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I put up a post a couple of weeks ago about the BlogAds survey of blog readers.

Now there’s an updated graphic from BlogAds, based on data from the same survey, providing information about liberal/conservative blog readers’ positions on some questions that weren’t addressed in the initial survey report:

There certainly are some strong patterns here, not that this comes as a shock to anyone. (Of course my caveat about self-selected data samples applies to these results as it did to the initial results.)

(Chicago Boyz is a BlogAds affiliate.)

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I am not quite sure when I discovered Rosemary Sutcliff’s novels; it was sometime in my teens. The public library had several copies of Rider on a White Horse, which I thought immediately was the most perfectly evocative historical fiction ever, knocking such lesser lights like Gone With the Wind effortlessly into the shade. Besides, I was a Unionist and an abolitionist; and I thought Scarlett was a spoiled, self-centered brat and Melanie a spineless simpleton and I usually wanted to throw GWTW across the room so hard that it banged against the opposite wall when Margaret Mitchell began complaining about Northern abolitionists. Anyway, the only book that came close to Rider was Sutcliff’s adult Arthurian novel – Sword at Sunset. This was the book that had me taking my poor younger brother and sister to every significant site of Rome in Britain, the summer that we spent there. Here and now I apologize here for dragging them to the remains of Galava Roman Fort, near Ambleside in the Lake District. In 1976 it was on the map, a clear and distinct quadrangle … but when we went to see it then, there was nothing but some shaped rocks edging a grassed-over stretch of ditch in a field full of cows. A thing of less interest could hardly be imagined … but I wanted to see it, anyway, being haunted by the sense that Sutcliff conveyed in Sword at Sunset and in books like Lantern Bearers – that of men and women who were living at the end of things, among the half-crumbled ruins of a great and dying empire, wistfully seeing all the evidence around that things had been better, greater, grander once, and now they weren’t – and wishing there was something that could be done to call those days back again.

“…we clattered under the gate arch into Narbo Martius, and found the place thrumming like a bee swarm with the crows pouring in to the horse fair. It must have been a fine place once, one could see that even now; the walls of the forum and basilica still stood up proudly above the huddle of reed thatch and timber, with the sunset warm on peeling plaster and old honey-colored stone; and above the heads of the crowds the air was full of the darting of swallows who had their mud nests under the eaves of ever hut and along every ledge and acanthus-carved cranny of the half-ruined colonnades…”

That’s from an early chapter, describing a visit to the horse fair at present-day Narbonne. Another chapter describes the arrival of Artos and his companions at Hadrian’s Wall.

“It must have been a fine sight in its day, the Wall, when the sentries came and went along the rampart walks and bronze-mailed cohorts held the fortress towers and the altars to the Legion’s gods were thick along the crest; and between it and the road and the vallum ditch that followed it like its own shadow … the towns were as dead as the Wall, now, for the menace of the North was too near, the raids too frequent for them to have outlived the protection of the Eagles; and we rode into a ghost town, the roofs long since fallen in and the walks crumbling away, the tall armies of nettles where the merchants had spread their wares and the Auxiliaries had taken their pleasure in off-duty hours, where the married quarters had been, and children and dogs had tumbled in the sunshine under the very feet of the marching cohorts, and the drink shops had spilled beery song into the night, and the smiths and sandalmakers, the horse dealers and the harlots had plied their trades; and all that moved was a blue hare among the fallen gravestones of forgotten men, and above us a hoodie crow perching on the rotting carcass of what had once been one of the great catapults of the Wall, that flew off croaking with a slow flap of indignant wings as we drew near…”

Sutcliff’s revisioning of King Arthur as Artos, the half-British, half-Roman cavalry commander, with his company of fighting horsemen – spelled out to me what it could be like; selling your lives dear to hold back the darkness for just a little longer, a long fight in twilight among crumbling ruins, with men and women who half-remembered the ways and habits of an older age. Sutcliff’s Artos and his comrades – they picked their hill, their Badon Hill and made their stand. They valued those ways and the memories of those institutions handed down, more than they valued their own lives, for living under the yoke of barbarian raiders … meant nothing at all. Better to die on your feet as free men and women, than live in chains … and to make the choice while it is yours to make.

(This post crossposted at my book blog, and at www.ncobrief.com. Later – a link to one of my favorite old posts about Rome – here.)

