Why We Need To Weed The Garden Of Our Hearts

At his best, like in this homily, Fr Vallee makes the work ahead of me as a Christian abundantly clear and slightly depressing. But it is not an irrational depression, just one commensurate with the task ahead. A sample from his homily:

We get so caught up in ego. Pride, jealousy and malice, meanness and insecurity haunt our hearts. These things, coming from inside, defile us and make us unclean. I fear that if someone disrespected me, I would put up more of a fight. But all of that is ego and nonsense. All of that is poison, it oozes from a discontented heart and makes everything unclean.

To be Christian is to be like Christ, to point beyond yourself. In John’s Gospel, when Jesus performs a miracle, and the crowd begins to praise him, Jesus cuts them off: “You don’t understand. These are not wonders, it is not about me, these are signs of my Father’s glory.” If you are only pointing to yourself, accumulating honor and glory for yourself, you are not Christian because you are not acting or thinking like Christ. Sin is not a monstrous demon waiting to overpower us from the outside. Sin is a tricky little devil who hides in our hearts, planting small seeds of malice, meanness and pettiness which, left to grow, bloom into great and terrible evils. Take care with the little things. Be gracious, kind and patient. Keep the garden of your heart free of weeds. ... As I always say sometimes: “In a world where Jewish carpenters rise from the dead, everything is possible.”

The email address to request to be put on Vallee's email distribution list is Cioran262@aol.com. To see the entire homily click on 'read more' below. Search for other Fr Vallee homilies in this blog by entering 'Vallee' in the search box in the upper left hand corner or look for Fr Vallee in the linked Labels.

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Fr Valle Homily - Aug 30, 2009

I. Gospel
I am struck by a line from today’s Gospel. Jesus says: “Nothing that goes into a man from the outside renders him unclean. Rather what comes out of a man’s heart makes him unclean.” When Jesus first spoke these words, they were, perhaps, the most revolutionary thing he ever said. Jews had suffered and died for dietary laws. Jesus was dismissing all of that with one fell swoop. Little wonder people were upset. People never like change: “All of a sudden we can eat pork as long as our hearts are pure!” Worse than that: “You mean it does us no good to refrain from pork if our hearts are impure!” Many of you are old enough to remember how scandalized many people were when they found out that they were not going to hell for eating meat on Friday.

II. The best and the worst
Jesus is clear that good and evil are about what is in our hearts, not what is in our bellies. Sin is an internal, not an external, matter. Today I would like to speak of one of the best priests, and human beings, I have ever had the good fortune to know and work with. He was a man who was pure of heart. If I ever grow up, I want to be like him.

III. Gilberto was the best
My second pastor as a priest was Fr. Gilberto Fernandez, now Bishop Fernandez. Please pray for the good bishop. He has been very ill for several years now. Bishop Gilberto was the pastor when I was the associate here at St. Kevin’s. Those of you who remember him know he was a wise, kind and gracious man. I remember someone once said if him: “Gilberto Fernandez is a perfect Christian gentleman.” Anyhow, when I was here, I was the only priest in the parish whose first language was English, so I did most of the English masses. One Saturday, a man came into the rectory and asked to speak to the pastor. The secretary called Fr. Fernandez. Fr. Gilberto greeted the man. The man, a little annoyed, said, “no I want to speak to the English pastor, the young guy who does the masses.” Most people would have at least corrected the man, asserting their position as the actual pastor of the parish, many priests, I fear, would have berated him, Fr Fernandez did neither. He smiled kindly at the man and said: “Wait a moment, I will go get Fr. Vallee.”

IV. What would I have done?
Think about this little story. It should make you easy; it makes me uneasy: “How would I have reacted in the same situation?” We get so caught up in ego. Pride, jealousy and malice, meanness and insecurity haunt our hearts. These things, coming from inside, defile us and make us unclean. I fear that if someone disrespected me, I would put up more of a fight. I would let ego take over and tell the old man, “Hey, wait a minute, I’m the pastor!” But all of that is ego and nonsense. All of that is poison, it oozes from a discontented heart and makes everything unclean.

V. They think they love God, they only really love themselves
To be Christian is to be like Christ, to point beyond yourself. In John’s Gospel, when Jesus performs a miracle, and the crowd begins to praise him, Jesus cuts them off: “You don’t understand. These are not wonders, it is not about me, these are signs of my Father’s glory.” If you are only pointing to yourself, accumulating honor and glory for yourself, you are not Christian because you are not acting or thinking like Christ. Sin is not a monstrous demon waiting to overpower us from the outside. Sin is a tricky little devil who hides in our hearts, planting small seeds of malice, meanness and pettiness which, left to grow, bloom into great and terrible evils. Take care with the little things. Be gracious, kind and patient. Keep the garden of your heart free of weeds. As for me, if I ever grow up, I want to be like Bp. Fernandez. I don’t mean I want to wear his miter or carry his crozier. I mean I want a heart that is simple, pure and kind. I know I am not there yet. But as I always say sometimes: “In a world where Jewish carpenters rise from the dead, everything is possible.”
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Meet Barack Obama's Grinder

One of my favorite William F Buckley quotes was his response to the question of why Robert Kennedy refused to debate him. He replied, "why does baloney reject the grinder."

Meet Barack Obama's Grinder on Health Care, Keith Hennessey.

In a pre-blogosphere era, a slick politician could do what President Obama did at Portsmouth on August 11th with little negative ramifications. What he did was speak extensively about health care reform and made significant and repeated mistakes about some of the facts involved. The mistakes all put his health care proposals in a better light, which obviously suggests that the mistakes were, at best, intentionally careless [see #'s 18 through 20 at end of post].

But thankfully, we are smack-dab in the blogosphere era. Enter Mr. Hennessey [with a name that begs for a cut & paste] and his blog. Why and how is his blog a nightmare for the Obama Administration? He never raises his font, uses no harsh language, examines the logic of positions and comments and then ties in all their supposed facts to either the legislation itself or other governmental entities reporting. It is a thing of beauty.

I'm not going to admit to shedding any tears of joy as Mr. Hennessey deconstructs Obama's statement [see #15 below] that, "I'm not promoting a single-payer plan." Hennessey points that Obama does not object to government being the "only entity that pays for all health care," it's just that he doesn't want to promote it because he realizes the transition would be disruptive. But there were a few Brian Piccolo sniffles, as I told the wife, 'think I'm coming down w'sumptin.'

BTW - The more we hear the President speak without a teleprompter, the more we understand his need for a teleprompter. Just like with his non-apology to the Cambridge police, I get the feeling the President is being exposed like some pre-season overrated college football team in their first game -- see every Notre Dame team since 1997. Will the genius label ever be used again by a non-shill without a smirk?

By all means check out his blog yourselves, but if you're rushed, here are the bullet points on the subject areas of discrepancy [fact or logic vs Obama statements] Mr. Hennessey highlights in separate blog posts:

1. The President’s overpromise that everyone can keep their health plan
2. Putting the government in charge of your health insurance
3. Waiting in line
4. Government-mandated benefits
5. Preventive care does not save money (in the aggregate)
6. The House bill would increase short-term, 10th year, and long-term budget deficits
7. The President was incorrect – AARP opposes the bill
8. The bills would take Medicare savings needed for solvency and spend them on a new entitlement
9. Medicare is not a good example of government-run health care because Medicare is fiscally unsustainable
10. Even if the public option drops out of legislation, other parts of these bills would put private insurance under government control
11. The President says the public option will keep private insurers honest at the same time he proposes cutting payments to private insurers competing with the Medicare public option
12. The pending bills would move more cost-benefit decisions from insurers to people chosen by the government
13. Guaranteed renewal and guaranteed issue
14. The President says “we may be able to get even more than” the $80 B of budgetary savings that the pharmaceutical industry thought was a ceiling promised by the White House
15. The President says he’s not “promoting” a single-payer plan, but the only concern he raises is a disruptive transition
16. Many examples suggest that the government cannot compete on a level playing field with private firms
17. The President trashes the U.S. Postal Service and undermines the case that government can run a complex health system
18. The President understates the annual cost of new spending by a factor of two
19. The President says that 2/3 of the offsets come from Medicare and Medicaid spending, while the only public estimate (for the House bill) shows 21% instead. He also advocates a tax proposal that Congressional Democrats killed last Winter
20. There are 46 million people who are technically uninsured, but the target population is probably one-third to one-half that size

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Edward Kennedy and Emotional Appeals

You can see it coming, right? Later this year, Democrat proponents of the single-payer option in Health Care reform will play the legacy card. The legacy card will sound something like this:

It would be a cruel twist of fate to delay this vote and risk that Sen. Kennedy not be with us to vote for this historic legislation. Let's act now so that he can rest at peace knowing that the great work of his Senate career was not in vain ...

In some circles it will have a powerful emotional appeal, i.e. Boston, Hyde Park, etc.

It would be a mistake to base such an important vote on an emotional appeal though. The thought runs counter to how Sen Kennedy acted during his life. In the most important -- aside from bar hopping on Good Friday 1991 -- decision of his life, Sen Kennedy mightily resisted any semblance of emotion; Namely, when to inform the police that he had driven a car off a bridge. The car contained a young woman who had not escaped. Some facts from that evening involving Chappaquiddick after the accident:

Kennedy swam across the 500-foot channel, back to Edgartown and returned to his hotel room, where he removed his clothes and collapsed on his bed.

By 7:30 am the next morning he was talking "casually" to the winner of the previous day's sailing race, with no indication that anything was amiss. At 8 a.m., Gargan and Markham joined Kennedy at his hotel. The three men subsequently crossed back to Chappaquiddick Island on the ferry, where Kennedy made a series of phone calls from a payphone to his friends for advice; he again did not report the accident to authorities.

