We caught the Gatlinburg fireworks show. Good stuff. After watching it for a little while we went back to our room and realized we had a good view from the porch.

This time we stayed at the Best Western Twin Islands hotel. The river wraps around and weaves through the hotel grounds, so most of the rooms are on the water. We see ducks wandering the grounds all the time. There’s a central courtyard with a pool and kids playground that’s nicely removed from the road. This is our new favorite place to stay. The price was reasonable - $150/night for a riverside suite on a holiday weekend.

I usually like Gatlinburg in the fall when the leaves are changing, the temperatures are just right, and there are apples to be had in Cosby. Now I like it for July 4th, too. There’s the parade at midnight, July 3rd and fireworks on the 4th. We’ll be doing this again.

We’re out of here for the long weekend. All the best to you and yours.

Top: 2007 roadtrip down highway 30. Bottom: From last year’s July 4th trip to Hendersonville, Saluda, and Flat Rock, NC.

The Hondurans are so concerned about potential despots, that Article 239 of their constitution states that any president who proposes extending his term in office is automatically removed from office. Article 313 of the Honduran constitution allows its Supreme Court to deputize the Honduran military to carry out its orders, including removing politicians from office who seek to extend a president’s term.

Ignoring the constitution, President Manuel Zelaya, a man less popular in Honduras than George Bush was when he left office in this country, ordered a “non-binding” referendum be put to the voters on extending his stay in office.

Glenn Garvin wrote in the Miami Herald, “After the Honduran supreme court ruled that only the country’s congress could call such an election, Zelaya ordered the army to help him stage it anyway. … When the head of the armed forces, acting on orders from the supreme court, refused, Zelaya fired him, then led a mob to break into a military base where the ballots were stored.”

The Honduran Supreme Court, congress, attorney general and members of Zelaya’s cabinet opposed his move as unconstitutional. The supreme court ordered the military to remove Zelaya from office. Honduras has no impeachment process as we know it.

Yet Obama, who felt he couldn’t meddle in the affairs of another country when the Iranian mullahs stole an election, is calling for Zelaya’s return, has broken off military relations with Honduras, and is part of an effort to have Honduras ejected from the Organization of American States.

Better still, compare the description of events in Honduras above with NPR’s coverage:

She explains that in this case a civilian government took power, as opposed to a military government, and plans elections. Nunez adds Zelaya was an unpopular leader anyway. She charges he had violated the constitution by planning a referendum that would have been a first step toward extending his rule. She says he had to be stopped.

American diplomats told NPR that the United States strongly disagrees with that interpretation. So much so, that the ousted president’s wife and son are staying in the ambassador’s residence in Tegucigalpa.

The U.S. says the non-binding referendum would have posed little threat to the constitutional order. And those diplomats say there’s little evidence that Zelaya had violated the constitution.

The Honduran supreme court found that Zelaya’s move violated the constitution. You would scarcely know that from the NPR piece, since it’s stated as a mere claim by one person, rather than as a factual matter of public record. Yet there’s “little evidence” he violated his country’s constitution, according to the U.S. diplomats NPR quoted in the story. NPR is supporting Obama’s narrative by ignoring the facts.

Hat tip to Instapundit for the Macon.com link.

When I asked her what made her think the market would come back when rates were going higher, availability of credit was down, incomes were down, unemployment was up and willingness and availability of people to spend was down, she had no answer.

Even more amazing was that we looked at four places in a similar price range and almost all of them had a similar strategy…”rent it out for a year and then sell when things get better”…

All these high-end people think they’ll just keep burning through capital and that everything will self-correct in 12-months and then go right back to the idiotic pricing levels that they themselves were crazy enough to pay.

You know who’s trying this strategy with their own homes? Financial geniuses FDIC Chairman Sheila Blair and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. The country is in the very best of hands.

What I’d like to do is just the opposite. Sell my house now and rent until the housing market finds its bottom. The challenge I’ve had is finding a rental big enough for my family. Finding one that wasn’t ungodly expensive would be a bonus, but just finding a four bedroom property to rent in a good school district ain’t easy.

