We can breathe easier now.  That chilly wind we mistook for political persecution turns out to be a big misunderstanding.  In today’s lead editorial, the New York Times assures us that

The Internal Revenue Service, according to an inspector general’s report, was not reacting to political pressure or ideology when it singled out conservative groups for special scrutiny in evaluating requests for tax exemptions. It acted inappropriately because employees couldn’t understand inadequate guidelines.

Thank goodness for inspector generals.  And I’m glad this is now all cleared up.  But for those of you that might still have some reservations about this matter, maybe a look at some excerpts from the inspector general’s interview with the two agents  – oops, now four agents (and a deputy director, several other high-ranking IRS officers and, various members of Congress and, for all we know, Butch Cassidy and the Hole-In-The-Wall Gang) involved in this tempest in a teapot :

IG:  What exactly did you find confusing in your guidelines?   Can you be specific?

Agent 1:  Well, sure.  Our supervisor told us that the head honchos wanted us to identify, investigate and deny tax-exempt status for Tea Parties involved in political fundraising.

IG:  Well, we have a copy of the guidelines she read to you, and it actually says “”the parties involved,” not “Tea Parties.”

Agent 2:  Whoops.

IG:  Then there was a second briefing, in which she clarified specifically that you were not to focus on conservative organizations.  Yet you added new names, almost all of which were conservative politically.  How did that happen?

Agent 1:  She did?

IG:  Yes — the new guidelines gave you said — let me read the exact language — “it is essential that in any such investigation, the highest priority shall be to stick to the right thing.”

Agent 1:  Oops.

Agent 2:  We thought she said “the right wing.”

IG:  Okay.  But then there was yet a third redefinition of the guidelines that — frankly — I don’t think left any room for ambiguity here, where she specifically said:  ”Let me make this clear.  A single-minded focus on conservative social welfare organizations is intolerable and you have to include more liberal applicants even if you endorse their objectives.”

Agent 1:  Well, I thought she said “We need to hound these cracker enemies of the administration, their children, their neighbors and their pets until they scream for mercy and sign a pledge to vote Democratic for the rest of their lives.”

Agent 2:  That’s what I heard.

IG:  Gentlemen, I am having a very big problem here.

Agent 1:  Actually, sir that’s a small problem.

IG:  It is?

Agent 2:  Yes sir.  A big problem would be that your father has been deducting $13,000 a year from his gross income for a “home office” when he’s been retired for the last seven years, and lives off his pension and Social Security.

Agent 1:  And an even bigger one is your sister’s failure to declare $120,000 a year in rental income from her villa in Acapulco.

IG:  I’m sure it’s just a case of their confusion about tax laws….

Agent 1:  Yes sir.

Agent 2:  You see how easily this can happen.

IG:  Well, gentlemen, I think this concludes my investigation.  I see this as a simple case of ‘inadequate guidelines’.

Agent 1:  I’m glad you see it that way, sir.

IG:  Let’s hope the New York Times doesn’t get hold of this story.  There’ll be hell to pay.

“This employee, who hit rock bottom some time ago, is now proceeding to auger in,” read an oft-quoted performance review from a bewildered supervisor.  It’s also a pretty good description of the ”new” Village Voice, whose zombie inexplicably continues to stagger and stumble across the media landscape.

The latest blow — and, with any luck, a fatal one – came a few days ago.  According to Keith Kelly, media analyst for the New York Post:

Turmoil has gripped the Village Voice once again after its top two editors walked off the job.

Editor-in-Chief William Bourne, who took the helm in November, quit yesterday along with Deputy Editor Jessica Lustig rather than make more staff cuts demanded by the new owners.

As Kelly points out, this is just the latest in a series of top-of-the-masthead missteps for the Voice.  The previous editor, Tony Ortega, was pushed out after lurching into an endless series of rambling screeds against Scientology, apparently as a penance for his tawdry editorial attempts to justify the Voice’s ownership of the nation’s largest online ad vehicle for child prostitution.

Unlike the most recently-departed editor-in-chief, however, Ortega came to the Voice carrying considerable baggage already.  Kelly notes:

[Ortega] caught the eye of the previous owners with a highly charged piece that claimed hedge-fund millionaire Bruce McMahan had seduced and married his long-lost biological daughter in a secret ceremony at Westminster Abbey.

More recently, questions about the veracity of that story have surfaced, including the fact that only the royals and members of the immediate parish around Westminster Abbey can be married there.

The Westminster Abbey silliness was in fact the least of this story’s missteps, which included misidentified photographs, forged documents and an interview with McMahan’s ex-wife which she denied under oath ever took place.   Ortega’s subsequent efforts at the Voice included a feud with Cablevision’s James Dolan which generated considerable sympathy and support for Dolan, a development hitherto thought highly unlikely, if not completely impossible, in New York City.  Ortega’s tenure saw the departure of almost all the remaining notable bylines at the Voice, including Pultizer Prize winner Jules Fieffer, long considered the dean of the nation’s political cartoonists.   While most of these names resigned, Fieffer was ignominiously and abruptly fired by Ortega as a “cost-saving measure.”  Fieffer’s salary at the time was $75,000 per year.

Now the two top editors have resigned, this time in protest of further cost-saving personnel cuts.  A new interim editor has been appointed, while management conducts a search for a permanent replacement.  Permanent, here, is loosely defined, and begs the question of who will succumb first — the latest editor, or, finally and mercifully, the Voice itself?  Many of those who choose to remember the Voice as it once was — a leading light in American alt journalism — wait to echo Hamlet’s last words to his father’s ghost:  ”Rest, perturbed spirit.”