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The contract over at InTrade is up to 86% for Walker as of this writing. As of the last week or so, the people on the Barrett side seem to have finally given up and are bailing furiously. Here is the chart.

The MSM is in a full court press to try to save Barrett but nothing seems to be working. The first three stories on our local “news” last night all bashed Walker in some form or another. It was ridiculous. They don’t even try to act impartial anymore.

Walker’s enormous war chest is crushing the Dems with wave after wave of mailers and TV ads. On top of this he will probably have $$ left over to spend for his candidates this fall. I have read that the national funding has dried up for the Dems. I think the unions are out of money. I don’t have any real proof of these things besides what I am hearing and seeing.

I don’t know how the state senate recall races will end up. I have a feeling the senate will be lost, but no big deal. Walker’s reforms are already through and are working. In addition, there is no legislative business until next year, and the R’s can perhaps peel back some of the D’s gains in the state senate (if there are any) this November.

There is more good news – super liberal congress critter Tammy Baldwin is behind ANY of the three Republicans currently running in polling for our vacant US Senate seat. That would be a pick up for the R’s as Dem Herb Kohl is (finally) retiring.

I don’t want to start celebrating yet, but the fat lady looks to be arriving at the opera hall pretty soon.

Disclosure – this blog is an InTrade affiliate.

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Here’s the S-1.


Is this company really worth the $100 billion or so implied by the IPO pricing? A few points of comparison: the market capitalization of Duke Energy is $29 billion. Target stores is $36B. Yahoo is $19B while Amazon is $101B and Cisco Systems is $89B. CSX railroad is $22B, Ford is $38B, and General Electric is $194B.


Do you think a $100B valuation for Facebook is realistic? What strategies and future environments could lead to this number being sustainable or even understated?


(I don’t have any direct financial interest in Facebook currently, but may do something with the stock at some point, more likely in the short than in the long direction. This post is for sharing of general information and discussion and does not represent financial advice.)

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The Supreme Court will rule on the constitutionality of Obamacare this year. The arguments and the issue which got the most publicity was the individual mandate. I don’t actually care much about this although it may well violate the Constitution. There are far worse things in the legislation and they should be emphatically rejected by the Supreme Court. The worst of the issues is discussed in detail here. This is a really frightening piece of legislation and I cannot imagine that the Court will let it stand. Of course, given the absence of argument, the Court will have to find this hidden provision itself.

Perhaps nothing in the Obamacare legislation embodies the top-down, command-and-control nature of Progressive healthcare more than the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), a 15-member panel of “experts” to be appointed by the President. There are three particular features of the IPAB that illustrate this fact: The IPAB will control all healthcare spending, public and private. The IPAB has been awarded near-dictatorial power. And the IPAB is designed to be a nearly immutable entity.

How is this accomplished ?

Specifically, Section 10320 (in the Managers’ Amendments portion of the legislation) grants the IPAB, beginning in 2015, the authority to limit all healthcare expenditures, that is, all healthcare expenditures, and not just expenditures by Medicare or government-run programs.

To emphasize this expanded authority, Section 10320 changes the name of the “Independent Medicare Advisory Board” to the “Independent Payment Advisory Board.” It directs the IPAB, at least every two years, to “submit to Congress and the President recommendations to slow the growth in national health expenditures” for private healthcare programs. Furthermore, it designates that these “recommendations” may be implemented by the Secretary of HHS or other Federal agencies “administratively” (that is, without any action by Congress).

Thus the federal government can control, under penalty of criminal prosecution of doctors, private health care spending ! This goes well beyond Medicare and Medicaid. It will prevent, unless stopped, people from spending their own money on health care.

That is not the worst of it. The IPAB cannot be changed or repealed by Congress. This is unprecedented in US law. Even the ill-advised Prohibition Amendment, promoted as another moral obligation by progressives after World War I, could be repealed by another constitutional amendment.

A quick reading of Section 3403 might leave one with the impression that the IPAB is a sort of Mr. Rogers of healthcare – a mild-mannered, friendly, always-helpful, but ultimately undemanding agent for good. This is the impression imparted by the first few paragraphs of the Section, which paint the new entity as an “advisory” board, whose main task is to develop “proposals” and “advisory reports,” which “proposals” and “advisory reports” would solely consist of various “recommendations,” that ought to be “considered” for the purpose of cost reduction.

So, in practice, the cost-cutting “recommendations” which the IPAB will “propose” for “consideration” by the Secretary and by the Congress will be implemented in their entirety, automatically, without revision, and will be backed by the full authority of the Federal government.

