A fun project

One of the difficulties today in terms of footwear is that for whatever reason, many manufacturers don't have the good quality leather which will take a dye without excessive surface treatments--more or less, the lack of leather quality is quite literally covered up with a heavy polyurethane treatment, resulting in a shoe that is far less breathable and flexible.  Comfort takes a hit.  Part of this, I'm convinced, is because we don't eat much veal anymore, and some of the best hides for shoes do come from young cattle.

So for fun, I took a sanding block (sandpaper over foam) to one such pair of shoes, and was able to remove not only the grime from mowing, but also a good portion of the polyurethane (though not so much that one could see the base leather.   Putting them on was a revelation--it was a lot more like the high quality shoes I've bought in the past.

So if you've got some leather shoes where appearance is not key--don't do this with patent leather dress shoes for obvious reasons--and you'd like to get a little more comfort out of them, you can give this a try.  I used about a 120 grit sandpaper for this purpose.

An idea born of totalitarian idiocy

If current Russian president Vladimir Jugashvili Putin wants to show that his thinking is better than that of the Soviet era--where escaped Soviet pilot Viktor Belenko noted that they were trying to grow maize in Siberia--he could do little worse than the evident proposal to make a tunnel between Siberia and Alaska.  

How so?  Well, look at a highway map of Alaska, and then move over to the Russian side.  If you look closely, you will see that there is something pretty obviously missing.

Roads and railroads to the area.  

And of course, there is a reason for this; it's incredibly difficult to build roads on permafrost.  To get to Welsh, Alaska, you can take a boat (in summer), a plane, or, when you've got diptheria antitoxin to deliver and a good dog named Balto, a dogsled.  To build roads on permafrost, you're talking a similar amount of money as was spent on the Alaska Pipeline--$8 billion in 1974, or about $52 billion today.  The Russian side would be even worse, so we're really talking about somewhere north of $100 billion when....if there really was a market for U.S.-Russian trade, ships could embark from the end of the Trans-Siberian Railroad in Vladivostok and arrive in Seattle. High speed rail in California looks positively intelligent in comparison.

The reality here is that such a proposal is a gambit by Putin to soothe the ego of our President and get him to sell out Ukraine.  If it were, by some tragedy, actually built, it could also serve as a highway to achieve something Putin's minions are hoping to see; Alaska again as a territory of Russia.  Let's hope and pray neither happens.

PSA for cyclists

This is the helmet of a young friend of mine who learned the hard way that hitting big bumps at 30mph leads to road rash.  Thankfully, apart from cuts and scrapes, he's going to be OK, but notice here that the helmet is pretty well cracked.  Without the helmet, it of course could have been his skull.

Thanks again, Mom

Back when I was a young skull full of mush--now I am an older skull full of the same--my mother responded to my asthma and allergies by getting me on the swim team, under the notion that the moisture would do me good.  I never seemed to figure out how much good it was doing me at the time, but yesterday, I hit the pool after a rougher day breathing and....

...well, you're right again, Mom.   

A real risk of marijuana

A study of drivers who died due to car crashes finds that about 42% of them showed signs of recent use of marijuana and THC, with a mean THC level of 30.7 ng/ml, about six times the legal limit in Colorado.  Compare this with only 15% of Americans using cannabis in any form, and it would seem that we are starting to see significant evidence that THC indeed impairs safe driving.  The next step, in my view, is to see what percentage of those fatalities also included alcohol or other drugs, and to determine what portion of users use THC at this level.

I write this as someone who is generally friendly to the notion that marijuana is nowhere near as dangerous as opioids, and I stay by that view, but we simultaneously ought to realize that the use of THC, a mild hallucinogen, will not be without consequences.

An interesting claim

Apparently Joy Reid, in decrying an alleged plot by the GOP to end the income tax and allow people to earn as much as they want, is trying to connect efforts to end the income tax with Jim Crow and the like.

Which is interesting, because the architect of the income tax, Woodrow Wilson, is also the person who returned Jim Crow to the federal government.  So if I'm going to make a correlation, I'd argue that the income tax and Jim Crow go hand in hand.  Yes, there was pervasive discrimination even before Wilson, but Wilson further entrenched it in the federal government, and in doing so, probably gave Jim Crow a good portion of another 40 years of existence.  The large increases in the size of the federal government further gave Jim Crow new life.

That said, if only the GOP were going to end the income tax.  It costs close to half a trillion dollars per year just to administer and comply with it, and its heavily progressive nature discourages building businesses that would employ people--people like poor blacks that Reid claims to care about.  In doing so, it also introduces patently false ways of doing accounting which, again, put productive Americans out of work.

Regarding her notion that "you can earn as much as you want", quite frankly, if that were possible, I might have given it a try, and it's really basic economics that gets in the way.  Sad to say, I do not earn the wages that Michael Jordan and Tom Brady earned simply because I've never been able to handle a basketball or football the way they did, not because of a lack of desire to earn more money.

Amateur hour in the White House

Russian stooge Dmitry Medvedev taunts President Trump by noting a lack of U.S. submarines near Russia, to which Trump responds that he's moved a couple nearby.

Amateur move.  If you want to do psy-ops, you've got to respond with "Well, as far as you know.", or some such thing.  Uncertainty and doubt--especially in light of the fact that U.S. submarines are famously quieter than the Russians--can be far more effective than bluster.

Yikes

If there is any truth to Ukrainian President Zelensky's claim that Russia will not wait to defeat Ukraine before attacking the rest of NATO,  we would have to assume that history, specifically the part of how bad an idea a war on two fronts against multiple enemies is, is not taught at Russian universities, military academies, and of course the KGB/FSB.

