World of Good Blogburst, Navy Style

Thanks to A Tic in the Mind’s Eye, we have the World of Good (WOG) Blogburst.

Update - I now have a post that describes the purpose of the WOGs, lists the ones we've done and asks you to help.

After the devastating tsunami in Asia in 2004, the U. S. and Australian Navies provided round-the-clock comfort and support for the devastated areas. Words don’t do justice to the sailors and airmen who worked until they dropped for people who they had never met. It is my hope that in some small way, the pictures posted here give you a sense of the brave, dedicated and resourceful people in the Navy. There’s much more at the Navy website.

Go Navy.


Ahangama, Sri Lanka (Jan. 16, 2005) - Steelworker Constructionman Nikolas Matthews, assigned to Naval Mobile Construction Battalion Seven (NMCB-7), Air Detachment, stacks roof tiles that were removed from damaged buildings at a primary school in Ahangama, Sri Lanka. The Seabees cleared the debris as part of the humanitarian relief efforts of Operation Unified Assistance, the humanitarian relief effort to aid the victims of the tsunami that struck Southeast Asia. U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate Greg Bingaman


Banda Aceh, Sumatra, Indonesia (Mar. 2 2005) – Cmdr. Karen McDonald, center, a U.S. Navy nurse, is assisted by members of the German military as they carry an Indonesian patient to an awaiting U.S. Navy helicopter for transport to the Military Sealift Command (MSC) hospital ship USNS Mercy (T-AH 19). Mercy served as an enabling platform to assist humanitarian operations ashore. Mercy was off the waters of Indonesia in support of Operation Unified Assistance, the humanitarian relief effort to aid the victims of the tsunami that struck Southeast Asia. U.S. Navy photo by Photographer's Mate 2nd Class Jeffery Russell


Indian Ocean (Mar. 14, 2005) - An elderly Indonesian patient shows her sincere appreciation to a "Project HOPE" volunteer by kissing her hand and saying a prayer for her as she waits for her helicopter flight back to Banda Aceh, Sumatra, Indonesia, upon discharge from the Military Sealift Command (MSC) hospital ship USNS Mercy (T-AH 19). U.S. Navy photo by Photographer's Mate 2nd Class Jeffery Russell


Indian Ocean (Mar. 14, 2005) - U.S. Navy personnel assist an Indonesian patient to a MH-60S Seahawk helicopter during her transfer back to University Hospital in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, following treatment aboard the Military Sealift Command (MSC) hospital ship USNS Mercy (T-AH 19). U.S. Navy photo by Photographer's Mate 2nd Class Jeffery Russell


Strait of Juan De Fuca, Puget Sound, Wash. (Mar. 4, 2005) - The Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72) transits the Strait of Juan De Fuca as they prepare to return to Naval Station Everett, Wash., after a deployment to the Western Pacific Ocean. The Lincoln Carrier Strike Group and embarked Carrier Air Wing Two (CVW-2) supported Operation Unified Assistance, the humanitarian relief effort to aid the victims of the tsunami that struck Southeast Asia. U.S. Navy photo by Photographer's Mate 3rd class Chris Otsen


San Diego, Calif. (June 8, 2005) - Families and friends wait as the Military Sealift Command (MSC) hospital ship USNS Mercy (T-AH 19) prepares to moor at Naval Station San Diego. Mercy returned from a five-month deployment in support of tsunami relief efforts and humanitarian aide missions to various Southeast Asia nations. U.S. Navy photo by Photographer's Mate 2nd Class Johansen Laurel

The Navy's been very kind to me, so there's plenty more where this came from. Are the rest of you going to let the Navy show you up? My offer still stands.

U.S. Navy imagery used in illustration without endorsement expressed or implied.

An Announcement from the Feline Theocracy

I, K T Cat, your Maximum Leader, have a grand announcement from the Feline Theocracy.


Because of his brave deeds, noble demeanor and kind offer to leave a plate of tuna out for me, Lawman is hereby named Knight Protector of the Feline Theocracy and Defender of Yarn Balls. Read ye his blog with great regularity.


Go forth now in your endeavors, Sir Knight, with the blessings and prayers of all felines!

As previously noted, the most honorable Empress Kukka-Maria has also been named Mother Superior of the Holy Order of Ocean Whitefish. Read also her blog, for it is great with feline wisdom.


All hail the Feline Theocracy!

Quote from forgotten author: “Cats were once worshipped as gods. Cats have never forgotten this.”

What To Do While Waiting In Court

Yesterday I had the unmistakable pleasure of showing up in court as a witness in a trial. While waiting to be called, I sat next to a middle-aged woman and her very young attorney. She had a harsh, bitter look about her as if she felt she had been done great ill and wanted revenge on everyone. He sat staring off into space. I hypothesized about his past.

He went to law school because he was a crusader. He wanted to change the world and defend the “little people”. He was also materialistic, which was shown by his clothes. He liked the finer things in life and those could be had with enough billable hours, at $240 an hour. He was young enough to be either paying off his first Corvette or saving for the down payment on his first condo in Telluride.

In law school he had learned case history, constitutional law, court procedures and various legal maneuvers for the courtroom. No one had told him that billable hours were just that, hours. Hours spent on uncomfortable plastic chairs in noisy, dirty hallways, waiting to see a judge who was behind schedule and ill tempered. Hours spent signing forms, filling out forms, looking for forms and discovering he had filled out the wrong forms.

Then the best fantasy of all struck me.

He had not been told that those billable hours were hours he was hired by his client to do…anything? As I watched them sit beside me, doing absolutely nothing, I imagined their bank accounts like parts of an hourglass. Hers was on top and his was on bottom and the grains of sand were dollar bills, falling at the rate of one every 15 seconds. She was spending four dollars a minute on him and he was just sitting there, staring off into the ether, imagining his Porsche or next Italian wool suit or airhead mistress.

As old as she was, she should have demanded more for her money than a blank look from a young punk in snappy clothes. I would. Here’s what I came up with as a list of things I want done for me while waiting by someone who is earning $240/hour of my money.

1. Shine my shoes.
2. Tell me stories.
3. Tell me jokes.
4. Make balloon animals for me.
5. Give me a massage.
6. Listen to every frightfully tedious story I have to tell as if it were the finest prose from Charles Dickens.
7. Sort my socks. I’ll bring a bag of them, fresh from my dryer, and you can match and fold them. I hate doing that.
8. Make shadow puppets on the wall and entertain me with a play. Ibsen is right out, so don’t go all highbrow on me just because you went to Yale.
9. Tap dance for me.
10. Do that really funny mime routine the guy at Sea World does as people are walking in for the next sea lion and otter show. You know, the one where the guy follows the lady to her seat and makes mocking, exaggerated sashaying motions with his hips while pursing his lips and making an idiotic face somewhat like hers. When her boyfriend / husband / lawyer catches you and kicks the tar out of you, make amusing noises during and after the beating.

And now a bonus suggestion. My personal favorite. The Lawyer Pit.

11. Fight with the other lawyers waiting for the other trials in an Ultimate Fighting-style match. We’ll set up a pit for you to fight in, with seats all around. We’ll take bets and sell hot dogs and beer. It will be great fun for all. Well, maybe not for you, but certainly for us.

If I’m giving you a new leather sofa every three hours, you had darn well better be earning it, boy, and contemplating the peeling paint on the wall across from you doesn’t qualify as earning anything more than the back of my hand. Imagine how common lawsuits would be if lawyers knew they had to go through this. CALA has some good stories of frivolous lawsuits.

I now open it up to you. What should your lawyer do for you at $240/hour instead of just using up valuable oxygen and taking up space?

Advice to the President on Defeating Terrorists

All hail the Alliance! Here at The Scratching Post we have it’s motto imprinted in our brains!

Sick, Distempered Tyrannosaurus!