Back in January, the Miami New Times Ran a series of sensational articles alleging that Alex Rodriguez had frequented a local clinic and purchased performance-enhancing drugs there.  But these articles were long on speculation and short on evidence.  In fact, the only real evidence offered were photos of an alleged “journal” kept by the clinic’s proprietor, who had vanished.

We were skeptical.  We have seen the New Times run this kind of scam before, most notably with their series of articles alleging that Bruce McMahan, a prominent hedge fund manager, had married his own daughter.  The McMahan articles, however, were pure fantasy, and the Rodriguez stories at least start out with some measure of credibility, as A-Rod has admitted to PED use in the past.

Still, more than two months have passed, and the New Times has yet to produce the alleged “journals.”  Both Major League Baseball and the FBI have indicated a strong interest, to say the least, in viewing them, as both are actively investigating the story, but The New Times steradfastly refuses to give them access.  Their reasons for withholding them are curious, to say the least.  According to a recent editorial in  the New Times itself:

Sorry, MLB Commissioner Bud Selig. We won’t hand over records that detail the inner workings of Biogenesis, the controversial Coral Gables anti-aging clinic that allegedly supplied prohibited drugs to six professional baseball players, including Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez.

The reasons are manifold. History plays a role in our decision. So do journalistic ethics and the fact that we have already posted dozens of records on our website. Finally, there is a hitherto-unreported Florida Department of Health criminal probe into clinic director Anthony Bosch.

When the New Times starts citing “journalistic ethics,” reach for your raincoat, because you are about to get drenched in phlegm.  This isn’t a case of protecting a source; they have already identified the author of the journals — the aforementioned owner — and no one cares who stole them and gave them to the New Times.

And “history?”  Here they refer to their unhappiness with Jeffery Luria, owner of the Dolphins, and Bud Selig’s role in assisting Luria to obtain tax dollars for a new stadium.  If you catch a whiff of the barnyard in this, you’re not alone — normally you’d have to witness a Rosanne Barr bungee jump to beat a stretch like this.

The facts:  the New Times publishes snapshots of  pages from a journal.  It then refuses to allow anyone at all to inspect the journals.  Take our word for it, they say.

Forgive us for suspecting that you’ve been taken in like rubes at a roundup, New Times.  And, as we have noted, this isn’t your first rodeo.  Put up or shut up.  Sooner or later, it will all come out.  If you have any curiosity about how this will end, you might try googling “Tony Ortega.”

A former restaurant critic turned social analyst named Frank Bruni has taken on hunting in today’s New York Times.  Mr. Bruni doesn’t think much of it, or of hunters, or of guns.  Mr. Bruni went to a “bird preserve,” where they raise game fowl as though  they were chickens, and then release them by the hundreds for well-heeled customers.  Mr. Bruni notes that, although is is a “lousy shot,” he bagged a partridge.  ”I killed,” he writes.

Mr. Bruni describes his foray into the wild thus:

…many of the birds weren’t so quick to use their wings.  We would be within inches of one of them before it fluttered skyward, and it would be maybe 20 feet away when one of us took our shot.

Mr. Bruni, you did not go hunting.  You may as well slip on some ice on the sidewalk and say you went skiing.  So-called “preserves” are regarded by most hunters as little more than outdoor slaughterhouses.  How would you react if someone told you they were conversant with haut cuisine because they once ate at a restaurant that “had tablecloths and everything?”

Mr. Bruni also has little use for fine firearms.

I had never used a firearm before, not even on a shooting range, and understood the allure instantly. My 12-gauge semi was black, sleek, elegant and Italian-made, as much an accessory as an instrument of death. The Vinci, it’s named, as in Leonardo da, the “Renaissance inventor, artist and thinker who shattered the technological boundaries of his world,” according to the Web site of the manufacturer, Benelli. This is how thoroughly a weapon can be romanticized and fetishized, as if it were a Rolex.  As if it were a shoe.

Perhaps Mr. Bruni is under the impression that hunters nuzzle their weapons lovingly in secret and apart,  stroking them and cooing in tender tones.  Or perhaps Mr. Bruni just really likes shoes.  In any event, he finds the concept of a beautifully-crafted firearm a form of perversion, ludicrous as a diamond choker on a gekko.

Yet Mr. Bruni, prior to his elevation from hashhouse commentary to the editorial page, was chiefly noted for his paeans to concoctions of eggs and air called souffles, prose poems about the mystical complexities of  spoiled fruit juices and detailed descriptions of food emporia charging upwards of $100 or $200 per head without even throwing in the booze.  Perhaps some people found this silly, disproportionate and more than a little redolent of Marie Antoinette.  If they did, Mr. Bruni regarded them as Philistines, and quite rightly so.   There is a place in this world for fine food and drink, and it would be a poorer life without them.

But hunting?  Well, Mr. Bruni’s real objection is its place in the current national debate about guns:

Hunting is always coming up when the country is debating new restrictions on firearms, as we are now. Opponents of such basic gun-control measures as universal background checks and an assault-weapons ban talk of slippery slopes and raise the specter of parents’ being unable to lend shotguns to their children for a wholesome duck or deer hunt. They assert the importance to hunters of certain semiautomatics that might be prohibited.  And it’s hooey.

