Zeta Woof

I bought a pair of Thorogood American Heritage boots in 2006. Lightweight, all leather, unlined, cost me $110.

I wore them on our evening walks until they broke my feet in. Then I wore them on my morning rambles up Nugget Butte.

The first formal hike, I think, was Lizzy and I at the Brown Mountain lava fields.

Shortly after that we hiked the Mt. Ashland Meadows, as we do almost every spring.

Later that fall Lizzy climbed Mt. Thielsen with me.

All through the winter I climbed Nugget Butte on a regular basis. It's right across the road, maybe two miles horizontal and 1400 feet vertical. It's steep, rough on boots, and tough on the feet that are in them.

The next spring we hiked Mt. Ashland Meadows again, and then Lizzy and I climbed Pilot Rock and Union Peak.

In September Greg, Susie, Vickie, Arleen, and I climbed Mt. McLoughlin. That was the one where I sipped a Guinness At The Summit.

I climbed Pilot Rock again that fall, and later I carried my new rifle all around the base of it, pretending to hunt. Ed took me for a few walks in the woods too, trying to teach me about deer. It didn't take.

The next year we hiked Mt. Ashland Meadows again, but I didn't do much hiking after that. It was a bad year employment-wise and I don't walk when I'm not happy. Things improved over the winter. I got a new job. We started the 2009 hiking season climbing down into the crater of Kilauea Iki.

That fall I hunted all over Nugget Butte and Gold Hill. Finally, on the last day of the season, I got my buck on Nugget Butte, less than a mile from my house.

By that time my old boots were shot. I shopped all over town for a new pair of boots, trying on everything up to $250 Danners. No good. Finally I went online and bought another pair of Thorogood American Heritage boots. $130, with free shipping, and made in Wisconsin, U.S.A.

The Rogue Pundit has some thoughts on the Superintendent of Public Instructions, also known as "the what?" to most of us voters, who, if we're honest with ourselves, would leave those boxes blank. Turns out there's a contest this year and it's pretty clear who needs to go.

The main purpose that Castillo has served is keeping an ostensibly non-partisan statewide office out of Republican hands. However, we need--and deserve--more than a placeholder. If nothing else, it's time to remind our Democratic leadership that they need to do more than demonize Republicans and promise fealty to the government unions to earn our votes.

Ron Maurer it is, then.

Now if someone could just advise us on that Judge of the Supreme Court, Posistion 5 slot... Gully? Are you out there, man?

Ted Nugent endorses the 2012 presidential candidate.

If Sarah Palin played a loud, grinding instrument, she would be in my band. The independent patriotic spirit, attitude and soul of our forefathers are alive and well in Sarah. In the way she lives, what she says and how she dedicates herself to make America better in these interesting times, she represents the good, while exposing the bad and ugly....

I'll second that. In fact, I'm already wearing the bumper sticker.

Oregon Guy has some recommendations in the goobernat... er, gubertnat... ure, the governor's race in Oregon: Allen Alley.

The Born Again Redneck and Max Redline concur.

But if it's Alley v. Kitz, you know, A.A. wins on alliteration and Kitz wins on moustache. Don't laugh. Facial hair means a lot in Oregon.

Jesse Felder today.

He has a bonus Dilbert strip that has, thus far anyway, only appeared on Scott Adams' blog.

Dogbert is my hero.

Not going on.

Heck of a way to test a scientific theory.

Update: Aaand... nothin's happening. OK we has a 6.5 170 miles off the coast of Taiwan. Big yawn.

True, it's only 10:00 PM on the west coast, so Palm Springs could still become oceanfront property, but I'm not waiting up till four in the morning to see if Pago Pago makes like Atlantis. It's over, girls. You didn't show enough cleavage. The earth didn't move. At least, not for you.

By way of Instapundit, an article in the Times that quotes Stephen Hawking on alien life:

He suggests that aliens might simply raid Earth for its resources and then move on: "We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach."

Hawking may be a brilliant theoretical physicist, but his economic thinking is stuck in the age of steam. Any civilization sufficiently advanced to undertake interstellar travel would have long since solved the resource problem, and not by raping and pillaging their way across the galaxy.

Oregon Guy, Max Redline, and David's Oregon Picayune have all covered it well and I have nothing to add but a little smirk:

Nice sign, sweetheart.

Have a nice day!

... Nazi.

“Turning pagan feasts into Christian holidays is something we've been doing for 2,000 years.”
— Brian Burch, CatholicVote.org.

By way of Insty and others the noise on the internets today is about humans interbreeding with other humanoids.

