Peanut Butter and Jelly

A few years ago (I real­ly have no idea how many, three? four? five maybe?), I aban­doned the prac­tice of eat­ing lunch out. I used to eat out five days a week, but it got to the point that I could no longer afford to do so.

I start­ed “brown­bag­ging” it. A cool­er, sev­er­al cans of caf­feine free Coca-Cola, and two peanut but­ter and jel­ly sand­wich­es. The first jel­ly was what I found in the fridge, Welch’s Grape Jel­ly. Then a few jars of Smuckers.

Over time, when Deb­by and I did any trav­el­ing, I start­ed buy­ing jars of jam at var­i­ous gift shops, winer­ies and oth­er retail stores that we stopped in. As the cans of Coca-Cola decreased with bot­tles of water replac­ing them, I also began to learn what I want­ed in a jam.

I much pre­fer pre­serves to jel­ly; I like to have some pieces of fruit in the jam. I learned that if the sug­ars were over ten grams in a table­spoon, it would be too sweet (today there is only water in the cool­er, no Coca-Cola.…not even in the house!). Also, I avoid any jam that lists corn syrup or any thing like it in the ingre­di­ants. I also pre­fer that the ingre­di­ant list begins with the appro­pri­ate fruit and the few­er ingre­di­ants the better.

Two week­ends ago, Deb­by had a week­end with her daugh­ter in St. Louis. One of the places they went to was the Mis­souri Botan­i­cal Gar­den. While there, Deb­by, being the lov­ing, thought­ful per­son she alway is, bought a jar of jam for me. She checked the label. No corn syrup and 2 grams of sug­ar per serving.

It did not take long for me to check the nutri­tion label when Deb­by gave me the pre­serves. “Two grams of sugar…gee, that might not be sweet enough,” I thought to myself. But I had just recent­ly fin­ished off a jar of jam that had only five grams of sug­ar and it was excel­lent. So I looked for­ward to try­ing my new preserves.

Just a cou­ple of days lat­er, I fin­ished the jar I was using and opened my new pre­serves. I made the sec­ond sand­wich with the new stuff, the first sand­wich with the last of the pre­vi­ous jar. Then I licked the knife.

It tast­ed very sweet.

When I ate the sand­wich­es, I knew imme­di­ate­ly when I bit into the one with the Mis­souri Botan­i­cal Gar­den Black­ber­ry Pre­serves. It was sweet. Very sweet. Too sweet.

There is no way in heck that those pre­serves have only two grams of sug­ar per serv­ing. That jar is so sweet, I can’t even believe that the two is a mis­print for twelve. Twen­ty one maybe. It is not edible.

I will fur­ther com­ment that the pre­serves have a tex­ture more akin to jel­ly than to pre­serves. There is lit­tle if any pieces of fruit. It is hard for me to judge due to the over­whelm­ing sweet­ness, but the black­ber­ry fla­vor that I think I maybe can detect is good.

I won­der if Deb­by can get her mon­ey back?

Happy Independence Day

Bart Gragg points me to an arti­cle about Noreen Evans, an Assem­bly Mem­ber in Cal­i­for­nia. Cal­i­for­nia, as I under­stand it, is in the midst of a seri­ous bud­get cri­sis. Evans is quot­ed in the arti­cle as saying

This mantra out there ‘live with­in our means,’ while it sounds real­ly nice, while it sounds real­ly sim­ple and it sounds real­ly respon­si­ble, it’s meaningless.

My first thought is that Mr. Coupal, of The Howard Jarvis Tax­pay­ers Asso­ci­a­tion, did not give enough con­text for the quote. I found a You Tube video of Evans’ com­ments. She added to the quote above:

Our means are com­plete­ly with­in our control…In good times we rou­tine­ly give away tax­es and in lean times we nev­er replace those tax deduc­tions or close those loop­holes. We con­tin­u­ous­ly bor­row, which is an enor­mous cost that we shift on into future years and we find our­selves now with a deficit, an ongo­ing struc­tur­al deficit that we sim­ply can’t close.

It is not clear who put the video togeth­er, but it is clear it was not done by some­one in agree­ment with Evans. I give cred­it to who­ev­er did it for pro­vid­ing a fuller context.

OK. That appears to be what was said. In my book, giv­en the con­text, Evans is cor­rect (but also wrong). Since the gov­ern­ment con­trols what the means are, to live with­in one’s means is, at best, a slip­pery con­cept. The prob­lem here is that it is still nec­es­sary to live with­in the means, whether it is by increas­ing the means or decreas­ing the living.

My grasp of what is hap­pen­ing in Cal­i­for­nia is slim at best and most­ly ground­ed in Jay Leno jokes (and I have not watched Leno in sev­er­al months). So from here on out I am talk­ing in the con­text of the fed­er­al government.