And they cannot be altered by subsequent Congresses.

Section 3403 also contains some remarkable language that likely has never been seen before in American legislative history. To wit:

And as astounding as it may sound, the IPAB and all its designated dictatorial functions are designed by law to be in force for perpetuity. Our Congress has passed legislation that purports to bind all future Congresses from altering it in any way.

This has never been seen before in American legislation, let alone legislation passed by irregular procedures.

Read the entire linked article. We can only hope that the USSC has read this section and realizes what it would do. We are looking at the equivalent of the Divine Right of Kings, here.

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The hot energy story of the last few years has been the vast expansion in the available supplies of natural gas, and the very significant economic implications thereof. I though it might be interesting to take a look at the past, present, and future of this commodity.
The first known use of natural gas was by the Chinese, circa 500 BC…they captured gas from places where it was seeping to the surface, transported it in bamboo pipelines, and burned it for a heat source to distill seawater and capture the resulting salt and fresh water. The modern gas era began circa 1800 with the use of gas for lighting–initially of streets and later of homes and other buildings. Since there was no network of gas wells and long-distance pipelines, the gas used for these applications was usually not true natural gas, but rather “town gas,” made by heating coal. (Gas stoves seem to have become popular circa 1880, and apparently had quite an impact….I’ve read that the term “gas-stove wife” was enviously applied to women who were so fortunate as to have one of these appliances and were thereby spared the labor of tending a wood or coal stove, and hence had some leisure time available.)


The transition from coal gas to true natural gas had to wait on the build-out of a long-haul pipeline network, which took place mainly from 1920 to 1960. Although electricity became the glamor “fuel” and displaced gas in many cases for cooking and heating, the generation of electricity itself has in recent years become a major source of gas demand. Natural gas is also important as a feedstock for the production of fertilizer and of various plastics. By the early 2000s, there were serious concerns that the US was running out of natural gas–see for example this 2003 TIME Magazine story. The article cites Alan Greenspan’s concerns that high nat gas prices would make us uncompetitive in many industries, as well as citing direct economic pain inflicted on consumers. The only solution seemed to be large-scale imports of natural gas via LNG (liquified natural gas) ships. (Gas is far more difficult to transport than oil, because it needs to be liquified in order to make the volumes manageable, which in turn requires refrigerating it to very low temperatures.) In late 2005, US natural gas prices hit an inflation-adjusted level of almost $16 per million BTUs.


The price is now about $2.50 per million BTUs. What happened?

What happened was “fracking,” or hydraulic fracturing, which uses the injection of fluids under pressure to crack open rock formations and make accessible gas/oil which would otherwise be unavailable. Although fracking has been used for decades, the technology has been intensively developed in recent years, especially thru the efforts of independent oilman George Mitchell. (It’s interesting that Exxon-Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson was also involved in fracking experiments when he was a young geologist.) This video explains how fracking is enabled by three related technologies: horizontal drilling, microseismic mapping, and slickwater injection.


In his state-of-the-union address, Obama was quick to cite “public research dollars” involved in the development of fracking technologies (although he avoided actually using the term “fracking”)…it would have been nice if he’d had the grace to acknowledge the role played by entrepreneurs such as George Mitchell in this revolution rather than exclusively emphasizing the government role.


The expansion of natural gas supplies has many implications. It will help to hold down and even reduce electricity prices, and help the nation avoid Obama’s promise of electricity prices that would “necessarily skyrocket” as a result of his war on coal and on fossil fuels in general. These lower electricity prices will in turn help to make manufacturing more competitive, as will the availability of natural gas as a low-priced feedstock for chemicals and plastics production. See for example Plastics News:


Newfound supplies of natural gas from shale deposits throughout the (North American) region have altered the dynamics of polyethylene and other plastics that use ethylene as a feedstock. Natural gas can be used to make ethane, which is converted into ethylene and then into PE and other resins. Proved shale gas deposits in the U.S. alone jumped 75 percent between 2008 and 2009. The discoveries have prompted several firms — including Dow Chemical Co. and Shell Oil — to announce plans to build new North American ethylene crackers, with Shell making the almost-unheard-of decision to place its new cracker in western Pennsylvania, near the gas-rich Marcellus Shale. Other companies, including Chevron Phillips Chemical Co. LLC and Formosa Plastics Corp. USA, have announced plans to increase their North American PE output as a result of the shale gas wave. “It’s like the gold rush,” Dow executive Mauro Gregorio said of the shale boom in an interview at NPE2012, held April 1-5 in Orlando. “The discovery of shale gas is one of the most important events in the U.S. in a long time.

