New Posts in the Sections

New Posts in the Clarion Content sections

Politics and Policy


Health care studies...and treatment

Weapons depot...blows up

Shocking school...policy

Lost...and found thirty-five years later


Sports


Michelle Wie...ever controversial

The good and...the bad of the college football

The Hawks have...the NBA's best record?!?

Interesting sports links...


Pop Culture


Careful with...the lawnmower

Pantry chili...

Africa splitting...



Want to know (care to guess) what words we searched in the Google Image finder to generate the banner pictures over the sections above, go here.

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They are on point!

Watts-Hillandale House tour

It was not that long ago that one of the members of the Clarion Content's editorial board was delighted to be able to go on a tour of the Watts-Hillandale neighborhood of Durham with a dear friend. We have been meaning to post the snaps and some of the tidbits garnered that day ever since. We have finally gotten them up over on the Pop Culture section. The houses of Watts-Hillandale are a delight. Check a few of them out through these links.

1111 Iredell Street

2301 West Club Boulevard

2422 West Club Boulevard

2215 West Club Boulevard

2310 West Club Boulevard

2016 West Club Boulevard

Snake Oil salesmen are slippery

The federal government is going to have an awfully hard time taking anyone to task for the financial meltdown the occurred at the end of the reign of George Bush II. By-in-large, the government bailed out the institutions involved, and short of the out right thievery of the likes of Bernie Madoff, the law is not written to prosecute the fund managers.

This week the government couldn't convict the first two Bear Sterns guys they prosecuted because they couldn't prove malicious intent. The problem prosecuting almost all individuals involved will be the same, intent. These people are salespeople. How can the government distinguish? Were these guys deliberately trying to deceive investors or were they just trying to put a positive spin on selling a crappy product in a declining market?

The Wall Street Journal notes, "while certain statements by executives ultimately proved incorrect, they can make a case that they believed what they were saying."

Defense attorneys spin it even further, "[they] were not trying to swindle widows out of their future; they were mismanaging the crisis."

The defendants didn't even find it necessary to take the stand in their own defense. This despite the reality that the two Bear Stearns funds that they managed lost more than $1.5 billion.

The government can indict individuals for the failings of capitalism, but short of embezzlement, it will never be able to successfully prosecute them. Capitalism itself is to blame. Capitalism, as it is currently constituted, institutionalizes spin and deception.

Read more on this story here in the Wall Street Journal.

We salute you

Words can hardly express the debt of gratitude all Americans owe our servicemen and women. Whatever our critiques of the American way, we gratefully lay our heads down at night to sleep safely thanks in no small part to their efforts. The Clarion Content humbly thanks and salutes all of our service people. We pray that those serving overseas may soon be reunited with their families. We pray that they are able to come home without firing another shot in anger, without losing another friend to war.

How bad are the Knicks?

"Wait, we suck, and our future depends how these two guys hit it off?" --- Knicks Fans

How bad are the Knicks?

It may be difficult to plumb the depths of that question this early in the NBA season. To try to put it in perspective, the Knicks lost last night to a Charlotte Bobcats team that scored a brutally awful 59 points in their season opener against the Celtics. This team beat the Knicks! And they, Charlotte, beat the Knicks despite their star player Gerald Wallace going a putrid 4 for 20 from the field.

The Knicks are so bad that this year's squad will bring back memories of those Knicks teams where Bernard King blew out his knee and Patrick Ewing was first drafted, the very nadir of the franchise, back to back 58 and 59 loss seasons. Worse yet, the Knicks are still being held hostage by the Isiah Thomas debacle. The Knicks might have the worst record in the league this year, but they won't reap the draft day benefits, Isiah traded their 2010 first round draft pick. (Without getting it lottery protected!)

Knicks fans knew this season was going to be a lousy. Donnie Walsh was given leeway to deconstruct the mess that Isiah made with plans to land a big free agent (LeBron) at the end of this campaign. Now even that ray of light appears to depend on whether or not the NBA approves the sale of the New Jersey Nets to a Russian oligarch. The Knicks need LeBron, the second fiddle free agents this off-season are not LeBron's caliber. Chris Bosh, pul-leeze. D-Wade is in LeBron's vicinity on the talent scale, but his body has absorbed years of beating already and the Clarion Content believes his statistical fall-off will be precipitous and not that far distant.

