The Customer is almost always wrong....

.....and Democracy as an answer is basically a crock. I was just listening to a podcast featuring an interview with the brewmaster, Peter B., at New Belgium Brewery, Fort Collins, CO talk about what he does. He went off on the interviewer when he started in about his beer "styles." He said, "I don't like the term "styles." I am an artist....I make 10 minutes of pleasure. The customer doesn't have a clue what he wants. Nobody wanted Fat Tire or Mothership Wit until we made it, and they liked it and started drinking it."

And he is right. Nobody knew they wanted to hear Bach's music until he started writing it. I could never have conceived of the technique displayed by Seurat in Un dimanche après-midi à l'Île de la Grande Jatte, (because it is based on color theory, a subject that I have zero interest in, per se) yet I never tire of looking at it. At the risk of being repetitive, another of the great myths of the modern age is that Democracy somehow provides answers. People have no idea what they want, it's just those running for office who are so sure they know what to give them- good and hard. It's just a way of being, and it may be good or it may be bad. It may be, as Winston Churchill said, just the least of a an array of evils, but it, and those who vote, have no more idea where it is best to go than a roll of the dice would provide.

Time to go....

A chunk of my ancestors emigrated from Lithuania, and high time to go and visit, particularly as this is a sign of the incipient dipshittery that is overtaking.....other places, before it's totally gone.

State of the Art

The discussions about plug-in electric vehicles always seem to tip-toe around the real question, which is performance. Can an electric vehicles equal the performance of a current fossil-fuel vehicle? Only if you don't plan on selling it, like the Tesla, which A) isn't real at this point, and B) if it were, would sell for over US $100K. So- the answer = no.
As for another level of practicality, in a very different vehicle, the answer is, yeah, sorta, as instantiated by the Electrovaya Maya-300. Which is a "real" all-electric car, which can be manufactured now, and uses none of the other fanciful components that other hypothetical vehicles propose to use. No unobtainium, dilithium crystals or Disneyite in this thing.

The downside? Very few would voluntarily buy the thing or drive it, unless they were forced at gunpoint. It's a roller-skate, and even though it has a range of 120 miles, does so at a maximum speed of 25-35 mph.

In this

Do we see the raise, much less call?

I admit I have very little stomach remaining for the global warming debate, from the standpoint of what's causing it. There's no doubt it's happening.....just like there's no doubt people see moving lights in the night sky. The question goes beyond these; in the case of the latter, "Where is an actual UFO?"
The obvious pertinent questions about global warming are "Should we do anything about it?" or "What / how much of X should we do about it?" and the kicker, "Are we going to do anything about it?"
For discussion of issues relating to the fossil fuel question (and increasingly, I think the word is "imbroglio"), you can't beat Robert Rapier's R-Squared Energy Blog. Recently, he discussed the final question, whether or not we're likely to ever voluntarily "go all in." Answer: probably not.

The Last Lion

Anyone who goes through what used to be a normal K-12 educaton in the United States, and really got caught up in Literature classes, could hardly help becoming something of an Anglophile.....at least of what Britain was. This is long gone, of course, and I had long dismissed the U.K. as merely a museum of the Old Greatness.
However, these things don't go all in a day, and there can still be echoes of the wonder that was Britannia. I was reminded of this in the recent death of George MacDonald Fraser. I reproduce the following excerpt in its entirety, not just because I can, but because it's not so far removed from my own sentiments toward the U.S.

The last testament of Flashman's creator: How Britain has destroyed itself
by GEORGE MACDONALD FRASER