If humans bred only with other humans, all these markers would create a neat phylogenetic tree, showing that human genetic diversity can be traced to a single population that existed in Africa in the last 100,000 years.

Instead, a team led by Jeffrey Long, at the University of New Mexico, found evidence that some of the markers looked far too old to have come from humans. Inbreeding with other ancient species is the likeliest explanation. "It means Neanderthals didn't completely disappear," he told Nature.

True, Neanderthals are the likeliest contenders for our ancestors' sexual partners, but they aren't the only ones.

Trolls and orcs are a possibilty also, if the girls were pretty enough. I doubt it. More likely the proto-humans raped elves and pixies, the better to gracilize the species. Cuter, too.

P.S. If you feel you've shown up a few minutes late, I've been on about this before: here, here, here, and here, and probably elsewhere, too.

Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, by Jennifer Burns.

Offhand, I can't remember when I bought this or why. But it certainly reads well.

In a few weeks Zeta Woof will publish the 5th annual Summer Reading List. I have a hunch this will be on it.

We want to thank you for paying our taxes. And for bailing out my husband's company and for winterizing our house. And for the down payment on our brand new hybrid car and for our 26-year-old son's health care. Do you mind helping us out with our mortgage? We're stretched a little thin.

Unlike the Obama birth certificate story which, even if — let me repeat that — even if it were true, would have no consequence whatever, the line that Jack Cashill is pursuing, that Bill Ayers wrote the book that became Obama's Dreams from My Father, will weigh a great deal in the scales of history. Like JFK's philandering and drug use, the truth will out with increasing force over time and shade the narrative as it will be written twenty, thirty, and fifty years in the future.

Read the latest installment in Jack Cashill's rough draft, and learn who Obama's mysterious New York girl friend really was.

Lierre Keith was a vegan for twenty years.

I was told that eating those foods, those annual monocrops, would save the world. So I ate. I was always hungry, but I believed that righteousness and justice would have to be nourishment. I made it be true. Body and brain wore down, day by day. To the very last hour of my vegan life, I made it be true.

On that last day, I went to see a Chi Gong master. He had cured the incurable. He learned Chi Gong as a boy in China, then emigrated to the US, endured a life of hardship. He had very kind eyes. He took my pulses. ...

Or, he tried to take my pulses. Then he stared at me, half in awe, half in horror.
"There's nothing here," he said, unbelieving. "You have no chi."
"What, am I dead?" I joked, only he didn't laugh.
"You are so tired," he said.
Unspeakably. And I also refused to say it. I couldn't.
"Your menstrual cycle?" he asked.
"Infrequent." If ever, I could have added. ...

"What do you eat?" he asked, and my heart snapped to alert.

"I don't eat..." I began, but words were getting harder to find. I knew. I knew what was coming. I knew what I was going to have to face. "No animal products."

"No meat? No chicken? No fish?" he repeated.
I nodded. I didn't want to cry.
"No," he said, gently and absolutely. "This you cannot do."

I started crying. ...

He did what he could for thirty minutes, and when I left, I didn't go home. I went to the store. ...

I sat at the kitchen table with a plastic fork. I didn't use my silverware or my dishes. I opened the can. How could I actually do this? I broke it down to the tiniest steps. Pick up the fork. Put the fork in the tuna. I was so desperate. Pain was the inhabitant of my body, and I was only the shadow it cast. Lift the fork toward you. I had come to the end. Open your mouth. And I was so, so tired.

I ate it.

I don't know how to describe what happened next. "I felt like I was coming out of a coma," one ex-vegan told me. "It was like being plugged into a low-voltage battery," another friend said. I could feel every cell in my body—literally, every cell—pulsing. And finally, finally being fed.

Oh god, I thought: this is what it feels like to be alive.

I put my head down and sobbed.

The Vegetarian Myth, by Lierre Keith

Absolutely do not miss the 2010 Iowahawk Earth Week Virtual Cruise-In. Bookmark it. Updates will continue all week.

A review in the LA Times.

Charles Fleming thought back on all the misery he'd endured the first two times he was cut open like a Christmas goose. He gave about two seconds' worth of consideration to the doctor's proposed disc-ectomy and said thanks, doc, but not just yet.

He couldn't face the knife again.

Just one problem: What to do about the crippling pain?

... He got out of the car, clenched his teeth and walked, trying to stretch out, and it felt OK. In fact, it was the only thing that relieved the pain.

He started modestly, covering two blocks or so in those early days, back in 2006. Then he got braver, and looser, and soon he was up to half a mile, followed by a mile, followed by long, therapeutic walks that felt really good. Much better than surgery, in fact.

He wrote a book. Secret Stairs: A Walking Guide to the Historic Staircases of Los Angeles. I haven't read the book yet but I wonder if he mentions Philip Marlowe.