No one in gov­ern­ment will use the con­trol of the means so that we live with­in our means. 

No one. Not the Democ­rats and not the Repub­li­cans.* I want so much to write:

The Democ­rats vote to maintain/​add pro­grams and raise tax­es while the Repub­li­cans want to cut pro­grams and cut tax­es and some­how this results in lots of pro­grams and low taxes.

But that would not be true. Repub­li­cans say they want to cut pro­grams and cut tax­es, but the empha­sis is cut­ting tax­es and the real­i­ty is cut­ting tax­es. Cut­ting pro­grams just gets lip ser­vice. It is my under­stand­ing that even Rea­gan man­aged to elim­i­nate only one pro­gram in eight years.

Democ­rats can­not raise tax­es suf­fi­cient­ly to pay for all the pro­grams because Repub­li­cans will raise hell and, we the peo­ple vote the Democ­rats out and the Repub­li­cans in and the tax­es get cut but not the pro­grams. Gen­er­al­ly, the Repub­li­cans are hap­py to run with deficits as long as tax­es are low and the deficits are not caused by any new programs.

The Democ­rats run on the issue of need­ed new pro­grams and we the peo­ple agree and vote them in. Pro­grams get added, some tax­es get raised (but not enough and deficits con­tin­ue) and Repub­li­cans run on cut­ting taxes.….

Note that the com­mon­al­i­ty in both sides of the prob­lem is we the peo­ple.

We the peo­ple like our pro­grams. We the peo­ple would of course rather have low­er tax­es than high­er tax­es if giv­en the choice. What’s a con­gress­man and sen­a­tor to do?

Two hun­dred and thir­ty three years ago, fifty six men, rep­re­sent­ing the thir­teen colonies, signed the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence. Their sig­na­tures appear just below the last sentence:

And for the sup­port of this dec­la­ra­tion, with a firm reliance on the pro­tec­tion of Divine Prov­i­dence, we mutu­al­ly pledge to each oth­er our lives, our for­tunes and our sacred honor.

Their lives, for­tunes and sacred hon­or.

Our con­gress­man and sen­a­tors today are not will­ing to put their own reelec­tion on the line, let alone their lives, for­tunes and sacred hon­or. And there you go. We the peo­ple want pro­grams with­out tax­es and our elect­ed offi­cials are not will­ing to dis­il­lu­sion us for fear we will not reelect them.

Three days ago I post­ed A Sea of Red Ink. My hope expressed there is that by run­ning the deficit/​debt up to unprece­dent­ed lev­els, our reps will then have no choice but to show some back­bone, risk reelec­tion, and fix the problem.

In the mean­time, if you com­plain your tax­es are too high, be sure you include in your com­plaint what pro­gram you would also have cut.

My best to Cal­i­for­nia. I hope they fig­ure some­thing out.

*Yes, Ron Paul would prob­a­bly cut every­thing, but one man is not enough (and peo­ple would want him lynched after their favorite pro­gram got cut).

Don’t Take Burning Man So Literally

Via Alt­house, at Law.com, a man who

“did not think it was dan­ger­ous to walk sev­en to 10 feet into the fire’ even with flames on either side of him”

can­not sue the orga­niz­ers of the Burn­ing Man event accord­ing to San Fran­cis­co’s 1st Dis­trict Court of Appeal, even though

Ben­i­nati caught his foot on some­thing, “tripped and fell into the fire twice, bad­ly burn­ing both of his hands.”

It’s nice to know that there is a point at which a per­son is respon­si­ble for their own actions.

Sarah Palin

I guess Mrs. Palin had sym­pa­thy for Michael Jack­son’s fam­i­ly. I come home and it seems like every­thing in my Google Read­er is about Sarah Palin. There is plen­ty of spec­u­la­tion about why she is resigning.

I have seen argu­ments that her resign­ing the gov­er­nor­ship will not hurt her pres­i­den­tial chances in 2012, and I have seen argu­ments that her chances for the pres­i­den­cy are now fin­ished. I would tend to agree with the lat­ter. I do not see some­one win­ning the pres­i­den­cy when oppo­nents can point and say “quit­ter.”

Time will tell.

I have nev­er been a fan of Sarah Palin. But I can see how she did well in Alas­ka. And I can see how she may have been good for Alas­ka. Alas­ka has 571,951.26 square miles and a pop­u­la­tion of 686,293 for a den­si­ty of 1.19 peo­ple per square mile. Plus, the state has large quan­ti­ties of nat­ur­al resources. Res­i­dents do not pay state tax­es, they get a check from the state for their share of the nat­ur­al resource prof­its! (that’s social­ism if any­one cares).

Giv­en those facts, how much state gov­ern­ment do Alaskans need? Very lit­tle. Pal­in’s ide­ol­o­gy is min­i­mal gov­ern­ment. A per­fect fit.

