and a sister. All the boys sounded alike on the phone, so when one called us in Westtown, he would say, “Hello, Art, Bill, Pres, Sid, June.” June was Frank, Junior, named for their father. He usually stopped when the right one answered. He was the second eldest.

He married Ethel Barnard and raised a couple of kids in the stone manor house of her father’s farm. They had chickens, a lot of grass to mow, and a dog named Monte who would lick the butter off a piece of toast and bring it back for more.

Bill Dunning started teaching chemistry at Temple at the beginning of time. He retired, then returned to teaching at PMC (now Widener) until his second retirement about the same time I was flunking freshman Chemistry at Stevens. I was not at the time smart enough to ask for help. He enjoyed working with his hands in the dirt as much as he enjoyed working with college kids. We had a pretty serious vegetable and flower garden in Westtown.

All the Dunning boys were athletic. Sidney, the tallest, turned down a major league pitching contract because they played ball on Sundays and the five of them together were tall enough to have fielded a pretty fair basketball team.

Interesting man he was. Ordained an elder in the Presbyterian Church of Frankford six months before my mother’s birthday. Invented and patented “red gas,” an anti-knock ingredient for gasoline that might have prevented our pumping tetraethyl lead onto our roadsides for decades. Rode the train every day to school. Transcribed hundreds of books into braille for the Pennsylvania Association for the Blind.

I had it good as a kid. My own folks moved back to the family home shortly after my grandmother whom I called “Da” died in 1953. Everyone shared the chores and I always had a built in babysitter. Boppa was usually home when my folks were out and vice versa. And my dad’s parents were just down Street Road at the station house on the Pennsey.

He made sure I had my own copy of Christopher Robin while I lay on Da’s bed eating Fig Newtons and pulling Jason’s tail. Jason was a great, golden-fleeced tom cat, the kind that comes but once a generation. I’m often not sure whether to identify with Christopher Robin or Pooh but I learned enough to make sure our cat, Ruff, was another.

He bought me my first slide rule when I entered Stevens. Keuffel & Esser manufactured its last slide rule in 1975. I still have Boppa’s first and my last. A slide rule does not depend on batteries.

He taught me, years before I had figured out that I would teach, too, that the teacher must stay a chapter ahead of the student. And he taught me how to coil an extension cord in a chicken laying box so it would not tangle.

Boppa was a quiet, private Victorian gentleman of strong will and strong opinion. I only once heard him complain — about a truly lousy honors chemistry course my high school snookered me to take — and that was after I had been graduated from college. He did not accept specious logic at the dinner table, at church, or in the news. He did volunteer at church, in the Township, and with friends. He did not like Dial soap because their commercials promoted “wishing everyone did.” He did speak Latin and read German.

In 1982, after living in the same house for more than 60 years, he took stock. “All my friends have died,” he said. “All of my brothers except the oldest have died. I have nothing more to keep me here. Let’s move to Florida.” 18 months later, after selling the farmhouse in Westtown, he and my folks started another great adventure, one that would last until his 100th year. He bought a little house in the middle of the Keys. I’m sitting there now, watching an egret preen on the rail of the boat next door.

Barnard/Dunning/Harper generations ran about 30 years each for a couple of centuries so he was 60 years old when I met him for the first time and he became Boppa. I guess I’m old enough to grow into it now, too.

Buying the first text book. $1.95
Buying a slide rule. $29.94
Remembering history. Priceless.

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Promise me you’ll always remember: You’re braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.

Posted in History, Big Thoughts, Random Access | 2 Comments »