I walked back through the arch and started up the steps. It was a nice walk if you liked grunting. There were two hundred and eighty steps up to Cabrillo Street. They were drifted over with windblown sand and the handrail was a cold and wet as a toad's belly.

When I reached the top the sparkle had gone from the water and a seagull with a broken trailing leg was twisting against the offsee breeze. I sat down on the damp cold top step and shook the sand out of my shoes and waited for my pulse to come down into the low hundreds.

That was in Bay City, a fictitious location some say is based on Santa Monica. I'd like to go there someday, and climb those steps. Maybe Fleming knows where they are.

Eh. Not much to report. (Lousy reporter.) Both OregonGuy and Finding Ponies have better reports. Go there first.

Update: Clueless Emma has great pictures of the Salem Tea Party.

I learned a couple of things.

You can either carry a sign or you can carry a camera, but you can't do both. I had my stupid sign (get the stupid mug!) but I had to keep explaining it to people. It seemed self-explanatory to me, but sometimes I forget that not everyone does the assigned reading. Or maybe people were getting hung up on the word "void." What does it mean that a law is void? It means it's empty. It has no force. You don't have to obey it, and the sheriff doesn't have to arrest you, and the D.A. doesn't have to prosecute you, although some will try.

Everyone I talked to seemed of above average intelligence, but some of the people I saw but didn't talk to looked like characters from Idiocracy. Never mind. As Bill Buckley sort of said, I'd rather be governed by the first hundred characters from Idiocracy than the faculty of Harvard Law.

You know I first got the idea of a Tax Day party from Claire Wolfe in 101 Things to Do 'Til the Revolution (1999). Number 71 was "Join the tax protesters on April 15." When I first read that I went down to the Post Office with my taxes in hand and there wasn't anyone there. Some protest. But times have changed.

Ultra-liberal Ashland, Oregon (83% for Obama in 2008) evidently only likes clean, articulate, black people in the abstract.

A study commissioned by the city shows a "shockingly high rate of discrimination" against blacks seeking to rent housing in Ashland....

As part of the study, the Fair Housing Council sent employees to inquire separately about housing listed for rent. Afterward, the testers compared notes.

"Some were told the property was no longer for rent, but then another person would come and it would still be for rent," said Goldman.

Sometimes the discrimination was more subtle, as when the landlords gave certain testers a better tour or more information about the rentals, he said.

"A lot of people, especially those with mother-in-law units in their backyard, have the assumption that they can rent it to someone they like," Goldman said. "But they have to rent it to the first qualified person."

I bet that really ticks them off. Nothing liberals hate worse than being told what to do. It's a role-reversal thing.

Good luck collecting.

Here's the schedule so far.

Reedsport Tax Day Tea Party
12:00 Hahn Memorial Park

Klamath Falls Tea Party Rally
1:00 Government Center, 305 Main Street

Medford AFP Tax Day Tea Party
3:00 Alba Park 10 South Oakdale

Grants Pass 9-12 Project Tea Party
5:00 Josephine County Court House

Lakeview Tax Day Tea Party
5:00 Lake County Courthouse

Roseburg Tax Day Tea Party
5:30 Douglas County Courthouse

Coos Bay Tax Day Tea Party
6:00 The Boardwalk in Coos Bay

Last year I partied in Medford, Klamath Falls, and Grants Pass. The schedule won't allow that this year, so probably just Medford and Roseburg. See you there!

Paul Beston reviews The Authenticity Hoax: How We Get Lost Finding Ourselves by Andrew Potter.

Authenticity, Mr. Potter writes, is "a positional good, which is valuable precisely because not everyone can have it." By competing against one another to see who is more authentic, he says, we just become bigger phonies than we were before. The local-food trend illustrates what Mr. Potter calls "conspicuous authenticity," by which the well-heeled embark on a "perpetual coolhunt," whether it is for authentic jeans, pristine vacation spots or mud flooring, part of the "natural building" movement. The overarching goal is less to possess the thing itself than to make a claim to refined taste and moral superiority.

Available on Amazon.

The Wall Street Journal:

On Jan. 7, Mattel launched a month-long voting campaign for Barbie's next career on Barbie.com, Barbie's Twitter and Facebook pages, plus a bus and billboard campaign in New York. After several popular technology Web sites wrote about the election, female computer engineers began encouraging colleagues to cast their ballot. During January, a total of 1,840 tweets discussed it....

