Ben F.'s Comments
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Mar 26, 2009 | comments: 312
Ben F. Mar 27, 2009, 8:17pm EDT
I blame the CAFE standards for SUVs. Do a real high gas tax and drop the income tax to make up for it. We'll have to get used to expenisve gas some time. If we do it at our own pace it'll be better than waiting around until supply and demand force us. It takes years to decades to get things so they work with higher gas prices.
Mar 26, 2009 | comments: 312
Ben F. Mar 27, 2009, 8:02pm EDT
Then theres people that figured they were in good shape because there houses and stocks had gone up so much. So they spent more than they would have and then found out they didn't have it to spend. Maybe they should have known better, but wasn't as plain then as it is now

Dumbist was when pension funds in California borrowed money and invested it in real estate near the top of the boom.
Mar 26, 2009 | comments: 312
Ben F. Mar 27, 2009, 7:02pm EDT
An old boy I knew growing up used to live high on the hog for a couple months whenever he would get a new credit card. Then he would max it out and pay the minimum. He had a good job, but he lived poor except those months when he would get a new credit card. That old boy is never going to be able to retire. Walmart greeter and eating dogfood when he's 75.

There's people like that and there's people that get in bad because of bad luck. One woman I know spent ten thousand on hospital bills for her kid. That was 20 years ago when ten thousand was woth about twice what it is now. She had insurance, and it paid 80 cents on the dollar. It's just that there were a lot of dollars.
Mar 26, 2009 | comments: 312
Ben F. Mar 27, 2009, 6:48pm EDT
The way I figure it, the feds take any political way of looking at things and twist it so there friends get money and the rest of us get screwed.

Free market, command economy. It doesn't matter much. It comes down to the culture. If we take responsible for what we do that goes a long ways. Hears the thing though. A lot of people don't. They'll say 'I take full responsibility' when they hurt someone and get caught at it, but then they don't do anything to make up for it.

I don't know about the law says about it, but it sounds to me like that a lot of big bankers just plain old pulled off a fraud, but they got so rich at it and made it so hard to figure out that we're going to get stuck with the tab and they're in charge of 'cleaning up the mess'.

Now on books: What you get in schools a lot of times is teachers trying to get kids to read good books so hard that they get them off of reading altogether. I didn't start out reading good stuff. I started out reading Hardy Boys and then went to mostly westerns. Looking back I see most of what I read early on was crap. Thing is, it got me reading. Thats the way to do it. Get people reading. It doesn't matter what.
Jan 15, 2009 | comments: 311
Ben F. Jan 17, 2009, 7:20pm EST
If I was going to enter that contest I would say anonymous too, but since I'm not I'll keep my mouth shut.

Sy: I'm not about to hug you. Not even an Internet hug. But I hope things go better for you.

I want to congratulate all those that's had books published. I can't imagine writing a book. Getting one published is probably even tougher.

Now critquing is a tough thing to do. The way I figure it most people that ask you what you think about there stories are like a woman who asks if something makes their butt look big. They don't want an honest opinion and there's no good that'll come from giving them one. You want an acquaintance? Give a close friend your honest opinion on what they wrote. If you're lucky you'll end up with an acquaintance.

Now I never was one to hold to much importance to how exactly someone says something. I'm more interested in what they have to say. You take someone who has seen something really interesting. They could write it in crayon with almost every word mispelled and it would be interesting.

Hear's a for instance. A brother in law of mine had someone miss a corner and go plowing into his house in there car back in the early sixties. Drunk couple in the car got to fighting and the woman ended up with her butt on the accelerator. That old car must have been doing 60 or 70 when it hit the house. It tore through most of the house and ended up with its nose against the crapper in the bathroom.

Now my brother in law was asleep in that house when the car came through there. He wasn't a real fancy talking man, but you get talking about how that car came through and he could talk up a storm. I don't think he ever wrote it down, but I bet that story would have been interesting on paper too. Didn't matter how good or bad he wrote it.
Jan 8, 2009 | comments: 305
Ben F. Jan 12, 2009, 12:47am EST
Hi. I haven't been around for a while. I thought Gather locked me out but what happened was I changed my password and when I changed it I made it 9 characters long. Gather took it just fine, but I never could get back on until I just accidentally left off the last letter. That got me right back in so I can spout off my usual nonsense.