This is classic misdirection.  Mr. Bruni narrow s the gun control discussion to the hunting aspect, and since hunting is in no danger from background checks and national registries, why then, obviously we should have background checks and national registries.  This is what happens when you take food critics and give them guns.

Mr. Bruni further notes that

the popularity of hunting has generally declined over the last four decades. According to a survey by the Fish and Wildlife Service, only 13.7 million Americans 16 or older hunted in 2011, the most recent year for which figures are available. That’s in a country of more than 313 million people.

Thirteen million people seem like a lot to me — it’s more than the population of Florida, Illinois, or Pennsylvania, and a lot more than the populations of Greece, Sweden or Switzerland, but I don’t hear Mr. Bruni saying that we should throw Pennsylvania’s delegates out of the Congress or refuse to recognize Swiss passports.

Mr. Bruni concludes:

It was impossible for me not to be nervous around guns, even with Seamus [his host at the  “preserve”] patiently teaching me and repeatedly urging vigilance.  He’s 38 and has hunted on and off since his teens. I asked him if more stringent gun control would cramp his and other hunters’ style.

“A totally bogus argument,” he said without hesitation or elaboration,

There you have it.  Seamus says so, and I guess that’s that.   Mr. Bruni has given us the equivalent of a rube walking into a museum and cackling at the Picassos, not even dimly aware of the dunce’s hat he has just donned – a not uncommon fault of op-ed folks at the Times, to be sure, but irritating still.

And as for “bogus arguments,”  Mr. Bruni’s stands almost without peer.   It’s not about hunting, Mr. Bruni.  It’s about being hunted.

Political corruption in New York state and New York City are nothing new, but it seems to be undergoing a phase shift.   Lately, we barely get wind of one mare’s nest of venality before a new outrage splashes across the front pages.  Two days ago brought us a Democratic senator and his NY city council henchman bribing folks far and near to get the senator on the — huh? — Republican ticket for mayor of NYC, and right on the heels of this story, another state senator is accused of accepting $22,000 in bribes to allow someone to open a daycare center in his district, while preventing anyone else from opening another center for three more years.

These scandals are hardly noteworthy, given the kubuki theater that is New York politics, where senators and councilmen and other public servants file in and out of the courts and prisons with admirable regularity, yet the sudden increase in frequency seems to demand an answer to the question of the hour:  when do even New York voters finally say they’ve had enough?  When do we start to think that these are not isolated incidents in a largely honest and reliable government?  At what point do we begin to suspect that the few cockroaches we catch are but a tiny fraction of the thousands hiding behind the wall?

First of all, voters would probably be more upset if they had some notion of what state senators and city council people do.  Whatever it is, it is not obvious.  Presumably the senators, who are “part-time”, are responsible for passing legislation relating to taxation, budgets and other weighty matters, but little of this filters out to the electorate, perhaps because political reporters are too busy covering trials and investigations to pay much attention to mundane matters like these, or perhaps because a series of strong governors have had their own way for so long where actual governing is concerned that the legislators would start in surprise if actually consulted by the executive branch.  In any event, it seems clear they are far too deeply engaged in looting the public purse to pay much attention to actual public business.   Ditto the city council, whose roster of mountebanks and charlatans is unrivaled domestically or internationally, save possibly Italy, which has been at it far longer, or Chicago, where all the dead are registered Democrats.

Or maybe we know what we’re doing, we voters.  God help us if those who hold public office actually tried to govern us, we think.  We see what mischief they get up to already; maybe we silently beg them to go about their petty thievery and back-alley hustling, squabbling over pitifully small bags of boodle (compared to the really big-time swindles their private-sector paymasters operate). “Never mind us,” we implore them, lest we wind up with even more law than we already have, which, to many minds, is already far too abundant.

It should gall us that those who hold the public trust and profess responsibility should be so very dishonest and without conscience.  We may be inured to this behavior from commercial chieftains, who make no pretense to community responsibility, but shouldn’t we expect better from those who have promised us to be trustworthy stewards of the state?   Think carefully.  Look what happens when incorruptible politicians gain power.  All manner of nanny-state mayhem begins to break out, and no soda is safe.

We have ample lessons from recent history and antiquity of the results of reform.  Suddenly newly-formed legislatures fill with earnest people demanding a bewildering array of civic revisions, throwing things into a turmoil that will not settle until the zealotry and energy of the right-minded are finally and inevitably dulled by the lust for power that dooms all revolutions to failure, and corruption creeps back into the res publica both in fiscal and despotic deformities.

Frankly, the only thing more odious than what we already have in New York is what we could get if we’re not careful.  The progress of organized crime in New York City might serve as a good example.  Each time the police managed to cripple whatever group controlled the underworld economy — starting with the Italian mafia — they left a vacuum which quickly filled with an even more savage and brutal bunch of thugs, finally arriving at today’s mix, whose enthusiasm for murder and flair for colorful vengeance beggars anything contemplated by those comparatively meek and civilized Dons.  If we clear all the current crop of scoundrels out of the cloakrooms of the Senate and the City Council, we might well find a new scourge of civil servants that make their predecessors look like guardian angels — or worse still, we might really get a group of guardian angels, whose unflinching self-righteousness and devotion to improving the populace threatens us with an even more invasive and dismaying thuggery, albeit of a different tenor.