Earlier that morning, two amateur fishermen had seen the overturned car in the water and notified the inhabitants of the nearest cottage to the pond, who called the authorities at around 8:20 am. A diver was sent down and discovered Kopechne's body at around 8:45 am. The diver, John Farrar, later testified at the inquest that Kopechne's body was pressed up in the car in the spot where an air bubble would have formed. He interpreted this to mean that Kopechne had survived for a while after the initial accident in the air bubble, and concluded that:

Had I received a call within five to ten minutes of the accident occurring, and was able, as I was the following morning, to be at the victim's side within twenty-five minutes of receiving the call, in such event there is a strong possibility that she would have been alive on removal from the submerged car

Police checked the car's license plate and saw that it was registered to Kennedy. When Kennedy, still at the pay phone by the ferry crossing, saw that the body had been discovered, he crossed back to Edgartown and went to the police station.

One thing is certain about Ted Kennedy. Edward McCormack was wrong. Edward Moore Kennedy wasn't a joke. The man who worried about his political future as a young woman died, proved to be something much more serious that evening.

In a way, it's easy to understand Kennedy's continued interest in politics as he approaches the end of his life. Politics is no doubt preferable to thinking about death, or what comes after. So while none of us knows for certain what awaits him, or us for that matter, how many people do you know who would trade places with him on judgment day, even if that day were not so imminent?

Mary Jo Kopechne, a Catholic woman, RIP.

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Jeremy Hermida And The Expectations Game

Jeremy Hermida and his up and down professional career reminds me of Joaquin Andujar's favorite word, 'jewneberno.' In 2002, at Double-A ball, he overshadowed his then and future teammate, Josh Johnson. The Marlins top Minor League prospect from 2004 through 2006, Hermida became only the 2nd player in MLB history to hit a grand slam in his first MLB at-bat, in August 2005. Since 2006, Hermida has proven to be an average MLB hitter, a poor outfielder and has received more fan abuse than an ACORN thug at a Minuteman rally.

But when you get into Hermida's batting splits, you begin to get a sense of why he gets more chances than Earl Weaver's first wife among baseball people.

Here are his overall numbers:
YR --- AB --- AVG --- OBP --- OPS
2006 - 307 -- .251 -- .332 -- .700
2007 - 429 -- .296 -- .369 -- .870
2008 - 502 -- .249 -- .323 -- .729
2009 - 380 -- .258 -- .347 -- .734

Here are his AWAY numbers:
YR --- AB --- AVG --- OBP --- OPS
2006 - 149 -- .242 -- .329 -- .685
2007 - 219 -- .324 -- .401 -- .949
2008 - 271 -- .288 -- .364 -- .851
2009 - 186 -- .231 -- .327 -- .709

Offensively, after having an OK rookie season, Hermida had a very good 2nd season. Further, buried in the numbers for that 2007 season, is a remarkable differential in favor of his 'away' stats - 57 points in batting average and 96 points in slugging percentage. In 2008, he regresses in his overall stats to numbers which are similar to his OK 2006 season. However, the advantage in 'away' stats not only remains, they increase to 85 points in batting average and 175 points in slugging percentage. On the road, Hermida actually had great and good seasons in 2007 and 2008.

So if you are the Marlins braintrust during the 2008 off-season, you know that you have a good left-handed hitter on the road, 3 full years of MLB experience at the age of 24 and a durable player. While your home field is not a hitters park, it does not explain the type of differentials Hermida has produced, so perhaps there is a chance that he can duplicate his road performances at home. Besides, other teams can read those stats too, which gave Hermida value. You can hear other GM's thinking, 'I bet that kid will really produce once we get him out of that silently morbid Death Valley ...'

Two-thirds of the way thru 2009 and Hermida is basically repeating his 2008 [and 2006] season, with one important change. The home / away differentials have disappeared. No wait, they haven't just disappeared, they've flipped. Hermida is hitting 53 points higher at home than on the road this season, while the power numbers are the same home / away. 'Splain dat to me Lucy.'

So now is the time, right? Now is the time to give up on him? Wait, one more thing, he is maintaing his averages from 2008, despite cutting down on his strikeouts and increasing his walks. Statistically speaking, a player who improves in those areas should see his average increase. Also, his OBP is over .400 for August, not bad for an 8th place hitter.

So go ahead and cut him loose if it makes you happy. Like Harry Calllahan's punk, I hope you feel lucky, because I think the guy will be consistent Nick Johnson-type hitter sooner than later. Besides, what's another 2 months at this point?

This evaluation stuff, is no so easy Mister

Take a look at the list of first overall MLB draft picks below. For every Alex Rodriguez, there's a Paul Wilson. For every Ken Griffey Jr, a David Clyde. For every Danny Goodwin, there's a ... Danny Goodwin. Listen, we are talking #1 overall here, which Hermida wasn't, if it's an inexact science with them, there are no sure things. In comparison we can say one positive thing about Hermida, he's no Danny Goodwin.

First overall Major League Baseball draft picks
1965 Rick Monday Kansas City Athletics
1966 Steve Chilcott New York Mets
1967 Ron Blomberg New York Yankees
1968 Tim Foli New York Mets
1969 Jeff Burroughs Washington Senators
1970 Mike Ivie San Diego Padres
1971 Danny Goodwin Chicago White Sox
1972 Dave Roberts San Diego Padres
1973 David Clyde Texas Rangers
1974 Bill Almon San Diego Padres
1975 Danny Goodwin California Angels
1976 Floyd Bannister Houston Astros
1977 Harold Baines Chicago White Sox
1978 Bob Horner Atlanta Braves
1979 Al Chambers Seattle Mariners
1980 Darryl Strawberry New York Mets
1981 Mike Moore Seattle Mariners
1982 Shawon Dunston Chicago Cubs
1983 Tim Belcher Minnesota Twins
1984 Shawn Abner New York Mets
1985 B.J. Surhoff Milwaukee Brewers
1986 Jeff King Pittsburgh Pirates
1987 Ken Griffey, Jr. Seattle Mariners
1988 Andy Benes San Diego Padres
1989 Ben McDonald Baltimore Orioles
1990 Chipper Jones Atlanta Braves
1991 Brien Taylor New York Yankees
1992 Phil Nevin Houston Astros
1993 Alex Rodriguez Seattle Mariners
1994 Paul Wilson New York Mets
1995 Darin Erstad California Angels
1996 Kris Benson Pittsburgh Pirates
1997 Matt Anderson Detroit Tigers
1998 Pat Burrell Philadelphia Phillies
1999 Josh Hamilton Tampa Bay Devil Rays
2000 Adrián González Florida Marlins
2001 Joe Mauer Minnesota Twins
2002 Bryan Bullington Pittsburgh Pirates
2003 Delmon Young Tampa Bay Devil Rays
2004 Matt Bush San Diego Padres
2005 Justin Upton Arizona Diamondbacks
2006 Luke Hochevar Kansas City Royals
2007 David Price Tampa Bay Devil Rays
2008 Timothy Beckham Tampa Bay Rays
2009 Stephen Strasburg Washington Nationals

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Why American Democracy Is In Trouble

Using the latest available year -- 2007 -- we know the following facts about people who filed Federal tax returns:

Top 1% of Household Incomes

• Top 1% are those who reported incomes of $410,000 or more
• Top 1% paid 40% of all the personal income taxes collected
• Top 1% pay more in federal taxes than the bottom 95% combined
• Their taxes amounted to 22% of their adjusted gross income

Top 5% of Household Incomes

• Top 5% are those who reported incomes of $160,000 or more
• Top 5% paid 60% of all the personal income taxes collected

Bottom 75% of Household Incomes

• Bottom 75% are those who reported incomes of $66,500 or less
• Bottom 75% paid 13% of all the personal income taxes collected

In the WSJ, Charles Murray makes the case on why having a significant part of the country not paying taxes is bad for America:

America is supposed to be a democracy in which we're all in it together. Part of that ethos, which has been so essential to the country in times of crisis, is a common understanding that we all pay a share of the costs. Taxes are an essential ingredient in the civic glue that binds us together.

Our democracy is corrupted when some voters think that they won't have to pay for the benefits their representatives offer them. It is corrupted when some voters see themselves as victims of exploitation by their fellow citizens.

By both standards, American democracy is in trouble. We have the worst of both worlds. The rhetoric of the president tells the public that the rich are not paying their fair share, undermining the common understanding from the bottom up.
...
This deforms the behavior of everyone—the voters who think they aren't paying for Congress's latest bright idea, the politicians who know that promising new programs will always be a winning political strategy with the majority of taxpayers who don't think they have to pay for them, and the wealthy who know that the only way to get politicians to refrain from that strategy is to buy them off.

The Murray article referenced is copied in full at end of post.

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Tax Withholding Is Bad for Democracy - AUGUST 13, 2009

So is the payroll tax. End them both and voters will have a healthier understanding of the government burden.

By CHARLES MURRAY

America is supposed to be a democracy in which we're all in it together. Part of that ethos, which has been so essential to the country in times of crisis, is a common understanding that we all pay a share of the costs. Taxes are an essential ingredient in the civic glue that binds us together.

Our democracy is corrupted when some voters think that they won't have to pay for the benefits their representatives offer them. It is corrupted when some voters see themselves as victims of exploitation by their fellow citizens.

By both standards, American democracy is in trouble. We have the worst of both worlds. The rhetoric of the president tells the public that the rich are not paying their fair share, undermining the common understanding from the bottom up. Meanwhile, the IRS recently released new numbers on who pays how much taxes, and those numbers tell the people at the top that they're being exploited.

Let's start with the rich, whom I define as families in the top 1% of income among those who filed tax returns. In 2007, the year with the most recent tax data, they had family incomes of $410,000 or more. They paid 40% of all the personal income taxes collected.