Or something like that. Anyway, they have a new Precision Guided Humor assignment. Who could give President Bush good advice on fighting terrorists, and what would they tell him to do?

First, let us examine the problem. Is the problem the way we are fighting terrorists? Do you think we can improve on these guys?




I think that’s a big no. The problem is these guys.




Too many people here in the U. S. listen to them and read what they write. The public becomes convinced that we’re losing or doing bad things. What we need is a way to get fewer people to pay attention to them. I suggest the best people to give President Bush advice on this are the talent agency casting services professionals at Hollywood Pictures dot com.

Reporters seem to be able to believe absolute rubbish at the drop of a hat. With a little encouragement, the fine people at Hollywood Pictures could convince them that “they ought to be in pictures.” A few acting lessons (Matt Damon is proof positive that very few are needed) and off they go into disastrously unpopular movies like Syriana, Brokeback Mountain and Good Night and Good Luck.

Where no one will ever hear from them again.

Muhahahahahaha! They might as well be thrown into a dungeon, they’ll be so totally cut off from the rest of us. It will be sort of like living in The Matrix for them. They’ll think they’re in the real world, but all the time they’ll be living in a bubble, unable to influence anyone who votes.

Oh sure, there will be some people who will go looking for them. A few inquiries at the police station and a private eye or two, but since they’ll only be seen in movie theaters, they’ll never be found! Although they would blame us for violating human rights, even the ACLU wouldn't be able to extricate them from this trap.

MUHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Sorry. I got carried away there.

Once they're out of the way, the American people will turn to other news sources and see the real effects of what America has done for the rest of the world



and patriotism and support for fighting criminal maniacs will never ever weaken again.






Now let me add a brief, serious note. The three pictures above are from the Navy relief effort after the recent, devastating tsunami. We should be very, very proud of the job done by the U. S. and Australian Navies in providing immediate assistance to the victims. Believe me, stories from those crews would make you never again doubt the good we do.

Red Sky at Night...

...sailor's delight.

Peggy Noonan, Hollywood and the French Revolution

In my last post I took Peggy Noonan out behind the barn and gave her a right good thumping for having been morose. I would like to remedy any hard feelings by saying that her recent article on Hollywood was excellent. Here’s a sample.

George Clooney has a canny respect for the Hollywood establishment, for its executives and agents, and treats his audience as if it were composed of his intellectual and artistic inferiors…
And because they are his inferiors, he must teach them. He must teach them about racial tolerance and speaking truth to power, etc. He must teach them to be brave. And so in his acceptance speech for best supporting actor the other night he instructed the audience about Hollywood's courage in making movies about AIDS, and recognizing the work of Hattie McDaniel with an Oscar.

Here’s the money quote for me:

Most Americans aren't leading media, they're leading lives. It would be nice to see a new respect in Hollywood for the lives they live.

Peggy, you rock! That gets you a big bowl of tuna from K T Cat. However, there’s a historical parallel that you need to follow up on. It’s the French Revolution. Here’s a key quote from my 1959 World Book Encyclopedia entry on the subject.

…in the 1700’s…the country was still in the Middle Ages so far as its forms of government and social organization were concerned. The king ruled by “divine right.” Nobles lived lives of great luxury, and the peasants did not have enough to eat…At the same time, new ideas about freedom and government were spreading from the men of learning to the people, who had come to think that government was not a divine right of kings, but an agreement shared by an entire nation.

Let’s alter that quote to match today.

…in the 2000’s…the country was still in the 1960’s so far as its forms of news media and entertainment were concerned. The broadcast media felt they ruled by “divine right.” Actors and reporters spoke from positions of great importance, and the people were not given respect…At the same time, new ideas about freedom and government were spreading to the people, who had come to think that sharing information was not a divine right of the media, but an ability shared by an entire nation.

The French Revolution turned violent in part because the French aristocracy had the army and personal guards to defend them.

The news media and Hollywood have George Clooney.

It's time to storm the Bastille, dudes.

A New Lawn Refutes the Decline of Civilization

With apologies to P. J. O’Rourke and his essay in Republican Party Reptile, Ferrari Refutes the Decline of the West.

I’ve taken to reading the blog, Storming Jericho. His post on the End of the World as We Know It bears some discussion.

I first started thinking about the direction of the changing world a few months ago after reading this entry by Cicero on Donklephant. Here Cicero discussed the notion among many Americans that the nation is coming apart at the seams, beyond anyone's ability to repair it.

Here’s a key section from the Cicero post quoting a morose Peggy Noonan column:

Among the elite, Ms. Noonan relays an anecdote about Senator Ted Kennedy, as told by Christopher Lawford, Senator Kennedy’s nephew, in his book ‘Symptoms of Withdrawal’:

…Everyone was laughing. Then, writes Mr. Lawford, Teddy “took a long, slow gulp of his vodka and tonic, thought for a moment, and changed tack. ‘I’m glad I’m not going to be around when you guys are my age.’ I asked him why, and he said, ‘Because when you guys are my age, the whole thing is going to fall apart.’ “

For those of you who read my blog for cats and humor, let me summarize my response so you can move on to the next post.

Get over yourselves! Christopher Lawford, Peggy Noonan, Ted Kennedy, what is this, The Great Gatsby? Who gives a rat’s ass what these people think? Here’s what concerns normal people:


That’s my neighbor’s new lawn in their backyard. They had a landscaper put it in last week. Maybe they needed it so that when they were overcome with existential ennui and passed out from overwhelming fatalism they had somewhere soft to fall. Or maybe they wanted a new lawn.

In the echo chambers of the self-important, this kind of conversation may be intriguing, but for the rest of us it’s downright ridiculous. A recent post on IMAO by Laurence Simon discussed the choice between going to an Astros game and seeing the cast of NRO play a baseball game as a fund-raiser. I like NRO, but let's be serious. The Astros are professionals. As for the NRO staff...Oooh, is that Ramesh Ponnuru at the plate? Oh, the glamour! I’m all a-twitter!

Stop and think about the event Peggy Noonan described for a moment. Uncle Teddy is getting pickled and some idiot is writing down what he has to say. Imagine that at one of your parties with your friends.

Heather Johnson knocked back her fifth margarita and as she slid to the floor off the tattered couch was heard to mumble, “We’re all screwed.”

Hey, Heather was drunked up said the country is going to the dogs! I feel so lost and impotent! Let’s write a column about that!

I’ve got a better idea. How about if Peggy Noonan takes a deep breath and then visits a Home Depot on a Saturday. I’m sure we can find one on Martha’s Vinyard or in the Hamptons. Let’s see here… well, there’s one in Hyannis. That should be close enough to Thurston Howell III and his friends so Peggy will feel right at home as she drives over to rub shoulders with us filthy proles. Afterwards she can sip a few glasses of Bollinger on the Kennedy yacht to wash away the sight of normal people doing constructive things to make their lives better.

Here’s a suggestion for a new column, Pegster: If the world sucks and we’re descending into a bottomless pit of despair, how come people are buying PVC irrigation pipe and drill bits?

Treats and the Proper Respect of Cats

Dear Readers,

I, K T Cat, your Maximum Leader, rarely write in my own voice. It is usually the human who I have granted the honor of feeding and petting me who writes these entries. Today, however, I take up the keyboard so that I may record an incident of great distress to my person.

The other day, the human's father came over to my house. As is fitting for all such visitors, he offered me a treat. The odor of the treat was sweet unto my senses and, with as much respect as I can show to such subordinates, I asked him to set the treat down that I might partake in it.


Amused by the urgency of my request, he laughed as I repeatedly asked for the treat. I felt that such indignities were unbecoming his Maximum Leader and I suggested that the treat might best be employed blocking one of his bodily orifices.


Upon seeing my discomfort, he respectfully placed the treat upon the floor so I could dine.