Excuse me if I don't read to far back.

Dana I would congratulate you too, (well shoot. I will anyway) but I can't quite get my head around that 20,000 words thing. How many pages would that be?

I've never heard of Sweeny Todd so I can't say much about that. I can tell that if you happen to be in the Midwest you're going to want to lay in some groceries and fill up you're gas tank because that old global warming thing has been postponed til week after next. Next week it's just plain old going to be cold.
Oct 20, 2008 | comments: 305
Ben F. Oct 21, 2008, 12:22pm EDT
My cover quote would be from Louis LAmour or Zane Grey (both dead unfortunately). Who writes westerns anymore?
Oct 16, 2008 | comments: 305
Ben F. Oct 20, 2008, 11:14am EDT
I'm interested in watching how you writer types do on your novel-in-a-month gig. How can I do that?
Oct 12, 2008 | comments: 340
Ben F. Oct 16, 2008, 12:40pm EDT
I misunderstood the article. Those numbers were an average. Here's where they say we were at back in May, before things started popping: "Based on the criteria in place a quarter century ago, today’s U.S. unemployment rate is somewhere between 9 percent and 12 percent; the inflation rate is as high as 7 or even 10 percent; economic growth since the recession of 2001 has been mediocre, despite a huge surge in the wealth and incomes of the superrich, and we are falling back into recession. If what we have been sold in recent years has been delusional “Pollyanna Creep,” what we really need today is a picture of our economy ex-distortion."
Oct 12, 2008 | comments: 340
Ben F. Oct 16, 2008, 12:19pm EDT
Now I'm just going to tiptoe into the financial mess just a little bit. I just recently come across an article that came out in Harpers magazine back in May of this year. That's before most people knew much about the mess. Any old how, this hear article says that since the 1960s both of our political parties have been screwing with the economic statistics so the people in power look better. It's got worse over the years. By the old standards we've had over twice the inflation the government says we're having. Five percent instead of 2 percent. By the old standards we've got 8 percent employment instead of 5.

Now this here article claims that this fiddling with the numbers is a lot of what got us in the mess we're in. Now I'm not able to tell you if any of this is true or not. I'll just give you the link and you can decide for yourself.

The numbers racket: Why the economy is worse than we know
Oct 12, 2008 | comments: 340
Ben F. Oct 16, 2008, 11:02am EDT
I think I heard somebody mention ice cream and fudge brownies. That's two things that's good about this hear world.

Talking about the topic of genres: I read a lot of Robert E. Howard when I was younger. He wasn't what you'd call a sophisticated writer. Matter of fact he didn't write fancy at all. But I'll tell you, what he wrote could be powerful stuff. He did mostly sort of science fiction or maybe you'd call it heroic fantasy. He also did odd-ball humor and a bunch of boxing stories. I'm not an emotional man when it comes to reading crap, but this old boy brought tears to my eyes a couple of times. Now you got to watch what you read from Howard because he was from the deep south in a time where racism was considered acceptable. There's a story or two of his I had to put down because I couldn't stomach the way he handled racial stuff. Mostly though he just wrote powerful vivid stories without much writing polish.
Oct 12, 2008 | comments: 340
Ben F. Oct 14, 2008, 10:32am EDT
I like westerns. I don't know if anyone under 50 reads them, but I've always enjoyed them. I started out with Zane Grey and thought a lot of his stories when I was a kid. I moved on to Luke Short and Louis Lamour, and then finally started reading the Longarm series. I tried re-reading a Zane Grey book a few years ago and found it unreadable. I felt bad because it killed the good memories from when I was a kid.

LAmour holds up pretty well to rereading. That old boy kicked around in some wild places when he was younger and that shows in his writing. The LongArm books are a mixed bag. They add pretty explicit sex into the mix. The earlier westerns wouldn't have done that. I don't have a problem with the sex, but since the hero has to ride away single and free after every book a pretty high number of his lady friends end up dead. I got so I was wondering more about how the sex interest was going to get offed this time. Sometimes that got downright silly. One book has this young lady tie the hero up, have sex with him, then die a few hours later from rampaging lockjaw. Him still being tied up, that ends up being a problem.

