Bunker Mulligan "Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry." ~Mark Twain

La Shawn felt it necessary to reinforce that she is “Queen Of My Domain”. Good for you, La Shawn. Ain’t control wonderful? But sometimes scary. She can handle it.

I’ve not had the need for such measures, and wonder how I would handle them. I did have someone call me a moron in the comments. I simply replied, “Thank you for playing.” He never came back.

The last few days I’ve had something even more pernicious–comment spam. Different names, different emails (all fake), but the same message and pointing to the same site. An online pharmacy. I visited them. I hit their “Contact Us” page and left a message.

If you care to continue advertising on my blog, I would be pleased to host you. My fee is only $100 per Comment Advertisement. Please contact me (I gave them my phone number, but not my email address–how times have changed!) for payment, or cease posting advertisements on my site.

I’ll continue to send them the same message each time I get one of theirs. I don’t know how many I should keep before taking any kind of legal action, but that’s the only way to stop them. When I keep the evidence, it won’t show up online unless you see it before I get to it.

I really don’t know what to think of this blog stuff. Strange things happen, and I really don’t understand them. In particular, I’ve been pondering the visits to this site and what they really are.

Fo a long time I received about 100 visits per day. In the last month or two, I’ve been getting about 200. The odd thing is that the number of comments decreased. That seems a bit out of sorts. Especially when I’ve written some very inflammatory things where I expected someone to try and blast me out of the water.

I can’t decide whether people simply ignore me as some kind of idiot who couldn’t possibly believe the things I write, or as a prescient super-thinker who has all the answers (my personal view).

No, I’m not trolling for praise or abuse. I’m simply curious if this is common with other sites this time of year…a lot of people looking, but nobody buying. Several bloggers I know are in a kind of writer’s funk right now. Perhaps it’s the same thing in commenting. Most of us are sick of politics right now, but I cannot even bring myself to opine on the Olympics. Nor on the fact Slice has made his journey (via a Griswald-like European tour) from Afghanistan to Rota.

Any thoughts on this out there?

I posted this some time ago, but thought it worthwhile to show again. A friend and I had a “discussion” at work on the topic of job losses during Bush’s tenure, and I told him about what I had found in doing this research. So, once more.

The Democratic operatives and some Democrats in office continue to claim that the economy today is the worst since Herbert Hoover was president. Today I heard it again, but the way it was worded caught my ear. The pundit said something to the effect that non-governmental jobs in domestic US companies etc., etc., etc. was worse than Hoover. So many caveats. Must be defining things in a very precise way for a reason.

Why they settled on poor old Herbert, I don’t know. I remember an economy in the 1970s that was so bad a new word was created to describe it: stagflation, a combination of stagnation in industry growth and high inflation. I had just returned from overseas and hoped to buy my first house. Unfortunately, mortgage interest rates at the time were in double digits. Car loans could be had, but the interest rate from most banks on consumer loans was around 20%.

I’ve never believed the President had much impact on the economy. Much has to do with the availability of money, and he has some control there. The more money available, the higher inflation goes. But money is needed for growth. Most Presidents stay away from that tangled web.

Where a President can have some impact is in tax policy and regulation. In these areas, he must have a Congress that enacts laws doing what he wants done.

Now, I’m just a simple helicopter mechanic with an engineering degree. I never took a single economics class in my life. I did take bypass exams which gave me credit for knowing as much as needed to pass the class without actually taking it. I took the CLEP subject exams in both micro- and macro-economics. So, I’m a self-educated idiot.

For argument sake, I’ll assume all the political experts are correct when they blame a President for the economy, good or bad. I went to the web site for the Bureau of Labor Statistics. No, I didn’t give you a link. You can find it for yourself if it is the kind of thing that rolls your socks up and down. I also got data from Dow Jones.

The numbers I’ve used are not statistical gymnastics, but raw numbers from the government and DJ. I went looking because I didn’t know, and wanted to know not because I wanted to prove anything one way or another. So don’t tell me I’m full of it if you don’t like the numbers. They aren’t mine, and I’m not going to draw any conclusions for you. I will simply point out what I see. You may see something else.

Because reporters often imply the Dow Jones Industrials index is a measure of economic performance, I built a chart from their data covering the terms of each President from Jimmy Carter to Dubya. I did this because finding employment data on the web site prior to 1972 was difficult, and inconsistent. No other reason, and I made no effort to graph any of it to see what it looked like before making the cut.

Remember when the DOW was below 2000? It wasn’t that long ago. I’ve outlined the terms of each President for your perusal. Notice how the line dips in 2000, and has now begun to climb again. Maybe the Consumer Price Index tells the story better. I think it is a more accurate indicator for the economy. The numbers up the y-axis are raw percentages of the change December to December.