I believe that I speak for all cats in suggesting to all humans that when they have treats for us cats, they place said treats within reach immediately.

Your Maximum Leader,
K T

Welcome Carnival of the Cats Readers!

The Scratching Post is an eclectic blog. We invite you to look around. We also do posts on politics , ethics and humor.

What's Your K Factor?

How do you measure the effectiveness of your blog? Let me posit that blog effectiveness can be measured by determining how often new visitors surf around your site. That is, how often do they visit one post and become so intrigued that they bother to look at others before they leave?

Among other metrics, blog success can be measured by the number of links to the site and the number of hits on the site. I would suggest that hit count is the more important of the two.

Measuring your success by the number of links you have can be deceiving. As soon as I joined Stop The ACLU, my link count shot up tremendously. However, if you went and examined those blogs linking to me, you would see that I was a single link in a sea of other links. I was indistinguishable from the rest. While I rose in the ecosystem, I did not see commensurate increases in traffic.

More evidence of this came from a recent Carnival of the Cats. I had two entries in it. One was the lead entry in the Carnival and the other as midway down the list of about 100. The first post got 15 times as many hits as the second. Being one link in a mass of links is relatively worthless.

In contrast, I recently received a link in a post from The Anchoress. That link pulled in over 150 hits to my site.

Carnivals and links from the more popular bloggers produce individual spikes in traffic. They are a poor measure of blog success since it doesn’t tell you if anyone liked your blog enough to read more.

Blog traffic can be broken down into

Ambient traffic + temporary traffic.

Ambient traffic is your repeat visitors. A good way to measure this is the number of times the first hit comes to your root site. Of course, this can come from one of the links on a sidebar or from looking at your profile, but this gives you a crude measure of your general popularity.

Temporary traffic are those visitors who come to a specific page from a link at someone else’s site. Again, this could include some of your repeat visitors, but in general it represents people who haven’t seen you before.

Ambient traffic is the key. Temporary traffic requires effort. You write a post and then advertise it as best you can, hoping for a link from someone. Ambient traffic comes by simply posting. Your repeat visitors will come back to see what you said without needing a link from another site. I’ve come up with a metric for how successful you are at converting temporary traffic into ambient traffic. I call it the K Factor. It’s really simple.

K Factor = count of hits to a specific post where the visitor went on to look at more pages / count of hits to a specific post.

From a recent Site Meter report on my own blog, of the last 20 hits I had 13 hits to specific pages. Of those 13, 8 went on to look at more of my blog. My K factor is then 8/13 or 0.62.

The higher your K Factor is, the more people like what you write. In general, if they don’t go on to visit other pages, then you didn’t grab them sufficiently to get them to come back again.

The K Factor can also be broken down by referencing sites. For instance, Hamster Heaven readers are typically just beaming in to look at hamster pictures. I have’t seen them stick around. In fact, in a recent entry about my hamster that I posted on the Hamster Heaven discussion board, I directly asked for comments. They came by, read the post and then went back to the discussion board to leave their comment instead of leaving it on the blog like I asked. Almost none of them stayed to see more of the blog. By contrast, a recent post on Spike Lee got many secondary hits by visitors from The Anchoress.

Analyzing your K Factor can tell you where to do your marketing. Hamster Heaven has been an outstanding source of one-time hits. Each post I link to on their discussion board brings in about 70 hits. That’s great until you realize that the only way to make that part of your recurring traffic is to repeatedly post links on their site. After the Anchoress gave me a link, it got a similar spike in traffic and then I saw a steady and permanent rise in ambient traffic. Both marketing efforts required the same effort. By examining my K Factor, I could see which one to repeat.

If you choose to feature the K Factor on your blog, please include a link to The Scratching Post.

Welcome Carnival of the Capitalist Readers!

The Scratching Post is an eclectic blog. We invite you to look around. We also do posts on cats, politics , ethics and humor.

Unreal

Dig this. The rest of the blog has more cool things just like it.

I didn't even know this was possible.

Justin's Blog Rocks

First, go and watch this.

Then go look at the rest of his blog. He gets added to the friends list even if he doesn't link to the Feline Theocracy.

We have an iPod. We also have a Rio Karma. The Karma's software is lightyears better than the iPod. I hate Apple. MP3 players are hard drives with a simple file structure, a program or two and a child-proof human-machine interface. Having written code for PCs, SGI machines, the Nintendo 64 and microcontrollers, I can tell you that this requires journeyman programming skills at best.

The iPod has an MS Outlook-like function. Calendar, contacts, task list and so on. MS Outlook is a simple database. You could reverse engineer the structure of the database with a text editor and some simple binary dump tools. Converting one database to another is a TRIVIAL ACTION. While it was advertised to be able to import your Outlook information onto itself, in reality, the iPod was utterly confused by the whole affair. I would have had more luck asking a cruciferous vegetable to display my Outlook calendar.

After endless hours on discussion boards, calling support and going to the Mac store, we gave up. By the way, the people at the Mac store are talented professionals who, with a little training, could get a job at Abercrombie and Fitch. As mannequins.

Since they use Macs, their primary talent is looking cool and bored and hip. You, the unwashed masses, walk into their store, see how cool and bored and hip they are and buy a Mac so that you, too, may someday be that cool. Macs are cool. They come in cool colors and shapes. People who use Macs are cool. The rest of us are not.

Right.

Take Me Out to the Ballgame

My son has an 8AM Pony League game today. It rained ferociously last night. Here's the current view from the deck:


The game hasn't been called yet. I love sports. I've managed several teams. This is way too hard core even for me.

After the tornado sweeps us away, I'll be blogging to you from Oz. If my camera survives the trip, I'll be sure to try and get some shots of those flying monkeys just for Frank J.

Oh Come On, This Isn't a Surprise

You Are Animal

A complete lunatic, you're operating on 100% animal instincts. You thrive on uncontrolled energy, and you're downright scary. But you sure can beat a good drum. "Animal! Animal!"

The Muppet Personality Test

The Great Sunflower Seed Debate

Just last night, Jacob and I had a serious disagreement. You're invited to cast your vote in the comments and resolve this debate.

Jacob: Would you mind getting me some sunflower seeds? I really like them, you know.

Me: I did. I put them in your dish.

Jacob: No you didn’t.

Me: Yes I did.

Jacob: Look at the dish! There’s not a single seed in it!


Me: You took them all and stuffed them in your cheeks.

Jacob: That’s an outrageous lie. There’s nothing in my cheeks at all.

Me: What are you talking about? Your cheeks are bulging with seeds.

Jacob: No they’re not. This is how I always look.

Me: Your cheeks are so stuffed with seeds that you sound like Marlon Brando from The Godfather when you talk.

Jacob: That was a good movie, wasn’t it?

Me: Yeah, but I liked the book better. Wait a minute! You’re changing the subject!

Jacob: You brought up the movie. So will you go get me some seeds already?

Me: No. I just gave you some.

Jacob: I thought we went through all of this already. There are no seeds here at all.

Me: This is getting repetitive. I suggest we leave it to the readers. Deal?

Jacob: Deal.

OK readers, here’s your chance. Did I cheat the little Syrian out of his sunflower seeds or does he have them in his cheeks? Your vote determines whether or not he gets more seeds tonight.

Volunteering to Fight the Police State

Got my coffee, got my music, got some rain on our glass dome roof, got my blog. It’s time for some Early Morning Blues and Greens and writing.

Instapundit links today to a well-researched Marc Cooper column on Hillary’s latest campaign speech. She claims some border control proposal or other will create a “police state”. Marc compares Clinton and Bush administration policies to make his point. I think he overanalyzes the situation. Zimbabwe is a police state. The US is not. Hillary’s assertion is self-evidently stupid. She might as well write campaign commercials for the Republicans with speeches like this.

Anyway, Marc takes up the gauntlet and manfully thwacks Hillary about the head and shoulders, but misses a broader point.

