Dorothy and I went without cable television from last July until a couple of weeks ago. Back all those long months ago, I remember watching the History Channel and, from time to time, seeing shows about history.

This entire weekend has been nothing but Ice Road Truckers and Axmen, some show about people cutting down trees. I’m quite sure that every time I have flipped to the History Channel it has been one of those two shows, either reviewing last season or talking about how great next season will be.

Check out their schedule for tomorrow. Out of 24 hours, I generously count 8 that could be classified as history programming. I understand that a show about the creation of the universe technically is about what has happened in the past, and I understand that if you get a geologist drunk he might say that a show about the creation of the earth is history. But surely there are other channels for that sort of thing. And shows about future technologies decidedly are not history.

Here’s Tuesday. I count 10 hours of history programming, if you include 2 hours about the artifacts of Indiana Jones. Here’s Wednesday, where they actually fill most of the day with history programming, but that includes 8 hours of Civil War programming during the day time. Two prime time hours are spent searching for “Mega Hogs” (i.e. creatures like Hogzilla) and ghosts, and another is spent showing an episode of Ice Road Truckers that aired at least three thousand times this weekend.

The amount of historical knowledge we now have, the technology we have to recreate the past, there’s an entire cable network supposedly devoted to showing shows about history…and the grand culmination of this are shows about Canadian truckers, and speculation on what technology will be like in fifty years? Geez.

Apollo posted this at 10:47 PM EDT on Sunday, June 8th, 2008 as Grumblin Mumblins

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John McCain will be addressing a racialist group who’s motto is, “For the race, everything; outside the race, nothing.”  I refer to La Raza, of course (H/T). Por la raza, todo. Fuera de la raza, nunca. 

Color me unimpressed.

Hubbard posted this at 1:21 PM EDT on Monday, May 5th, 2008 as Grumblin Mumblins, The Melting Pot Boils Over, Audacity of Hype

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I can understand why politicians use the loopholes to circumvent laws they don’t like, but when you’re the author of the law, you really should obey the letter and spirit of it.  John McCain is busy weaseling out of McCain-Feingold, as Kim Strassel reports:

Unable to match Mr. Obama with smaller donors and (thanks to his own law) unable to cash any million-dollar donations, Mr. McCain is resigned to public financing. This will limit him to $84 million in taxpayer funds from the convention to Election Day. Mr. Obama will have no such restrictions.

Meanwhile, McCain-Feingold’s biggest “accomplishment” these past five years has been the flowering of those shadowy operations known as 527s, which abide by no rules. Democrats have fine-tuned these outfits, and are gearing up to unload hundreds of millions in negative advertising on none other than Mr. McCain. This bullet is aimed not at his foot, but his head.

In light of all this, the McCain camp has come up with a plan that it hopes will tighten the score. It has filed to create the “McCain Victory ‘08″ fund, a “hybrid legal structure” that includes the campaign, the Republican National Committee, and four battleground states.

Mr. McCain’s own law restricts individuals to donations of $2,300 per candidate, but those individuals can also contribute much bigger amounts to different party funds. So, with “McCain Victory ‘08,” donors can write a check for $70,000.

Technically, the money is divvied up between Mr. McCain, the RNC ($28,500) and the four states ($10,000 each). In reality, it will in effect all be used for the candidate’s benefit.

Well, isn’t that nice for a well connected guy like McCain?  What happens to the poor souls who don’t have his lawyers?  Ask the people of Parker North.  I’ve mentioned them in passing before, and here’s an old article with background on them; George Will today reports that they were successful in preventing annexation, but they’re still tangled up in a lawsuit:

Herewith another example of what is being done around the nation in the name of political hygiene, as that is understood by “campaign finance reformers,” those irksome improvers whose animating ideology is McCainism.

Parker North is a cluster of about 300 houses close to the town of Parker. When two residents proposed a vote on annexation of their subdivision to Parker, six others began trying to persuade the rest to oppose annexation. They printed lawn signs and fliers, started an online discussion group and canvassed neighbors, little knowing that they were provoking Colorado’s speech police.

One proponent of annexation sued them. This tactic — wielding campaign finance regulations to suppress opponents’ speech — is common in the America of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. The complaint did not just threaten the Parker Six for any “illegal activities.” It also said that anyone who had contacted them or received a lawn sign might be subjected to “investigation, scrutinization and sanctions for campaign finance violations.”

This is the sort of garbage I’m tired of.  McCain would go up in my opinion if he filed an amicus curiae in support of the folks of Parker North; after all, he wrote the idiotic law and is subverting it, so why should they be punished for doing what he’s doing?