Now I've never tried to write a western myself, but I like them.
Jun 17, 2008 | comments: 18
Ben F. Jun 28, 2008, 12:25pm EDT
Wendy: No. Guys don't call them thingies. We call them a long list of other things, but not thingies.
Jun 27, 2008 | comments: 18
Ben F. Jun 28, 2008, 11:40am EDT
Well, I wouldn't worry too much about the lawyers. Just say the magic word 'Parody' and they'll probably walk away unless they want to screw with your life for some reason.

Now here's the thing though. This is fun but it isn't something you could actually sell. The editor would laugh his butt off. Then he would say, "We'd have to get rights from half a dozen people or we'd risk getting sued or getting it thrown up in our faces if we have to sue somebody about using one of our author's characters. Not worth the effort. Next.
May 31, 2008 | comments: 297
Ben F. May 31, 2008, 3:51pm EDT
Pat and Jamie: That snake talk got me out of just lurking. I spent a lot of time when I was growing up in a place where rattlesnakes and copperheads were common. I never got bit, but I got stung on the back by a wasp one time. If snake bites hurt any worse than that old wasp I don't know how anyone lives through it.

Since I'm hear, I wrote up something about my summer a few years back and just now put it up. I hope you don't mind me telling you about it hear. Old House.
May 13, 2008 | comments: 95
Ben F. May 22, 2008, 11:36am EDT
Now hears something funny. A while back I tossed out an idea just to see what Steve could do with it. I didn't take it too serious. I said that all of this overfishing was probably changing how much carbon was in the ocean. Well, we argued back and forth on that for a while before we dropped it. Now just the other day I was going through some old magazines out my shed. I'm not even sure where they came from. Any old how, I come across the December 1997 issue of "Earth" magazine and there's article in there called "Some Fishy Air". It talks about how fish may be affecting carbon: "Simply changing the type of fish in a lake can also change the flow of carbon--which has a big effect on global warming and cooling--between the lake and the air above it. "The discovery that simple biological changes can alter the exchange of carbon into the atmosphere has powerful implications on a global scale," says limnologist Stephen Carpenter of the University of Wisconsin, Madison."

These guys stocked some lakes with minnows and others with minnows and bass. The lakes with just minnows ended up taking in 5% more carbon than the ones with minnows plus bass. Without bass there were more minnows. More minnow ate more zooplankton. Less zooplankton meant more algae to take up the carbon.

Now that's lakes, but they claim this sort of thing could apply to oceans too. "When the fish switch is flicked, the amount of carbon dioxide in the air above the lake changes by about five percent, all other factors being equal. Although it is rare to find a lake with minnows naturally at the top of the food chain, this switch is likely to be present in other ecosystems such as oceans, says Carpenter. If so, changes in the marine food chain, such as the drastic decrease of sharks, a top predator, might alter the carbon exchange between the atmosphere and oceans."

I tried to find this article on line, but didn't. If you Google Stephen Carpenter you'll find a bibliography and a list of his publications.

I'm kind of proud of myself. I pulled an idea out of my butt and it turned out to be true.
May 13, 2008 | comments: 95
Ben F. May 22, 2008, 11:02am EDT
Now hears another couple of thing:

I'm not comfortable with carbon dioxide in the air being higher than it's ever been in the last couple of million years and going higher. That scares me just in general even if it didn't have a thing to do with global warming. But hears the thing. It HAS never been as high as it is now, at least not any time when we could figure out what it did. It HAS never been as high as it's probably going to go. That means they don't really know what will happen. They can guess based on what's happened so far, but that doesn't always work with nature. If it did, a glass of water would take up less room at 30 degrees than it does at 40. Sometimes something in nature will go along just as straight as you please for a while and then just fall off a cliff. There could be some threshold with carbon dioxide where if you get above that something totally unexpected happens. Now I'm not saying we should just cruise along fat dumb and happy and see. Unexpected crap in nature isn't usually crap you want to see happen.

Hears some possibilities I haven't seen bounced around on this global warming. If you get carbon dioxide higher than normal and keep it there, nature will probably take advantage of it. Bacteria and small plants could evolve to take advantage of more carbon in the air. That would take a while, but then once they make those changes they could take off. So you could end up with carbon going up for a while and then evening out or falling once nature has a chance to adapt.
May 13, 2008 | comments: 95
Ben F. May 22, 2008, 10:17am EDT
David: I can't speak for Sy. Just talking for myself, I argued against what Steve said about IPCC and those organizations. I argued against it because they aren't as sure about some of this crap as Steve seemed to think. Hears some for instances: They can't nail down how sensitive the climate is to all this crap we're spewing out. How much will the temperature go up if the concentration of carbon in the air doubles? Some of those IPCC models say 2 degrees centigrade. Others say 4.5. Their about 90% sure it won't under be under 1.5 degrees, but they aren't so sure it won't be higher. Their best estimate is 3 degrees, but they are not solid on it.