Yes, you read it right: 1% of American families paid 40% of America's personal taxes.

The families in the rest of the top 5% had family incomes of $160,000 to $410,000. They paid another 20% of total personal income taxes. Now we're up to three out of every five dollars in personal taxes paid by just five out of every 100 American families.

Turn to the bottom three-quarters of the families who filed income tax returns in 2007—not just low-income families, but everybody with family incomes below $66,500. That 75% of families paid just 13% of all personal income taxes. Scott Hodge of the Tax Foundation has recast these numbers in terms of a single, stunning statistic: The top 1% of American households pay more in federal taxes than the bottom 95% combined.

My point is not that the rich are being bled dry. The taxes paid by families in the top 1% amounted to 22% of their adjusted gross income, not a confiscatory rate. The issue is that it is inherently problematic to have a democracy in which a third of filers pay no personal income tax at all (another datum from the IRS), and the entire bottom half of filers, meaning those with adjusted gross incomes below $33,000, have an average tax rate of just 3%.

This deforms the behavior of everyone—the voters who think they aren't paying for Congress's latest bright idea, the politicians who know that promising new programs will always be a winning political strategy with the majority of taxpayers who don't think they have to pay for them, and the wealthy who know that the only way to get politicians to refrain from that strategy is to buy them off.

For once, we face a problem with a solution that costs nothing. Most families who pay little or no personal income taxes are paying Social Security and Medicare taxes. All we need to do is make an accounting change, no longer pretending that payroll taxes are sequestered in trust funds.

Fold payroll taxes into the personal tax code, adjusting the rules so that everyone still pays the same total, but the tax bill shows up on the 1040. Doing so will tell everyone the truth: Their payroll taxes are being used to pay whatever bills the federal government brings upon itself, among which are the costs of Social Security and Medicare.

The finishing touch is to make sure that people understand how much they are paying, which is presently obscured by withholding at the workplace. End withholding, and require everybody to do what millions of Americans already do: write checks for estimated taxes four times a year.

Both of those simple changes scare politicians. Payroll taxes are politically useful because low-income and middle-income taxpayers don't complain about what they believe are contributions to their retirement and they think, wrongly, that they aren't paying much for anything else. Tax withholding has a wonderfully anesthetizing effect on people whose only income is a paycheck, leaving many of them actually feeling grateful for their tax refund check every year, not noticing how much the government has taken from them.

But the politicians' fear of being honest about taxes doesn't change the urgent need to be honest. The average taxpayer is wrong if he believes the affluent aren't paying their fair share—the top income earners carry an extraordinary proportion of the tax burden. High-income earners are wrong, too, about being exploited: Take account of payroll taxes, and low-income people also bear a heavy tax load.

End the payroll tax, end withholding, and these corrosive misapprehensions go away. We will once again be a democracy in which we're all in it together, we all know that we're all paying a share, and we are all aware how much that share is.

Mr. Murray is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. His most recent book, "Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality," will be out in paperback later this month (Three Rivers).
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Could Guantánamo Bay Be The Next Hong Kong?

Could Guantánamo Bay become the next Hong Kong? Yes.

Paul Romer lays out one possible scenario in his TED talk about Charter cities. Romer's scenario would be dependent on Cuban leadership that was honest as to the limitations and failures of its existing government. We obviously can't expect to happen with the current regime.

But who knows about the next person in a position of leadership for Cuba. They might be looking for a way out of the Communist albatross without explicitly admitting defeat to the US. Again it's obviously unlikely, but what a powerful idea. A recap from the post on the most interesting blog on the web - Marginal Revolution:

Imagine that the United States and Cuba agree to disengage by closing the military base and transferring local administrative control to Canada...

To help the city flourish, the Canadians encourage immigration. It is a place with Canadian judges and Mounties that happily accepts millions of immigrants. Some of the new residents could be Cuban émigrés who return from North America. Others might be Haitians who come work in garment factories that firms no longer feel safe bringing into Haiti...

Initially, the government of Cuba lets some of its citizens participate by migrating to the new city. Over time, it encourages citizens to move instead to a new city that it creates in a special economic zone located right outside the charter city, just as the Mainland Chinese let its citizens move into Shenzhen next to Hong Kong.

With clear rules spelled out in the charter and enforced by the Canadian judicial system, all the infrastructure for the new city is financed by private investment. The Canadians pay for the government services they provide (the legal, judicial, and regulatory systems, education, basic health care) out of the gains in the value of the land in the administrative zone. This, of course, creates the right incentives to invest in education and health. Growth in human capital makes income grow very rapidly, which makes the land in the zone even more valuable.

What do bright minds who look around and see the type of governments the world constantly produces wish to do? Here is how Patri Friedman [yes, he of Milton and David lineage] summarizes the libertarian dilemma:

Democracy is rigged against libertarians. Candidates bid for electoral victory partly by selling future political favors to raise funds and votes for their campaigns. Libertarians (and other honest candidates) who will not abuse their office can’t sell favors, thus have fewer resources to campaign with, and so have a huge intrinsic disadvantage in an election.

Libertarians are a minority, and we underperform in elections, so winning electoral victories is a hopeless endeavor.

So what is a libertarian to do? It's called Seasteading and this is their mission statement:

To further the establishment and growth of permanent, autonomous ocean communities, enabling innovation with new political and social systems. By opening a new frontier, we intend to revolutionize humanity's capacity to improve quality-of-life worldwide by creating experimentation and competition among governments.

Now this organization has been in the planning for years. But I suspect the current administration is not exactly hurting their recruiting efforts. When I look at the Oasis of the Sea model above, I see people who are doing a lot more than bemoaning the encroachment on their freedoms. I agree with their reasoning, but am not ready to get onboard. Ultimately, we Christians who believe in freedom are called to [the good] fight here on land until the last ACORN drops, or we do.

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What Is It Like To Be A Florida Marlins Fan?

What is it like to be a Florida Marlins fan? It's not as bad you might think, even before the great Wild Card run of 2009 [which will come to be known as the ugliest Phillies collapse since 64]. You've heard all the negatives, here are just a few of the positives, which encompass some of the supposed negatives:

• World Championship every 5 or 6 years
• None of those spoiled and wealthy players just going through the motions
• A zero tolerance policy towards 'can't miss prospects.' Yes they can miss and we are going to find out right now!
• Our unique attendance and home field dynamics, allow Miami fans to watch MLB while still observing CDC swine flu precaution guidelines.
• We Marlins fans can bond with great players before they enter the insufferably pompous stage of their career. There was a slight, but unavoidable, overlap with Miguel Cabrera.
  

The last item is the one which is the most constant source of fun for us Marlins fans. Every series seems to be another opportunity to re-live great memories or likable ball players. Let's walk back across the recent schedule:

• Houston Astros in town. Pudge catching, J.T. Snow is out! But it's not just the stars, Brian Moehler was here in 2005 & 2006.
• We just left Philadelphia. Paul Bakko did some time here in 2000. The dearth of ex-Marlins is the likely cause of the curse about to befall them.
• Washington Nationals? They are the Northern Marlins. Josh Willingham, Scot Olsen. Logan Kensing. Again it's not just that they played here [Ron Villone 2005], those guys came up to the big leagues here. Marlins fans would root against Willingham in only the most extreme conditions.
• Cubs. Derek Lee. 2-run double off Mark Prior in THE INNING. Ryan Dempster was a starter here for 5 years. Kevin Gregg was the most recent in a long list of improbably good Florida Marlins relievers - see the list below.
• Atlanta Braves. Eric Gregg [click here for an ode to the greatest strike call ever] and Yunel Escobar. Escobar is from Cuba, which is the equivalent of spending 3 years with the Marlins in our community].

OK, the streak ended with Atlanta. The Boston Red Sox? Oh, you mean the place Lowell and Beckett went to cash out with our blessings. I scan the boxscores for R Andino, M Cabrera, L Castillo, R Castro, A Gonzalez, M Jacobs, D Lee, M Lowell, M Olivo, J Pierre, M Redmon, I Rodriguez, G Sheffield, M Treanor, etc. I don't like to see our pitchers have to face each other, J Beckett, AJ Burnett, K Gregg, B Looper, J Miller, S Mitre, C Pavano, B Penny, J Vargas, D Willis, etc.

The Improbably Good Florida Marlins Closers

• 1993 - Bryan Harvey
• 1994 through 1997 - Robb Nen
• 1998 - *no saves were recorded
• 1999 through 2001 - Antonio Alfonseca [aka, El Pulpo, The Dragonslayer, and Six-Fingers]
• 2002 - Vladimir Nunez
• 2003 - Braden Looper - a personal favorite of mine - Marlins had a Saturday morning game-day promotion where kids were taken on a pitching, fielding and hitting sessions right on the field and under the stands, in the case of the hitting. Looper and Freddi Gonzalez were the pitching and batting instructors. In a highlight, my 7-year old daughter almost knocked Freddi over with a line drive. We're talking 2000 or 2001.
• 2004 - Armando Benitez
• 2005 - Todd Jones
• 2006 - Joe Borowski
• 2007 through 2008 - Kevin Gregg

*-Just kidding - Matt Mantei

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Mariano Rivera Will Be The Next John Smoltz

That 39-year old Mariano Rivera will be the next John Smoltz is a matter of if, not when. By 'the next John Smoltz,' we mean the example of an aging superstar pitcher whose body finally begins to pitch his age. Sometimes the 'ifs' in MLB are hard to see coming. This ain't one of them.

We invoke Baseball Gods and fate to explain some sports injuries. But unless you run a plastic surgery factory in Aventura, the effects of aging is a fairly mainstream scientific idea. That's why this is the one injury -- perhaps breakdown is a more exact term -- which would most affect who the next world Series Champion will be and is not hard to see coming.

