Painting The Addition

On the last day of 2012 I spent the bulk of the day painting. I expected that it would go fast and it did--there are no floors in yet, or trim, or even switches, electrical outlets or lights.

I blew-through five gallons of primer in 6 hours of continuous work and then I was done, not with the job, but at least with the day since I was out of paint.

As I was progressing I had a couple of thoughts:

1. I am glad I ignored the advice of the paint clerk at the hardware store. He thought I should need only two gallons of paint, reasoning that each will do 400 square feet and the addition is about 800. I reasoned that the 400 figure was wall area not floor area and that is about the coverage I got.

2. I nearly got one gallon of paint onto the walls per hour of effort and so wondered what kind of benchmark "real" painters achieve? On further reflection, I doubt painters measure their work that way. Most are probably paid by the hour, not by how much paint they use-up. Even if you paid by some measure of how much work was completed, you probably would not want it to be by paint volume since that might just encourage wasteful application of product.

I have never hired a painter since it seems like the quintessential do-it-yourself kind of thing. But I may look into how they quote for jobs. Do they just come in and do everything? Or do you buy the paint and they just apply it?

At the end of the last day of 2012, I was exhausted. I don't know how I managed to find the energy to go out after that and pick-up more paint, but somehow I did. Yet the next day I (with Wife's help) finished the primering and the amount of time on the job was similar to what I had spent on painting on the day before. But I felt fine. I suppose that one's body adapts to whatever kind of work is demanded of it.

His Ethics are...Situational

The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our government’s reckless fiscal policies. . . . Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here. Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.

Obama 2006

But Obama warned again that he would not negotiate with Republicans over the $16.4 trillion debt limit, which must be raised in the coming weeks. “While I will negotiate over many things,” he said, “I will not have another debate with this Congress over whether they will pay the bills they’ve already racked up.”

Obama from today's Washington Post

2012 running

Running report for the year: 1,502.13 miles at an average pace of 7:57. 861.48 miles with shoes @ 8:03/mile and 640.65 barefoot @ 7:50/mile. I was hoping for 1560, so that the average would be 30/week.

I think that I get about 500 miles on a pair of shoes, so if nothing else, I saved about $50 on shoes this last year. The real reason I do it is the savings in time: 13 seconds/mile on average and what makes it more impressive is that the barefoot runs were mostly medium distance and long distance while the ones with shoes were mostly short runs. The other big savings is on injuries: I get more superficial cuts, blisters and abrasions on my feet; but my joints have never felt better.

Playing Against Type

1. From the picture above and from years of watching the show, it seemed like Jack Klugman was older--not by a lot, but older. In fact, Tony Randall was two years older.

2. Yes, I realize that the characters played are not like the actors. But still, can you imagine the show working if the roles were reversed? In fact, Klugman was a lifetime smoker while Randall did not smoke. Yet the slovenly guy who ate what he wanted and smoked, lived 6 years longer.

3. Divorce: On the show, both were famously divorced--which is how they came to be living together. Yet both actors were never divorced and their initial marriages lasted over 50 years. (Klugman did legally seperate from his wife of 21 years, but they never divorced).

Not a Christmas Song,..but really evokes Christmas

The Pretenders -- 2000 Miles



OK, this is weird.

Zooey Deschanel and Leon Redbone (Baby It's Cold Outside) .

The Waitresses, "Christmass Wrapping"

Fisking Marcotte is Like Shooting Fish in a Barrel

But here goes anyway:

National Review Writer Doubts the Power of the Bushmaster AR-15
By Amanda Marcotte

If you, like many red-blooded Americans, plan on joining the gun shopping spree that mass shootings usually inspire,

It is not the mass shooting that inspires gun shopping, it is the fear that the predictible hysteria will lead to a ban. So, it is prudent to buy while you still can.

The fact that he successfully killed 27 women and children with only one target escaping with an injury certainly suggests that the gun does what it was designed to do: kill a whole bunch of people in a short period of time.

There is a lot of history behind the development of the .223 Remington. To sum it up, the earlier cartridge types were more powerful than they needed to be. The 30.06 could be fatal at ranges of up to 800 yards while most soldiers lack the skill to make a hit beyond 200 yards. Further, it is better in a battlefield situation to wound (badly) than to kill outright. The logic is that a wounded soldier needs assistance while a dead one can wait for attention, so you remove more of the enemy by wounding them than by killing. Further advantages are that smaller lighter ammunition allows for more rounds to be carried and the lighter recoil helps with accuracy. Many states do not allow big game hunting with .223 Win because it is not deemed powerful enough. We err on the side of overkill for hunting because it is inhumane to inflict a wound which will kill, but only slowly.