Isn’t there a compromise?  Can’t we expect, at the very least, to have a reasonable number of honest, hard-working people in our city and state government?  In fact, we may already have this, in a strange way, in that there may be  many folks on the take who also devote a fair amount of their time to the public welfare, in the time-honored tradition of Tammany Hall, Huey Long, Jim Curley and many other noted American institutions, who knew that a healthy host was in the best interests of the parasitical classes. Charlie Rangel, who gamed the system as well as anyone, probably did as much for his constituents as he could, given the world he lived in, and is still held in high enough regard to keep his seat in Washington.

Besides, even when the reformers think they’ve got it right, it all seems to end in tears.  Eliot Spitzer, crusading state attorney general, is elected governor, but Sir Galahad is revealed as “Client Number Six” of a $5000-a-night hooker.  Anthony Wiener, fire-breathing champion of the oppressed, turns out to be less obsessed with the plight of the underdog than sexting photos of his own underwear.  ”Put not thy trust in princes,” counseled Machiavelli.  Wise words then; wiser still now.

Here at the Cannibal we’re worried about wimps today.   Up until now, we had been dimly aware of them, but did not view them as particularly troublesome, even though there are an awful lot of them everywhere.  Mostly, they seemed to be pretty innocuous, preferring to go their way with as little interaction with anything as as they could manage, remaining invisible and virtually undetectable except for those few who might actively be looking for them.

At this point we should probably explain that we are not talking about spineless milquetoasts who always wear galoshes when it’s wet out.  We are talking about WIMPS, which is an acronym for Weakly-Interacting Massive Particles, and perhaps now you can better understand our concern.  Whatever a “massive particle” is — and we’re still not too sure (nor, for that matter, is anyone else) — it doesn’t sound like anything we want to get mixed up in.  But we can’t avoid it, because there are a near-infinite number of them.  We can’t see them, we can’t feel them, and we can only deduce their existence from certain anomalies in the gravitational field of the universe.

Why worry, then?

Because, up until relatively recently, we didn’t know they were there at all.  WIMPS are suspected of comprising so-called “dark matter.”  This is important because, according to Wikipedia, “based on the standard model of cosmology, the total mass–energy of the universe contains 4.9% ordinary matter, 26.8% dark matter and 68.3% dark energy. Thus, dark matter is estimated to constitute 84.5% of the total matter in the universe.“

Get that?  These scientists we hear from every day,  pontificating on everything from calories to carbon dioxide with such suave certainty, had no farging clue until a comparatively short time ago what 84.5% on the stuff in the universe was up to, or where it was, or even that it existed at all.  Does this concern you?  Because it bothers the hell out of me.  I mean, 84.5 %?

Now I’m told that quadrillions of so-called”massive” particles are sleeting through me at near light speed every second, but I shouldn’t worry about it because they are “weakly-interacting.”  Why should I believe them?  How big is a “massive” particle?  The size of a house?  A BB?  How do they know?

Which brings us to our point.  Science is a work in progress, which we all too frequently forget.  Just as we think we’ve figured it all out, along comes something to upset the applecart, and previously-cherished notions about how everything works end up in history’s ashcan.   Now it seems quaint that learned experts actually believed that planets occasionally but predictably moved backwards in their orbits.  That fire was made of tiny particles called “phlogistons.”  That “atoms” were indivisible.  That stress caused ulcers.

Today, much of what he hear about science seems to have the word “climate” attached to it.   And lately, previously-cherished notions about what is or isn’t happening to the climate have come under sharper scrutiny.  It seems troublesome that there has been no increase in the global mean temperature for 12 years, which contradicts the iconic “models” so highly prized by those who have no doubts whatever about this topic.  One scientist with a hard-to-beat resume, Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, pretty much summed up the main problem.  Dyson believes that the planet is warming, and believes that human activity probably has something to do with it.  He is not so sure about how much it is warming, or how large a role  human activity has played.

What he is sure of is how useful climatologists  computer models are.  He notes that, having played around with computer models for decades now in the world of quantum physics, it seems very  very unlikely that something as complex and as little-understood as the atmosphere can be modeled on a computer with any better predictability than that offered by a Ouija board.  He his not, therefore, a climate skeptic, but a model skeptic.  And Freeman Dyson, in the world of models, may not be a bad one to emulate.

A money manager I interviewed once drew three concentric circles on a whiteboard.  The first, quite small, he said was “what we know about markets.”  The second, much larger circle represented “what we don’t know about markets.”  I asked him, after a brief silence, what the third circle, by far the largest, represented.  He smiled.  ”That is what we don’t know we don’t know.”

The next time you see some guy in a lab coat on TV gravely explaining with charts and laser pointers how you need to replace all the light bulbs in your house with flickering diodes filled with poisonous vapors in order to “save” the planet, remember:  he not only may not have any idea what he’s talking about, he may also have no idea that he doesn’t have any idea.  Thems is the most dangerous kind.

It snowed in Arizona yesterday, cancelling a round of a PGA Tour event.  I would have paid money to see the faces of the pros when the flakes started coming down.  But not all the flakes were falling from the sky.

Predictably, whenever there is weird weather, you get someone ascribing it to human folly.  This time it was a PGA rules official, Mark Russell, who opined “It’s just climate change, you know — what can you say?”

Well, for one thing, you could say something that didn’t make you look like a thorough moron gibbering about something you know absolutely nothing about.