(via Carpe Diem, which has more on the gas revolution here.) Also see how unconventional gas fuels America’s manufacturing revival at the GE blog (although I have to note in passing that GE’s excessive hyping of wind/solar over the last several years has been less than helpful for the development of an intelligent national energy policy.) Low gas prices also encourage natural gas use in transportation: there is already considerable use of compressed gas for local vehicles such as delivery trucks and buses, and there are potential applications for LNG with long-haul trucking and even with rail. Indeed, the natural gas revolution has been one of the very few bright spots in the American economy over the last few years, and has the potential to contribute greatly to this country’s economic recovery and growth.


So what could go wrong?


It is possible that decline curves are being calculated incorrectly and that the fields now being developed could hold significantly less potential than believed by their developers and investors and that the economics will turn out to be terrible. It is possible that there will turn out to be genuine environmental problems which are so serious that they justify the shutting down or extreme restriction of advanced fracking technologies.


But I think the technology and the industry are well enough developed that these risks are fairly minimal.  The primary risk is political: that environmental extremists will do to natural gas what they did to nuclear power and will apply irrational fear-mongering to get fracking suppressed or tied up in enough regulatory knots to inhibit the fulfillment of its potential. This danger is certainly much, much higher if Barack Obama is reelected: the President, and the Democratic Party in general, have repeatedly demonstrated extreme hostility to the fossil-fuel industry (see for example this: the administration is killing even more energy jobs than we thought) and extreme obesiance to environmental pressure groups.  It should be obvious that if Obama had succeeded in establishing the degree of energy-industry control of which he dreams, the natural gas revolution never would have taken place. Regardless of how much credit Obama in his campaign speeches tries to take for increases in gas production, you can be very sure that a second Obama administration would involve a much more constrained role for natural gas than would a Romney administration–with very malign consequences for the entire national economy.


Disclosure: I ‘m an investor in many natural-gas-related enterprises. 

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There are many blogging tools to use; over at LITGM we use “Blogger” which is owned by Google (and free) and over at Chicago Boyz and at other sites we use Word Press.  Many of the up and coming sites are now on Tumblr, which looks pretty much like another blogging platform to me.

There was a Louis CK sketch where he talks about how amazing it is to fly on an airplane and connect to the Internet and all the things we take for granted while everyone whines about it.  I felt the same way as I started to look at some of the new technologies available under Blogger.

Blogger just rolled out “dynamic views”.  I am not a blogging technical expert but in laymans’ terms, you get a lot of real estate back that is taken up with static page elements like the blogroll on the side and post categories and comments.  When you hover your cursor over these items, they “pop up” (dynamically) and then you can click on them if you wish else they don’t take up space otherwise.

Another advantage is that they load up your blog when you turn it on (you see the Blogger “gears” running) and then you can view it a bunch of different ways, from a “classic” view to a “magazine” view or “flip card” which is cool if you have a lot of photos because you can see them at a glance and click to get at the post underneath.

Like everything else, they are trying to get the bugs out at Blogger.  When they initially rolled it out, you couldn’t see items like your blogroll / links because those “widgets” didn’t work with dynamic views.  Some super-technical web nerds could make it work but the average person wouldn’t unless they wanted to hack html code.  There are sites and message boards out there with many comments bemoaning the new technology and what is lacking but of course Google has added many of these widgets back so that they now work with dynamic views and at least you can see comments and labels (basically their version of tags or categories).

I turned “the most important site on the internet” Drunk Bear Fans into a dynamic views site and it is pretty cool.  Since there is more page real estate (the tabs on the side only pop out when you hover over them) I was able to make the pictures bigger and I also did some other housecleaning.  This is more of a test bed than LITGM so I will keep working over there until it is ready for “prime time” and then maybe we will kick over LITGM, too.  For now we are looking at the header because you still have to work on that in html to get the great pictures up there that Gerry inserts but I am sure one of the tech guys at Google is working on that in a frenzy and that will be in some upcoming version.