Despite re-signing the dynamic young duo of David Lee and Nate Robinson, the Knicks could be staring the worst record in the conference in the face.

Oy, another tough year in the Garden.

"Let's go Rangers!"

Nature

Just a quick editor's note here: not sure if anyone clicked through the link in this morning's post about Einstein's insight that time's linearity is illusory, but if you did click through the link, it went to the European Organization for Nuclear Research homepage for the Large Hadron Collider.

This is the page that gives their official spiel on the machine with which they hope to recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang. The single most interesting thing in the manifesto née sales brochure is that they arbitrarily capitalize nature, ostensibly treating it as a proper noun. It is our recollection that nature with the capital N is associated with the divine, nu? Aren't these folks particle physicists? Who made the call on capitalizing the word nature? It has especially explosive implications given the fears of some about what the Large Hadron Collider may be capable of reproducing.

Food for thought

One of our editors ran across this delightful Einstein quote in an article in the New York Times about the restart, scheduled for December in Switzerland, of the Large Hadron Collider.

"For those of us who believe in physics, this separation between past, present and future is only an illusion."---Albert Einstein

Costly Hoax?

Deep in the Clarion Content's not so bleeding libertarian heart we are fired up about the possibility that the balloon kid's family perpetrated a hoax. The Larimer County Sheriff is preparing to file charges against the kid's father as evidence mounts that the family knew that the kid was hiding in the attic all along.

The Clarion Content believes that if that turns out to be the case; the family put the six year old up to it, and they knew that they were bamboozling the authorities all along, the State has a right and even a duty to sue them to recover the costs of the expedition that was put together to rescue the child. The Clarion Content strongly believes in the culture of personal responsibility. The State does not owe the stupid or reckless individual extra consideration as part of the social contract.

The balloon family, if they perpetrated a hoax, owes restitution for the costs to the State of the aborted rescue. It is analogous to skiers who are helicoptered into an otherwise unreachable spot, only to trapped by an avalanche or beset by other tragedy. The Clarion Content is not sending in the State's emergency response crews to save them, until said skiers open up their checkbooks and prove that they can and will pay for their pick-up.

The same applies to health insurance for smokers. Assume a proven risk to your health like smoking, pay for it yourself, not out of the health insurance pool of everyone else who was wise enough not to smoke. The same goes for folks who re-build weather destroyed houses in flood plains, areas prone to mudslides or barrier islands that are regularly whipped by hurricanes. You want to do that, buy your own private homeowner's insurance. The State should not be subsidizing your stupid decision at the expense of all other citizens who were smart enough not to build their homes in a disaster prone areas.

Growing up means taking responsibility for one's actions. If the Heene balloon boy family perpetrated a hoax, they should be made to assume the fiscal costs to the State of it.

Real Life Calvin

A real Calvin and Hobbs story came to life today near Fort Collins, Colorado. News organizations broke into coverage of President Barry Obama speaking in New Orleans to announce that a six year-old boy had climbed into a homemade helium boom and drifted skyward. He was now floating at 6,000 feet over Colorado.

This is how the Washington Post reported what happened next, "For three hours on a workaday Thursday, a mesmerized and helpless America watched this shiny silvery disc spin slowly against a brilliant blue sky with puffy white clouds. As it tipped this way and that, emergency vehicles trailed the balloon over two counties and 50 miles. The Air Force was alerted. The Federal Aviation Administration grounded planes. A Black Hawk chopper flew in close, blades slashing, to create a downwash to defeat a contraption that looked like a giant birthday party balloon...At last, the jet stream set the shimmering orb gently down in the middle of a vast field.

Men in overalls ran to the balloon and stabbed it with shovels until it slowly crumpled.

A nation held its breath.

There was no boy.

Authorities scoured the ground for bits of broken plywood, a crumpled child. "

As it turned out, Calvin-esque to the end, the kid had never left his house (except possibly in his imagination). He had gone upstairs to the attic to get away from his Dad and older brothers. At six years-old, he goofed around playing a cardboard box for a while and then fell asleep.

After going unaccounted for five hours, intrepid reporters quoted the child as saying, "I played and then I went to sleep."

Read the whole story here.