Your argument holds in a monopoly game. But we temporarily got around the basic limit of what can be financed in a monopoly game by adding a second monoply game to the system: we increased the money supply in the bank using money from a second monoply game; we liberalized the building rules so that we could build as much as we wanted to on a property; we issued IOUs to each other to prevent bankruptcies; and among other “Bernanke-like” changes, we added houses and hotel pieces to the original game’s supply.

Our monopoly game went on for two or three more trips past Go, and then there was one gigantic bankruptcy. So your argument holds: in a closed money supply system, there is a basic limit to what can be financed from the bank.

We played this double monopoly game as kids one hot afternoon in San Jose, and we learned some important lessons in economics that apparently the Federal Reserve Bank has yet to learn.

As we added the second game’s money to the original game and liberalized building rules, the first thing we noticed was that the cost of living on the game board went up. (We had inflation.) The cost of living made the final bankruptcy bloodier than ever.

The most interesting thing was that the second bankrutcy— the killer— came quite fast. A couple of trips around the monopoly board, and it was game-over. Unless we wanted to issue more IOUs to each other, the game had reached an end determined by the money supply shortage at the bank. There was not enough money (even with the second game’s supply of money added-in to the money supply) to pay the new rents on the original game board.

Accessing the old memory banks I recalled the Savage 101, a Colt Peacemaker look-alike with a unique single shot cylinder:

and the Stevens single shot target pistol

The first one can be had cheap. The second one can get a little pricey.

Via Mark Peacock’s Facebook wall.

[E]ver since Jimmy Carter spoke about human rights in his 1977 inaugural address and created a new infrastructure to give bureaucratic meaning to his words, the advancement of human rights has been one of the consistent objectives of America’s diplomats and an occasional one of its soldiers.

This tradition has been ruptured by the Obama administration. The new president signaled his intent on the eve of his inauguration, when he told editors of the Washington Post that democracy was less important than “freedom from want and freedom from fear. If people aren’t secure, if people are starving, then elections may or may not address those issues, but they are not a perfect overlay.”

If free health care and government cheese are more important than freedom, you can always move to Cuba. Or get arrested and go to prison where you can get three hots and a cot plus a prison dentist. And no, it doesn’t sound good to me, either.

Following his meeting with the Organization of American states in April, Obama told a press conference: “What we showed here is that we can make progress when we’re willing to break free from some of the stale debates and old ideologies that have dominated and distorted the debate in this hemisphere for far too long.” His secretary of state echoed the thought: “Let’s put ideology aside,” she said. “That is so yesterday.”

This begs the question of exactly which ideologies are passé or whether all are equally so. Communism, which so roiled the twentieth century, is certainly on its deathbed. Democracy, on the other hand, has flourished and spread in recent decades as never before, to the point where more than sixty percent of the world’s governments are chosen in bona fide elections. To lump together these “ideologies” is gratuitously to belittle democracy.

Thus for example, Clinton, on a first state visit to China, told reporters she would not say much about human rights or Tibet because “our pressing on those issues can’t interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis and the security crisis.” Amnesty International declared it was “shocked and extremely disappointed” by her words. Unfazed, Clinton moved on to Russia, where she glibly presented its dictator, Vladimir Putin, with a toy “reset button” even while the string of unsolved murders of independent journalists that has marked his reign continued to lengthen.

The Kissinger era was marked by realpolitik, a term of art that indicates a surrender to bad governments that had to be negotiated with, particularly if they would form alliances of opportunity with the United States and against the Soviet Union. The catchphrase was that a dictator might be an asshole, but he was our asshole, a cynical attitude that led to the U.S. supporting tinpot dictators as long as they promised to be on our side and not Russia’s side.

Realism was paralleled by detente - a policy that the USSR would never, ever go away and would always be with us - a policy that would be proven wrong in the Reagan-Bush era.