By the end of January, computer Barbie was clearly the frontrunner and Mattel began soliciting input on her design from groups of computer scientists. " 'Make us look cool and hip.' 'Don't put us in lab coats.' 'Don't make us look like nerds,' " says Nathan Kahl, a spokesman for the National Academy of Engineering, recounting the comments from women members that he submitted to Mattel.

Mattel announced the winner and displayed a prototype of computer engineer Barbie at the International Toy Fair in New York Feb. 11....

Computer engineer Barbie will hit stores in the fall.

Understanding Exposure: How to Shoot Great Photographs with a Film or Digital Camera by Bryan Peterson.

The Tax Foundation tells us that this year Tax Freedom Day — the point at which you stop working to pay your taxes and start working to pay yourself — comes on April 9.

I think they've got it exactly backwards. They imply that if we pay our masters first then our masters will at some point grant us the freedom to work for ourselves. That makes April 9th a day of liberation. Free at last! Free at last! Oh, boy, now I'm really going to get to work!

Bad move behaviorally, and really stupid from a business point of view. We all start the year in a low tax bracket, taking home maybe 85¢ on the dollar. If we were to quit in April most of us wouldn't pay any income tax at all. By June we're in a higher bracket, and our take-home is down to 75¢ on the dollar. By September it's getting really bad; 60¢ on the dollar. We really should quit while we're ahead.

That's why I think the foundation should mark Tax Slavery Day instead. On September 23 it all comes crashing down. That's the day on which you no longer work for yourself, and from then on, for the last three months of the year, you're nothing but a slave.

Maybe you could petition your masters for a few minutes off on November 2nd, you know, sort of join a rebellion or something. That might work. Or maybe you could just tell them all to go to hell, stoke up the wood stove, and live on canned goods until January 2nd.

It's better than being a slave.

A new painting by Portland artist Philip Fake.

I own a Fake. You should too. If you can't afford the original, go to his Zazzle store and buy a print on a mug. I own five of them, too.

Mark Steyn.

We are now not merely disincentivizing economic energy but actively waging war on it. If 51 percent can vote themselves government lollipops from the other 49 percent, soon, 60 percent will be shaking down the remaining 40 percent, and then 70 percent will be sticking it to the remaining 30 percent. How low can it go? When you think about it, that 53 percent of American households prop up not just this country but half the planet: They effectively pick up the defense tab for our wealthiest allies, so that Germany, Japan and others can maintain minimal militaries and lavish the savings on cradle-to-grave entitlements. A relatively tiny group of people is writing the check for the entire global order. What proportion of them would need to figure out the game's no longer worth it to bring the whole system crashing down?

‘Sarah Palin Fires Back at Obama, Mocks His “Experience” on Nuclear Issues’ (The quotes are theirs.)

She's doing all right. Even the lamestream media can tell a strong horse from a weak horse. It's time to short the Obama stock, and they know it.

While the egotist rebels at the idea that his deepest thoughts could be reduced to a bumper sticker, the practical man admits that his could, and with room to spare.

What's more, selling the stuff might yeild a profit sufficient to buy the occasional drink. Which will inspire the next deep thought. And so on. It's a virtuous circle.

So move your eyes right and click on the links in my sidebar. More deep thoughts will follow.

But three quick refs anyway.

David Boaz says There's no such thing as a golden age of lost liberty. Good point, and worth keeping in mind.

Michael Ledeen says Barack Obama is just "the stereotypical American undergrad at a stereotypical Ivy League college."

And Randall Hoven says the Laffer curve doesn't explain as well as the Laffer hill.

Maths geeks like me know that going from a curve to a surface (one independent variable to two) is just the beginning. Most people have trouble with three-dimensional models, it's a rare mind that can picture four, and no mathematical model can begin to mimic reality with less than seven. Want to draw a graph of that? Picasso, Dali, Turner, and Pollock: blend on high.

By way of Weasel & Stoat, a web site you must see to believe.

London (Reuters)

Two women were arrested at a British airport on suspicion of trying to smuggle a dead relative onto a flight bound for Germany, police said on Tuesday.

The 91-year-old deceased man was pushed in a wheelchair through Liverpool's John Lennon airport wearing sunglasses before check-in staff became suspicious on Saturday and he was prevented from boarding the plane.

Along with all the seething rage it brings.

At least I'm still working. So is restaurateur Ralph R. Reiland, but he won't be hiring any extra help:

With a waiting line on weekends, we could use the additional seats. The adjacent space could also be turned into a party room with seating for 50, perfect for communions, business meetings, and showers.

But there will be no sawing and hammering or reducing the neighborhood's unemployment rate because we already have 42 employees and it's at 50 workers that the hefty new fines, mandates and penalties kick in under Obamacare.