In 1954, when I was six, I awoke one morning in southern California to find about a foot of snow on the ground.  My friends and I were ecstatic.  Classes were cancelled; we ran around throwing snowballs, building snowmen, sliding and jumping.  We had never seen snow.  Among the adults no one could remember any snow there before.  They referred to it as a “freak storm.”  We started looking for the freaks.

No scientist from the PGA Tour was there to tell us that this miracle from the sky was a portent of doom, or a proof that we were destroying our planet.  What is the difference between that snowfall and yesterday’s event in Arizona?  None, I suspect, except for the tendency of self-appointed climatologists to claim it as yet another proof that their religion is the word of The One True God.

I turned 65 a few days ago.  It feels fantastic.

I’m in reasonably good health, with no noticeable aches, pains, infirmities or disabling wounds.  I have been to 39 countries and 34 states.  I have eaten some really weird things, seen weirder ones, drunk a 1945 Chateau Lafite, flown on the Concorde, dined on the HMS Victory, sailed on a Swan 651, slept in a jail, lived with a soap opera actress, snubbed Mick Jagger (didn’t recognize him) and driven across the country twice — once in a  in a Jaguar XKE and once in a Corvette Stringray.

I have played Pebble Beach, skied down Ruthie’s run, scuba-dived in Bonaire, and played tennis in Bibury, squash at the Racquet Club, backgammon at the Regency, hold ‘em poker at the Horseshoe, honeymoon bridge in room 220 of the Aruba Caribbean Hotel, billiards at Whites, baccarat in Monte Carlo, Monopoly in Quito and Chinese poker on a junk in the middle of Hong Kong Harbor.

I have never jumped out of an airplane, snowboarded, gone whitewater rafting, bungee-jumped, hang-glided, para-sailed, been to the top of the Empire State Building or gone to Cuba to help harvest sugar cane.  I took a pass on Woodstock, didn’t go on strike in 1968 at Harvard, and never went to a sit-in.  I avoided gurus, ashrams, crystals, macrobiotic diets, macrame, oat bran muffins (remember them?), dieting, “wellness” classes and anything that had the word “spinning” associated with it.

I have worked with some of the smartest and dumbest people in banking and finance.  I have changed careers five times in my life.  I was a stockbroker, a casino executive, a marketing consultant to banks, a specialist in alternative investments and a blogger (I’m still a blogger.  So far, it’s may favorite job).  I have earned a lot of money, very little money and no money at all at various times in my life.

Of course, I have regrets.  Those who say they don’t have either attained a perfection that I can only admire, or are lying.  If you have no regrets, you haven’t tried hard enough.

But the thing that strikes me the most on this day is the difference between what I expected from the world, and what the world actually delivered.  Let me go back to 1957, when I was ten.  I promise to make the trip a brief one.

Telephones had dials, TVs were black and white, and parents were pretty sure that rock and roll was the devil’s work.  But things were changing very, very fast.  The Space Age had begun with Sputnik in 1957.  Cars had suddenly sprouted huge tail fins and rakish designs foretelling an ultramodern era of automated convenience and plenty.  The biggest danger to the world was communism.  And the US was the most prosperous, most powerful and most technologically advanced nation in the world by a very wide margin.

But if you had asked us then to predict what would be the most important changes in the world fifty-five years later, we wouldn’t have come close.  Computers?  Terrorism?  China?  Energy?  Pollution?  We gave these things little if any thought.

What I am suggesting here is that we today are no different.  The issues that will concern us fifty-five years from now are most likely things that we barely notice today.   Oh, yes, we face dire threats.  Haven’t we always?

Net result:  I’m not going to worry about it any more.  At this point, I have already done most of what I had hoped to do.  With any luck, I still have many years ahead of me, and I don’t plan to spend them fussing and fretting about the latest “crisis” as defined by politicians and so-called journalists.  Chances are there won’t be much I can do about it anyway.    Or that they will, like so many “critical” issues and events, mean either something very different from what we think, or very little at all, at least in the long run.  Communism did not enslave the world.  (Yes, in part because it was vigorously opposed by the “free world.”  But what killed the Soviet Union was not our missiles, bombers or propaganda.  It was disgust.)

What’s the most important thing I have learned?  It has to do with that frog that sits complacently in a pot of water as a fire beneath it finally heats the water to a boil, to the unwitting detriment of the frog.  As I grew older, I was sure that the world was getting worse.  Period.  People had become as complacent as the frog, and increasingly more entitled.  Politicians misled us and stole from us with increasing facility and impunity.  The media had become hopelessly shrill and blatantly biased.   Vested interests and powerful lobbies had corrupted the agencies built to supervise them.  Young people were hopelessly self-centered, foolish, eager to follow every pied piper off any available cliff.

Now I think the world is probably either very little better or very little worse than it was when I was ten.  Of course it has changed; it always does, but its basic themes remain largely the same.  What has changed, much more than anything else, is me.

I think that much of what I was told and believed over all these years has been wrong, and now, having no allegiance at this point to any credo or dogma, I am in a state of constant discovery and frequent amazement.  I find this exhilarating, and intend to enjoy, in my “declining” years, the freedom to see my world without the constraint of preconception, of the need to believe, or the kaleidoscopic frenzy of wishful thinking — all of which have hampered me to some extent my whole life thus far.  Time for a change.  Change I can believe in.  This ought to be fun.

