This is Kit, our other, older, somewhat sullen cat in her new hiding place.

I see a LOLcats in her future…

If forced to pick, I’d have to say that Vladimir Nabokov is my favorite writer; he’s someone who rereading after rereading shows me something new and intricately beautiful.

One of my favorite novels of his is ‘Pale Fire’ – a tragic satire on art in the academy, on political power and loss, and on our ability to spin magic life out of words.

TNR just reposted Mary McCarthy’s brilliant review from 1962 online (h/t Mickey Kaus)

Pale Fire is a Jack-in-the-box, a Faberge gem, a clockwork toy, a chess problem, an infernal machine, a trap to catch reviewers, a cat-and-mouse game, a do-it-yourself novel. It consists of a 999-line poem of four cantos in heroic couplets together with an editor’s preface, notes, index, and proof-corrections. When the separate parts are assembled, according to the manufacturer’s directions, and fitted together with the help of clues and cross-references, which must be hunted down as in a paper-chase, a novel on several levels is revealed, and these “levels” are not the customary “levels of meaning” of modernist criticism but planes in a fictive space, rather like those houses of memory in medieval mnemonic science, where words, facts, and numbers were stored till wanted in various rooms and attics, or like the Houses of astrology into which the heavens are divided.

…read the whole thing, and then go buy the book.

I’ve started shooting a fair amount again this year (as karmic balance for my pro-Obama vote, I bought a Kimber 1911 and a Springfield M1A for Kwaanza, as well as a Kahr P9 for TG); and I’m recently stunned by the price of ammo (and shooting enough that it matters).

Bulk (200 – 1,000 rounds) .308 rifle ammunition is over $1.25/round for Federal Match and well over $0.50/round for bulk military surplus (about 2x what I’m used to paying). 45ACP is $0.50 in bulk (over 2x what I’m used to paying).

Now before you get concerned that by buying 500 – 1,000 rounds at a time I’m stocking up for the Zombie wars, note that a morning’s serious practice with the handgun can use 200 rounds, and that a morning with the rifle is 50 rounds easily.

(And as a result of burning all this powder, my shooting is getting back to decent, except for my one bad pistol habit – lifting my head to see where the shot went, which pulls the rounds low.)

But I just was sent a great blog post on why ammo is so spendy and one that ought to get us all thinking about the modern economy.

Supply Chain Management 101: on the ammunition shortage:

…Ammo makers, too, know with fair certainty how much they’re going to sell to the wholesalers during that period, and sign contracts for the purchase of sufficient components to produce those products. They don’t typically keep large stores of components on hand, as standing inventory is expensive, so components are delivered on a “just in time” basis.

The suppliers of those components do the same thing with raw materials; again, ammunition is a stable business, which allows them to forecast with pretty good accuracy the stuff they need to make the components they sell. This pattern repeats itself on up the chain, all the way to the people who mine the stuff necessary to make a single cartridge.

Along comes a huge, sudden spike in demand. Retailers all over the country are suddenly swamped with ammunition purchases, and quickly call their suppliers to get more. The first few calls are rewarded with replacement stock, but soon the wholesaler’s shelves are bare too – their entire year allotment of ammunition is gone in just a few days.

Read the whole thing, as they say…his final paragraph is worth noting as well:

The supply chain is simply empty, all the way up to the people who mine the raw materials. It’s going to take time to replace all the links in that chain, and it’s not because of the war in Iraq/Afghanistan, The Joos, FEMA, the CIA, a secret agreement to implement gun control through ammo availability, or any other silly theory you may have heard. This is a textbook example of what happens when an inelastic supply chain, composed with scarce “just in time” inventories, meets insatiable demand. It’s not sexy or intriguing, but that’s the way it is.

You know what’s scarier? Your food comes to you the same way. Imagine what would happen if…

Or if two of the big container ports were closed for two months…

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So the media are all abuzz over a conversation my Congresswoman, Jane Harman, had regarding AIPAC in 2006.

The events themselves are interesting – not fascinating, but interesting – as an example of the ‘scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’ politics that represents our government today. Only snippets have been released, so we don’t know if they are edited to do maximum damage to Harman (I’d guess likely) or minimize the import of the conversation.

Without getting into the substance of the AIPAC thing, it always seemed small beer, but significant as the tip of a larger set of partially hidden events around the jockeying by Israel and the Arab states for influence over US policy.

What’s most interesting to me about this story is the timing. Why is it being released now?

That’s always the interesting question with things like this. Is it just random timing?

Or is someone trying to pin a strong advocate for Israel into a corner just as Obama gets ready to begin getting deeply engaged in the Israel-Palestine impasse?

…I need to do a post on that, by the way…

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From Tom McMahon’s cool blog ‘4-block world‘:

(h/t American Digest)

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So I’ve been meaning to post about this for a while; it’s a petty thing, but still something that goes to the heart of my irritation (and I think other people’s) with the way government is run today.

Here’s a blurry snapshot I took at LAX last night as we waited for the parking shuttle:

It’s a ‘LAX Flyaway’ bus, a service of the Los Angeles World Airports “…a unique system of four airports owned and operated by the City of Los Angeles.“

And it’s registered in Wyoming.

Now it makes a lot of sense to register a commercial vehicle in Wyoming…which costs a flat $60/yr. In California the CVRA fee (assuming a 48,000 pound GVWR) would be $1,161 plus license and registration.