As the National Federation of Independent Business explains: "Businesses with 50 or more workers will now have to pay a penalty of $2,000 per worker if they do not offer health-care coverage... "

How many small businesses in America do you suppose have between forty and fifty workers? Thousands, I'd guess, maybe millions. They won't be hiring this year or next.

There was a lot of noise on Friday when the employment numbers came in. The Wall Street Journal posted this cheery little graph. Angry Bob would point out that this graph is a derivative function. What it shows, you idiots, is the rate of change, not the change itself. What it says is this: first there was no growth at all, then we fell off a cliff, and now we're lying at the bottom and a little puff of dust has risen up.

Aw, t'heck with it. Here's the real picture.

Usually, of course, the best advice when you're in a hole like this is to stop digging, but Obama, Pelosi, and Reid are down there on the bottom shoveling like mad.

Stock up on canned goods. We've got years to go.

From Isaac Asimov's Guide to the Bible:

The existence of Mary Magdalene may explain a puzzle concerning the resurrection—why it was believed, and yet not believed.

On the one hand, there seems no question that the disciples accepted the resurrection and that they continued to preach the doctrines of Jesus on that basis, so that their successors, after three centuries, won the empire.

On the other hand, if Jesus did indeed rise from the dead, why was this not the signal for a wild acclamation of the Messiah and a revolt against Rome, as the authorities feared?

One might reconstruct events something like this. Mary Magdalene was the first to see the risen Jesus:

Mark 16:.9 Now when Jesus was risen early the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had cast seven devils.
Mark 16:10. And she went and told them that had been with him, as they mourned and wept.
Mark 16:11. And they . . . believed not.

Nevertheless, the tale of Mary Magdalene must eventually have carried conviction to the mourning disciples, who would, after all, have wanted fervently to believe that Jesus was indeed the Messiah and would rise from the dead.

Once Mary Magdalene’s tale of an empty tomb and of a Jesus who appeared to her was believed, confirming tales would naturally arise in later times. There would come tales of Jesus having appeared to this disciple or that, under such circumstances or others, and a number of them would be recorded in the gospels when these came to be written. But all might conceivably have rested entirely upon the word of one witness, Mary Magdalene.

Yet Mary Magdalene had been possessed of “seven devils.” She had been a madwoman or, in any case, seriously disturbed, and her behavior might have remained erratic enough to give here the reputation of being “touched.” Even if she had shown marked improvement under Jesus’ influence, the shock of the arrest, trial and crucifixion might well have unhinged her once more and made her an easy target for hallucination.

Aside from the disciples, who may have accepted her story only after a while, there might have been no one who would lend it credence. The people generally would have shrugged off anything she had to say as the ravings of a madwoman.

In the Weekend Journal, an inteview with James Shapiro, author of Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?

Why do you think projecting the author's life onto the plays is so problematic?

People say: What difference does it make who wrote the plays? It's because either you believe he's recycling bits and pieces of his life, or you believe that he imagined them, and I like to think that he had the greatest imagination of any writer in the language. And I don't want that belittled.

Worth reading in its entirety. The article and, I hope, the book.

Medford, Oregon gets the top half of page three in The Wall Street Journal this morning. As usual, the state serves as a bad example.

Already $10 million in debt, Associated Fruit faces a crisis, Mr. Lowry says as he strolls through an orchard first planted by his family 75 years ago. The parcel, which abuts a housing development called Phoenix Acres, would fetch $100,000 per acre if the Lowry family could sell it to a housing developer, he says.

Selling the 70-acre orchard would raise $7 million, Mr. Lowry says, enough to refinance Associated Fruit's debt, with plenty left over to plant new orchards on land further from Medford's core. Instead, the land is valued at just $10,000 per acre, he says, a moot point since there are no takers.

Oregon land use law. It's not about quality, it's about control.

You got to spread the wealth around.

As seen on Cato@Liberty.

Daniel Henninger's weekly column seems always worth reading.

Somewhere inside the programmatic details of ObamaCare and the methods that the president, Speaker Pelosi and Sen. Reid used to pass it, something went terribly wrong. Just as something has gone terribly wrong inside the governments of states like California, New York, New Jersey, Michigan and Massachusetts.

The 10th Amendment tumult does not mean anyone is going to secede. It doesn't mean "nullification" is coming back. We are not going to refight the Civil War or the Voting Rights Act. Richard Russell isn't rising from his Georgia grave.

It means that the current edition of the Democratic Party has disconnected itself from the average American's sense of political modesty. The party's members and theorists now defend expanding government authority with the same arrogance that brought Progressive Era reforms down upon untethered industrial interests.

In such times, this country has an honored tradition of changing direction. That time may be arriving.