When 30 years ago I resurrected Flashman, the bully in Thomas Hughes's Victorian novel Tom Brown's Schooldays, political correctness hadn't been heard of, and no exception was taken to my adopted hero's character, behaviour, attitude to women and subject races (indeed, any races, including his own) and general awfulness.
On the contrary, it soon became evident that these were his main attractions. He was politically incorrect with a vengeance.
Through the Seventies and Eighties I led him on his disgraceful way, toadying, lying, cheating, running away, treating women as chattels, abusing inferiors of all colours, with only one redeeming virtue - the unsparing honesty with which he admitted to his faults, and even gloried in them..
And no one minded, or if they did, they didn't tell me. In all the many thousands of readers' letters I received, not one objected.
In the Nineties, a change began to take place. Reviewers and interviewers started describing Flashman (and me) as politically incorrect, which we are, though by no means in the same way.
This is fine by me. Flashman is my bread and butter, and if he wasn't an elitist, racist, sexist swine, I'd be selling bootlaces at street corners instead of being a successful popular writer.
But what I notice with amusement is that many commentators now draw attention to Flashy's (and my) political incorrectness in order to make a point of distancing themselves from it.
It's not that they dislike the books. But where once the non-PC thing could pass unremarked, they now feel they must warn readers that some may find Flashman offensive, and that his views are certainly not those of the interviewer or reviewer, God forbid.
I find the disclaimers alarming. They are almost a knee-jerk reaction and often rather a nervous one, as if the writer were saying: "Look, I'm not a racist or sexist. I hold the right views and I'm in line with modern enlightened thought, honestly."
They won't risk saying anything to which the PC lobby could take exception. And it is this that alarms me - the fear evident in so many sincere and honest folk of being thought out of step.
I first came across this in the United States, where the cancer has gone much deeper. As a screenwriter [at which Fraser was almost as successful as he was with the 12 Flashman novels; his best-known work was scripting the Three Musketeers films] I once put forward a script for a film called The Lone Ranger, in which I used a piece of Western history which had never been shown on screen and was as spectacular as it was shocking - and true.
The whisky traders of the American plains used to build little stockades, from which they passed out their ghastly rot-gut liquor through a small hatch to the Indians, who paid by shoving furs back though the hatch.
The result was that frenzied, drunken Indians who had run out of furs were besieging the stockade, while the traders sat snug inside and did not emerge until the Indians had either gone away or passed out.
Political correctness stormed onto the scene, red in tooth and claw. The word came down from on high that the scene would offend "Native Americans".
Their ancestors may have got pieeyed on moonshine but they didn't want to know it, and it must not be shown on screen. Damn history. Let's pretend it didn't happen because we don't like the look of it.
I think little of people who will deny their history because it doesn't present the picture they would like.
My forebears from the Highlands of Scotland were a fairly primitive, treacherous, blood-thirsty bunch and, as Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote, would have been none the worse for washing. Fine, let them be so depicted, if any film maker feels like it; better that than insulting, inaccurate drivel like Braveheart.
The philosophy of political correctness is now firmly entrenched over here, too, and at its core is a refusal to look the truth squarely in the face, unpalatable as it may be.
Political correctness is about denial, usually in the weasel circumlocutory jargon which distorts and evades and seldom stands up to honest analysis.
It comes in many guises, some of them so effective that the PC can be difficult to detect. The silly euphemisms, apparently harmless, but forever dripping to wear away common sense - the naivete of the phrase "a caring force for the future" on Remembrance poppy trays, which suggests that the army is some kind of peace corps, when in fact its true function is killing.
The continual attempt to soften and sanitise the harsh realities of life in the name of liberalism, in an effort to suppress truths unwelcome to the PC mind; the social engineering which plays down Christianity, demanding equal status for alien religions.
The selective distortions of history, so beloved by New Labour, denigrating Britain's past with such propaganda as hopelessly unbalanced accounts of the slave trade, laying all the blame on the white races, but carefully censoring the truth that not a slave could have come out of Africa without the active assistance of black slavers, and that the trade was only finally suppressed by the Royal Navy virtually single-handed.
In schools, the waging of war against examinations as "elitist" exercises which will undermine the confidence of those who fail - what an intelligent way to prepare children for real life in which competition and failure are inevitable, since both are what life, if not liberal lunacy, is about.
PC also demands that "stress", which used to be coped with by less sensitive generations, should now be compensated by huge cash payments lavished on griping incompetents who can't do their jobs, and on policemen and firemen "traumatised" by the normal hazards of work which their predecessors took for granted.
Furthermore, it makes grieving part of the national culture, as it was on such a nauseating scale when large areas were carpeted in rotting vegetation in "mourning" for the Princess of Wales; and it insists that anyone suffering ordinary hardship should be regarded as a "victim" - and, of course, be paid for it.
That PC should have become acceptable in Britain is a glaring symptom of the country's decline.
No generation has seen their country so altered, so turned upside down, as children like me born in the 20 years between the two world wars. In our adult lives Britain's entire national spirit, its philosophy, values and standards, have changed beyond belief.
Probably no country on earth has experienced such a revolution in thought and outlook and behaviour in so short a space.