Soon we will appreciate the irony that the great John Smoltz's final game happened in front a similarly great contemporary like Rivera. Don't think Rivera wasn't having melancholy thoughts as he watched either; 'Is that how it will be for me? Will I have to suffer the ignominy of having a Coco Crisp doing Grand Slam curtain calls? God, maybe I should get out now? Worse, maybe that moron Girardi will call me in again to discuss my mechanics.'

So what do wealthy New York franchises do with stubborn facts about the aging process? They develop a theory of course. Let's call it the Omar Minaya theory. Now Omar Minaya didn't invent this theory, he is just its latest poster boy. The OM Theory defined:

1. The mental act, condition, or habit of placing trust or confidence in that paying 8-figure salaries to veteran players who would be in the decline of their careers in any other era [a non-Bionic era], will keep them healthy during an entire major league baseball season: i.e., see Carlos Delgado.

2. Something believed or accepted as true, especially a particular tenet or a body of tenets accepted by a group of persons. i.e., management of New York MLB teams and their fans.

[Middle English bileve, alteration (influenced by bileven, to believe) of Old English gelafa; see leubh- in Indo-European roots.]

I'm not a gambler, but if I were, finding a Yankee fan and placing a wager that we are only weeks away from the beginning of the end of Mariano Rivera's spectacular HOF career is almost an unfair way to make some money. The more interesting question to me is which Bionic Era major leaguer will go down next.

Now members of my own family, who inconceivably worship at the secular-Yankee alter, namely my brother Fred and Evelio [I-phone Yankee logo wallpaper, 'nuff said], will vociferously suggest that this observation is driven by a hatred of the Yankees [and a broader hatred of all NY professional sports teams]. They would not so much be wrong about my feelings as they would be limited in the understanding of why I take such pleasure in their misfortune, i.e. sports hatred.

I appreciate what the Yankees do for MLB. They and other large market teams have in effect been subsidizing smaller market teams for many years. They do not do so out of charity; you see, if there there were not economically viable MLB teams in smaller markets, there would be no NY Yankees. I just love the irony of seeing the beneficiaries of their payouts succeed where they fail. Besides, I made a promise as I sat and watched the stinking, Darwin theory-challenging and thuggish-Knick [redundant?] fans exiting the Miami Arena on May 3rd, 1998.

It may be slightly outdated, but I urge all fans to read Sports Illusion, Sports Reality by Leonard Koppett. He does an excellent job of explaining why if it weren't for the constant drumbeat of media coverage, we wouldn't be as interested in MLB. In other words, we are kidding ourselves if we think we follow professional or college teams based on the love of the sport.

So again, who's next after Rivera?

That guy ===> ===>

But don't say his name out loud, we wouldn't want to jinx the 35-year old.

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Why The Baseball Gods Stepped In

At a certain point during Tuesday night's Marlins game at Washington, the following factors must have reached a tipping point with the Baseball Gods:

• Florida Marlins record against the Washington Nationals in 2008, 14-3.
• Florida Marlins record against the Washington Nationals in 2009, 9-0.
• 25-yr old Josh Johnson appeared on the verge of throwing a 2 hit shutout, having retired the last 20 batters and about to face the bottom of the order with a low-pitch count in the 8th inning.
• Johnson would also be likely extending his streak streak of allowing three runs or fewer in his starts - the streak was now at 18 straight games.

The Marlins were on the verge of going 24-3 against the Nationals. The Baseball Gods don't allow great teams to abuse bad teams that badly over a 2 year period, let alone a just average team doing it to a bad team. The surprise was not that the Nationals rallied with 6 runs in the 8th, but that they even had to rally. That the rally came so late. What kind of debts does this franchise have with the Baseball Gods? Are the Baseball Gods trying to make Pittsburgh feel better in comparison?

Take a look at the Elias MLB Standings grid. The grid allow us to go back to 2002. I'll focus on division rivals which typically play each other 18 times and find the most lopsided records in both leagues and what those teams records were the following year.

• 2002 - BOS v TB 16-3
• 2003 - BOS v TB 12-7

• 2002 - PIT v MIL 15-4
• 2003 - PIT v MIL 7-10

• 2003 - OAK v TEX 15-4
• 2004 - OAK v TEX 11-9

• 2003 - SF v SD 14-5 and WAS v NYM 14-5
• 2004 - SF v SD 7-12 and WAS v NYM 9-10

• 2004 - NYY v TB 15-4
• 2005 - NYY v TB 8-11

• 2004 - LAD v ARI 16-3
• 2005 - LAD v ARI 5-13

• 2005 - LAA v TEX 15-4
• 2006 - LAA v TEX 11-8

• 2005 - ARI v LAD 13-5
• 2006 - ARI v LAD 8-10

• 2006 - BOS v BAL 15-3
• 2007 - BOS v BAL 12-6

• 2006 - HOU v PIT 13-3
• 2007 - HOU v PIT 5-10

• 2007 - CLE v MIN 14-4
• 2008 - CLE v MIN 8-10

• 2007 - SD v SF 14-4
• 2008 - SD v SF 5-13

• 2008 - TB v BAL 15-3
• 2009 [partial] TB v BAL 3-4

• 2008 - ARI v COL 15-3
• 2009 [partial] ARI v COL 6-6

• 2008 - FLA v WAS 14-3
• 2009 [partial] FLA v WAS 9-1

If the Marlins finish the year with a 13-5 record against the Nationals, they are on track to have had the best record in back to back years against a division rival than any other team in MLB since at least 2002.

Seriously fellow Marlins fans, what are we complaining about?

Happy birthday Daniel!

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The Mismatch of the Century: Spin vs Video

Are you going to believe a bunch of grainy old videos taken on camera phones by the type of people who attend speeches and seminars about Health Care policy -- which the White House does not denied their authenticity -- or the White House Communications Director spin?

Check out the Breitbart TV, The Weekly Standard and the
Drudge Report

This White House is even going as far as asking people to rat on their fellow citizens if they criticize their health care proposals. Can naming block captains be far behind?

Here is the nuts and bolts of why they are panicked. From economist Keith Hennessey's blog:

The President’s fiscal policy is based upon a flawed health care premise, and the flaws are becoming apparent to a wider audience.

The Administration’s fiscal strategy is to increase short-term spending (and not just on health care) and more than offset those spending increases through long-term reductions in federal health care spending.

In theory this strategy could work, but by ducking painful policy choices on health care reform that would actually reduce long-term health care spending, the President and his team have placed their health care and fiscal policy strategies in jeopardy.

Flaw 1: The arithmetic is nearly impossible. These bills start by increasing federal health spending 10-15% by creating a new entitlement. That digs a huge hole before beginning to address the existing fiscal problem.

Flaw 2: As it becomes increasingly more difficult to pass health care reform legislation, the Administration is lowering the bar to say such legislation must not increase the long-term deficit (rather than must reduce it). But to make their fiscal policy case, the Administration needs to be able to demonstrate that health care reform will reduce long-term deficits.

Flaw 3: The Administration has not recommended policies that would actually reduce long-term federal health spending. When experts (like CBO) point this out, the Administration misrepresents the analysis and repeats their claims of long-term savings.

As CBO has dismantled this argument, it has placed health care legislation in jeopardy. In addition, the linchpin of the President’s fiscal policy case is buckling.

Flaw 4: The Administration says the long-term savings will exist, but the savings are too nebulous to be precisely scored. What, then, do they plan to display in next year’s President’s budget if they are successful? At some point someone would have to attribute specific long-term budgetary effects to an enacted health care reform bill. You can’t just hand-wave past this problem forever. It will catch up to you.

Perhaps the most prominent non-lefty economist is Greg Mankiw. He summarizes the issue the following way:

Are you more worried about the problem of the uninsured or about the long-term fiscal imbalance?

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Is It Not Enough To Believe?

Is it not enough to believe? No, suggests our favorite ethernet pastor, Fr Vallee, we must believe for the right reason.

In today’s Gospel, the crowds have followed Jesus because of the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves. Jesus is, clearly, critical of the crowd’s motivations. He says, “You are looking for me not because you saw ‘signs’ but because you ate your full of the loaves.” This is a clear and repeated theme in John’s Gospel. Jesus always insists that the mighty works he does are not miracles or even proofs that he is who he says he is. For John’s Jesus, the deeds of power he performs are “signs.” Signs of what? Signs of his Father’s glory. It is not enough that the crowd, or ourselves for that matter, believe. We must believe for the right reason. As T.S. Eliot opined in The Cocktail Party, “the last temptation is the greatest treason, to do the right thing for the wrong reason.” So, what exactly is the right reason? The right reason, the only reason that makes any sense, is that we have come to know and love Jesus Christ.

The email address to request to be put on Vallee's email distribution list is Cioran262@aol.com. To see the entire homily click on 'read more.' Search for other Fr Vallee homilies in this blog by entering 'Vallee' in the search box in the upper left hand corner or look for Fr Vallee in the Labels.