It is simply amazing how far the technology has come on blogging and web development FOR FREE.  Dan was chuckling at how much just the hard drive would have cost back when we were in college 20+ years ago to store the pictures, movies and other elements associated with a site like LITGM, which also is free along with all the development time Google has put into this platform (plus the fact that they bought the company that made the original technology in the first place).

I was in the dot.com “boom” era in the early 2000′s in the middle of all the companies that imploded.  I can tell you first-hand that building a site that a 10 year old could do with dynamic views would have cost millions and millions of dollars, and it would have crawled.  The cloud based infrastructure that these sites use and the power of the tools that they give developers and non-developers alike FOR FREE is amazing.    For a couple of minutes it is worth stepping back and reflecting on that.  Then back to complaining about everything, just like Louis CK says.

Cross posted at LITGM

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Via sportsman extraordinaire Dan from Madison, this fascinating video shows the operations of a British bicycle factory in 1945. If the factory shown is not a composite it may be the Raleigh works in Nottingham. (The video shows Rudge branded bike frames being made. Wikipedia says that the electronics — now music — company EMI bought the Rudge name and produced bikes from 1935 until 1943 when they sold the brand to Raleigh.)

The video was a promotional effort on behalf of British industry. In hindsight it shows British industry on the cusp of postwar decline. But that’s hindsight. The bicycles shown are pre-war designs, variations of which are still used in much of the world. (Many of the bikes shown in the video would have been exported, perhaps mainly to what are now the Commonwealth countries.) Updated versions of these bikes were popular in the USA until the 1970s when they began to be superseded by more modern designs. Since then the Raleigh brand has passed through multiple acquisitions, and Raleigh bicycles are no longer made in Britain (I have no idea when the Rudge brand was last used).

Increased wealth and the automobile eventually killed off most demand for bicycles as routine transportation in developed countries. The video shows crowds of English people in business dress, including at least one woman in heels, cycling about. Nowadays most of them would drive or take buses or trains (even if, as I suspect is the case in the video, they work for a bicycle manufacturer). But in the hard times of 1945 the bicycle would have been the best short-distance travel option for many Britons and Europeans. And in Britain’s post-war socialist austerity the bicycle industry, like every other British industry, needed all the help it could get.
 

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Remember the standard: “If you are going to cover a song, rip it apart a bit and make it your own.”

Coldplay, in tribute to the recently departed MCA of Beastie Boys.

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I’m sure I’m no ascetic; I’m as pleasant as can be;
You’ll always find me ready with a crushing repartee,
I’ve an irritating chuckle, I’ve a celebrated sneer, I’ve an entertaining snigger, I’ve a fascinating leer.
To ev’rybody’s prejudice I know a thing or two;
I can tell a woman’s age in half a minute — and I do. But although I try to make myself as pleasant as I can,
Yet ev’rybody says I’m such a disagreeable man!
And I can’t think why! –

From Gilbert & Sullivan’s Princess Ida

I suppose that one of the most enjoyable things about romping in the halls of historical research is getting to know people, some of whom are famous and others notorious, all of them interesting and they tickle my interest to the point where I would have very much liked to have met some of them personally. Sam Houston is one of them in Texas history that I’d have loved to meet, Jack Hays another, Angelina Eberly a third. I would have loved to have met Queen Elizabeth I of England – three of the four are complicated people, as nearly as I can judge from reading accounts of them. I just would have liked to have had the chance to form my own, independently-arrived at opinion, you see. About the only way that I can indulge this curiosity is to work them up as characters for various books – walk-on parts, usually. Assemble the various views, take a look at some known writing of theirs, consult the grave and sober historians and come up with something that I hope will be revealing, true to the historical facts, and at least a jolly good read … but now and again, in the pages of history, I encounter those that I don’t like very much at all. Some of them are so immediately disagreeable, dislikeable and all-unpleasant that I marvel they lived long enough to make a mark in history at all.

Ah, well – the Muse of History records mercilessly and without particular favor … although she does seem to favor the literate and those with a basic grasp of favorable marketing. She will have her ways with her humble devotees.

The historical character which I developed such an immediate and thoroughgoing dislike for was one John Robert Baylor: he is not the Baylor that Baylor University is named after. That Baylor was his uncle, Robert Emmett Bledsoe Baylor; a dedicated and relatively harmless Baptist minister, judge and politician, as well a co-founder of the university. John Baylor was another and completely unappetizing kettle of fish entirely. He managed – in the middle of the Civil War – to be sacked from his relatively high and responsible position as the Confederate Governor of Arizona Territory, and to have his commission as an officer in the Confederate Army revoked. I read about him first in Alvin Josephy’s The Civil War in the American West, where the action that he proposed in time of war was considered to be so vile and unacceptable to Jefferson Davis and the Confederate high command … that he instantly became a military untouchable. What could have been so horrible, so beyond the limits of what was considered acceptable in fighting for the Confederacy that it cost Baylor so dearly?