But before you rush to give Bushmaster your hard-earned dollars, let me present a second opinion on the gun's manhood-bolstering capabilities from Robert VerBruggen, courtesy of the (sic) National Review Online, who argues that Lanza's weapon is too weak to bother banning:

VerBruggen's logic is not exactly difficult to follow: Gun control people claim that they are not after hunting weapons, but want to ban "powerful" "assault weapons". Hunting rifles are much more powerful than so-called assault weapons. So if you want to make a limit on how powerful civilian weapons can be, you will end up banning all large game rifles.

CHS Symphony Orchestra--Student Led

Barefoot Half Marathon

This is no kind of record for me, I've done this distance barefoot several times this year, although all have been since early fall.

I had originally wanted to run with shoes because I have a goal of doing at least one long run (15 miles or more) before the end of the year and my feet can't take much beyond 13. The problem lately is that if I run with shoes I am too tired to go further than that, so 13 seems to be the limit for now.

It was a nice day, sunny and low 40's and there are only so many days left before we are hit with the kind of cold and snow that will keep even my shoes on. So I will make barefoot runs while I can.

It was just cold enough, or really just warm enough depending on how you look at it, so that in sunny parts it was perfectly comfortable. In shady areas I felt a chill and my feet were cold. One might think that my feet would be numb all the time when running in 40 degree weather. Not so! Even at about 30 degrees, the feet are numb for a little while but then thaw out in a mile or two. A lot depends on if the ground is wet. In any case, numb feet are fine comfort-wise but I worry about damaging myself and not noticing until too late. A small sharp stone or peice of glass can stick to the bottom of your foot and slowly drill its way in with every footfall.

I started the run at about noon and yet the sun was low in the sky. The trees along the bikepath were casting shadows at right angles to the path and even though the pavement is asphault, the lit areas were almost white in the sun so there was a large contrast between the shadows and lit areas. As I ran down the path, I imagined that I was traveling along an endless barcode. The tree trunks cast shadows of various thicknesses and the spacing was random yet homogeneous in that there were few areas of total blackness or of light. I amused myself thinking about what messages could be encoded by the alternating bands of light and dark. We assume that the bands on packages mean something, even if we don't know what it is. We similarly asssume that the natural barcode means nothing, though at the very least it tells us a lot about the population density and age distribution of the trees in the wood.

Things took a poor turn soon into the run. I had been looking forward to getting out of the woods and onto roads since there would be more sunshine out in the open. Indeed there was, but also broken glass. My vision has gotten worse over the years, in the sense that I can't focus up-close anymore, but I can see small pebbles and glass peices well enough to avoid stepping on them. A sharp pain at around mile 3 told me that my senses failed. I stopped for a bit and found a shard of amber glass, not much bigger than a largish grain of sand embedded in the ball of one foot. I easily dug it out with a fingernail and was dismayed to see a bright drop of blood welling out of the wound. Great! Only ten miles to go! By about the half-way mark, sharp pains in both feet indicated further wounds, though there was no more glass to pick-out.

Not every step rewarded me with sharp pain, it was more like a couple of steps per minute of running. Maybe it was from when a small grain of grit got into the wound. In all, not a bad run. I made just under 8:00 per mile.

Pickles

They are not expensive and I don't think we use them on anything other than burgers, but we always seem to be running out of sliced pickles.

Monday, I did a Costco run and saw that I could get a gallon jar of whole dill pickles for $3.49! After a bit of indecision, it will take up a lot of space, I decided to get it.

It took only two pickles to fill the Mt. Olive jar most of the way--a 3rd would not have fit. The economics of it would seem to be sound: The big Vlasic jar would only need to have about 4 pickes to hit break-even. Based on the label, there should be around 18 in the jar: The label says that a serving is 1/4 of a pickle and there are 70 servings. Another way of calculation is that both jars say that a serving is one ounce and there are 10 servings in the pre-sliced jar.

The main benefit is that I can re-fill the sliced jar whenever it is low and so am saved from the Hobbson's choice of either keeping a spare jar of sliced pickes or having a burger with no pickles. Also, if I want pickle spears I can make them--I would never buy a jar of pickle spears since we almost never use them.