The second Bush era was typified by neoconservatism - the idea that the U.S. should be in the business of spreading democracy rather than suppressing it in the name of expedient political alliances. History will determine if it was succesful or not, but it represents an improvement of ideological commitment over supporting and/or negotiating with some banana republic’s Supreme Dictator for Life du jour in the hope his country wouldn’t go Commie. ETA: or worse, propping up some banana republic’s Supreme Dictator for Life du jour because he is a Commie, which is more Obama’s MO.

“It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.”

Any media that has to be turned over is just begging for replacement.

Old fart memory from the 20th century alert!

I remember a Rolling Stone review of some album in the early days of the CD. I want to say it was by Sting. Whoever it was took advantage of the greater space available on a CD to deliver more than the 40 minutes of music that was typical of the LP and cassette era.

That turned out to be a downside for cassette listeners. The extra time meant that the album had to ship as a double cassette. The reviewer noted that the album was best listened to on a CD, because when the longish CD was stretched across four cassette sides you were constantly flipping tapes. With the CD you could push play once and hear the whole thing. What a concept!

While the world wasn’t looking, Honduras’s left-leaning Pres. Manuel “Mel” Zelaya tried to trash every legal institution in his country  In an attempt to open the door for re-election, Zelaya demanded a popular referendum. (Honduran presidents can’t be re-elected, so Mel needs to change the constitution). When every institution from the Electoral Tribunal to the Supreme Court said no, “Mad” Mel stepped on the gas.

On Wednesday, he drove straight for the military, demanding they support his personal poll. The head of the armed forces objected to carrying out the illegal order. Zelaya fired him.

The next day, the Supreme Court ruled the firing unjustified. Zelaya fired back: “We will not obey the Supreme Court. The court which only imparts justice for the powerful, the rich, and the bankers, only causes problems for democracy.”

Andrew McCarthy:

Wouldn’t Want to Meddle in the Internal Affairs of Other Countries . . . except, of course, Israel and now . . . Honduras. A military coup appears to have ousted the Leftist government of Honduras, so the Obama administration has wasted no time joining Hugo Chàvez in condemning it. Further details here.

Right, because Obama sets one impossibly high standard for U.S allies and an unbelievably low standard for governments with an avowed hatred of the U.S. The standard isn’t based on the foreign government’s actual conduct. The standard is based on the government’s relations with the U.S. Perversely, Obama rewards governments that hate us or even threaten us. Needless to say, this is not a rational basis for U.S. foreign policy.

Take any url and put aviary.com/ in front of it. Aviary will take a screengrab and open it in a Web-based editor. From there you can host the image online or save it to your desktop in PNG format. Pretty neat.

Via Mashable, which is my new source for social media news.

From Phrases.org.uk:

Music Makers
People of energetic demeanour, who initiate change and influence events.

Origin
The expression ‘movers and shakers’ is now most often applied to the rich and powerful in politics and business. In a year (2009) in which the movers and shakers of the financial world brought us to the brink of ruin, it is worth a thought as to who the original movers and shakers were.

The public perception of the term began after the first performance of Sir Edward Elgar’s popular choral work The Music Makers, at the Birmingham Festival in October 1912. The work is a setting of Arthur O’Shaughnessy’s 1874 poem ‘Ode’, from his Music and Moonlight collection. In that poem, which singles out poets and musicians as the bards that guide lay thinking, O’Shaughnessy coined the phrase ‘movers and shakers’:

We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.

And here’s the complete Willy Wonka script.

Previously - “Button, button, who’s got the button?”

Previous WOTD - Ames Window

Ayers is fixated with faces, especially eyes. He writes of “sparkling” eyes, “shining” eyes, “laughing” eyes, “twinkling” eyes, eyes “like ice,” and people who are “wide-eyed” and “dark-eyed.”

As it happens, Obama is also fixated with faces, especially eyes. He also writes of “sparkling” eyes, “shining” eyes, “laughing” eyes, “twinkling” eyes, and uses the phrases “wide-eyed” and “dark-eyed.” Obama adds “smoldering eyes,” “smoldering” being a word that he and Ayers inject repeatedly. Obama also uses the highly distinctive phrase “like ice,” in his case to describe the glinting of the stars.