Hears another for instance: They don't have a handle on these hear aerosols. Reading what they say about that, I can see why. They're learning crap about it fast, but there is a lot of uncertainty and they say so. Now that's important because until they understand what aerosols are actually doing to the temperature they can't figure out how much the greenhouse gases are actually doing to the temperature. They could be doing less, or they could be doing more.

Now none of this denies that people are causing global warming. I'm pretty sure we are, at least some. Nothing in there says we shouldn't try to stop doing it. We should.

Now hears the thing though. You go around saying that the science is all settled and yep temperatures are going to up this amount or that and your running some risks to science. If these predictions about global warming don't pan out, scientists are going to have one hell of time convincing the public about anything after that.

You're running a risk even if you're right. You get some big ass volcano going off like the one that caused the year without a summer back in 1816, and people aren't ever going to take global warming seriously again.
May 13, 2008 | comments: 95
Ben F. May 21, 2008, 2:28pm EDT
Well, I'm going to try to shed light instead of heat on this hear topic for a while. Now hears some figures I got out of that IPCC report on what they think is causing what.

These IPCC people put together where they think global warming is coming from. I figured the percentages myself, so their coming from the IPCC through and old redneck's calculator:

Carbon Dioxide from Fossil Fuel - 34.4%
Carbon Dioxide from Land Use Changes - 17.2%
Methane - 14.92%
Tropospheric ozone (whatever that is) - 10.88%
Freon, etc (From before the ban I guess) - 9.95%
Black Carbon - 6.22%
Nitrous Oxide - 4.97%
Biomass Burning - .93%

Aerosols offset around 18.7% of the global warming.

Now someone a while back was claiming that Black Carbon was causing a lot more the of the global warming than IPCC figgered. I did the percents with their figures for black carbon. That puts the percent of warming from Carbon Dioxide from burning gas, coal and the like down to 28.25% of the global warming. Black Carbon goes up to just under 23%. Now a lot of this black carbon is from people in China and India burning wood and cow crap to cook and to see by at night.

This hear black carbon comes out of the air in a few weeks. It seems to me like you could solve a good hunk of this hear global warming problem just by getting those folks some other way to cook and see at night. That's what us rednecks call a low-hanging fruit.
May 13, 2008 | comments: 95
Ben F. May 18, 2008, 11:19am EDT
Steve: I'm going to ask you real nice: Don't put words in my mouth. I've said that we ought to be getting off of fossil fuel quite a few times. I do just as much as I can personally to help that along.

Also, don't put words in mouths of other people. IPCC, NAS, AGU, AAAS, etc have taken positions on global warming. However, at least the IPCC (and probably the other organizations) have not taken your position on global warming. You say that the debate is over. You say that there is a scientific consensus on global warming. The IPCC does not say that. They have a phrase to use in cases where the facts are nailed down and the scientists are all on board. It's virtually certain. When you see IPCC using those words, then they're saying that the debate is over. When they don't use that, they're saying that there either all the scientists aren't on board or they don't have all the facts nailed down.

If you actually read the IPCC reports you'll see that they don't even use very likely real often. A lot of this crap is likely. That means there may be a little over one chance in three that they're wrong.

Last thing: Steve, you know what my motives are. I told you what they were when I jumped into this hear argument. If you forgot you can just go back through my comments until you find where I told you.

Now, Sy: You may have already figgered this, but this hear global warming crap is like politics and religion. You can't reason with people on it. Whatever you say is going to get somebody mad at you. Me, I don't care because I like to argue. I'm a guessing that you would rather not waste your writing time on something where it ain't going change a blame thing and whatever you say will maybe make you an enemy.

Me and Steve's both kind of retired and we'll probably be whaling away at each other on this until they haul us both away to nursing homes. Maybe we'll get put in the same nursing home and we can settle it by whaling away at each other with canes from our wheelchairs. (Laughing out loud)
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