The Reason There Should Not Be an Agreement

Yuval Levin summs it up perfectly here.

The Democrats want to raise revenue and the Republicans want to reform entitlements. Those goals would seem to be easily reconciled — just do some of each, or even lots of each. But it only seems that way because we don’t often think about why the parties want these things. Simply (and surely somewhat too simply) put, the Democrats want more money so that the entitlement system doesn’t have to be reformed, while the Republicans want to reform the entitlement system so that the government doesn’t have to take more of the country’s money or take up even more of the economy. That means that doing some of each, let alone lots of each, doesn’t give both parties what they want, it gives both parties what they are desperately trying to avoid.

It is not really in either side's interest to compromise: The left would like to only raise taxes on "the rich" but don't really care if everyone gets hit--especially if they can blame the Republicans for it. The Republicans would rather have the taxes hit everybody since otherwise, there would be no leverage to get the economically harmfull rates on the high incomes brought back down.

The place where the Republicans have real leverage is on the debt limit. If they don't raise it then 31% of all federal spending will have to be cut. This is roughly the amount of spending on the discretionary side of the budget. If no agreement is made, then entitlements will have to be cut.

Getting "Played"

There is a lot of hate aimed at our presidents these days.

To some extent it has always been this way but it seems as if this phenomina has gotten much worse with the last three presidents.

Here is my theory as to why this is the case: It is different for the different sides:

The left hated George W. Bush because he was endlessly vilified in the press. It is only natural when everybody says how awful you are that you get to be disliked. For the right, the hatred of Clinton and Obama is for another reason and it is also less intense IMO. The hate comes from a feeling of injustice: Clinton (to what now seems like a relatively small degree) and Obama (massively) have gotten a total pass when they have failed.

A key to not being manipulated by all of this is to remember: It is not Bush's fault that the press demonized him, and it is not Clinton nor Obama's fault that the press lionizes them.

AK-47

I believe I have pointed out how I like to collect instances where things seem alike when viewed from one standpoint and seem opposite when viewed from another. The below quote from Instapundit is similar in a way: It can be taken in either of two ways, but they both point to the same conclusion.

HARDLY A SURPRISE: AK-47 Sales Soar, Crime Rates Fall? I mean, would you mug a guy with an AK-47?

"Would you mug a guy with an AK-47?" This could mean, if you were a mugger and a potential victim was carrying an AK-47, you probably would not mug him. It could also mean, if you were the kind of mugger who wanted to carry a weapon, it would almost certainly not be a rifle of any kind. After all, concealability would seem to be a logical concern.

Either of the meanings reinforce the correct conclusion that AK-47 type weapons are not suitable tools for the criminal class, at least not when it comes to mugging.

Let me see if I have this right?

The idea of Veteren's Day is to honor people who served in our military. This is all well and good--even as it may appear to be self-serving, I am all for it.

But why is it a Federal holiday? The largest group of people who get the day off are public employees. They range from generally to overwhelmingly left of center. It is also well-known that the ranks of the military have long been right of center.

So we honor veterens by giving a day off to mostly people who never served.

End Of The Line?

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville

Why is it that single women and minorities are the most loyal Democratic voters? They know which party will offer them the most goodies (at someone else's expense).

I hope that we as a nation are not doomed, demographics do point in that direction though: The underclass is growing and the productive classes are not.

Added: I was discussing these issues with my 15 year old daughter and she pointed out (correctly) that it is rational for people to vote in their own interest. We fairly explain the votes of the dependent class, but why to elites vote to the left so often? They make a lot of money and would be hit hard by higher taxes, it is certainly not in their interest to vote the way they do. Maybe it is a mirror image of What's the Matter with Kansas?

Mary Matalin of The Corner Has It Exactly Right

A political narcissistic sociopath leveraged fear and ignorance with a campaign marked by mendacity and malice rather than a mandate for resurgence and reform. Instead of using his high office to articulate a vision for our future, Obama used it as a vehicle for character assassination, replete with unrelenting and destructive distortion, derision, and division.

Read it all here.


Added: That he got away with it says something about what we have become as a people. That something is more depressing than the prospect of putting up with this clown for another four years.