If Ayers is fixated on eyes, about eyebrows he is positively fetishistic. There are six references to “eyebrows” in Fugitive Days — bushy ones, flaring ones, arched ones, black ones and, stunningly, seven references in Dreams — heavy ones, bushy ones, wispy ones. It is the rare memoirist who talks about eyebrows at all.

Hat tip to Six Meat Buffet.

Previously: Did Bill Ayers ghostwrite “Dreams From My Father”?

The magazine conducted another experiment to determine the extent to which larger diamonds appreciate in value over a one-year period. In 1970, it bought a 1.42 carat diamond for £745. In 1971, the highest offer it received for the same gem was £568. Rather than sell it at such an enormous loss, Watts decided to extend the experiment until 1974, when he again made the round of the jewelers in Hatton Garden to have it appraised. During this tour of the diamond district, Watts found that the diamond had mysteriously shrunk in weight to 1.04 carats. One of the jewelers had apparently switched diamonds during the appraisal. In that same year, Watts, undaunted, bought another diamond, this one 1.4 carats, from a reputable London dealer. He paid £2,595. A week later, he decided to sell it. The maximum offer he received was £1,000.

The article details the manipulations of market and sentiment involved in creating the modern market for diamonds.

The mall opened in 1981 when I was in 7th grade. Back then it had two book stores, two record stores, one or two toystores, an arcade or two, and a Walgreen’s drug store, plus the usual department stores and clothing stores.

Except for the department stores and clothing stores all of that is gone. No bookstores, record stores, toy stores, arcades, nothing. Just clothes and worthless crap. With high rents and the competition from the Internet and big box stores I can see how some of those business can’t compete these days. There’s just no reason to go to the mall any more, even for kids, unless you want to buy clothes or you’re going to Sears for Kenmore appliances, Craftsman tools, or Diehard batteries.

Katie is four year old, so she didn’t notice the absense of anything worthwhile. We entertained ourselves with gumball machines, some frogs for sale at a sunglass kiosk, and massage chairs. Even as a ‘tween I can’t imagine her being very entertained as a mall rat in what’s left of the malls these days.

I imagine some malls will have to go through the same decline that many downtown business districts suffered. Once the rents get low enough someone will figure out a way to do something with the malls to bring back businesses and customers.

There’s something icky about the fake news ads showing up on genuine news sites like Salon, Slate and Huffington Post. Are things really so bad that we’ll let scammers use the tropes of journalism to lure consumers into shady deals?

If I don’t like it, I can always quit the business and earn $1,700 a week posting links on Google. I know this because I recently saw this headline on Huffington Post: “How I Make $1700 a Week Posting Links on Google.”

The article is good, but the comments on fake news are even better:

“It turns out there’s a whole fake-media empire” Yeah ABC proved it last night. (run by the white-house)

When did HuffPo, Salon, or Slate become real news sites?

Wait a minute, Wired dot com is complaining about fake news sites? So all eight hundred of those recent “news stories” Wired dot com writes about how the new iPhone is transforming the entire universe and are the most important technological advance of the last two centuries are considered real journalism?? I’ve got to give it to Wired dot com for having enormous nerve to actually complain about web sites that have advertisements that look like news stories, considering that’s just about all you’ll find here.

If you like that last one you might enjoy Joel Johnson’s Awesome Gizmodo Rant.

And you guys just ate it up. Kept buying shitty phones and broken media devices green and dripping with DRM. You broke the site, clogging up the pipe like retarded salmon, to read the latest announcements of the most trivial jerk-off products, completely ignoring the stories about technology actually making a difference to real human beings, because you wanted a new chromed robot turd to put in your pocket to impress your friends and make you forget for just a few minutes, blood coursing as you tremblingly cut through the blister pack, that your life is utterly void of any lasting purpose.