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Fr Vallee Homily - Aug 2 2009

I. Miracles vrs. Signs
In today’s Gospel, the crowds have followed Jesus because of the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves. Jesus is, clearly, critical of the crowd’s motivations. He says, “You are looking for me not because you saw ‘signs’ but because you ate your full of the loaves.” This is a clear and repeated theme in John’s Gospel. Jesus always insists that the mighty works he does are not miracles or even proofs that he is who he says he is. For John’s Jesus, the deeds of power he performs are “signs.” Signs of what? Signs of his Father’s glory. It is not enough that the crowd, or ourselves for that matter, believe. We must believe for the right reason. As T.S. Eliot opined in The Cocktail Party, “the last temptation is the greatest treason, to do the right thing for the wrong reason.” So, what exactly is the right reason? The right reason, the only reason that makes any sense, is that we have come to know and love Jesus Christ. Jesus us tells us this himself at the end of today’s Gospel. After they have been arguing about the bread Jesus gave and the bread Moses gave in the desert, Jesus makes his case with prodigious clarity and stark simplicity: “I myself am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

II. Not coercion, invitation
Being a philosopher, I find this entire matter fascinating. You see, the great deeds Jesus performs are not miracles in the normal sense of the word; they are signs of his Father’s glory. Those of you who are not philosophers might think this to be an unimportant and rather “too subtle” distinction. But the multiplication of the loaves is not a mere historical fact or a scientific anomaly. In fact, Jesus himself says that if faith is just based on miracles and wonders, it is not really faith. The great deeds that Jesus performs are not attempts to coerce belief from skeptical crowds. The great deeds that Jesus performs are nothing less than invitations to see the glory of the Father and share in the love of the Father and the Son. The great deeds of Jesus are invitations to share in the inner life of the Trinity. This is why, even after the Ascension, Christians still perform these mighty deeds. Because Christ sent us the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit is, precisely, the love which exists between the Father and the Son. Maybe there are so few miracles today because there is so little true faith or, maybe, there are still miracles going on all around us. We have just forgotten how to recognize them as such. Anyhow, that is a question for another homily.

III. A story of an old and young philosopher
I know I have waxed a bit theological today. I apologize. John’s Gospel, with all of its mystical poetry and theological dreaminess, tends to have that effect on me. Let me try to simplify. These last two weeks I have had my nephew Jason with me. He is 12 years old and a very curious (curious in the good sense) child. One of the first things he did, upon arriving, was beat me in chess. He, then, preceded to beat me in tennis. If it were not for ping-pong, I would have no manly pride left whatsoever. My nephew likes to discuss philosophy with me. One day we were discussing the nature of perfection. Well, let me be honest, we were not so much discussing as arguing. I must say I was very impressed that a 12 year old who has read a few books on philosophy could hold his own with his uncle who has a doctorate in philosophy. Anyhow as we were discussing (arguing), it dawned on me all of sudden that the very act of discussing is an act of love and respect. In fact, without love and respect, no discussion is possible. The point is I do not love my nephew because he is clever; he does not love me because I am a philosopher. We love each other and that love makes everything else possible. The crowds and ourselves do not believe in Jesus because he is powerful and can multiply loaves, cure the sick or raise the dead. We believe in Jesus Christ because we have come to know and love Jesus Christ and that love, which is an extension of the love which exists between the Father and the Son, is what makes all signs and wonders possible.
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Sgt Barnes: Boy, Whachew Know About Farming?

There is a great scene in Annie Hall where Woody Allen produces the author some proverbial gasbag has been pontificating about and enjoys the moment as Marshall McLuhan completely refutes the man's loud and unsolicited opinions about his work.

An AEI magazine article by a farmer named Blake Hurst is an updated version of that scene. As you will read, Mr. Hurst handled it in a polite manner. Part of me wishes he could have pulled in the Tom Berenger character in Platoon, Sgt Barnes, to handle the exchange; 'Boy, whachew know about farming?' The switchblade knife being optional. Here is an excerpt from Mr Hurst's version:

I’m dozing, as I often do on airplanes, but the guy behind me has been broadcasting nonstop for nearly three hours. I finally admit defeat and start some serious eavesdropping. He’s talking about food, damning farming, particularly livestock farming, compensating for his lack of knowledge with volume.

I’m so tired of people who wouldn’t visit a doctor who used a stethoscope instead of an MRI demanding that farmers like me use 1930s technology to raise food. Farming has always been messy and painful, and bloody and dirty. It still is.

But now we have to listen to self-appointed experts on airplanes frightening their seatmates about the profession I have practiced for more than 30 years. I’d had enough. I turned around and politely told the lecturer that he ought not believe everything he reads. He quieted and asked me what kind of farming I do. I told him, and when he asked if I used organic farming, I said no, and left it at that. I didn’t answer with the first thought that came to mind, which is simply this: I deal in the real world, not superstitions, and unless the consumer absolutely forces my hand, I am about as likely to adopt organic methods as the Wall Street Journal is to publish their next edition by setting the type by hand.

In looking up the Tom Berenger link, I came across a great post about the movie Platoon in the MoneyLaw Blog by Jim Chen - great stuff - an excerpt:

Notwithstanding The Last Temptation of Christ, Platoon was the movie in which Willem Dafoe got his first opportunity to play the role of Jesus. Dafoe's character went by the name Elias and represented good in the form of marijuana and ethical warfare. Dafoe's foil, Tom Berenguer, depicted the crafty but corrupt Barnes, a ruthless survivor who treats war crime as another day at the office. These sergeants fought for the soul of Pvt. Chris Taylor (depicted by Charlie Sheen) and the rest of their platoon. Yes, it's allegory of the bluntest sort. But MoneyLaw is partial to allegory, and "good versus evil" is really the only story in the world.

The AEI farming article referenced is copied in full at end of post.

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The Omnivore’s Delusion: Against the Agri-intellectuals

By Blake Hurst Thursday, July 30, 2009

Filed under: Lifestyle, Big Ideas, Culture, Science & Technology
Farming has always been messy and painful, and bloody and dirty. It still is. This is something the critics of industrial farming never seem to understand.

I’m dozing, as I often do on airplanes, but the guy behind me has been broadcasting nonstop for nearly three hours. I finally admit defeat and start some serious eavesdropping. He’s talking about food, damning farming, particularly livestock farming, compensating for his lack of knowledge with volume.

I’m so tired of people who wouldn’t visit a doctor who used a stethoscope instead of an MRI demanding that farmers like me use 1930s technology to raise food. Farming has always been messy and painful, and bloody and dirty. It still is.

But now we have to listen to self-appointed experts on airplanes frightening their seatmates about the profession I have practiced for more than 30 years. I’d had enough. I turned around and politely told the lecturer that he ought not believe everything he reads. He quieted and asked me what kind of farming I do. I told him, and when he asked if I used organic farming, I said no, and left it at that. I didn’t answer with the first thought that came to mind, which is simply this: I deal in the real world, not superstitions, and unless the consumer absolutely forces my hand, I am about as likely to adopt organic methods as the Wall Street Journal is to publish their next edition by setting the type by hand.

Young turkeys aren't smart enough to come in out of the rain, and will stand outside in a downpour, with beaks open and eyes skyward, until they drown.

He was a businessman, and I’m sure spends his days with spreadsheets, projections, and marketing studies. He hasn’t used a slide rule in his career and wouldn’t make projections with tea leaves or soothsayers. He does not blame witchcraft for a bad quarter, or expect the factory that makes his product to use steam power instead of electricity, or horses and wagons to deliver his products instead of trucks and trains. But he expects me to farm like my grandfather, and not incidentally, I suppose, to live like him as well. He thinks farmers are too stupid to farm sustainably, too cruel to treat their animals well, and too careless to worry about their communities, their health, and their families. I would not presume to criticize his car, or the size of his house, or the way he runs his business. But he is an expert about me, on the strength of one book, and is sharing that expertise with captive audiences every time he gets the chance. Enough, enough, enough.

Industrial Farming and Its Critics

Critics of “industrial farming” spend most of their time concerned with the processes by which food is raised. This is because the results of organic production are so, well, troublesome. With the subtraction of every “unnatural” additive, molds, fungus, and bugs increase. Since it is difficult to sell a religion with so many readily quantifiable bad results, the trusty family farmer has to be thrown into the breach, saving the whole organic movement by his saintly presence, chewing on his straw, plodding along, at one with his environment, his community, his neighborhood. Except that some of the largest farms in the country are organic—and are giant organizations dependent upon lots of hired stoop labor doing the most backbreaking of tasks in order to save the sensitive conscience of my fellow passenger the merest whiff of pesticide contamination. They do not spend much time talking about that at the Whole Foods store.

The most delicious irony is this: the parts of farming that are the most “industrial” are the most likely to be owned by the kind of family farmers that elicit such a positive response from the consumer. Corn farms are almost all owned and managed by small family farmers. But corn farmers salivate at the thought of one more biotech breakthrough, use vast amounts of energy to increase production, and raise large quantities of an indistinguishable commodity to sell to huge corporations that turn that corn into thousands of industrial products.

The biggest environmental harm I’ve done as a farmer is the topsoil (and nutrients) I used to send down the Missouri River to the Gulf of Mexico before we began to practice no-till farming, made possible only by the use of herbicides.

Most livestock is produced by family farms, and even the poultry industry, with its contracts and vertical integration, relies on family farms to contract for the production of the birds. Despite the obvious change in scale over time, family farms, like ours, still meet around the kitchen table, send their kids to the same small schools, sit in the same church pew, and belong to the same civic organizations our parents and grandparents did. We may be industrial by some definition, but not our own. Reality is messier than it appears in the book my tormentor was reading, and farming more complicated than a simple morality play.

On the desk in front of me are a dozen books, all hugely critical of present-day farming. Farmers are often given a pass in these books, painted as either naïve tools of corporate greed, or economic nullities forced into their present circumstances by the unrelenting forces of the twin grindstones of corporate greed and unfeeling markets. To the farmer on the ground, though, a farmer blessed with free choice and hard won experience, the moral choices aren’t quite so easy. Biotech crops actually cut the use of chemicals, and increase food safety. Are people who refuse to use them my moral superiors? Herbicides cut the need for tillage, which decreases soil erosion by millions of tons. The biggest environmental harm I have done as a farmer is the topsoil (and nutrients) I used to send down the Missouri River to the Gulf of Mexico before we began to practice no-till farming, made possible only by the use of herbicides. The combination of herbicides and genetically modified seed has made my farm more sustainable, not less, and actually reduces the pollution I send down the river.