Commercial vehicles with appropriate permits are allowed to operate in California. So I’ll wager that we get a few dollars extra; but right now a City-sponsored transit agency is skirting state taxes in a way that would doubtless get a private bus line in trouble.

And the problem is that private citizens look at our political leadership playing the corners and we ask why it is that we don’t as well.

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This morning I read this article at Factcheck.org:

There’s no dispute that thousands of handguns, military style rifles and other firearms are purchased in the U.S. and end up in the hands of Mexican criminals each year. It’s relatively easy to buy such guns legally in Texas and other border states and to smuggle them across.

But is it true as President Obama said, that “More than 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States?” No, it’s not.

Then, on my Blackberry, I read this in the LA Times opinion section:

Imagine, for a moment, that a drug war in the United States had claimed 10,000 American lives in a little more than two years, and that about 90% of the 16,000 military-style assault weapons captured from traffickers here were traced to gun dealers in Mexico. What would the reaction of the U.S. government be? And how would we respond if the president of Mexico, having campaigned on a platform to reinstate a ban on assault weapons, acknowledged that it would be too politically difficult to take on the gun enthusiasts?

I meant to blog something about it, but the LA Times bloggers beat me to it (talking about Obama’s assertion):

On his recently concluded first visit to Mexico as president, a week after telling Europeans that his country had been at times arrogant, President Barack Obama blamed his own country for providing 90% of Mexico’s recovered crime guns.

According to a report by the independent FactCheck.org this afternoon, that’s incorrect. By a, uh, long shot.

The president’s assertion, also cited by Mexican President Felipe Calderon during their joint news conference in Mexico City, and the reported inaccuracy seems likely to fuel the eternal American gun-control debate, especially as it relates to the U.S. role in Mexico’s deadly drug world.

Now on one hand, none of the many layers of editors managing LA Times quality knows how to use Google. On the other, someone at the LA Times does, but doesn’t read their own editorial pages.

I see some room for improvement here…

And as a sidenote, it would be really interesting someday to see some ‘nuance’ in the LA Times (or NY Times for that matter) positions on firearms…

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So I was in the neighborhood, and stopped by during the runup to the South Bay Tea Party at Dockweiler Beach. I left about the time the speeches started, but wanted to get a checkup on the attitudes and temperatures of the crowds.

So, for starters, here are three pictures:

It was crazy windy…

And here’s the crowd:

I talked to a decent number of folks, and I’ll post more as I have time to make sense of my notes. I tried to guesstimate the size of crowd, and realized I had no clue. The Dockweiler lot holds 2000 cars, and the north lot was completely full when I left, and the south lot was about half full. Not everyone was at the rally, but it was a horrible day to be at the beach unless you were a master kite-flyer.

So, a few comments about the crowd.

I was given a pamphlet on monetary policy that was printed by the John Birch Society. Who knew they were still around? A smattering of Ron Paul and Fair Tax bumper stickers, and the usual truck decorated with slogans on every body panel.

But the overwhelming impression from the people I spoke with was of normal folks; call it 20% ideolologs and crazies, and 80% whitebread.

There are two interesting questions that will determine the future of the movement – if it has one.

And that is whether those ratios stay the same or change, and which way they change if they do, And whether the movement retains it’s political independence – the initial speakers were incredibly careful to point out that they were reaching out to Republicans, Libertarians, and Democrats; there was an invocation in Spanish (which wasn’t all that well-received). The organizers are clearly trying.

Will they succeed, or will this become a GOP mailing list? I can’t begin to say. I have to say that there were no signs of professional organization; as someone who has done a little bit of organizing, I know better than to try and do something where they did it – directly under the takeoff runway of LAX. Hard to make speeches…

I heard the intros so can’t comment on the content of the speeches.

My own attitudes toward the movement are kind of muddled. On one hand, I don’t have a lot of space for the Ron Paul folks; I’m a libertarian liberal, but a liberal nonetheless.

On the other, there really is a reservoir of populist rage that’s building as the political and financial elites work to saw off the limb they are sitting on in the hopes that it will stay in the air without the rest of the country that has been supporting them.

A long time ago, I wrote this:

ARE THERE ANY LIBERALS IN THE SKYBOXES?

The folks that ran ASUC are now running the country.

And people who are real liberals – people who care about the working class, about public goods – the people who think a coop bicycle shop is a good idea – should be as pissed off as badly as the cnservatives are.

And so I believe there’s a lot of room for this phenomenon to do more than become the Moveon.org of the GOP, and I’ll be as dissapointed if that happens as I was when Moveon became the party shills they are today.

Because we need to empty the Skyboxes out, not fight over who is sitting in them.

And if this is that kind of garden party … count me out.

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So in the post below, I expressed my unhappiness with people who – with no meaningful data – built a narrative critical of the White House. I claimed that they did so because they were more interested in selling a narrative than telling the truth.

I still believe that.

But…I’ve been contacted by someone who I reasonably believe has meaningful data, and who set out for me information that places the White House in a pretty bad position on this. I’ll leave it to others who can disclose sources to make more of a public issue of this – but I know enough now to question my own assertions.

It’s complicated, but I want to suggest that I was both right (that critics didn’t have enough information to make the partisan claims they were making) and wrong (in saying that the White House had performed well).

Sigh. Reality is a cruel bitch sometimes.

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