Hillary is a politician. She may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but she’s reasonably professional. She wants votes. She gets votes by talking. She thinks this speech will get her more votes. Why? In short, Hillary needs campaign volunteers. Because of the blogosphere, those who might volunteer for her campaign want to hear this.

Those of you growing bored are encouraged to go look at pictures of KT and Jacob. My next post won’t be so serious, I promise. I’ll get this windbaggery out of my system and go back to animals and humor shortly.

In Michael Medved’s autobiography, Right Turns, he discusses his experience as a volunteer on various political campaigns. What struck me as I read it was the mechanics of getting elected. While wealthy corporations and individuals can bankroll campaigns and grant advantages over campaigns with less funding, to be consistently successful you need a cadre of dedicated volunteers.

In general, volunteering for a political campaign is the act of a political fanatic. With the advent of the blogosphere, political fanatics now have a place to gather and encourage one another.

Howard Dean rose to contend for the presidency because of such volunteers. That lesson was not lost on everyone else. In addition to courting the fatcats like George Soros, politicians like Hillary are courting the pools of volunteers. The blogosphere helps politicians like Hillary tune in to what these people want. There’s no need for focus groups because the fanatics are publishing mini-manifestos on a daily basis.

More than that, these echo chambers create peer pressure among the volunteers. The Daily Kos is savaging Joe Lieberman on a daily basis. It’s kind of hard to volunteer to work for the guy if your ideological comrades will beat you senseless for doing so. It’s a high school locker room for political junkies.

I was going to list some posts from Kos to give you some examples of the locker room chatter, but after paging through 60 of their headlines I found them so relentlessly boring that I couldn’t bring myself to inflict more than one of them on you. Here’s a sample. Pretend you're Hillary and you want to court these people. Why wouldn’t you say America was becoming a police state?

A Little More on Argentina

Check out this post and blog.

In my post below, my quick research revealed Argentina as an up and coming place. Reading this fellow's blog reinforces that. I also just read the entire World FactBook piece on Argentina and found more reasons to like the place. I wonder what the Wall Street Journal has to say...

Here's what I found:

Now, with Argentina in the midst of its fourth year of a super-strong economic recovery and having paid back in full a $9.5 billion debt to the IMF, the mood between both sides appears to have greatly improved.

The FactBook says they have about 35% or so of their population below the poverty line and WSJ makes some warning noises in other articles. Nevertheless, there's a world out there other than Europe, Asia and the Middle East that bears watching.

Thursday 13

My Thursday 13 is being published on Wednesday night. I've got to be in at work by 5:30AM, so I don't think I'll be blogging tomorrow morning...

Thirteen Things about K T Cat
13 Places I want to visit

I suspect you'll see a theme here. I really enjoyed this exercise. It took forever to find nice links for each of these, so I didn't write much. You'll just have to check out the links to get the message. I've got a ton of frequent flyer miles and I'm thinking that #5 looks pretty good right now...

1. Maui – been there several times. Maui no ka oi!
2. Key West – Going there soon. Can’t wait!
3. New Orleans – Awesome food and N’awlins Saints football!

Mmmmm. Tropical Islands....
4. Kiribati
5. Fiji
6. Tahiti
7. St. Thomas
8. Maldives

Cool places to visit...
9. Cairns, Australia
10. Thailand
11. Peruvian Amazon
12. Yucatan
13. Galveston – Of course!

Welcome, Thursday 13 visitors! Please have a look around. We do posts about animals, charitable acts and some political humor, too.

Links to other Thursday Thirteens!
Yellow Rose
Wystful
Reverberate
Master Enigma
Heather
Volcanic Sacrifices
Jake Silver

Get the Thursday Thirteen code here!


The purpose of the meme is to get to know everyone who participates a little bit better every Thursday. Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your Thirteen in others comments. It’s easy, and fun! Be sure to update your Thirteen with links that are left for you, as well! I will link to everyone who participates and leaves a link to their 13 things. Trackbacks, pings, comment links accepted!

View More Thursday Thirteen Participants

Mi nombre es K T Gato

Mark Steyn has written extensively on demographics and how it is changing the world. He writes almost exclusively from a birth rate point of view and persuasively suggests that Western Europe and Japan are in for rough times because of their low birth rate and the advance of a rapidly growing Moslem subculture.

Rather than repeat his work, I’ve chosen to look at where things are going well. Put another way, “What language should you learn to speak aside from English?” I took the 25 largest countries in terms of their economies and then removed ones where the people are very poor, and then removed the ones where the birth rate is so low that the population is aging rapidly. I then ranked them according to per capita income, which gives you a rough idea of how well off the citizens of that country are. In addition to the top 25, I threw in Ireland because it’s supposed to have one of the freest economies in the world and Ireland is cool. Also, I’m part Irish and so they’re doubly cool for me.

I got the data from the CIA World Factbook on the web. Insert your CIA jokes here.

Here we go.

The 25 largest economies, plus Ireland, in order of their Gross Domestic Product:

1. USA
2. China
3. Japan
4. India
5. Germany
6. UK
7. France
8. Italy
9. Brazil
10. Russia
11. Canada
12. Mexico
13. Spain
14. South Korea
15. Indonesia
16. Australia
17. Taiwan
18. Iran
19. Turkey
20. Thailand
21. Argentina
22. South Africa
23. Netherlands
24. Poland
25. Philippines
26. Ireland*

If the people of the country made less than $8,000 per year, that country gets thrown off the list. It’s an arbitrary number, but it reflects the fact that below a certain level you worry more about starving and freezing to death than you do studying geometry and starting a multinational corporation. Say goodbye to China, India, Indonesia, Turkey and the Philippines.

1. USA
2. Japan
3. Germany
4. UK
5. France
6. Italy
7. Brazil
8. Russia
9. Canada
10. Mexico
11. Spain
12. South Korea
13. Australia
14. Taiwan
15. Iran
16. Thailand
17. Argentina
18. South Africa
19. Netherlands
20. Poland
21. Ireland*

Countries where few children are being born are in for real trouble. You know those taxes you pay for Social Security and the retirement funds that come out of your paycheck? Up, up, up they go! I set the birthrate threshold at 1.7 births per woman. Anything below about 2.05 indicates a falling population, but I gave partial credit for countries that seem to be at least trying.

Japan, Germany, UK, Italy, Russia, Canada, Spain, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Netherlands and Poland, out, out, out you go!

1. USA
2. France
3. Brazil
4. Mexico
5. Australia
6. Iran
7. Argentina
8. South Africa
9. Ireland*

So here we have a list of the most powerful economies in the world that would be good places to live (because the people are doing OK) and will be in good shape 10 years from now (because they are still having kids). Let’s sort them by per capita income.

1. USA - $41,800
2. Ireland* - $34,100
3. Australia - $32,000
4. France - $29,900
5. Argentina - $13,600
6. South Africa - $11,900
7. Mexico - $10,000
8. Brazil - $8,500
9. Iran - $8,100

Of the top 8 plus Ireland, English-speaking countries take the top 3 slots. Thank you, Queen Victoria. If you don’t speak English now, you should. If you do speak English now, what’s your second language going to be? I count 3 Latin American countries in the mix and three unrelated countries. And yes, I know, some Latin countries speak Spanish and some speak Portugese.

Mark Steyn makes a good case against France. Riots and all that, you know.

South Africa has severe AIDS problems. No thank you.

Iran is not the best place to hold Easter services. Is it too late to change my flight to Tehran to a flight to Rio?

So what language should we learn? Let’s all say it together, class. “Buenos dias, amigo!”

Postscript

A little more on Argentina.