Finally, consumers benefit from cheap food. If you think they don’t, just remember the headlines after food prices began increasing in 2007 and 2008, including the study by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations announcing that 50 million additional people are now hungry because of increasing food prices. Only “industrial farming” can possibly meet the demands of an increasing population and increased demand for food as a result of growing incomes.

The distance between the farmer and what he grows has certainly increased, but, believe me, if we weren't closely connected, we wouldn't still be farming.

So the stakes in this argument are even higher. Farmers can raise food in different ways if that is what the market wants. It is important, though, that even people riding in airplanes know that there are environmental and food safety costs to whatever kind of farming we choose.

Pigs in a Pen

In his book Dominion, author Mathew Scully calls “factory farming” an “obvious moral evil so sickening and horrendous it would leave us ashen.” Scully, a speechwriter for the second President Bush, can hardly be called a man of the left. Just to make sure the point is not lost, he quotes the conservative historian Paul Johnson a page later:

The rise of factory farming, whereby food producers cannot remain competitive except by subjecting animals to unspeakable deprivation, has hastened this process. The human spirit revolts at what we have been doing.

Arizona and Florida have outlawed pig gestation crates, and California recently passed, overwhelmingly, a ballot initiative doing the same. There is no doubt that Scully and Johnson have the wind at their backs, and confinement raising of livestock may well be outlawed everywhere. And only a person so callous as to have a spirit that cannot be revolted, or so hardened to any kind of morality that he could countenance an obvious moral evil, could say a word in defense of caging animals during their production. In the quote above, Paul Johnson is forecasting a move toward vegetarianism. But if we assume, at least for the present, that most of us will continue to eat meat, let me dive in where most fear to tread.

Lynn Niemann was a neighbor of my family’s, a farmer with a vision. He began raising turkeys on a field near his house around 1956. They were, I suppose, what we would now call “free range” turkeys. Turkeys raised in a natural manner, with no roof over their heads, just gamboling around in the pasture, as God surely intended. Free to eat grasshoppers, and grass, and scratch for grubs and worms. And also free to serve as prey for weasels, who kill turkeys by slitting their necks and practicing exsanguination. Weasels were a problem, but not as much a threat as one of our typically violent early summer thunderstorms. It seems that turkeys, at least young ones, are not smart enough to come in out of the rain, and will stand outside in a downpour, with beaks open and eyes skyward, until they drown. One night Niemann lost 4,000 turkeys to drowning, along with his dream, and his farm.

Food production will have a claim on fossil fuels long after we've learned how to use renewables and nuclear power to handle many of our other energy needs.

Now, turkeys are raised in large open sheds. Chickens and turkeys raised for meat are not grown in cages. As the critics of "industrial farming" like to point out, the sheds get quite crowded by the time Thanksgiving rolls around and the turkeys are fully grown. And yes, the birds are bedded in sawdust, so the turkeys do walk around in their own waste. Although the turkeys don't seem to mind, this quite clearly disgusts the various authors I've read whom have actually visited a turkey farm. But none of those authors, whose descriptions of the horrors of modern poultry production have a certain sameness, were there when Neimann picked up those 4,000 dead turkeys. Sheds are expensive, and it was easier to raise turkeys in open, inexpensive pastures. But that type of production really was hard on the turkeys. Protected from the weather and predators, today's turkeys may not be aware that they are a part of a morally reprehensible system.

Like most young people in my part of the world, I was a 4-H member. Raising cattle and hogs, showing them at the county fair, and then sending to slaughter those animals that we had spent the summer feeding, washing, and training. We would then tour the packing house, where our friend was hung on a rail, with his loin eye measured and his carcass evaluated. We farm kids got an early start on dulling our moral sensibilities. I'm still proud of my win in the Atchison County Carcass competition of 1969, as it is the only trophy I have ever received. We raised the hogs in a shed, or farrowing (birthing) house. On one side were eight crates of the kind that the good citizens of California have outlawed. On the other were the kind of wooden pens that our critics would have us use, where the sow could turn around, lie down, and presumably act in a natural way. Which included lying down on my 4-H project, killing several piglets, and forcing me to clean up the mess when I did my chores before school. The crates protect the piglets from their mothers. Farmers do not cage their hogs because of sadism, but because dead pigs are a drag on the profit margin, and because being crushed by your mother really is an awful way to go. As is being eaten by your mother, which I've seen sows do to newborn pigs as well.

I warned you that farming is still dirty and bloody, and I wasn't kidding. So let's talk about manure. It is an article of faith amongst the agri-intellectuals that we no longer use manure as fertilizer. To quote Dr. Michael Fox in his book Eating with a Conscience, "The animal waste is not going back to the land from which he animal feed originated." Or Bill McKibben, in his book Deep Economy, writing about modern livestock production: "But this concentrates the waste in one place, where instead of being useful fertilizer to spread on crop fields it becomes a toxic threat."

In my inbox is an email from our farm's neighbor, who raises thousands of hogs in close proximity to our farm, and several of my family member's houses as well. The email outlines the amount and chemical analysis of the manure that will be spread on our fields this fall, manure that will replace dozens of tons of commercial fertilizer. The manure is captured underneath the hog houses in cement pits, and is knifed into the soil after the crops are harvested. At no time is it exposed to erosion, and it is an extremely valuable resource, one which farmers use to its fullest extent, just as they have since agriculture began.

Pollan thinks farmers use commercial fertilizer because it's easier, and because it's cheap. Pollan is right. But those are perfectly defensible reasons.

In the southern part of Missouri, there is an extensive poultry industry in areas of the state where the soil is poor. The farmers there spread the poultry litter on pasture, and the advent of poultry barns made cattle production possible in areas that used to be waste ground. The "industrial" poultry houses are owned by family farmers, who have then used the byproducts to produce beef in areas where cattle couldn't survive before. McKibben is certain that the contracts these farmers sign with companies like Tyson are unfair, and the farmers might agree. But they like those cows, so there is a waiting list for new chicken barns. In some areas, there is indeed more manure than available cropland. But the trend in the industry, thankfully, is toward a dispersion of animals and manure, as the value of the manure increases, and the cost of transporting the manure becomes prohibitive.

We Can’t Change Nature

The largest producer of pigs in the United States has promised to gradually end the use of hog crates. The Humane Society promises to take their initiative drive to outlaw farrowing crates and poultry cages to more states. Many of the counties in my own state of Missouri have chosen to outlaw the the building of confinement facilities. Barack Obama has been harshly critical of animal agriculture. We are clearly in the process of deciding that we will not continue to raise animals the way we do now. Because other countries may not share our sensibilities, we'll have to withdraw or amend free trade agreements to keep any semblance of a livestock industry.

We can do that, and we may be a better society for it, but we can't change nature. Pigs will be allowed to "return to their mire," as Kipling had it, but they'll also be crushed and eaten by their mothers. Chickens will provide lunch to any number of predators, and some number of chickens will die as flocks establish their pecking order.

In recent years, the cost of producing pork dropped as farmers increased feed efficiency (the amount of feed needed to produce a pound of pork) by 20 percent. Free-range chickens and pigs will increase the price of food, using more energy and water to produce the extra grain required for the same amount of meat, and some people will go hungry. It is also instructive that the first company to move away from farrowing crates is the largest producer of pigs. Changing the way we raise animals will not necessarily change the scale of the companies involved in the industry. If we are about to require more expensive ways of producing food, the largest and most well-capitalized farms will have the least trouble adapting.

The Omnivores’ Delusions

Michael Pollan, in an 8,000-word essay in the New York Times Magazine, took the expected swipes at animal agriculture. But his truly radical prescriptions had to do with raising of crops. Pollan, who seemed to be aware of the nitrogen problem in his book The Omnivore's Dilemma, left nuance behind, as well as the laws of chemistry, in his recommendations. The nitrogen problem is this: without nitrogen, we do not have life. Until we learned to produce nitrogen from natural gas early in the last century, the only way to get nitrogen was through nitrogen produced by plants called legumes, or from small amounts of nitrogen that are produced by lightning strikes. The amount of life the earth could support was limited by the amount of nitrogen available for crop production.

In his book, Pollan quotes geographer Vaclav Smil to the effect that 40 percent of the people alive today would not be alive without the ability to artificially synthesize nitrogen. But in his directive on food policy, Pollan damns agriculture's dependence on fossil fuels, and urges the president to encourage agriculture to move away from expensive and declining supplies of natural gas toward the unlimited sunshine that supported life, and agriculture, as recently as the 1940s. Now, why didn't I think of that?

Well, I did. I've raised clover and alfalfa for the nitrogen they produce, and half the time my land is planted to soybeans, another nitrogen producing legume. Pollan writes as if all of his ideas are new, but my father tells of agriculture extension meetings in the late 1950s entitled "Clover and Corn, the Road to Profitability." Farmers know that organic farming was the default position of agriculture for thousands of years, years when hunger was just around the corner for even advanced societies. I use all the animal manure available to me, and do everything I can to reduce the amount of commercial fertilizers I use. When corn genetically modified to use nitrogen more efficiently enters the market, as it soon will, I will use it as well. But none of those things will completely replace commercial fertilizer.

Norman Borlaug, founder of the green revolution, estimates that the amount of nitrogen available naturally would only support a worldwide population of 4 billion souls or so. He further remarks that we would need another 5 billion cows to produce enough manure to fertilize our present crops with "natural" fertilizer. That would play havoc with global warming. And cows do not produce nitrogen from the air, but only from the forages they eat, so to produce more manure we will have to plant more forages. Most of the critics of industrial farming maintain the contradictory positions that we should increase the use of manure as a fertilizer, and decrease our consumption of meat. Pollan would solve the problem with cover crops, planted after the corn crop is harvested, and with mandatory composting. Pollan should talk to some actual farmers before he presumes to advise a president.