Other lands have known what seem to be greater upheavals, the result of wars and revolutions, but these do not compare with the experience of a country which passed in less than a lifetime from being the mightiest empire in history, governing a quarter of mankind, to being a feeble little offshore island whose so-called leaders have lost the will and the courage, indeed the ability, to govern at all.
This is not a lament for past imperial glory, though I regret its inevitable passing, nor is it the raging of a die-hard Conservative.
I loathe all political parties, which I regard as inventions of the devil. My favourite prime minister was Sir Alec Douglas-Home, not because he was on the Right, but because he spent a year in office without, on his own admission, doing a damned thing.
This would not commend him to New Labour, who count all time lost when they're not wrecking the country.
I am deeply concerned for the United Kingdom and its future. I look at the old country as it was in my youth and as it is today and, to use a fine Scots word, I am scunnered.
I know that some things are wonderfully better than they used to be: the new miracles of surgery, public attitudes to the disabled, the health and well-being of children, intelligent concern for the environment, the massive strides in science and technology.
Yes, there are material blessings and benefits innumerable which were unknown in our youth.
But much has deteriorated. The United Kingdom has begun to look more like a Third World country, shabby, littered, ugly, run down, without purpose or direction, misruled by a typical Third World government, corrupt, incompetent and undemocratic.
My generation has seen the decay of ordinary morality, standards of decency, sportsmanship, politeness, respect for the law, family values, politics and education and religion, the very character of the British.
Oh how Blimpish this must sound to modern ears, how out of date, how blind to "the need for change and the novelty of a new age". But don't worry about me. It's the present generation with their permissive society, their anything-goes philosophy, and their generally laid-back, inyerface attitude I feel sorry for.
They regard themselves as a completely liberated society when in fact they are less free than any generation since the Middle Ages.
Indeed, there may never have been such an enslaved generation, in thrall to hang-ups, taboos, restrictions and oppressions unknown to their ancestors (to say nothing of being neck-deep in debt, thanks to a moneylender's economy).
We were freer by far 50 years ago - yes, even with conscription, censorship, direction of labour, rationing, and shortages of everything that nowadays is regarded as essential to enjoyment.
We still had liberty beyond modern understanding because we had other freedoms, the really important ones, that are denied to the youth of today.
We could say what we liked; they can't. We were not subject to the aggressive pressure of specialinterest minority groups; they are. We had no worries about race or sexual orientation; they have.
We could, and did, differ from fashionable opinion with impunity, and would have laughed PC to scorn, had our society been weak and stupid enough to let it exist.
We had available to us an education system, public and private, that was the envy of the world. We had little reason to fear being mugged or raped (killed in war, maybe, but that was an acceptable hazard).
Our children could play in street and country in safety. We had few problems with bullies because society knew how to deal with bullying and was not afraid to punish it in ways that would send today's progressives into hysterics.
We did not know the stifling tyranny of a liberal establishment, determined to impose its views, and beginning to resemble George Orwell's Ministry of Truth.
Above all, we knew who we were and we lived in the knowledge that certain values and standards held true, and that our country, with all its faults and need for reforms, was sound at heart.
Not any more. I find it difficult to identify a time when the country was as badly governed as it has been in the past 50 years.
We have had the two worst Prime Ministers in our history - Edward Heath (who dragooned us into the Common Market) and Tony Blair. The harm these two have done to Britain is incalculable and almost certainly irreparable.
Whether the public can be blamed for letting them pursue their ruinous policies is debatable.
Short of assassination there is little people can do when their political masters have forgotten the true meaning of the democracy of which they are forever prating, are determined to have their own way at all costs and hold public opinion in contempt.
I feel I speak not just for myself but for the huge majority of my generation who think as I do but whose voices are so often lost in the clamour.
We are yesterday's people, the over-the-hill gang. (Yes, the old people - not the senior citizens or the time-challenged, but the old people.) Those of ultra-liberal views may take consolation from this - that my kind won't be around much longer, and then they can get on with wrecking civilisation in peace.
But they should beware. There may well be more who think like me than the liberal Left establishment likes to think. When my views were first published in book form in 2002, I was not surprised that almost all the reviewers were unfavourable. I had expected that my old-fashioned views would get a fairly hostile reception, but the bitterness did astonish me.
I had not realised how offensive the plain truth can be to the politically correct, how enraged they can be by its mere expression, and how deeply they detest the values and standards respected 50 years ago and which dinosaurs like me still believe in, God help us.
But the readers' reactions to the book were the exact opposite of critical opinion. I have never received such wholehearted and generous support.
For the first time in 30 years as a professional writer I had to fall back on a printed card thanking readers for writing, apologising because I could not reply personally to them all.
Most of the letters came from the older generation, but by no means all. I was made aware that among the middle-aged and people in their 20s and 30s there is a groundswell of anger and frustration at the damage done to Britain by so-called reformers and dishonest politicians who hardly bother to conceal their contempt for the public's wishes.
Plainly many thought they were alone in some reactionary minority. They had been led to think that they were voices muttering to themselves in the wilderness.
Well, you are not. There are more of you out there than you realise - very many more, perhaps even a majority.