Too Mellow to Blog Loudly

I’ve got my cup of coffee. The kids won’t be up for another hour and a half. I’ve got a couple of posts I started a while back I could finish, but it just doesn’t seem like the thing to do right now. Last night was another awesome sunset over the Pacific, but they’re so commonplace now that we didn’t even bother to run up to the deck to take the photos. I’ve got a couple of spares to share with you here.




Stop the ACLU had some interesting emails, but I just don’t feel like getting all wound up to mock the poor people who worry that military recruiters on a campus receiving Federal funding are a sign of the Apocalypse. Get a haircut and get a real job.

K T is an independent cat, but last night she lay down on the desk with me while I surfed and blogged. She got upset when the mouse invaded her personal space and we had a short wrestling match, but no photos were taken.

I let Jacob out to run around last night while I sat with him and read. He’s new to our family and he’s a little skittish, but he’s calming down. He really likes sunflower seeds and he now stops what he’s doing and sits up when I come in the room, hoping for the magic seeds. Last night he ran over to me a couple of times, but didn’t work up the courage to climb up and sit on my knee. That will come in time.

It’s supposed to rain this weekend and it looks like it will be too cold for surfing. My son’s baseball game may get rained out, so we’ll have an indoor weekend instead. I’m trying to think of a family project, but nothing is coming to me. Feel free to leave some suggestions.

A few weeks back we made a custom bookshelf for a spot in our house that had odd dimensions. We used white, laminated particleboard and tried to use dowels to make the joints, but without a drill press, dowels are very difficult to use. We ended up making some unusable jigs and drilling unusable holes and then fell back on wood screws and pledging to never move the thing so that it wouldn’t fall apart. It’s sturdy where it sits, but if we move it, the wood screws will pull right out of the particleboard and the whole thing will be ruined. It ended up looking really nice.

As a dad, I want my kids to be well rounded when they leave the nest. Cooking, carpentry, home repair, car repair, literature, music, investing, they should feel comfortable with each. A month or so ago I made a list of the things I wanted to share with them before they moved out (the first leaves in four years or so). I’ll share it with you as soon as I set up my Road Runner home page so I can post html files. If there were things that you wish you had known when you moved away from home, let me know.

To the folks that are still reading this post let me just say thank you. I read an essay by a fellow who, as a young author, got to spend an afternoon alone with Rudyard Kipling. He told Mr. Kipling that he thought the encounter one-sided as the legendary author freely gave advice. Rudyard replied, "Well, you're giving me your time and attention and that's a sign of affection." Not comparing myself to Kipling, I want to acknowledge your gift of attention.

Warmly,
KT's Human

Is it Possible...

...for Bill Gates to make a rock so big even he can't lift it?

My home page is a categorized list of my favorite links. I wrote it in MS Word and saved it as html. When I open it in Explorer, I get this panicky warning telling me that "this file contains active content and will probably cause you to lose all your data and find rancid wool in your shoes!" Or something like that.

Anyway, what's with that active content stuff? Can't all the MS programs just get along?

Sheesh!

This is Too Easy

Glenn's PR Firm responds in court to his misdeeds: It all depends on what your definition of "heh" is.

Explanation here.

Better Living Through Protesting

Before I get started, let me make a few things clear. I work with the Navy and Marines. They are the coolest. I think Sheehan is a publicity-crazed, narcissistic maniac. There. I put on my anti-flame suit. Last time I did this I got all kinds of hate from people I agree with, calling me a troll and worse. Now that I've buckled up and put on my asbestos underwear, let's release the brakes and let it rip.


Have any of you ever been to a demonstration? Not necessarily as participants, but perhaps as bystanders or just walking past one. Have you ever noticed how dreary and tiresome the whole thing is? What a waste of time it is? I mean, back at home, the demonstrators have carpet that needs cleaning, dogs that need washing, plants that need trimming and it’s all going to seed. Meanwhile, they’re out yelling about global warming, war, all manner of large-scale problems while the ones they can really do something about go unfixed.

There are lots of better ways to spend your afternoon if you’re committed to saving the world. Hospice, Catholic Charities and the Special Olympics come to mind.

Michelle Malkin writes today about an anti-Cindy Sheehan protest planned in Germany where Ms. Sheehan is protesting something or other. I think Cindy's protest has something to do with strudel. I started reading about it and dozed off. I find her incredibly dull. Sort of like a symphony with one note.

I’m sure the protesters are very well intentioned and are deeply committed to the cause of anti-Cindy Sheehanism, but I would like to suggest a different approach. How about a get-together based on something productive or fun that just happens to also feature a unified position on Cindy and her antics.

How about a picnic with a softball game?


How about repairing an old house for a senior citizen?


How about a 10K fund-raiser for cystic fibrosis where all the participants wear some anti-Cindy slogan instead of a number? “And the winner today was Cindy is a nut with second place going to I support the troops! Thanks to all of you, we raised $5,643.29 to fight this terrible disease!”

Just a suggestion. I noticed on the protest website that they’re in need of the standard items required for any big gathering. Wouldn’t it be easier to find donors if the cause was a big BBQ? Wouldn’t it be a lot more fun?



Best of all, can you imagine how enraged she'd be at the sight of people having a good time and doing productive things while protesting her? Her kind are the most humorless, self-important toads in the world. What could be worse for her than to be mocked while wahines in bikinis swat home runs and everyone has a beer?

Postscript

Noeli raises a good point in the comments. She also has a blog, go check it out.

What makes the US military distinctive is how it advances civilization. Palestine has a military, too. At their core, both militaries exist to break things and kill people. The difference is how they’re used.

Taking Iraq as an example, the success of the US military means more schools, a better infrastructure, more jobs, a stock exchange, democracy, newspapers and blogs and so on for the Iraqi people. With some exceptions, a military does not create things. The US military makes it possible for others to create things by protecting productive people.

In contrast, the Palestinians simply blow things up. At the end of the day, the per capita income of the Palestinians is no better off for having had a military. In fact, their car bombs and shooting guns in the air actually destroys things that could be used for productive purposes. Somalia would be another example of this. They have a military, but it’s actually to their detriment rather than their advantage.

If one of the key features of our military is how it advances civilization and productive lives, wouldn’t it make more sense to make your displays of support for them productive as well? Let the other side march in circles, chanting. That produces nothing of value at all and no one’s lives are better because of it. I’m suggesting that our “counter-protests” be highly publicized acts of charity.

No matter the venue, the protests on either side will get no more than 90 seconds or so on the news. At the end of the day when everyone packs up to go home, without anything else having been done, it will be those 90 seconds of publicity that will be the end product. If you make your protest repairing run-down homes for the handicapped, then at the end of the day you have your 90 seconds on TV and some fellow citizens have a better place to live.

Making life better for all of us is what the US military is all about. I’m suggesting we carry that theme into our counter-protests. Thanks for the comment, Noeli.

Do NOT Go to this Link

Dear readers,

Please do NOT visit this link.

Linklinklinklink.

HT: Emporer Misha.

If you go there, you may find yourself feeling good about being an American.

Request for Stories of Kindness

One of the themes of this blog is that kindness pays in all kinds of strange and wonderful ways. Joe over at A Tic in the Mind’s Eye hosts a weekly World of Goodness Blogburst. I can’t think of anything more important for the blogosphere, whacking Dan Rather included.

Here is Joe's latest example.

Civilization, in its broadest sense, advances with every act of kindness and recedes with every act of cruelty. I think we can encourage kindness by publicizing it. Lord knows evil gets enough publicity.

I would like to make an offer to all of you. I’m a fast typist and a reasonably good editor. I will take any story of kindness and its results you can send me. I'll accept it in whatever form you wish and edit it and make sure it gets posted in the World of Good blogburst. After I edit it, I will send it back to you for final approval. Nothing will be posted without your OK. Names can be changed to protect privacy and no email or blog addresses will be posted unless you ask for it explicitly.

You can email me here.