Pollan tells of flying over the upper Midwest in the winter, and seeing the black, fallow soil. I suppose one sees what one wants to see, but we have not had the kind of tillage implement on our farm that would produce black soil in nearly 20 years. Pollan would provide our nitrogen by planting those black fields to nitrogen-producing cover crops after the cash crops are harvested. This is a fine plan, one that farmers have known about for generations. And sometimes it would even work. But not last year, as we finished harvest in November in a freezing rain. It is hard to think of a legume that would have done its thing between then and corn planting time. Plants do not grow very well in freezing weather, a fact that would evidently surprise Pollan.

And even if we could have gotten a legume established last fall, it would not have fixed any nitrogen before planting time. We used to plant corn in late May, plowing down our green manure and killing the first flush of weeds. But that meant the corn would enter its crucial growing period during the hottest, driest parts of the summer, and that soil erosion would be increased because the land was bare during drenching spring rains. Now we plant in early April, best utilizing our spring rains, and ensuring that pollination occurs before the dog days of August.

A few other problems come to mind. The last time I planted a cover crop, the clover provided a perfect habitat in early spring for bugs, bugs that I had to kill with an insecticide. We do not normally apply insecticides, but we did that year. Of course, you can provide nitrogen with legumes by using a longer crop rotation, growing clover one year and corn the next. But that uses twice as much water to produce a corn crop, and takes twice as much land to produce the same number of bushels. We are producing twice the food we did in 1960 on less land, and commercial nitrogen is one of the main reasons why. It may be that we decide we would rather spend land and water than energy, but Pollan never mentions that we are faced with that choice.

His other grand idea is mandatory household composting, with the compost delivered to farmers free of charge. Why not? Compost is a valuable soil amendment, and if somebody else is paying to deliver it to my farm, then bring it on. But it will not do much to solve the nitrogen problem. Household compost has somewhere between 1 and 5 percent nitrogen, and not all that nitrogen is available to crops the first year. Presently, we are applying about 150 pounds of nitrogen per acre to corn, and crediting about 40 pounds per acre from the preceding years soybean crop. Let's assume a 5 percent nitrogen rate, or about 100 pounds of nitrogen per ton of compost. That would require 3,000 pounds of compost per acre. Or about 150,000 tons for the corn raised in our county. The average truck carries about 20 tons. Picture 7,500 trucks traveling from New York City to our small county here in the Midwest, delivering compost. Five million truckloads to fertilize the country's corn crop. Now, that would be a carbon footprint!

Pollan thinks farmers use commercial fertilizer because it is easier, and because it is cheap. Pollan is right. But those are perfectly defensible reasons. Nitrogen quadrupled in price over the last several years, and farmers are still using it, albeit more cautiously. We are using GPS monitors on all of our equipment to ensure that we do not use too much, and our production of corn per pound of nitrogen is rapidly increasing. On our farm, we have increased yields about 50 percent during my career, while applying about the same amount of nitrogen we did when I began farming. That fortunate trend will increase even faster with the advent of new GMO hybrids. But as much as Pollan might desire it, even President Obama cannot reshuffle the chemical deck that nature has dealt. Energy may well get much more expensive, and peak oil production may have been reached. But food production will have a claim on fossil fuels long after we have learned how to use renewables and nuclear power to handle many of our other energy needs.

Farming and Connectedness

Much of farming is more "industrial," more technical, and more complex than it used to be. Farmers farm more acres, and are less close to the ground and their animals than they were in the past. Almost all critics of industrial agriculture bemoan this loss of closeness, this "connectedness," to use author Rod Dreher's term. It is a given in most of the writing about agriculture that the knowledge and experience of the organic farmer is what makes him so unique and so important. The "industrial farmer," on the other hand, is a mere pawn of Cargill, backed into his ignorant way of life by forces too large, too far from the farm, and too powerful to resist. Concern about this alienation, both between farmers and the land, and between consumers and their food supply, is what drives much of the literature about agriculture.

The distance between the farmer and what he grows has certainly increased, but, believe me, if we weren't closely connected, we wouldn't still be farming. It's important to our critics that they emphasize this alienation, because they have to ignore the "industrial" farmer's experience and knowledge to say the things they do about farming.

But farmers have reasons for their actions, and society should listen to them as we embark upon this reappraisal of our agricultural system. I use chemicals and diesel fuel to accomplish the tasks my grandfather used to do with sweat, and I use a computer instead of a lined notebook and a pencil, but I'm still farming the same land he did 80 years ago, and the fund of knowledge that our family has accumulated about our small part of Missouri is valuable. And everything I know and I have learned tells me this: we have to farm "industrially" to feed the world, and by using those "industrial" tools sensibly, we can accomplish that task and leave my grandchildren a prosperous and productive farm, while protecting the land, water, and air around us.

Blake Hurst is a farmer in Missouri. In a few days he will spend the next six weeks on a combine.
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Art Imitates Economic Philosophical Goals?

In a way, a good political satire is kind of like a campaign promise, you don't necessarily have to believe it [not one dime!], for it to be effective. But a good political satire should exploit the target's weakness. The image below accomplishes that very effectively.

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Why Is Tomorrow Promised To No One?

Why is tomorrow promised to no one?

In the New Testament, the letter from James 4:13-15 -- who was not one of the two disciples names James -- says the following:

Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and get gain" whereas you do not know about tomorrow. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, "If the Lord wills, we shall live and we shall do this or that."

There is also a mathematical formulation for more secularized mindsets about why tomorrow is promised to no one:
P(t) \approx e^{-0.003 e^{(t-25)/10}}

Fortunately, the blog Gravity and Levity also puts the formula into a readable format.

What do you think are the odds that you will die during the next year? Try to put a number to it — 1 in 100? 1 in 10,000? Whatever it is, it will be twice as large 8 years from now.

This startling fact was first noticed by the British actuary Benjamin Gompertz in 1825 and is now called the “Gompertz Law of human mortality.” Your probability of dying during a given year doubles every 8 years. For me, a 25-year-old American, the probability of dying during the next year is a fairly minuscule 0.03% — about 1 in 3,000. When I’m 33 it will be about 1 in 1,500, when I’m 42 it will be about 1 in 750, and so on. By the time I reach age 100 (and I do plan on it) the probability of living to 101 will only be about 50%. This is seriously fast growth — my mortality rate is increasing exponentially with age.

And if my mortality rate (the probability of dying during the next year, or during the next second, however you want to phrase it) is rising exponentially, that means that the probability of me surviving to a particular age is falling super-exponentially.

Currently, I'm at 1 in 375.

Next blog post, we will explore the phrase, 'better you than me.'

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Our African-American and Calibrated President

While I'm no fan, I have to give President Obama some credit. He fought giving the appearance of wanting to be the first African-American president as long as he could. He fought it at times I thought he shouldn't, namely his nomination speech on the 45th anniversary of MLK's 'I Have a Dream' speech. That's discipline, a real and important skill which I put at the top of his attributes which most impress me.

But the temptation in the form of the arrest of an Ivy-league college employed, African-American intellectual in his own home was borderline unfair. It's like making 365 gambling-free days while working at an online-betting service, a condition of Pete Rose's return to MLB.

I actually agree that it is messed up that someone could end up being arrested in their own home. But the particulars of the arrest itself does not interest me as much as the politics involved. In fact, the details of the incident are so delicious, I briefly worried that I actually brought about the incident through some bizarre form of telekinesis. Only when I was able to confirm that the person who accompanied Gates that evening wasn't Cornell West, was I sure that the event occurred on its own and not some wacked-out, Billy Mumy inspired, Twilight Zone-ish contrivance of my imagination.

You see Henry Louis Gates Jr. is not just any African-American intellectual from any Ivy-league school. No he is the most prestigious African-American scholar from Harvard. This from his Wikipedia page:

As a literary theorist and critic, Gates has combined literary techniques of deconstruction with native African literary traditions; he draws on structuralism, post-structuralism, and semiotics to textual analysis and matters of identity politics. As a black intellectual and public figure, Gates has been an outspoken critic of the Eurocentric literary canon. He has insisted that black literature must be evaluated by the aesthetic criteria of its culture of origin, not criteria imported from Western or European cultural traditions that express a "tone deafness to the black cultural voice" and result in "intellectual racism."

The underlined stuff basically means that he reserves himself the right to give anything whatever meaning he prefers and if you disagree, ... well, y'know. In short, he is an expert in all things 'victim.' The odds that Mr Gates would had seen anything but racism in the actions of the police were non-existent.

And who was the arresting police officer? Before we answer that, put yourself in the shoes [sandals?] of every non-God-fearing liberal you know. 'Please, please, [insert a spiritual, but non-religious symbol], let him be a racist. Let him make Theophilus Eugene "Bull" Connor look like a Black Panther sympathizer.'

That the arresting officer appeared a reasonable sort in early interviews was bad enough. When it was revealed that he had spent the past five years teaching police cadets about how to avoid racial profiling, that was a vicious blow to their solar plexus. Think of the truly primal scream uttered by The Enemy at the conclusion of The Passion of The Christ, and you would be at about 60% of the disappointment level felt by liberals at that news.

Enter the president, stage left. This was one issue he would have no use for a teleprompter [he initially assumed]. In giving his thoughts, he would be in effect summarizing the conversation at every other dinner party he attended during his adult life. So spoketh President Obama:

... the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home.