To begin to grasp an explanation one need to know a little about Baylor. Like many of his contemporaries in Texas, he had come there as a relatively young man of eighteen years, after the death of his Army surgeon father. In 1840, John Baylor and his brother settled on a farm near LaGrange owned by their uncle. Almost immediately he began participating in the local mounted militia company, defending the settlers against constant, bloody raids by Comanche Indians. The depredations of the Comanche on the Anglo settlers and Mexican alike were horrific – sufficient indeed to engender a considerable amount of hatred for them on the part of those who fought against them. But Baylor’s unvarnished and indiscriminant hatred of Indians seems to have been extreme even among his fellow militiamen and Rangers. Texians frequently depended upon Indian allies such as the Tonkawa, the Cherokee and the Delaware. A fair number of them observed the distinctions between tribes, divisions and even individuals, inclined to walk the path of peace and those who were not. Sam Houston himself was especially a partisan of the Cherokee, John O. Meusebach, leader among the German settlements along the frontier even negotiated a successful peace treaty between his settlers and the Southern, or Penateka Comanche. Robert Neighbors worked tirelessly to ensure the safety and security of such individuals and bands who were willing to follow the Cherokee example to settle down, and John ‘Rip’ Ford recruited fighters among the Tonkawa, Anadarko and Shawnee for an 1858 punitive expedition into the heart of Comancheria.

But John Baylor was of a different ilk – and not just because of a couple of narrow escapes. He arrived too late for the great Plum Creek fight, where companies of Rangers and mounted militiamen ambushed Buffalo Hump and his Penateka band after the sack of Linville. And he was a member of Nicholas Mosby Dawson’s company, come from La Grange in answer to Mathew ‘Old Paint’ Caldwell’s plea for volunteers to beat back the Mexican Army expedition which briefly took San Antonio in 1842. John Baylor somehow became separated from the main body of Dawson’s men, and so was not there when Dawson’s company was overrun and all but exterminated by the retreating Mexican force. Upon that narrow escape, he settled for a while in Oklahoma Territory, at Fort Gibson and took a job as a teacher – but it didn’t last long. He was charged as an accomplice when his brother-in-law murdered a local Indian trader, and hopped it back to Texas. By 1851 he had settled down somewhat to a life of farming and ranching, married and was elected to the legislature. In mid-decade, Baylor was appointed as Indian Agent to those Comanche who had settled on the Clear Fork Reservation. It was not a successful appointment, for he clashed bitterly and constantly with his supervisor, Robert Neighbors, who had long been a champion of Indians and had worked tirelessly to defend them. Baylor also accused several of the Reservation Indians of conniving with their non-settled brethren in carrying out raids. The area around the Reservation on the Clear Fork was rich land and was becoming settled by white men. When they were raided by Comanche, they blamed the Reservation Indians; some accounts have it that the raiders were quite pleased to leave tracks and evidence framing the Reservation Indians. On being relieved as Indian agent, Baylor took up an anti-Indian crusade; he traveled extensively across the settlements of Northern Texas, preaching hatred of Indians … all Indians, regardless of tribe or peaceful intent. He edited an anti-Indian newspaper and recruited vigilantes. He feuded viciously with Robert Neighbors and campaigned for his replacement and Indian Agent.

Late in December, seventeen peaceful Anadarko and Caddo Indians were attacked by white vigilantes as they slept. Although identified by name, the murderers were never tried. By 1859 it was clear that the Clear Fork Indians would be slaughtered if they remained in Texas and Baylor was chiefly responsible for the situation, in continuing to throw rhetorical kerosene on an already blazing bonfire. Those surviving Indians on the Clear Fork Reservation were evacuated to a new reserve in Indian Territory. Robert Neighbors and three companies of Federal troops accompanied them there. On his return, Robert Neighbors went to file his report on the matter at Fort Belknap, and was murdered there by a local man who disagreed with Neighbor’s advocacy of the Indian’s rights.