There are negatives in the past, back during the Great Depression–Herbert Hoover’s time. What this shows is that consumer prices continue to climb, although the rate of increase has been declining since 1980–Jimmy Carter’s term. Any point an the line above zero is an increase.

How about employment/unemployment? Unemployment is currently around 5.6% which is being called high right now. The next chart shows raw employment numbers for non-government jobs. This is about 67% of the workforce. It was about 68%, but the hiring of all those TSA employees (remember, government workers can do airport security better than civilians) bumped up the government employment numbers.

The number are in thousands, going from zero to 160 million. It is hard to compare how the rates change on this chart, so I shifted and magnified the employment numbers to closely match the values of the unemployment numbers. Remember, these are raw numbers, not percentages. What I get is this next chart.

I simply divided the employment number by 20. This shifted it down, but also magnified the variation so that it is easier to see. As with all the charts, I’ve put overlay boxes to define Presidential terms. Perhaps this is where the mysterious “3 million lost jobs” comes from. Note that the losses began before Bush took office. Note also, though, that employment continued to rise at the same time, although at a flatter rate.

To get a better idea of what was actually happening, I superimposed the employment numbers adjusting so they began at the same point as unemployment numbers.

So I don’t confuse you (I want you to understand, I’m not trying to blow smoke), I simply moved the actual employment numbers down the axis so that the starting point is the same as the starting point for unemployment (about 4 million). To explain what it shows, the number of people in the US employed in jobs not in government was rising when Carter took office, leveled out, the rose again during Reagan’s terms, leveled out during Bush 41, and began rising prior to Clinton, where it continued to climb. It leveled off again during Clinton’s last year, and has recently begun to climb once again. Unemployment has actually been quite stable over the last 30 years, rising slightly. As these are total numbers and not percentages, It looks to me as though that should be expected. I would be curious to see how the numbers looked before Johnson. I may check that later.

Okay. Some of you smarter than me may be able to take this data and make something of it. I can’t see anything here that convicts Bush of presiding over the worst economy since Herbert Hoover. Hell, he doesn’t even fail as bad as Jimmy Carter!

Life would be pretty dull if we all stood on common ground. And neither would we learn much from one another. One of my regular readers just departed because he felt we didn’t share enough common ground. That disturbs me a bit simply because we had a few good conversations, and I can only imagine that my admitting I have already decided to vote for Bush was the final straw.

I’m not putting any of these electrons to phosphor out there in an attempt to tell anyone how to vote. If you don’t like Bush, don’t vote for him. I can’t understand people hating him, nor do I really see why they would think he was a bad President or that “he lied” unless they only hear one side of everything. For that reason, I don’t simply read sites I agree with. Apparently, not everyone can do that.

There are some out there who feel that anyone with religious beliefs is unfit for public office. Yet those same religious beliefs, if sincere, keep someone from crossing the line into immoral or unethical conduct. I like that.

I also enjoy learning from others’ perspectives. I don’t enjoy debate. Debate is a competition without any desire to learn. It is simply a presentation of opinion in hopes of doing a better job of presenting your ideas than your opponent. Discussion is interaction. Bogey and I do this. We both get frustrated with the other on occasion, but there is no animosity, no winner and loser. I try to share my (too) many years of experience, and he tries to share his youthful perspective.

What I write here is an attempt to view things from a slightly different angle. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. That comes from my background. As a young helicopter mechanic, I had the good luck to be entrusted to an experienced man with a good sense of teaching. Being an aircraft mechanic means following strict procedures as laid out in a tech manual. No deviation allowed. Safety. But there are many things where imagination can solve a problem. Those of you who deal intimately with machinery, whether it be a race car or a tuned mountain bike, understand. The machine actually tells you what is wrong if you are aware enough to hear it. My trainer gave me enough loose leash to make mistakes where possible. Even if he knew what I was doing was wrong, he let me make that mistake. When it was obvious I’d been wrong, he’d simply say, “F**ked up, didn’t ya?” I learned. And I became the best troubleshooter in the unit.

Even so, when I began working with some Special Forces folks, I saw that my “thinking outside the box” didn’t expand the world as much as it could. I learned. We flew in support of SF and SEALS, and did what was necessary to get the job done. After a mission, we would review what we had done right and wrong, and where we have violated some flying regulation. If the reg was wrong, we initiated a change. We didn’t simply keep violating it. But thinking on the fly and reacting agressively to a situation was essential.

Another area where the military mentality is different from that of civilians is blame. This is the thing I had the most trouble dealing with in my transition to civilian life. I would point out a problem, and everyone got defensive. “Is he blaming me?” In the military, if someone is to blame, they are dealt with quickly, and everyone moves on to solve the problem. The first step in solving a problem is to adequately identify it. In my experience, civilians don’t do this very well. They spend more time looking for someone to blame than they do in defining the problem. That is amplified in the political process. Damn. Just fix the problem.