Obama, a few days later, his non-apology apology [hey wasn't that Bush's problem?]:

... I wanted to make clear that in my choice of words, I think, I unfortunately, I think, gave an impression that I was maligning the Cambridge Police Department or Sergeant Crowley specifically,” Mr. Obama said. “And I could have calibrated those words differently.

But we still have not gotten to my favorite part of the incident. Obama further calibrates through his 'people':

Mr. Obama called his senior adviser, David Axelrod. “I’m going to call Sergeant Crowley and then I think I ought to step into the press room and address it,” Mr. Axelrod said he said.

In other words, his senior adviser wants us to believe that the president didn't call his senior adviser for advice, but merely to inform him of what he was about to do. [Note to Editor: Let's hold off on that Axelrod genius piece.]

Because you know, the president wouldn't want to give the impression that he finds himself under the biggest microscope in the world with the least amount of executive experience than all his predecessors. All in an impossible job whose potential for achievement is front-loaded. In other words, his best opportunity for achieving his goals comes at the time when he is least prepared. To paraphrase Leon Wieseltier:

... the learning curve of an American president is the insult that history adds to their injury.

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When Today's Headlines Were Yesterday's Jokes

There was an old joke about how a socialist [or centrally planned] economy worked:

What would have happened had the first socialist country been established in the Sahara desert instead of the Soviet Union? It would have run out of sand.

The joke reflects a basic economic truth about why socialist economies fail. There is a real item in Reuters news recently which reminds us of the truth in that joke.

Venezuela to Import Coffee 1st Time Ever

Caracas, July 22 - Venezuela, a traditional coffee exporter that boasts one of the best cups of java in South America, may have to import coffee for the first time ever this year or face shortages, industry experts said.

Producers say rising costs and prices fixed by the government have caused production to fall and illegal exports to rise. The government says poor climate and speculation by growers and roasters is to blame.

I googled whether any government had ever responded to poor economic news by confessing, 'Man we are so over our heads here ... we're actually OK with those disastrous figures.' Nyet. And so it goes with Latin America's Petro-dictatorship.

Hey, did you hear the one about the supposed savings in government-run health care?

Soviet jokes compiled by David Frum are copied in full at end of post.

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Commie Jokes, Another Round - David Frum - 06/27/08

Ben Zycher of the Manhattan Institute sends this:

Stalin decided to honor the great Russian poet Aleksandr Pushkin by erecting a monument to Pushkin in his home town. What was the monument? It was a huge bronze statue of Stalin reading from a book of Pushkin's poetry.

Peter Bogucki, associate dean at Princeton, sends these from Poland's Solidarity period:

The express train is running from Warsaw to Legnica (site of a big Soviet Airforce Base in the communist years) when it suddenly jumps the tracks and runs off into the woods. After a while going through the woods, it returns to the tracks and somehow gets back on. The conductor goes up to the engineer and says, "What are you, nuts? Running off into the woods like that." The engineer replies, "There was a Russian general standing on the tracks." The conductor berates him, "Then why didn't you just run the #%$$^%$ over?" to which the engineer replies, "That's just it, he ran into the woods."

and

Edward Gierek, first secretary of the Party from 1970 to 1980, goes down to Silesia to visit the miners and see how they live. He goes up to one block of flats, and goes to the door of one on the ground floor.It's open, so he enters and finds that it's furnished very luxuriously: color TV, refrigerator, plush sofas, and a little boy is sitting on the couch. Gierek says to him, "Son, do you know who I am?" The little boy shakes his head no, looking scared. Gierek spreads his arms and says, "Son, thanks to me, you have all this!" The little boy's face brightens and calls out to his parents in the next room, "Mommy, daddy, Uncle Hans from West Germany is here!"

Finally - and I think this is final - Prof. Jay Bergman who teaches Soviet history at the Central Connecticut State University sends this collection:

1) What do you call a Soviet quartet that goes abroad? A trio.

2) One day in the 1970's the Politburo was discussing a plan to send Soviet cosmonauts to the sun. When someone expressed the concern that if they did so, they'd be burned alive, Brezhnev casually responded: "Don't worry. They'll land at night."

3) Three men in a Soviet labor camp are sitting around the barrel stove one night and the subject of what they are incarcerated for comes up. The first one says: "I am here because I voted for Comrade Petrov in 1934." The second one says: "I am here because I voted against Comrade Petrov in 1934." The third one says: "I am Comrade Petrov."

4) A Frenchman, a Brit, and a Russian are admiring a painting of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. The Frenchman says, "they must be French, they're naked and they're eating fruit." The Englishman says, "clearly they're English. Observe how politely the man is offering the woman the fruit." The Russian notes, "they are Russian of course. They have nothing to wear, nothing to eat, and they think they are in paradise."

5) Two Muscovites, Ivan and Piotr, are waiting in line on a Moscow street in the Gorbachev era, waiting to buy bread. The line is long and it hardly moves. Finally, Piotr says to Ivan in exasperation, "I've had it. I'm going to shoot Gorbachev." Off he goes to shoot Gorbachev. Several hours pass. Ivan is still in line. At last Piotr appears and Ivan asks him if he's shot Gorbachev. Piotr replies: "I couldn't. The line was too long."

6) In Moscow there are two workmen with shovels walking along the edge of a city street, stopping every five yards so that one of them can dig a hole in the dirt. As soon as it is dug, his comrade fills the hole back in. Then they move along another five yards and repeat the exercise. A Soviet citizen observing this scene loses his temper and stomps up to the two workers. "Comrades," he shouts, "what kind of craziness is this? You dig a hole, then the other fellow fills it right up. You're accomplishing nothing at all. We're wasting good money paying you." "No, no", one of the workers replies, "you don't understand. Usually we work with a third lad, Volodya, but he's home drunk today. Volodya plants trees. I dig the hole, he sticks in the tree, and Ivan here fills the hole back in. Just because Voldoya's off drunk, does that mean Ivan and I have to stop working?"

7) Brezhnev and Kosygin are discussing what would happen if the Soviet Union truly adhered to the Helsinki Accords and adopted an open emigration policy. Brezhnev says to Kosygin that "you and I will be the only two citizens left in the Soviet Union." To which Kosygin replies, "Speak for yourself."

8) There was the Russian who bought a car and was told it would be delivered ten years from the purchase date. "Morning or afternoon?" he inquired. "What does it matter?" asked the salesman. "The plumber is coming in the morning."

9) A train stalled on the Trans-Siberian Railway. On board were Tsar Nicholas II, Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Chernenko, Andropov, Gorbachev, and Yeltsin.

Tsar Nicholas stands up and says, "I shall make this train move." He gets off the train, mounts his horse, and rides off to Paris.

Lenin then stands up and says, "I shall make this train move." He leaves the car and returns a few minutes later. "I've instituted a new 8-day work week." The train doesn't move.

Stalin stands up and says, I shall make this train move." He leaves the car and returns a few minutes later." "I've shot the engineer." The train doesn't move.

Khrushchev then stands up and says, "I shall make this train move." He leaves the car and returns a few minutes later. "I've reinstated the engineer posthumously," he says as he sits down. The train still doesn't move.

Brezhnev then stands up and says, "I shall make this train move." He then instructs everyone on the train to act as if it is moving. The train doesn't move.

Chernenko and Andropov then stand up and say, "We shall make this train move." They then get off the train. The train still does not move.

Gorbachev, with a sigh, then stands up and says. "I will make this train move." He stands up, and pulling the window open, yells outside, "This train doesn't move." The train still doesn't move.

Yeltsin, quite put out, stands up and says, I Shall change this train for one that works." He leaves and returns shortly with a new train. As the passengers board it, they notice that it is an old American steam train which is owned by the Germans and has no wheels. Is this train going to move."

10) A group of rabbits appear at the Soviet-Polish frontier in the 1930's, applying for admission to Poland. When asked why they want to leave the Soviet Union they say that the NKVD has given orders to arrest all camels in the Soviet Union. "But you are not camels," the border guards say to them. They reply: "Just try telling that to the NKVD."

11) Asked in 2004 whether Russian democracy under Putin was dead or dying, Gregorii Yavlinskii, the head of the liberal party, Iabloko, repeated an old joke about an ambulance driver taking a man to the morgue. "Why," the man asked. "I'm not dead yet." "well," the driver replied, "we're not there yet."

12) What's the difference between perestroika and chess? In chess you think before you move.

13) There are two ways for resolving the crisis in the Soviet economy. One of them is realistic, the other is fantastic. The realistic way is to call on people from outer space. The fantastic way is to let the Soviet government do it.

14) Stalin was having a meeting in his office with the Central Committee one afternoon. After they all left, he realized that his pipe was missing. He called Beria and told him to question every member of the Committee about his pipe. The next day, Stalin found his pipe and called Beria to tell him to stop the questioning. Upon hearing this, Beria answered, "I am sorry Comrade Stalin but half of the Committee already admitted to taking the pipe, and the other half died during questioning."

15) A conversation in the GULAG. How many years did they give you? Twenty. How about you? Also twenty. What are you in for? Nothing. Liar. For nothing they give you ten.

16) Define a secure Soviet border. One with Soviet soldiers on both sides of it.

17) What would have happened had the first socialist country been established in the Sahara desert instead of the Soviet Union? It would have run out of sand.

18) Why is communism superior to capitalism? Because it heroically overcomes problems that do not exist in any other system.

19) What are the main obstacles obstructing Soviet agriculture? Spring, summer, autumn, and winter.

20) Brezhnev instructs his clever assistant to write him a ten minute speech. "Remember, just ten minutes," he admonishes. After returning, Brezhnev is furious and berates the assistant mercilessly. "You fool, I told you to write me a ten minute speech but it took twenty minutes to deliver. The assistant replies: "But comrade general secretary I gave you two copies.
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