Those looking for portents from the sky are having a field day these days.  Last weekend, we had a “killer storm” in the US northeast, which indeed did kill a few people, in spite of the best efforts of various governors to keep us safe.  New Hampshire closed its liquor stores, Massachusetts threatened anyone who drove after 4PM Saturday with a year in prison, and New York’s Andrew Cuomo personally arrested several dozen snowflakes that violated a no-fly zone near his bedroom.  The media went into a predictable screamfest, with various talking heads issuing detailed instructions on storm preparation and survival.

One particular directive was puzzling:  ”turn down the cooling in your refrigerator.”  What does this mean?  Turn “down” as in “reduce the amount of cooling in your refrigerator?”  Or as in “lower the temperature in your refrigerator?”  And, more important — why?  What aspect of a snowstorm requires us to alter the temperature setting of an insulated device?  They do not explain.  Confused, I left my refrigerator alone.  But now I’m afraid to eat anything in it.

Then there is the meteor.  Something about the size of a respectable yacht is about to graze earth, missing us by 17,000 miles.  This event has produced some interesting commentary, but by far the most entertaining spin comes from  CNN’s Deb Feyerick:

“Talk about something else that’s falling from the sky and that is an asteroid. What’s coming our way? Is this an effect of, perhaps, of global warming or is this just some meteoric occasion?”

We have heard many things attributed to global warming; this swept us right off our feet.  Was it some dim recollection that weathermen are called “meteorlogists” that induced this burst of cognitive flatulence, or just ignorance?  If the latter, is it really possible that someone who holds a college degree can imagine that interplanetary orbits are affected by minute temperature changes on a planet hundreds of millions of miles away?

But even Ms. Feyerick might have shied from a conclusion blared in the U.K.’s  Telegraph:

Scientists have dismissed fears an asteroid due to whizz past the Earth on Friday will ‘destroy London’ – but it could take out vital telecommunications satellites.

Actually, it could hit a satellite.  I have a better chance of bringing down a 747 taking off from LaGuardia by flinging a bread roll out my apartment window, but there is some possibility.  We make it somewhere in the neighborhood of about 1.5 x 10(376), a figure we arrived at by comparing the size of the meteor to the size of the roughly 100 satellites it might hit as compared to the volume of space actually involved.  Another more telling analogy might be the probability of hitting pea a mile away by aiming a sniper rifle in its general direction.

Now, with all the shit we have to worry about that is actually happening, has happened, or might probably happen, why is the Telegraph wasting our time with this lurid Chicken Little crap?  Here, there is a connection with Ms. Feyerick.

The word “meteor” acts on most media types like verbal Viagra.  ”Storm” is good,  ’crisis” is better, but for pure, spine-chilling it-came-from-outer-space terror, not much beats a meteor.  It’s even better than ebola, or terrorism.  Shit, a meteor got the dinosaurs!  Okay, this one’s going to miss us, but — maybe it will hit a satellite!  Or maybe it’s a sign from the Heavens warning us to turn down our refrigerators.

One final thought:  Los Angeles is now in a state of panic over one Chris Dorner, a rampaging ex-cop who has killed three people while on a deranged revenge spree against other cops.  So far, the police in the LA area have shot up two vehicles similar to the one last seen driven by the culprit.  One was occupied by two women delivering newspapers; the other by a white guy bearing little resemblance to the killer.  In a world where the media cry wolf at the slightest provocation, we wonder:  has any of the LA press suggested:  ”Hey, if you drive a truck that looks anything like Dorner’s, better you leave it in the driveway for a few days?”  Because that meteor may miss those satellites by a comfortable margin, but those cops — they are shooting to kill.  

It’s a question many people can’t stop asking:  When so many have so little, how can a few have so much?

If they shouldn’t have it — who should?  And there’s the rub.  How would we go about taking from those who have and getting it to those who don’t?  It’s been tried, but with no noteworthy success.  Somehow, once it gets taken from those who have, it seems to get stuck.

In fact, the only good examples we can find of effective wealth redistribution are those that involve conversions of previously socialist economies to systems more oriented towards private wealth and private property.   Only with the arrival of private wealth and a new class of billionaires did China manage to create its explosive growth of a  middle class.  Ditto Russia.  The oligarchs that came with the upward mobility of the peasant classes may be unattractive, and even obscene, but they seem to go hand in glove with widespread and highly substantial economic improvements for the poor.

Of course, this is capitalism, where people confuse material comfort with a purer and more spiritual growth. Try as we might, we cannot seem to persuade people that happiness is more than just a  full belly, or a decent home, or all the other temporal comforts we pursue, and that freedom also entails an acceptance that the greater good must take precedence over individual license.  The President has repeatedly said that If we can save even one life by further limiting weapons ownership, then we clearly have an obligation to favor community safety.  Shouldn’t this also apply to income distribution?  The correlation between poverty and poor health is well-known (if not actually well-understood).  And should we not also look further?  For example, as much as people may enjoy motorcycles, does that justify the thousands they maim, cripple and kill?  Do we tolerate them out of some antiquated and jejune conceit we have about individual choice?

The other problem with redistributing wealth is determining what level of wealth comprises excess.  How much should one person or household have before it is too much? Clearly we should err on the side of generosity; it would be better (I suppose) if one had a little too much than have too little.  Still, what metric should apply?  Mr. Reich, we would suspect, earns well over the median household income for our country, which is about $31,000.  And by the standards of the rest of the industrialized world (we’ll leave out that half of the globe that dwells in a state of uninterrupted poverty, because they don’t really count), even $31,000 — more than twice the median figure for Israel, for example — seems princely.  (If you do look further, you’ll find that the average per capita income globally is just a little more then $7,000.)