This is why, in my view, Putin's aggressive tactics towards the NATO border countries need to be responded to rather directly with something like "Mr. Putin, you're losing a war against Ukraine, and the help NATO has provided amounts to about 2% of our weapons systems.  You do not want to see how quickly things go badly when the other 98% start to be used.".

Slava Ukraini, and Putin delenda est!

On the light side

It was nice, but a bit disconcerting, last night when the young man at Culver's gave me my first senior discount.  Hey, 72 cents off is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick!

I also read that former NFL player Shaun Alexander and his wife Valerie are expecting their 14th child.  Call me weird, but I think Valerie's got just as much right to a spot in a Hall of Fame as her husband--and that's not disparaging Shaun's accomplishments at all.   

Is this the new style?

It appears that after cartridges used by the murderer of Charlie Kirk had messages scrawled on them, the same thing was done for cartridges used by the shooter at an ICE facility.  So either this is becoming a fashion among the far left, or maybe it suggests that there might be some coordination between some of these guys.  Might be worth looking into.

And hopefully, of course, this causes the cartridges to fail to seat properly in the firing chamber, leading to inaccuracy and jamming.  Perhaps someday, we will even have a situation where the mainstream media look at these things and say "you know, somebody might be trying to tell us something here...".

If it were possible to spin in one's grave as one's life's work was trashed by one's successors, I think my great uncle would be doing so.  It is reasonable to ask "is this for real, or is this a diversionary tactic?", but not to ignore the evidence entirely.

This will leave a mark

Judge Steven Merryday, appointed by Donald Trump, strikes down Trump's lawsuit against the New York Times, filed in Tampa.  OK, the President's home is in Florida, but we have to wonder if there was some venue shopping going on here, as the southern district is far closer to Mar-A-Lago.  

But that noted, the judge's big objection is not venue, but apparently a violation of federal law that more or less says a complaint must be concise and understandable.  Trump's attorneys apparently have pulled a trick out of Kamala Harris' hat and written a legal complaint in "word salad".  

I am getting to be a broken record here, but it seems that too often, lawyers who ought to know better are failing in basic duties to their clients.  This may not be a case where Trump gets to get these guys disbarred, but at the very least, he's entitled to a refund of his legal fees.

More on the Macron/Owens fiasco

Apparently the lawyer (s?) for French President Macron and his wife are a bit slow on the uptake about how one is to win a defamation lawsuit.  For the uninitiated, when someone has access to the press, as the Macrons doubtless have, one must prove both that the accused knew that what she was saying was a lie, and that it was done with actual malice.

In this case, by saying they are going to provide "scientific evidence" that Madame Macron is female, what they've just done is to concede that (a) one could indeed have reasonable doubt about whether Macron was born female or not, and (b) hence Owens' mental state when making the claims is of no importance.

Chalk that one up to "time to refund those billable hours, counsel", and of course my hope and prayer, for the sake of any jury that might be seated, is that the evidence is a cheek swab and not some other evidence of being born female.  "I did not need to see that.", that sort of thing. 

Again, the better way for the Macrons to retaliate against Candace Owens would have been to present the results of a cheek swab, pictures of Madame Macron while pregnant, and the like and ask "what kind of idiot would, knowing that Brigitte Macron is a mother, make up such a story?".

On that free speech vs. hate speech

Apparently many on the left are up in arms about the recent firing of Jimmy Kimmel after he claimed--after news was coming out that Charlie Kirk's murderer was living with (or romantically involved with) a trans person, had inscribed socialist writings on cartridges, etc..--that the murderer was somehow "MAGA" and a Trump supporter.

For those unclear about the matter, yes, the First Amendment does, with narrowly defined exceptions, to say just about anything.  However, what it does not do is prevent others from making decisions on whether they will associate with you based on what you say.  So if you're running a TV show based on current events, and you completely misrepresent current events, your employer just might wonder if you're up to the job.  It is worse if your interpretation of current events will offend half the prospective audience.

Again, there have been very real, very nasty fascist movements out there.  Firing Jimmy Kimmel when he spouts off nonsense is not evidence of one.

Just sayin'

Trans cyclist (and near-Olympic qualifier) tells those objecting to biological males in women's cycling to "suck a sawed off shotgun", among other things showing clearly what a paragon of class the individual is. 

Pro tip for Wolfe; there are things called "history books" that explain precisely what the real Nazis did, and you might do well to read one.  Suffice it to say that the real version went well beyond making speeches on college campuses.

Thoughts on the murder of Charlie Kirk

I've been refraining a bit to let passions--maybe--die down a bit, but maybe I've got something good to say here.  First thing is that I really don't like the term "assassination", but prefer "murder" to describe this sort of thing, because "assassination" can lend an air of respectability to a crime that left a woman a widow, their children fatherless, and all in the name of a perverse sort of politics.

Murder it is.  Regarding the claim that a hot temperature of rhetoric led to this, maybe, but we might be a little more specific.  The habit I can think of that makes things the worst--the one that inflames passions--is generally the habit of making false allegations.  They are often close to true, but in reality, they are false.

A good example is the claim that Kirk said that black women did not have the brain power to be taken seriously.  Now I am not enough of a fan of Kirk's work to comment on his whole life's statements on this (and on many issues he seems to have changed his mind), but I am smart enough to listen to what he said in that video, which was that some specific black women did not have the brain power to be taken seriously.

We might say that Kirk ought to have considered the fact that some of these women have Ivy League degrees, whatever their affirmative action status, but in context, his actual statement is nowhere near as inflammatory as many, including supposed fact checkers, claim.  It is the difference between the Aristotelian categories of "some" and "all".

And so how might we respond to this tragedy?  I would dare say by choosing our words carefully, and by pointing out the problem when peoples' words and deeds are twisted to something they never meant.