John Baylor doubtless felt himself vindicated. With secession and the fortunes of the new Confederate States riding high, he shortly found himself as the commander of the Second Texas Rifles, with a mission to secure the overland route to the west. In short order he had captured Mesilla, forced the surrender of Union troops at Fort Fillmore, and established the Confederate Territory of Arizona, with himself as governor. It was one of whose early Confederate victories which gave overwhelming overconfidence to those who had championed secession and the military virtues of the Southern cavalier … but very soon, Baylor ran into trouble. He might have gotten the Union soldiers to surrender easily enough, but his old bête noir – Indians – were another matter. The various Apache tribes were every bit as adept at warfare as the Comanche. At the start of the war, an outbreak of Apache raids had forced the Butterfield Stage line to cease operations. The Apache were in no way inclined to make common cause with the Confederacy against the Union, on the principle of an enemy of an enemy being a friend. The Union Army had all but withdrawn from that part of the southwest. Impulsive, proud and intemperate in deeds and words, Baylor does not seem the kind of man who could deal tactfully and efficiently with a fluid and complicated situation. Proof of that is in what happened when Robert P. Kelley the pro-Confederate editor of the Mesilla Times criticized him repeatedly in in a series of articles. Baylor took violent exception – so violent that it came to physical blows. Kelley was so badly injured in this frank exchange of opinions that he died as a result of them, some days later.

But there is more. Baylor’s command was so harassed by Apache raids and by their inability to do anything effective about them, that he wrote a letter to one of his subordinates, directing him to take certain actions against the Apaches. “I learn that the Indians have been to your post for the purpose of making a treaty,” Baylor wrote. “The Congress of the Confederate States have passed a law declaring extermination of all hostile Indians. You will therefore use all means to persuade the Apaches or any tribe to come in for the purpose of making peace, and when you get them together, kill all the grown Indians and take the children prisoners and sell them to defray the expense of killing the Indians.” There were also reports of Baylor ordering that poisoned foodstuffs be given to Indians – but the contents of this letter became known to Jefferson Davis and his government. They had never ordered any such actions be taken, and as far as is known none of his orders with respect to exterminating Apache Indians were carried out. But the scandal was immense; as a matter of record, Davis had been trying for allies among the Oklahoma Indian tribes. Baylor was sacked from his office as military governor and his officer’s commission revoked. He appealed the decision, but Davis stood his ground.

Baylor did return to Texas, where he was later elected to the Second Confederate Congress. He served the remainder of the war as a private, regaining a commission only at the end of it. He ended his days as a rancher, near Montell, Texas. He ran unsuccessfully for the office of governor in the 1870s … which seems to have been a fortunate decision on the part of the voters. He continued to have a reputation as a man with a violent temper; he is supposed to have killed a man in a feud over livestock and been involved in at least one gunfight. Surprisingly, he lived to the age of 71 and died of natural causes.

(Crossposted at www.ncobrief.com and at my book blog)

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…are just meant to be outside.

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British Bookmakers William Hill and Ladbrokes both have these odds on the US Presidential race:

Barack Obama    1/2
Mitt Romney  13/8

That means people putting real money on the table are saying that as of today the odds are 2 to 1 in favor of Obama, 8 to 13 in favor, i.e. 13 to 8 against Romney.

This is consistent with the steady 60 on Intrade in favor of Obama.

Disregard the polls.

The betting money says Obama wins.

It is an uphill race for Romney.

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Recently I was walking in River North and a restaurant was touting their “local farming” element. Fine but that hay bale seemed to be sprouting some extra fungus. I don’t think Dan would feed it to his animals.

I liked this gull on a lamp.

Dan and I have an ongoing complex analysis going on linking the city of Baltimore and tattoos of the skull variety. Here is a high end rug for the richest drug dealer in that town.

As part of the ongoing series “Cars that Should Not be Left in the Street” I bring you – a Bentley convertible.

Last and least the giant garish statue of the famous girl with her skirt blowing up.

Cross posted at LITGM

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…and its successor, the computer-driven phototypesetting machine.

Because in the Olden Days, when typesetting was done by hand, the typesetter would need a physical piece of type for each occurrence of a specific letter in a particular composition.

If we were still at that level of technology, there would be a serious “I” shortage for print-media reporting of the speeches of a certain individual.

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Arthur Brooks (surely one of the very few people to pursue a career as a professional player of the French horn before becoming a professor of business and government) has a good piece in today’s WSJ.