Hubbard posted this at 3:06 PM EDT on Sunday, April 27th, 2008 as Grumblin Mumblins, Audacity of Hype

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I just subscribed to Major League Baseball’s audio service (Gameday Audio), so that I can listen to the Cardinals’ radio feed here in Texas. I’ve subscribed to the service in the past, and it’s not bad.

But what is bad is that as a “bonus” I get 14 free issues of Sports Illustrated. The true bonus is that the subscription automatically renews at their normal yearly rate! Wow, I get 14 free issues of a magazine I don’t like, and now I also get the obligation to call and tell them I don’t like it, or else they’ll take more of my money and keep sending me their crappy magazine. Now that’s a bonus.

Apollo posted this at 1:50 PM EDT on Sunday, April 20th, 2008 as Grumblin Mumblins

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I just watched a bit on ABC news interviewing two of the “average” people being hit by the housing crash. The two were an upper-middle class couple in their mid-30s. Nice house, a kid or two, good incomes. So they decided to invest and buy two (2!) investment condos near Miami. They bought the condos pre-construction and they planned to sell them for a profit before the buildings were finished. Now that they can’t sell them, they’re actually having to pay for the mortgages for the two condos, and the rent only covers half of the mortgage.

Reasons not to feel sorry for these people:

1. They acknowledged that their investments were purely speculation. Anyone who invests more than they can afford to lose in a speculation is asking for it.
2. If rent is only covering half of the mortgage, they paid way more for the condos than they were worth to begin with. It was a foolish investment, or else they had so little capital for the down payment that the monthly mortgage payment too high (which is a way of saying that it was a foolish investment for them).
3. They planned on buying the condos before they were built and selling them again before they were built, and making a profit off of this. They planned on adding not one whit of value to these properties. Walter Williams defines capitalism as being paid to provide a service to your fellow man. These people were wanting money for nothing.

Let’s review instead why these people should feel sorry for me:

1. As my wife and I are advancing through young adulthood, speculators are driving the price of housing up just when we need to buy. People like this couple, who want buyers like me to pay them a premium for…um…well, for being there, are part of the problem. Their behavior had socially unproductive consequences.
2. It’s pretty much guaranteed that one of the major parties is going to run a candidate who wants to raise taxes on the upper-middle class (I’m going to law school precisely because I want to be part of that class), and who wants to use tax dollars (i.e. my dollars) to bail out speculators getting bitten by the housing crash.

So after being priced out of the housing market I went to law school. If a Democrat wins the White House, the money I make from being a lawyer will be taken from me at a confiscatory rate and given to those people who made foolish investments and priced me out of the housing market. I hope in those circumstances Charlie Gibson comes around to feel sorry for me.

Apollo posted this at 6:12 PM EDT on Monday, March 31st, 2008 as Journalism, Grumblin Mumblins, It's Economics - Stupid!

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At 5 a.m., I thought, “It sure is raining hard.  I live on the fifth floor of an eight story building, and I can hear it pattering away!”

At 5:30 a.m., I realized that it wasn’t raining.  Water was coming out of my ceiling onto my water heater, making the pitter patter psuedo-rainfall noise.

At 5:45 a.m., I was dressed and complaining to management.

At 6 a.m., I started taking pictures for posterity (and a potential landlord-tenant dispute should things go badly).  Before the battery died, I had a very nice one of water streaming down from the ceiling.  Quite a bit of rust mixed in, too—one might have thought the walls were bleeding.

At 7 a.m., they finally found the problem: a burst pipe on the seventh floor.  The people in the apartment above me on six are apparently out on vacation.

At 8:30 a.m., the water seemed to have stopped, so I trudged to work.

At 9 a.m., the first message in my e-mail inbox was a request from the boss: could I work this weekend?

At 9:30 a.m., I finished swearing.

“Frustration” is our Dorothy Parker poem of the morning:

If I had a shiny gun,
I could have a world of fun
Speeding bullets through the brains
Of the folk who give me pains;

Or had I some poison gas,
I could make the moments pass
Bumping off a number of
People whom I do not love.

But I have no lethal weapon —
Thus does fate our pleasure step on!
So they still are quick and well
Who should be, by rights, in hell.

I think I’ll get a cup of coffee.  I’ll try to resist the temptation to spike it.

Hubbard posted this at 8:59 AM EDT on Friday, March 14th, 2008 as Ourselves, Grumblin Mumblins

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