When I say I will accept stories in any form, I do mean any form. Spelling, punctuation, capitalization, organization, I will take care of all of that. Give me the raw material and we can get to work encouraging good.

If you send me a story, please try to have the word kindness in the subject line so my email program can filter it properly.

Some people, men in particular, are reluctant to acknowledge kindness. It can be seen as a sign of weakness or sentimentality. I think it’s a sign of strength. The instructors at my old Kung Fu school are some of the nicest people I know. There is no way one would consider them weak. Mr. Early is an extraordinarily compassionate person, but when he fights he is a very, very unpleasant man.

Acknowledgements

Now I need to acknowledge some people who’ve done good things for me recently.

The Anchoress lives up to her philosophy. I sent her a link to a post I had written about an obscure movie suggestion and she posted it on her blog. She’s a blogosphere heavyweight and I needed some exposure, so her act was very kind.

I’m a marketer, but I market emotionally instead of analytically. FMF helps with the Carnival of the Capitalists and he accepted my entry without requiring tables, graphs and charts.

Laurence Simon is the bomb. His Ask the Cats posts are a great way for a new blogger to get some links out there.

Emporer Misha does nice things without knowing it. Many of the popular blogs do not allow comments. They require added effort for the blogger as they have to patrol the comments for nasty messages. His work in maintaining his comments allows newbies like me to post messages that get my work seen by many.

Reformed Blacks of America not only enjoyed my (positive) suggestions for the next Spike Lee film, but invited me to participate in their discussion boards. They rock.

Bonny Underfoot responded to some questions I had about blogging with some very heartfelt comments that I treasure.

Angel, Jake and Killired are just good friends to have.

I know I’ve forgotten a few, but I’ll try and catch them next time.

All the best,
KT

The Mask has Fallen!

Thanks to the Missouri legislature, the Theocracy has begun! Come and pray to our Maximum Leader, K T Cat, that she might grant you the paradise of tuna!



Some might call posts like this:

The fascists who bring down America will not be wearing brownshirts and displaying swastikas, but rather they will be carrying Bibles and displaying the cross

panicky, hysterical paranoia from a reasoning-challenged knothead, but lo, it is true! He does well to hide under his bed and quake in fear.

Bow down and worship her! She has come from on high, well actually just from the bathroom sink, bringing the word of Truth! Only she can save you! She shall pray for you, that God might grant you tuna, or at least wet food, if you but send her your links and tithe her 10% of your blog traffic.

Brother Jacob, pass the collection plate.

Postscript

Some are trying to continue the masquerade, but I urge them to drop all pretense and follow our Maximum Leader.

Because she has linked to us, Heidi has been placed on the protected list. When the feline theocracy comes to full flower, she shall be given a comfy sofa in a sunbeam to sit with the Maximum Leader on her lap and pet her. All others shall toil day and night in the tuna mines!

The feline Empress Kukka-Maria has most graciously given us the honor of a link and pledges her tithe. Until we can find a way to email a gift certificate to her for a can of Fancy Feast, she shall have to be content with being able add the title of "Mother Superior of the Holy Order of Ocean Whitefish" to her name.

Yet another blog has publicized the feline Theocracy. The evangelism spreads!

Happy Saturday!

This is my last post of the day other than to play in the comments discussions. If you're a blogger or you like to read blogs, I'd appreciate it if you took a look at this post on blogging and blog readers and comment if you'd like.

If not, then be sure to visit Bonnie Underfoot and Victor Tabbycat. Also, let me recommend art for art's sake at Atlantis Art.

I really need to set up some index pages. Until then, here's a sampler platter from The Scratching Post.

Humor
Animals
Optimism and Kindness

Maracuya the Cat

Meet Maracuya, my friend Brent's cat. Brent is an accomplished artist and woodworker. Even if you don't decide to buy any of his work, his site is worth visiting just for aesthetics alone. Maracuya is a key assistant in the workshop and is in charge of quality control.



If you've just beamed in from the Carnival of the Cats, please have a look around. The crack blogging staff at The Scratching Post does humor, animal and business posts.

Free Samples

The real title is: Free Samples as a Marketing Approach for Knowledge Workers

There. I’ve done it. I’ve just turned off all my normal blog readers (all 12 of them) by giving a dry, pedantic title to a post. And I’m doing all this for you, Carnival of the Capitalists readers. You’re welcome.

If you’re looking for the standard Scratching Post fare, let me point you to the political humor, the morality posts and the animal sections of the blog.

Well, now that they’re out of the way, we can get down to, ahem, business.

Everyone is familiar with the free samples stands at stores like Costco. The company gives away a tiny amount of its product in order to entice you to buy the big box of it. Let me suggest that it is an effort to build trust with the consumer.

“I know I like cheese and I know I like crunchy things, but will I like Cheese Crunchies? (crunch crunch crunch) I do! Let’s buy 10!”

Uncertainty is replaced with certainty and another $10/box wends its way out of the customer’s wallet into the fat coffers of the multinational megacorporation CheeseCrunchies, Inc. and the customer ends up having to buy new leaf springs for the rear suspension of their 1985 Buick Skylark because the things snapped under the weight of the boxes of Cheese Crunchies in the trunk. But I digress.

Knowledge workers, as defined by Peter Drucker, are those people who are hired to apply their knowledge to a customer’s problems. Typically, they represent a far more serious investment than a box of Cheese Crunchies. The investment can be far more than the direct cost of the knowledge worker, abbreviated hereafter as KW.

Say your company is building a new type of wireless, networked camera so people can watch their cats sleep while they’re at work. Knowing nothing about wireless networking, you hire a KW who designs the wireless connection for the camera. He’s expensive, but the camera is projected to sell well. It will be the first one on the market with special GroovyCam features that has the ability to show the cats with those weird special effects they used in the psychedelic movies in the 60’s and 70’s. It’s anticipated to do well with aging hippies who are flush with disposable income. Your competitor, SwineCorp is working on one as well, but they’re months behind.

The cost of the KW is not just his salary, but also the anticipated return on his work. If the KW turns out to be a charlatan, the project will be delayed while a new KW reworks the design and SwineCorp will have won the race to market. They will have all the press and customer buzz you wanted for yourself.

The upshot of this is that hiring KWs requires an enormous amount of trust. As animals, we react to heightened risk with heightened caution. Risking the GroovyCam on an untried KW may be too much to take. For the KW, selling yourself, which is the product when you’re a KW, requires winning the confidence of the customer. For CheeseCrunchies, Inc., that trust is won by giving away some of your product for free. For the KW, it may be that you have to do the same.

I am currently marketing our firm to an organization that represents a whole new customer base. Our firm is made up exclusively of KWs. This new customer would open up a vast wealth of teaming opportunities and fascinating and vital work. One of our competitors is thoroughly entrenched with this customer. We have certain capabilities that they lack and cannot easily duplicate. For the sake of discussion, let’s use the GroovyCam example and say that we were the wireless networking KWs.

Our competitor offered to create the GroovyCam for the customer, but had a poor design for the wireless network. Our first reaction was to march in to the customer and reveal our competitors for what they were, pig-headed morons who at best were fit to slop hogs. At the proposal meeting, a grand melee would ensue and our customers would see that we were the ones they should trust.

Or at least that’s what we dreamed. In reality, the confused and non-technical customer would sense heightened risk and uncertainty and would probably deep-six the whole GroovyCam project and instead go with the less risky HaggisCam proposal, an idea best not described.

In order to win the day, we needed to team with our competitor and allay the fears of our new customer. Both our prospective teammates and customer were uncertain as to our value.

So what did we do?

We followed the example of CheeseCrunchies, Inc. and gave our product away for free. Not all of it, mind you, but enough to gain their confidence. In addition, we gained something more valuable than that: their gratitude. Everyone involved had seen combative bloodbaths before. By giving free samples, we averted a war and made our customers a success.

It’s been very rewarding.