Where then to draw the line? Democrats have suggested $250,000 per year as a reasonable cutoff between “enough” income” and maybe “too much,” where income in excess of that figure warrants a kind of punitive taxation.  Republicans argue for $1,000,000.  But to the average global citizen making $7,000 a year, this would seem absurd.  True, costs are higher in the US, but not by a factor of 142.9.

One thing we know:  we could take all the private wealth of the 1% in America, and divide it equally among all the rest of America, and it would do very little to really improve anyone’s life over the longer term.  In fact, if all private wealth in the US were divided equally by each individual, each person would have roughly $180,000.  And even Mr. Reich would most likely not suggest that this distribution, even if it could be effected, would not swiftly redistribute itself once again, until, very shortly thereafter, 25% of people would hold 78% of the total wealth.

It makes wonderful sound bites to wail about the morality of great wealth, until you start thinking about those pesky Chinese, and how the warts of the new oligarchy seem to grow only on the healthy tissue of the equally-new middle class.  Great wealth may be not only indefensible, but indispensable.  How that galls those who believe that the guilty must be punished, even if the innocent suffer the more for it.

“We are taking away a choice that continues to let people waste their own money.”

Thus spake departing energy secretary Steven Chu in his bizarre effort to justify his attempt to prevent Americans from using incandescent lightbulbs.

Doesn’t seem like a very big deal, does it?  Chu’s bewilderment — that people didn’t seem to get immediately why this ban was an obvious and benevolent act of consumer protection — is easier to understand if you have the benefit of Chu’s perspective.  From his point of view, consumers simply aren’t qualified to make certain choices, especially when math is involved.  The new bulbs were more expensive, true.  But they lasted much longer, used less power, and, in the end, were — theoretically, at least — cheaper.

That meant there had to be a law mandating their use.

It was clear as day to Chu.

Never mind that the new bulbs were hideous.  Never mind that they took as long as 5 minutes to achieve full brightness (a problem, as one consumer noted, if they were lighting a closet).   Disregard their environmental risks.  And pay no attention to the deathly, Dracula’s castle hues they bathed us in.  The quality of light is unimportant.  Just ask Rembrandt, Constable, Renoir, John Ford, Louis Tiffany or Sir Christopher Wren.

This is the harsh and Hobbsean world of Steven Chu.  He shall determine what you need, and how you shall get it.  Your choice?  What do you know?  The mullah has spoken, and you must be guided. Submit.

Good riddance, Mr. Chu.  You represent a brand of philistine vulgarity and totalitarian smugness that is all too pervasive in this world, where it may well find support from those equally insensitive to the larger consequences of ignorant coercion.  But please, not here, not any longer.  And take Solyndra with you.

Where there’s smoke…someone might be smoking.  And something doesn’t quite smell right here.

The Miami New Times, a weekly free “alternative” newspaper, reported on Tuesday that Alex Rodriguez had used prohibited substances on a regular basis over the past several years.  Immediately the media, including the New York Times, latched onto the story, which swiftly went viral on the internet.  And not one person, not one publication — no one — seems to entertain the notion that the “dope” on Rodriguez could be a bunch of crap.

This wouldn’t be the first time the New Times has run a story that turned out to be hogwash.  Several years ago, they got caught with something very similar that turned out to be nothing more than a blackmail attempt disguised as a tell-all expose, and there are some eerie parallels here.

Here are the actual facts:

The A-Rod story runs at some length describing the people and activities, clients and histories of Biogenesis, a clinic in Miami that ostensibly provides anti-aging treatment.  In reality, the story very convincingly asserts, it is a front for dealing banned steroid and similar drugs to ordinary people and a range of well-known professional athletes, including Melky Cabrera, Manny Ramirez and other disgraced baseball players caught using banned substances.

But the evidence that actually fingers A-Rod comprises a series of “personal notebooks” and other records that purportedly belonged to Anthony Bosch, Biogenesis’s owner and a shadowy figure from the sports doping underworld.  These records were “found” by Juan Garcia, an” investor” in and salesman for Biogenesis.   According to Tim Elfrink, the MNT reporter who broke the story:

The names are all included in an extraordinary batch of records from Biogenesis, an anti-aging clinic tucked into a two-story office building just a hard line drive’s distance from the UM campus. They were given to New Times by an employee who worked at Biogenesis before it closed last month and its owner abruptly disappeared. The records are clear in describing the firm’s real business: selling performance-enhancing drugs, from human growth hormone (HGH) to testosterone to anabolic steroids.

Elfrink also spoke to several people connected to the operation:

Interviews with six customers and two former employees corroborate the tale told by the patient files, the payment records, and the handwritten notebooks kept by the clinic’s chief, 49-year-old Anthony Bosch.

“Corroborate” what tale?  Most of what is in the article seems plausible, and is likely true.  The article is lengthy and well-researched.  But almost none of it concerns A-Rod.   And without A-Rod it’s just another drug den story, of no interest to anyone.   Other than some notebooks — which even the reporter acknowledges may or may not actually have been written by Bosch — found by a disgruntled investor in the seamy business, who seems to be the primary source for the article, and turned over to Elfrink, the only other connection to Rodriguez is this:

“He [Bosch] was always talking about A-Rod,” says one former employee who asked not to be named. “We never saw any athletes in the office, so we didn’t know if he was just talking bullshit or not. But he would brag about how tight they were.”