Two Elections: Each A Defense "Of The One Big Thing"

It is too early yet to know if Obama has managed to be re-elected, but I see a real parallel between George W. Bush's re-election in 2004 and this race:

Both men were highly polarizing. To my view, the left (including the press) hated Bush and never saw his win as legitimate and therefore felt free to attack him with little regard for the good of the country. In Obama's case, he is polarizing because he has nothing but contempt for about half the country and we have noticed. Not to get too sidetracked, but each re-election only really mattered due to what it would prevent:

For Bush, it would prevent the left from pulling a Vietnam in Iraq and abandoning the cause after most of the effort was behind us.

For Obama, it is to prevent the overturn of "Obamacare".

There are a lot of differences too. The war was initially very popular and the Republicans made it a central point of the campain. Obamacare has never been all that popular. I don't think it has ever gone up to 50% and has fallen from its peak--though it is more popular now than the gulf war ended up being. Though, I suspect that if the president is in for another term, by the end of it Obamacare will be about as popular as the war ended up being. In any case, defence of the healthcare law has barely been mentioned and has not been a central theme.

Really, there hasn't been a central theme at all, just small snipey gripey things like threats of abortion being totally banned, big bird and tax breaks for millionares. Basically just a bunch of substanceless BS.

Do We Value Sincerity?

I had this little Twitter dialog over the weekend and it needs some expansion, but I don't want to harass Dawkins or be confined to 140 letter thoughts.

Richard Dawkins:
Romney believes a religion which is not only barking mad and utterly unscientific. It is also deeply racist. Mr Deity: http://bit.ly/Qu74Pv

David Pecchia:
@RichardDawkins Obama also claims to be a Christian. Are we assuming that this is somehow different, or that he is being insincere?

Richard Dawkins:
@dpecchia I hope he's being insincere. I'd hate to think he really believes it. But even Christianity is not in the same league as Mormonism

He is saying a couple of things here:

1. Mormonism is especially weird.

2. Obama is probably faking his religious belief, which is apparently a good thing.

I'll take the first point first: It is a little odd in the first place for atheists to debate which belief system is the most bizarre. Isn't belief in something for which, in the mind of a good atheist, there is no evidence at all, really the main gripe? Another way of looking at members of the LDS is more operational: Do they engage in behavior that is unconventional? I have spent time around Mormons and to my experience; they are anodyne to a fault. A final note: Romney grew up in a Mormon household. It is very common for people to stick-with the faith they grew-up with. Obama took-up his Christianity as an adult. I usually regard people who find religion as an adult as being more sincere in their belief--unless they do it under duress, like if they have to convert in order to marry. It seems that Obama's conversion may have been in the service of his "community organizing" and so may not be a typical conversion story.

As an aside: I sometimes make fun of my wife's Hindu background, to which she retorts, "But you don't even believe in God"! My (former Catholic) answer, "Yes, but the God I don't believe in is the one true God"!

As for the second point: I will start off by agreeing with Dawkins. I think Obama is really agnostic or atheist and is only pretending to be Christian. Where we depart is in how it makes us feel about Obama and Romney.

Neither of us know what is in the heart of either of these men: Romny could be secretly an atheist and Obama really a devout Christian. Somehow, people as different as Dawkins and me both think (on this point at least) that Romney is being honest and Obama is being deceitful. Now, as a point of first principles, one should favor an honest man over a liar. Maybe even Dawkins would agree, but I think that to Dawkins, it is better to be a liar than a believer in God. But doesn't the lie go to the heart of what a politician in a representative democracy stands for? Why would an atheist even want to lead a nation which is highly religious and which would never elect an admitted atheist? If you so utterly disrespect the belief of a people, why would you want to waste your time serving as their leader?

Added: Another part of the conversation via WSJ Best of the Web Today...

Richard Dawkins
@TheRiler @jamestaranto I don't like it, but a president who lies out of political necessity is a lesser evil than a stupid president

Wow! So Dawkins is calling anyone who believes in God, stupid? Amazing! Thoughtful people on both sides understand that this is not something which can be proven, right?

Identical or Opposite

Probably dating back to when I was majoring in philosophy, I've been facinated by things which can seem similar when looked at in one way and opposite when approached from another angle:

A good recent one is insurance coverage for ED medicines and for contraception.

From one viewpoint, they are the same because they facilitate sexual activity. On the other hand, ED drugs treat a lack of proper function, while contraception prevents normal function.