• Edited extract from The Light's On At Signpost by George MacDonald Fraser (published by Harper Collins)

Quote o' the Day.....

"Well, three different men have won in three different primaries. Tell us [Bob, Carol, Ted, Alice, Lou, Bud, Moe, Curly, Larry].....where is this all headed?"

Oh, Boo Hoo Hoo

In what passes for contemporary culture:

1) It is evidently necessary to apologize for any perceived injury, real or imaginary.

2) It is evidently necessary to grovel- abjectly.

3) It is now becoming de rigueur to characterize the offense being apologized for as "inexcusable."

4) It is also becoming very common for people -whether or not they have what would be called in court "standing to sue," i.e., they were not the supposedly aggrieved party- to refuse to accept the apology. For an example of this, take the Way-Bac Machine to about a year ago, and review Hizzoner Al Sharpton's responses in the Don Imus / Rutgers fiasco.

For those who may not be familiar with this phenomenon, consult the Washington State case of the cancer patient ordered to remove her hat in the courtroom.

.....but this is only the tip of the iceberg, even though it contains all the essential elements of the current disease.

Questions raised include:

1) Is all this apologizing just an attempt to equate the putative offender with the victim, the "We're all just victims" nonsense? (cf. present political campaigning, if you don't understand what this is about.)

2) Nothing is more characteristic of human beings than mistakes. Whatever happened to "Um- I didn't think about that. Never mind?" Instead, it's become "I am a filthy bastard and not fit to pick your nose, o you whose very feces are an untrammeled delight."

3) An apology, by definition, craves pardon. If it's inexcusable, why apologize in the first place?

4) Am I going to bump someone in the grocery store tomorrow, say "Excuse me," and have another person standing within earshot say "I absolutely refuse to accept your apology?"

5) How much weirder is this country going to get?

Riddle me this....

Question asked by Paul Begala on the "new, improved" Imus in the Morning on RFD-TV: Why don't the Democratic candidates talk about the recession instead of firing accusations at each other about race, gender, and the pecking order as heirs of the civil rights movement?

Possible answer: Mr. Begala makes the startling statement that it is part of the Democratic platform that we have a consumer economy, thus presumably we need to encourage spending. (I thought that a consumer economy had been a given since at least V-J Day, but moving right along....) What is unclear, I should think, is how consumers are going to have that money to spend given the already announced intention of the Democrats to raise taxes / eliminate tax cuts.

Maybe that's why they're not talking about it.

Missing it.....

What I've been able to stand watching in re primary campaign matters has left me with one major question. With all the yammering about "fresh starts" and "new beginnings," has there been anything said about "stable governance?"

I didn't think so, it's pretty boring, anyway.

Not the point, really....

Somehow, it seems appropriate to begin blogging in the new year with a note on energy. The Web abounds with "cure for cancer" articles, this one in the Guardian Unlimited claiming that Nanosolar's cheap printed PV cells will revolutionize power generation. The problem is that power generation has never been the problem. It's power storage that's the issue. The consumption of electricity is far from linear, and it's not very portable. It comes down to the venerable battery, and despite the claims of Duracell, Energizer, etc. hasn't changed all that much since Alessandro Volta invented it. Give us the next Thomas Edison, Edwin Howard Armstrong, John Bardeen or etc. and an increase in battery storage capacity and durability of an order of magnitude, and then -and only then- will you have what has become a contemporary cliché, "this changes everything."

Is this possible? Given my understanding of basic physics -which is pretty basic- I'd have to say, along with the Magic 8-Ball, "Don't count on it."

Oh, Happy New Year!