KWs are usually reticent to give free samples since their samples are so much more expensive than a bowl of Cheese Crunchies. With KWs pocketing $100-$200 or more per hour, 2-3 weeks of free samples can cost thousands of dollars in lost revenue for the freelance KW or the KW firm. Nevertheless, trust has to be earned before the customer makes the purchase. Free samples can be the cost of doing business, both for the cracker maker and the KW.

I wrote about the hidden value of kindness previously on this blog. When we were in the middle of this effort, I never thought in terms of free samples, I thought of an act of kindness. As I analyze the results and mechanics of the sale, I see the analogy to free samples. Just thought I’d share. For free.

That was fun. Now let's do some begging.

Comment Change

I moved from Haloscan to Blogger comments. Unfortunately, the old comments will be inaccessible to you. I like Blogger's comments better.

Violence in Iraq not as Bad as Reported

All,

Go here.

Thank you.

KT

Weekend Blogger Discussion

This weekend's blogger discussion post is about being eclectic and it's effect on your traffic.

Being a marketer, I've been studying the mechanisms of generating blog traffic both through customer loyalty and brand recognition. Blogging seems to follow a pretty standard model. There haven't been many surprises and I'm learning what generates traffic.

Since each blog has a unique voice, I'm beginning to wonder if my own voice will significantly limit my traffic. Everyone's does, of course. Dallas Cowboy fanatics won't be visiting Angel any time soon and people fixated on horseback riding probably won't be going over to the Jake Silver Show. As wonderful as she is, Bonnie Underfoot won't get a sudden burst of traffic from the UFO crowd.

My blog is turning into a lot of fairly pointed political humor, such as the thrashing I gave the Europeans in Appeasement by Example, animal posts such as the Jacob Action Photos and my posts on the value of kindness like the one about Ferrari.

The question is this: how much will opposing posts cancel each other out? If I start advertising to the evangelical community about stories of kindness, will they get turned off when they read that I've called the French a bunch of bedwetting creeps?

Come to think of it, isn't it kind of hypocritical to rip the Danes and then strike a Gandhi pose and utter platitudes on cooperation and kindness? Hmmm.

I admit to being a newbie. I'm fascinated by the sociological and marketing aspects of blogging. I would be very grateful for a discussion in the comments section. If the discussion turns into an analysis of someone else's blog, that's great, too. It's the act of doing business case analysis that teaches you about the case you care about.

And fer cryin' out loud, don't think there's any magic to this analysis and not comment because you don't think you've got anything valuable to say. Marketing is all about what everyone thinks, not just the snobs with the degrees.

Begging

Tragic events (which may not be completely factual) have led The Sratching Post employees to beg for some links and traffic. You see, I had to pawn my only jacket to buy tofu for my ailing grandmother and the winter is so very, very cold here in San Diego. Why, just last week it rained on the palm trees right outside my window. Rain! Can you imagine the chaos and panic? The roads were slick after the rain and we nearly spilled our lattes as we were talking on our cell phones and driving our SUVs to the beach volleyball game. Poor Heather, my neighbor, had to wear a one-piece bathing suit because it was too cold for her string bikini.

Our only solace is that we might have just a few more links and a visit or two to keep us warm while we wait for the Old Mission Beach Athletic Club’s Over-the-line tournament.

Please, any help is appreciated. If you can't spare a link or email a post to a friend (or enemy if the post was really bad), then a quick visit to the rest of the site will gladden our hearts.

Thank you.

Appeasement by Example

The Alliance has spoken. Its oracular powers are not to be questioned. We hear and obey. Though we may lay an egg on this one and leave the field of comedy in disgrace, our heads pierced with fake arrows with those loopy wire things and our rubber chickens dangling limply from our fingers, we sally forth bravely to answer the question:

Having already surrendered the right to print cartoons in a free press, what further concessions will terrorist appeasers make next?

The answer lies not in the terrorists, but in the appeasers. Allow me to quote from the editor who published the cartoons in the first place:

At the end of September, a Danish standup comedian said in an interview with Jyllands-Posten that he had no problem urinating on the Bible in front of a camera, but he dared not do the same thing with the Koran.

This was the culmination of a series of disturbing instances of self-censorship.

What one group values, the other despises. Bravely, the Danes sought to whip out their willies and wee on the work, but were soon wimpily whining for mercy. The French, completely unassociated with the whole thing, followed their natural instincts and surrendered immediately.

Our dear customers, in our show of support with the Islamic and Egyptian world, we don’t sell Danish products.

Apparently, it is not necessary to invade France to defeat them, you need merely hold protests thousands of miles away against a nation in the general vicinity of France and they will sell you out faster than you can say retraite.

Don’t think for a moment that I am suggesting that our Continental allies are silly. Absolutely not. Danes drawing cartoons to bolster their courage so that they may comfortably relieve themselves on a book causing the French to pull products off their supermarket shelves are all manly acts in the great tradition of Napoleon, Hindenburg and Maurice Chevalier.

Is it too late to change teams? Thank God Bush is in India. They seem like a serious people. Don’t they have some kind of hell-on-wheels monkey god that rips people’s brains out and devours them? Frankly, if the monkey god merely gave you a stern talking to, he’d be several orders of magnitude more fierce than the sheet moisteners on the Continent.

I digress. The assignment was to list the next steps in the path of appeasement. This is way too hard. How the heck should I know? It’s like they’re not even the same species. In the Anglo world, we’re debating whether or not we should launch a full-scale war against one of the world’s major military powers on the other side of the planet to prevent nuclear Armageddon. Meanwhile, Danes are sitting in their artist lofts drawing stick figures because they want to feel as comfortable peeing on the Koran as they do peeing on the Bible.

Appeasement? Their whole lives are an appeasement. They’re a bunch of bed-wetting, skillet-licking, namby-pamby mama’s boys who, when they’re not running away from mobs with sharp sticks, are crawling to the UN for protection. Whole populations are being slaughtered one country over and they’re hiding in their closets because they saw a spider in the hallway and they don’t dare leave their room.

I’m coming to the conclusion that it is not possible for the citizens of the country that gave you people like Michael Fay and Mikal Calvert to comprehend the actions of people like Jacques Chirac.

I’ve written myself into a corner. I need an answer. At this point, any answer will do because I’ve convinced myself that I can’t come up with anything nearly as self-humiliating as what they’ll actually do.

I don’t know, how about this: the Continentals will all get together and write a document with hundreds and hundreds of pages of twaddle that will supposedly bring them together so they can finally have the spine to stand up to a bunch of 16th century savages and then they’ll fail to pass that document into law because they can’t agree on how many toys the government will put in their Happy Meals.

There. That’s my answer.

What? They already did that?

I quit.

Postscript

The Ports Deal and Thursday Ramblings

Running in to work at an ungodly hour. Got my blogging fix with James Lileks. His take on the ports deal said it all.

Last night I was in Jacob's room reading while he ran around out of his cage. I had a new bowl of treats for him right next to me. He scurried over to it, his eyes wide with delight like he's just won the lottery and he proceeded to rummage around in it, looking for his favorites, the sunflower seeds. He ate one and then packed the rest in his cheeks. He then grabbed one of his food pellets, which is about 1/3 the size of his head and stuffed that in his cheeks. He then grabbed a two-peanut shell (with peanuts inside) and stuffed that in his cheeks. I thought he was going to choke. He looked like a hammerhead shark with the thing protruding all around the inside of his head as he tried to position it.

I was laughing so hard I had tears coming down my face. I wish I had my camera. It was priceless. Imagine stuffing a 3' long 4x4 into your mouth and you get the idea. Next time I promise to bring the camera and share it with you all.