Bosch hardly seems like a credible witness, and wouldn’t be the first fast-talker to promote himself by expropriating someone else’s fame.  Further, Elfrink mentions another figure, A-Rod’s cousin, who has a lengthy history of dealing in banned substances:

 On a 2009 client list, near A-Rod’s name, is that of Yuri Sucart, who paid Bosch $500 for a weeklong supply of HGH. Sucart is famous to anyone who has followed baseball’s steroid scandal. Soon after A-Rod’s admission, the slugger admitted that Sucart — his cousin and close friend — was the mule who provided the superstar his drugs.

Was Sucart in fact Bosch’s customer?  Did Sucart enhance his leverage with Bosch with intimations or assertions that he was acting for A-Rod?  Who knows?  This much we do know, according to the the New York Daily News:

Tenants of the building that once housed Biogenesis — located in a beige, non-descript office building near the University of Miami — say they never saw A-Rod.

It all seems a little to neat for us.  Garcia, an angry partner, stiffed by Bosch, goes to — the Miami Herald?  ESPN?  – no , to the Miami New Times — with a boxful of notebooks that “appear” to be Bosch’s, with a dozen or so ledger entries containing references to A-Rod, and says “here’s proof that Alex Rodriguez used banned substances as recently as 2012.”

As we said, it could be true, but the closer we look, the funnier it smells.  Something here just doesn’t make sense — and as a wise old sage once pointed out, if something doesn’t make sense, then there’s something you don’t know.

First, why did this story come out at all?  Who benefits?  Not Garcia, the shortchanged investor.  Is he out for revenge?  On whom?  Bosch vanished well before the story came out two days ago; he only responded to calls yesterday, saying only that he had no comment.  Clearly his business was already in flames.  Was Garcia motivated by a sense of civic duty?  Does that seem even remotely possible?

Second — did Rodriguez really deal with someone like Bosch — already deeply implicated in doping through the Manny Ramirez scandal and other high-profile doping investigations?  People do insanely stupid things, but this seems pretty unlikely.

We do not in any way doubt that Elfrink, the reporter, believes his story is accurate, and that they present a strong case against Rodriguez.  But — as we mentioned — we also know well that this wouldn’t be the first time a New Times publication has been taken in by a lurid story told by someone with an axe to grind.

Back in 2007 , the Miami New Times’ reprinted  two articles  from its sister publication up the road, the Broward New Times, alleging that a prominent hedge fund manager, Bruce McMahan, had married his own daughter in Westminster Abbey.  This article was subsequently thoroughly debunked, as it depended on “evidence” and allegations even flimsier than the A-Rod connection in this story.  As it turned out, the New Times, and ultimately, its parent, the Village Voice, allowed themselves to be used as unwitting dupes in a clumsy extortion plot.

Unlike the A-Rod story, this tissue of snot was not picked up by the mainstream media — with the sole exception of the New York Post, which then ran a follow-up interview with one of McMahan’s daughters, in which she described the New Times story’s source as a delusional sociopath.   Here, however, there’s been a media rush to judgment.  Even the New York Times ran a lengthy recap of the A-Rod article, although it was very careful to repeat ”these allegations, if proven” as a kind of metronomic qualifier to its summary execution.

Here’s our problem:  There is a “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” mentality operating here, fresh on the heels of the Armstrong catastrophe and last summer’s serial exposes about major league baseball.  The public is disposed to believe these stories, however shaky, for obvious reasons, with the grim pleasure of watching the mighty laid low not an insubstantial factor.

Someone who really does have an ax to grind — against A-Rod, against Bosch — could easily take advantage of a gullible publication in search of a blockbuster story.  And who better than the New Times?  Why them?  Well:

A group of senior executives and staff of Village Voice Media, the New Times parent,  only recently purchased the company  from Jim Larkin and Michael Lacey, also notorious owners of Backpage.com, the subject of a national campaign against online teen prostitution.  Larkin and Lacey divested Village Voice Media when advertisers began blacklisting the publications because of their affiliation with Backpage.com.

Village Voice Media is struggling.  Deprived of its cash cow Backpage, it needs a healthy shot in the arm to boost its revenues and keep afloat in a world notoriously hostile to publications of all stripes these days.  We don’t suggest that they published this story in bad faith – far from it.  We do suggest that they may be a little quicker to dive for a rotten fish than most pelicans, that they have done so before, and that what they have published may be a thorough indictment of Biogenesis, Bosch and even Garcia — but when it comes to Rodriguez, they may be way off base.

Investigations are underway.  We’ll see what comes out.  But for right now, when it comes to the New Times and its lamentable tendency to sell its readers a bill of goods, well — caveat emptor.

Kelly Cramer claims infallibility — live and under oath:

See more, if you have the stomach for it.

This came out about five years ago, but we never saw it.  Usually we don’t put much stock in these things, but it’s a thought well worth considering, whatever your political bent:

Called finally to account yourself, you foam about how it is McMahan’s practice to “Destroy. Seek and destroy his litigants.”  Yet when asked if you did not in fact set out to destroy McMahan, you replied:

“That’s not a reporter’s job.  A reporter’s job is to tell stories.”

Even if they’re whoppers?

More highly entertaining weaseling from Kelly Cramer.  Watch her squirm.