As I grew in my career, I tried to provide the same atmosphere for my subordinates. Some found it difficult to operate that way. I insisted that all decisions be made at the lowest level–don’t bring me a problem unless you just can’t solve it. I did the same at USAFA. On the first day I would have a student walk across the desks with his eyes closed. Invariably, they felt their way tentatively along. My rationale, as I explained to them, was that if you know a boundary exists, you tend to stay away from it. Nobody wants to fall. I didn’t want them to know where the boundaries were in my classroom, but I would tell them when they crossed one. I wanted them to grow, and not confine themselves by something artificial. Of course, someone would then prop his feet up on the desk, and I simply said, “That’s not allowed.” They understood, and we had some really great discussions throughout the year.

Really, that’s what I hope to accomplish here. Open minds and different approaches to a situation without fear of embarrassment. I embarrass myself often enough. I try not to sound like a shill for the Republicans, because I’m not. I sometimes get forced into that corner by my own ineptitude, but that’s not where I am. I also regret people’s desire to present the latest gossip as fact. I don’t like lists of facts or pseudo-facts, but prefer a novel analysis of things. That’s where SDB and Wretchard excel. They take you into a problem from a perspective you may never have considered.

You will probably disagree with me somewhere along the line. I hope so. But don’t expect to debate with me. I don’t debate. I’ll be happy to discuss a different perspective. But if you want debate, I give up. You win.

One of the things I like about the blogosphere is that everyone has a different collection of regular visits and visitors. I don’t have to scour the internet looking for something interesting to read. Any one of my regular visits might have some completely different perspective highlighted at a site I never visit on my own, and I get a chance to read it.

Each of us is unique. We have our own likes and dislikes. Yes, there is something of a herd mentality in the blogosphere, where people read only those sites they agree with. But, even then each blogger is eclectic if only in a small way.

I read La Shawn Barber each day. There’s a young lady who has some perspective. Yet she is taken to task for being a black conservative. Obviously, not all her readers are conservative. Sarah tells us she voted for Gore in 2000, but will vote for Bush this year. She also gets readers from an opposition point of view, some quite vicious. Roger Simon will be at the RNC Convention by invitation, which surprised him a bit. Rob takes me many places, some I have no real interest in being! Each of these writers takes me to different sites, and different opinions, some of which vary from their own.

I felt the need to say all that because I’m about to adjust my links once again. the list is getting unwieldy. But we have set up our Homespun Bloggers blogroll so that it now updates as new posts are added. You’ll find the most prolific posters at the top of the list. Several are in my regular list already. It is a good group. There are a couple with graphics-intensive sites which take a while to load, but the group, as a whole, is pretty diverse, and pretty good. I’m using the word “diverse” as defined in the dictionary. I don’t know the skin color of all the bloggers, as diversity has come to mean. More on that to come. This group isn’t the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy and don’t get their daily talking points from White House memos. I do, but the rest of them are just pikers!

If you don’t read Slattsnews each day, you should.

they think DIY stands for drive-in yoga

I view Aussies as kindred Texans who just happen to live farther south. Each morning I begin my reading with folks like Slatts, Kev, Tim, and others in time zones earlier than mine.

When I went to Officer Training School, I was 30 years old and an E6. That made me one of the oldest Officer Trainees (OT) and one of the most experienced. During the second half of the school, my roomate was another old guy, and we had a young running buddy who became our OT Squadron Commander. My roomie was in charge of our flight, and I was in charge of the “kids” in the class behind ours.

One of the wonderful aspects of OTS is the experience of Peer Evaluations, or “Peer Spears.” These are anonymous, and intended to give the evaluee some idea of his strengths and weaknesses as perceived by others in the flight. I wrote mine by hand, but some wanted desperately to keep their identity hidden and spent nights typing (remember typewriters?) every one.

We were each called to the office individually to be given our review by the officer in charge, our Flight Commander. I sat down and read through all of mine and he asked, “Any surprises in there?” I knew what he meant. “I guess I could be a little less demanding.”

He grinned. “Good point. But I’d rather have someone overbearing than some limp-wristed leader.”

I went back to our classroom to send the next person down, and tried to figure out how to react when I walked in. I opened the door, sent the next victim to visit the captain, then slammed my fist on the table in the center of the room. “I want to know who said I was overbearing!” And I stared at every person, one by one. A few of the younger guys were a bit shaken by my approach. My roommate slowly raised his hand. Our young buddy followed suit. When they did that, I had to smile, and soon everyone in the room had their hand in the air. I apologized, and promised to try and do better in the future.

My boys all felt I was pretty authoritarian when they were young. And a lot of people see me as a right wing nut job. So, I took the Political Compass survey. You will all be pleased to learn I am almost dead center on the Authoritarian/Libertarian (Social) and Left/Right (Economic) axes. On a scale of 1-10, I am at +2.32 (authoritarian) and +1.2 (right).

So there!