ACLU Round Table

Tonight we received a request from stoptheaclu for a free-form anti-ACLU post and a trackback to their site. Since we all come at this from different angles, we’re holding The Scratching Post’s very first roundtable blog post. I, the nameless human, shall be your moderator. Tonight on our panel we have our Maximum Leader, KT Cat and her loyal minion, Jacob the Syrian Hamster.

Moderator: I’ll open it up to you, KT. What’s your take on the ACLU in general?

KT: Well, I have to say pffft, pffft and hiss. Those guys are major hairballs. The thought that they would oppose cats because of their religion is just sickening.

Jacob: What on Earth are you talking about?

KT: The ACLU. The Anti-Cat Lutheran Union.

Jacob: That’s the wrong ACLU. He’s talking about the Airborne Cetacean Landing Unit. It’s a group devoted to making sure that breaching whales crush hamsters.

Mod: Actually, I don’t think that’s it at all. Let’s check this email one more time…

KT: Where’s this email from?

Mod: There’s something in it about Hostettler and legion…

KT: Sounds like the ghost of an ancient Roman soldier who was stationed in Gaul.

Jacob: It could be the Aging Centurian Liberation Unification Front

KT: That would be the ACLUF.

Jacob: Actually, I think the F is parenthetical. ACLU(F).

KT: How can the F be parenthetical? It’s the noun the whole rest of the phrase modifies.

Jacob: Well, what is it then, if it involves the ghost of a Roman soldier?

Mod: I don’t think it involves ghosts or Romans at all. The guy is from Indiana.

KT: How about the Arch-Catholic Lebanon Unicyclers?

Jacob: As a Syrian, I must object to that Lebanon comment.

KT: Lebanon is a city in Indiana.

Jacob: Oh. Sorry.

Mod: I’m sure Unicycles are big in Indiana and everything, but that doesn’t seem like something you’d get particularly exercised about. Oooh. That was a bad pun, wasn’t it?

KT: Yes it was. Well, I can’t do any better if this is all we have to go on.

Jacob: You didn’t have any problems at the beginning when you knew nothing.

KT: I don’t need facts to have an opinion. I’m a blogger, after all.

Mod: Maybe he means the American Cheese and Lithium Unifiers.

Jacob: Huh?

KT: What are you talking about? Unifying Cheese and Lithium? Are you on drugs? That makes even less sense than people who want whales to land on hamsters.

Jacob: Hey, it could happen.

Mod: Yeah, that was a reach. Actually, I think it’s the Alliance of Carpetbaggers and Lushes for Uranium.

KT: Now you’re just flaunting all that chemistry you took.

Jacob: Did anyone bring some sunflower seeds? I’m getting hungry.

KT: You brought some.

Jacob: I did?

KT: Well, you brought something. Your cheeks are bulging out so much that you look like a hammerhead shark.

Jacob: Oh, so they are. Here, let’s see what we have…food pellet…peanut…piece of carrot…walnut fragment…

KT: That is so gross. If you come across a can of tuna in there, it’s mine.

Mod: I’ve got it!

Jacob: Sunflower seeds?

KT: Tuna?

Mod: No, the acronym. I know what the acronym means! It’s the American Civil Liberties Union.

KT: Aren’t those the guys who want to tell the Boy Scouts what to do?

Jacob: And the ones who wet their beds when someone mentions religion?

Mod: The very same.

KT: And you want us to have a take on that?

Mod: Well…yes.

Jacob: What kind of opinion are we supposed to have with that? The Constitution of the United States is festooned with references to God.

KT: The Boy Scouts are a harmless, civilizing and educational institution.

Mod: That’s all true.

KT: I like that “festooned” back there. Cool word.

Jacob: Thanks.

Mod: So…

KT: So what?

Mod: So what do you have to say?

Jacob: About what?

Mod: About the ACLU?

Jacob: The group with the whales?

KT: I think he means the lawyers who panic about God and want to push a bunch of kids and parents around.

Jacob: Well, here’s what I think. I'd like to tell them to get a haircut and get a real job.

KT: Rock on!

Mod: Well, I think that covers it. That’s all we have time for tonight, folks. I hope you enjoyed our first round table. If you have suggestions for a future round table, be sure to leave them in the comments section.

Follow up

Got a nasty email about sharing the link for this. They called it "spam" and that it "added nothing to the discussion". Can you believe that? Well, truthfully, I can see where you would. Sorry about that.

Anyway, my point, driven home with a balpeen hammer, or perhaps a rubber chicken, is that there is no "there" "there" when it comes to the ACLU. Once upon a time they did great things. Once those great things were done, they moved on to smaller things. And so on and so on. Now they're concerned with things about as important as the color of your toe lint and the number of times you refer to iguanas in a trip to the zoo.

All that college education and training for...what? To insist that the Boy Socuts open their doors to gay scoutmasters? Even if that was a mighty injustice, how important is it? Just how many legitimately aggreived people are there out there, ayway? And just how big of a difference does it make in someone's life to not be a scoutmaster? Their crusade against religion is similarly trivial.

It's all just counting angels dancing on the head of a pin. There is such a thing as reducing the size of an organization or phasing it out entirely. When the job is done, move on. To cling to the old regime and serve smaller and smaller causes is pathetic. I repeat my take on the ACLU.

Get a haircut and get a real job.

Follow up 2

The nutjob teacher Jay Bennish who got caught on tape going nonlinear against the US in front of his class (like many of my own high school teachers used to do) has hired an ACLU lawyer to defend him. The same one Ward Churchill hired. I rest my case. This titan of the legal profession is now defending wacky history teachers who face termination over teaching idiocy.

No, joining the ACLU wasn't a meaningless way to spend your career. No, of course not.

Postscript

This was a production of Stop The ACLU Blogburst. If you would like to join us, please email Jay or Gribbit. You will be added to our mailing list and blogroll. Over 150 blogs already on-board

Tag, you're it!

The hot topics of the day all stink. All the blogosphere is all lathered up about who's going to be managing a couple of our ports. Do any of them have a clue as to what that job really is? In effect, they're all yammering away about how terrible it would be if somebody thousands of miles away was administering janitorial contracts for the longshoremen. Can you think of anything more boring?

It’s time to start a game of tag. The theme will be blogging. No, I don't have much of an imagination. Why do you ask?

If you want to play in our next game of tag, leave a comment with your blog info. And now, on with the show!

The Rules

In the list of blogs below, add yourself to the top and move everyone else down 1 spot. Keep only the five most recently tagged blogs. Tag only one more blog.

1.The Scratching Post
2.
3.
4.
5.

In your tag post, answer these questions:

1. What is your blog’s theme song?


2. If you could have any mortal human from history as your blogging partner, who would it be?


3. Who would you like to see post a comment on your blog?


4. You can’t come up with a post for the day. Your readers demand something new! To break your writer’s block, you…


5. While blogging, you find yourself mindlessly eating…

My Answers

1. “For Pete’s Sake” by the Monkees from their Headquarters album. I love the tune and the message, too. I may be a libertarian, hawkish Catholic, but I'm also a libertarian, hawkish, Catholic hippy. :-)

2. Rasputin! He would be completely unpredictable. You’d walk in, turn on the computer and fall out of your chair from the utterly insane posts he’d leave. You’d spend all of your time assuring your readers that you weren’t both that crazy.

3. I’d like to see Glenn Reynolds post a comment. I’d like to see him apologize for ignoring me. I’d like to see him promise to feature me from now on instead of Ann Althouse.

4. Quick, grab the camera and take a photo of the cat! Add some ridiculous caption to it and you’re done.

5. Chips and salsa! Get them away from me! I feel sick!

Since I’m also a cheater, I’m going to tag two blogs instead of just one and start this tag chain moving in two totally different directions. Angel and Jake, you’re it!

Exodus 17

Behold, I will stand before thee there upon the rock in Horeb; and thou shalt smite the rock, and there shall come water out of it, that the people may drink. And Moses did so in the sight of the elders of Israel.