The opposite of earned success is “learned helplessness,” a term coined by Martin Seligman, the eminent psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. It refers to what happens if rewards and punishments are not tied to merit: People simply give up and stop trying to succeed.

During experiments, Mr. Seligman observed that when people realized they were powerless to influence their circumstances, they would become depressed and had difficulty performing even ordinary tasks. In an interview in the New York Times, Mr. Seligman said: “We found that even when good things occurred that weren’t earned, like nickels coming out of slot machines, it did not increase people’s well-being. It produced helplessness. People gave up and became passive.”

Read the whole thing.

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Some cocktail napkin math and most likely incorrect analysis of yesterday’s recall primary under the fold for anyone who is interested.

The results of yesterday’s recall election held some real surprises for me – not with the results, but with the percentages involved.

There seems to have been very little crossover. Wisconsin is an open primary state so you could choose to vote in either parties primary for either recall (governor and lt. governor). I voted in the R primary for governor and crossed over to vote in the D primary for lt. governor since the R had no opposition. Personally, I think these open primaries are sort of stupid, and the primaries should be paid for by the parties, but those are different subjects for a different day. The main thrust is that there appears to have been little crossover.

There was a fake Republican on the R side going up against Walker. The results:
Walker – 626,538 – 97%
Kohl-Riggs – 19,920 – 3%
It is a certainty that almost all of those 19,920 votes were crossovers.

Here are the results of the Democrat primary, to pick the challenger to Walker:
Barrett – 390,109 – 58%
Falk – 228,940 – 38%
Vinehout – 26,926 – 4%
LaFollette – 19,461 – 3%
Huber – 4,842 – 1%

So we get a rematch of 2010. Can you believe this? After all of that bucket drumming, chanting, marching around the square, crashing in and trashing of the capitol building, and all the rest, we have the same exact match up we had in 2010. The Democrat party effectively kneecapped the left and progressives by putting a figurative bullet to the head of Falk. I have heard from friends that Obama/Emmanuel had something to do with this but don’t have any firm proof.

Falk early on said she would do everything in her power to repeal Walker’s reforms and put things “right” for the government unions. She received early endorsements from EVERY government union and AFSCME was even running early attack ads against Barrett. The Democrats understood early on that a “union” candidate would get blasted by Walker so they began their “war on women” and crushed Falk. Barrett is a much more centrist candidate. Many of the left will still crawl over broken glass to vote for him, much like conservatives with Romney, but it has got to be a bitter pill to swallow to see how the left and unions were played by the Dems. Hilarious to me, though.

So lets look at this turnout – the Democrats cast a total of 670,278 votes. Hey, wait a minute. That isn’t even close to the number of petitions filed for the recall in the first place (around one million supposedly). What is up with that? Only a few things can be surmised.

Massive petition fraud.
People signed just to feel good, or get a family member or someone else out of their face.
People didn’t understand what they were signing.
Something else?

I don’t get that at all. Hey, YOU are the ones that wanted this stupid recall and you aren’t even going to vote in the primary now to select the candidate to go against the dark lord Walker? Sheesh. What a scam.

The Republican turnout was impressive – 646,458 votes – almost MORE than the Dems and for the Rs, there wasn’t really anything to vote for. I am pleasantly surprised at this.

By Barrett winning, it is absolutely clear now that this isn’t about collective bargaining for government unions anymore. It is a power grab by one party over another, plain and simple. Barrett has campaigned FAR away from the union issue and I can only assume will continue to do so.

So prediction time, and a little crystal ball stuff.

I think Walker will win. I also think that the Senate will flip from R to D. I believe there are four state senate races to be decided in the general recall election on June 5. It is going to be a LONG month up here with robocalls, ads, and all the rest.

But what if Walker loses? Well, it isn’t the end of the world. We will have a corporatist, centrist governor who won’t try to take down everything Walker has done. And he won’t be able to because the Assembly is in firm control of the Rs, and appears that it will be for a generation. The legislative business is done for this year and many people will forget a lot of things by the time November rolls around and we have yet another election. When I vote for President in November, it will be the fifth or sixth time I have voted this year. I am sick of it as are many others. But don’t forget what the despicable Russ Feingold said last year – the game’s not over until we win.

If Walker loses, he will be free to help Washington get its crap together, or he could come back in 2014 to run again for governor here in Wisconsin (when the current term for governor ends).