voluntaryXchange

Too Much Water In the Desert

I shouldn't laugh, but check out the picture beside this article. The intermountain west is coming out of its drought with a vengeance. The home in this picture is not far from where we went to catch pollywogs on Memorial Day. Extra runoff in our valley goes to a place called Lake Quichapa, which has been dry since we moved here. Now it is about 50 square miles and up to 15 feet deep.

BTW: Our home is on the low dark green hills in front of the red hill.

George Washington - Party Animal

GW distributed "28 gallons of rum, 50 gallons of rum punch, 34 gallons of wine, and 46 gallons of beer" to the 400 eligible voters while campaigning for election to the House of Burgesses in 1758.

That works out to 9 shots of rum, 3 glasses of punch, 2 glasses of wine, and a pint of beer for everyone. With that much hooch in them, they probably voted for Christine Gregoire too.

Yet one more example of why we worry too much about the minor league corruption entailed by the amount we spend on contemporary presidential elections.

This is drawn from a review entitled "Civilization's Liquid Assets" of the book entitled "A History of the World In 6 Glasses" in the May 25 Wall Street Journal.

More Polygamist Fraud

Lots of action with the FLDS polygamist sect this past week (if you need a primer, click through the link at the bottom of the post).

The skinny is that on May 24 Arizona authorities exercised a warrant on the local school district headquarters, on May 26 Utah moved to have the sect's trust fund assets frozen and on May 27 a judge approved. On May 28 some limited information about what was found in the search became available.

Apparently the school district has been under investigation for about 2 years. Arizona recently passed a law effective August 12 allowing mismanaged districts to be placed in receivership. It is believed that the raid was an attempt to preserve records of the district. During the past year the district has had difficulty paying teachers. All of the administrators and school board members are FLDS members, although all FLDS children and teachers were withdrawn from the district a few years ago, and current administrators are not supposed to mix with current teachers and students. It is known that the district has an employee for every three students (about 5 times the normal ratio), and that non-teaching employees are frequently paid more than the teachers.

Utah moved to freeze the assets of the sect on Thursday. After providing evidence that there was a liquidation going on, a judge approved this motion and scheduled a June 22 hearing on removing all of the current trustees. The sect was not represented at the hearing after having established a history of defaulting on judgements.

A limited release of information from the search warrant included these tidbits:

• The district owns a Cessna for adminstrative use.
• Around $900K passed through a miscellaneous spending account.
• Around $3M in granted funds never made it to teachers.
• The district provides equipment for private businesses of administrators.
• There appears to be some featherbedding of employees who are FLDS members.
• Non-employees have keys to the buildings while teachers do not.
• And - this is rich - cans of beer (see the photo) in the offices of adminstrators.

The superintendent of the district - whose 30 year tenure may be the longest of any school district superintendent in U.S. history - had no comment. Of course, he's a piker compared to the school board president - who has served in that position since 1960 - and who heads a board that contains no parents of students.

All of this ties together to indicate racketeering. Arizona has a funding rule that preserves funding levels for school districts with rapidly declining enrollments. The sect built schools for lease by the school district, and required non-refundable prepayment. Then the sect withdrew their students and teachers from the school district. The district then terminated the leases on the buildings, which were turned into private schools. The school district lost the money, but this was covered by the quirky Arizona law guaranteeing the district continued funding in spite of losing 2/3 of its students. The school district then built new buildings - with FLDS subcontractors - next to the old buildings, and with storerooms with external entrances on that side. Want more?

An Anniversary of Folly

This is the 100^th anniversary of perhaps the worst military folly in history – the May 27, 1905 naval Battle off Tsushima.

The lead up to it is a bizarre story that’s worth reading if you've never heard it.

The story ends with the destruction of a second Russian fleet by the Japanese in 1905.

Pack Up the Moon and Dismantle the Sun

Bluebarrie - the cute gray dog caricatured at the left - died yesterday.

I would like to thank everyone that made a donation to help care for her. We nurtured her to a ripe old age, and the memory of that will have to be enough now...

The vX spouse and I are not taking this well - but hey, it's still been less than 24 hours. The reason seems to be that we averted her premature (and potentially very nasty) demise from her birth defect so many times in the past; she was as good as dead so many times and yet it was never final. This time it was clear very early in the process that we shouldn't even try to win the last battle against advanced age.

Is Book Burning Next?

Read this from the Ogden Standard-Examiner and form your own opinion. Note that the newspaper article has a forum that is decidedly anti-Mormon on this issue. Here is a forum from the LDS blog Our Thoughts.

Wanna' Buy a Ghost Town?

Modena is for sale. The whole town can be had for less than a jumbo mortgage. You will have to upgrade the 99 year old town water supply though. On the bright side, it has a red level rating for UFO spotting.

Modena isn't quite a ghost town - about 10 people live there.

Models In This Ad ...

"Models used in this ad do not reflect any racial preference" said the fine print.

They put beautiful women in advertisements to get mens' attention. I'm normal - this works on me.

The Friday section of The Wall Street Journal called Weekend Journal contains a lot of these ads - usually for high priced condos. My attention was drawn to one of these, and for some reason I read the whole ad. There at the bottom at the end of the small print was the statement "Models used in this ad do not reflect any racial preference".

How bizarre I thought. In a country that is 70% white, you have to put a disclaimer in an ad that features a white model.

So I looked at the other ads. None of them had this disclaimer, save one. Again, this featured a very good looking, young, white model. The unifying feature in both ads was that the woman was alone, and her picture dominated about a quarter of the broadsheet page.

It gets even more bizarre: this complex has the disclaimer on their website even thought they don't show models there, while this website does not have the disclaimer although it does flash a picture of the same model as the print ad.

So ... apparently there is now a threshold for advertising to the baser instincts of men above which you have to legally protect yourself because your choice of eye candy is potentially deleterious to your bottom line.

Tip: If you are into website design, or just design in general, the sites for these high priced condos often have cool websites with interesting features.

Galbraith

For those who have had read John Kenneth Galbraith and recognize their misfortune, the usually quick and concise Newmark's Door has a scathing and lengthy take-off on a review of a new hagiography. Now that I know the biography of Galbraith's early years (I couldn't find a reasonably detailed one online, so no link) I'm a little bit ashamed for how he turned out. He's great for quotes though.

BTW: I'm 40 and never had to touch Galbraith during my 1981-7 career of economics classes. By then he was viewed as a crank even in the left-leaning department I got three degrees from. He was required reading for a political science class in 1982 called U.S. Political Economy, which was one of the worst classes I took in college (although my appreciation for the exposure to literature it gave me has increased with time).

Iran

No really ... what are we going to do if Iran gets nukes? Or North Korea for that matter?

Think about it. Opponents of the U.S. make the following sort of argument: the U.S. has used its superpower position and weaponry to unduly influence events around the world without having to resort to its nuclear weapons. By carrying a big stick, we've been able to get a lot of events to turn our way.

Even if you don't buy this argument as fact, it's pretty clear that this is an effective strategy.

So, what should we expect if Iran or North Korea gets nukes? Not nuclear attacks, but rather more brazen conventional attacks. Chicago Boyz hits this on the head with respect to Iran.

The Iranians are working on nuclear weapons, and they are run by a regime that has sponsored terrorist attacks against the West in the past. They see us as "the Great Satan". If they get nuclear weapons, what possible reason would they have for not sponsoring repeated, conventional attacks against the Great Satan itself? What could we do about it? Would we accept a nuclear exchange to retaliate for another 9/11-style attack? Would we wait until we've suffered five of them?

Read the whole thing here.