When Palin was picked as McCain’s VP can­di­date, I had two prob­lems with her. I did not agree with her ide­ol­o­gy and she was not pre­pared to deal with the issues of the coun­try at large. Yes, she had her ide­al­o­gy and she had what she knew to do for Alas­ka, but she clear­ly had not giv­en the issues of the coun­try as a whole much thought. I would want the VP to have spent a bit more time think­ing about Iraq, Afgan­istan, Israel, and Iran; health care, reces­sions, bub­bles, and fed pol­i­cy than can be done in a six month cram ses­sion while furi­ous­ly trav­el­ing the coun­try campaigning.

I have no idea of what her plans are. And I wish her well. But if she is plan­ning to run for pres­i­dent in 2012 or 2016, I hope she uses the inter­im time to become famil­iar with the issues that a pres­i­dent may have to deal with so she can dis­cuss them with­out so much reliance on con­ser­v­a­tive boilerplate.

The Star Spangled Banner

Com­plaints about Amer­i­ca’s nation­al anthem are com­mon­place. Some­where along the line, prob­a­bly in high school, I joined the cho­rus. “The nation­al anthem is ter­ri­ble and should be changed.” Then my mind was changed.*

It was in the nine­teen eight­ies, I believe. There was an arti­cle in The New Repub­lic in defense of the nation­al anthem. The prin­ci­ple argu­ment was that the song is unsingable by one per­son. The more peo­ple singing the song, the bet­ter it sounds. This makes it a per­fect stand in for democracy.

I was convinced.

The prob­lem with the nation­al anthem is that “we” do not sing it any­more. Instead of an activ­i­ty to which we can all con­tribute, it has become a spec­ta­tor event. Yes, some­times the per­for­mance by this or that celebri­ty is spec­tac­u­lar. But often it is not so good. Some­times bor­der­ing on, if not out­right, dis­re­spect­ful and insulting.

Yes­ter­day, The New Repub­lic pub­lished a blog entry on The Star Span­gled Ban­ner with links to a cou­ple of arti­cles on why it should not be the nation­al anthem. I guess the author did not search far enough back into the archives to find the arti­cle that changed my mind. Also to be found at the web­site of The New Repub­lic is a video slideshow of good and bad per­for­mances and attempt­ed per­for­mances of The Star Span­gled Ban­ner.

The ninth video in that slideshow is of Steven Tyler singing the anthem at the Indy 500 in 2001. The cap­tion reads:

Unable to remem­ber “the home of the brave,” Tyler replaced it with “the home of the Indi­anapo­lis 500.

But watch­ing the video, I don’t believe for a moment that Tyler for­got the last word of the song. He inten­tion­al­ly sub­sti­tut­ed the lyrics and paused for dra­mat­ic effect.

*What do you know? I guess I’m not so close mind­ed as I thought.

A Sea of Red Ink

As, I hope, most Amer­i­cans are, I am con­cerned about the fed­er­al debt. Already high at the end of the Bush years, the fed­er­al deficit is now even high­er, and the fore­cast for future years is even worse.

Clear­ly this is unsustainable.

I vot­ed for Oba­ma and I sup­port his agen­da. But at some point the deficit/​debt must be addressed. I believe Oba­ma to be an intel­li­gent man and an astute politi­cian. He sure­ly under­stands the poten­tial prob­lems of con­tin­u­ing to pile up debt. I have to believe that he has a plan.

And the plan is this.* Effec­tive­ly deal­ing with the fed­er­al deficit will not be polit­i­cal­ly pop­u­lar. Pro­grams will have to be cut and tax­es raised. It will take a lot of Oba­ma’s polit­i­cal cap­i­tal to do this. So much so, that it would be dif­fi­cult for him to get his oth­er agen­da items through after deal­ing with the deficit.

Of course, get­ting his oth­er agen­da items through might not leave him with enough cap­i­tal to deal with the deficit. So what to do? By leav­ing the deficit for lat­er, it con­tin­ues to grow to obscene amounts. A year (or two?) from now, con­gress will have no choice but to get seri­ous about the deficit. Democ­rats will have to accept some pro­gram cuts and Repub­li­cans will have to accept some tax­es. They will be push­ing each oth­er aside to cut and raise more than the other.

A guy can dream, right?

*No, I have no inside info. This is com­plete­ly spec­u­la­tive on my part.

Where Are the Lawyers?

I present for your con­sid­er­a­tion a warn­ing label that gives the read­er cred­it for pos­sess­ing com­mon sense.

Garage door warning label
Do Not Paint Over This Label

Note at the bot­tom of the label the addi­tion­al warn­ing to not paint over the label. The label fails to warn against paint­ing over the red screws. It is amaz­ing to me that the lawyers missed that.