MatthewMaynard.net

We’re trying Mad Men as a replacement for The Tudors, and frankly, I’m beginning to wonder why. I get that the series is a period piece on the 1960s, and that Don Draper is supposed to be the stereotypical American male of the era, self-absorbed while living the American Dream ™. The sets are wonderful, and the costumes are period-perfect.

But what is the point behind Don Draper? He is, as the Wikipedia page notes, often cast half in shadow or in such a way as to show only half his face, which plays into other little facts they reveal on the page (I swear, they need to create and start posting a spoiler alert template).

At least with Breaking Bad, AMC’s other dark serial drama, you understand why Walter White does what he does. Cancer can push you to do crazy things to secure your family’s future, like synthesize crystal meth. I get Walter White; I don’t agree with his tactics, but I understand him at some level. I don’t understand Don Draper, at least not yet.

I’ll give it a few more episodes, but I sense the scale slowly tipping in favor of watching something else. That being said, Jon Hamm plays the role perfectly well – dark and mysterious, but socially open at the same time.

Ugh, this is interminable.

It seems the President has allowed Turbo Timmy to take default off the table as a political weapon. If we’re paying bondholders, we’re not in default, and no, getting a Social Security check does not make you a bondholder. So at least there’s that.

On the other hand, no one in a position of leadership is taking the bold step of suggesting an elimination of the deficit for the next budget, however long it is specified to last. Of course the President won’t sign it, since he’s a Keynesian, and his party won’t let it pass the Senate, but it was just a thought.

Of course back when this started to boil over like an unwatched wort, Boehner did suggest a dollar of debt limit target increase for a dollar of spending cuts, and the President refused. But those weren’t real cuts – they were just reductions in the amount of projected increases in spending, which translates to a budget line with a positive slope, but less positive than the other guys budget.

I think they take us for fools. Nope, I don’t just think it, I’m convinced of it.

Somewhere in the quote list on the right hand side of this blog (which is apparently not working right now) you will find the following:

… a tax cut without a spending cut isn’t a tax cut at all, because it just transforms the nature of the tax to inflation or debt.

It’s from Thomas R. Eddlem, and it captures the nature of the problem: all spending must be paid for at some point in time, either now or in the future. Increasing spending, at any rate, increases our debt and puts us closer to the inevitable default, when we can’t use incoming revenue to pay creditors only because the incoming will be less than the outgoing.

We will get downgraded, and likely as soon as we pass a budget, so I’m glad the tea party candidates are holding up Speaker Boehner’s budget from accounting hell.

The Keynes and Hayek videos were better.

Readers may remember that back in May I made a stock market investment in Silver, hoping

… that silver would rise in the short term, bouncing off $35 an ounce and continuing its bull run.

Let’s reexamine that investment, now that almost a quarter has gone by.

On May 9th, Kitco.com shows that Silver in London was fixed at $38.00. Today it was fixed at $40.34, and Kitco is reporting a current market price of $40.83. This represents a price change of +6.2% in a mere 78 days, or, if you assume the same rate of growth over a calendar year (the annualized percent return), +28.8%.

That would have been a pretty good bet to place, as it beats both the “official” government inflation number (worthless though it may be), and the realistic inflation number of 10-20%. For full disclosure purposes, I closed out the bet I placed on May 9th at a profit, and opened a new position similar to that one a few days ago. So far, it is profitable. Of course, there are other bets you can place on precious metals, such as SLV, AGQ, and the hard physical metal itself.

Maybe I do have a talent for this money and investing stuff after all.

We finished watching The Tudors tonight, polishing off the last two episodes along with a bottle of beer and a glass of wine.

I liked the series, because it put a period of history I wasn’t very familiar with into a larger context and because the actors were well cast for their roles, acting their parts with sincerity and depth. Although there were some historical errors, none of them were serious enough to make me less interested in the time period or the subject. Indeed, the overall portrayal of Henry was so well scripted and acted that it made me realize the cultural context of some scriptures I’ve read recently, namely some passages in the Samuels, the Kings, the Chronicles, and Esther that describe kings and how they behaved.

I would recommend it, especially if you are looking for a new series to watch but don’t want to get tied down for a long time (there’s only 38 episodes, so you could crank through it in a month or two).

Differing weights and differing measures, Both of them are abominable to the LORD. Proverbs 20:10

Not only are differing measures a way to cheat, lie to, and steal from people, but they screw up your homebrewing process, and as in a marketplace, you may not even notice until it is too late.

Today I brewed the Russian Imperial Stout kit I mentioned yesterday. Everything went well (except the dry malt extract part, but that’s always a mess), until I got to the original gravity (OG) measurement. OG is one of the numbers you measure to determine your alcohol content, either by volume or by weight. You place a floating gauge in a sample of the liquid and see at what number it floats. If you add water, the OG will get closer to 1.0, because the water dilutes the mixture.

I measured a 1.062, which is about 0.008-0.010 below where it needed to be. In the past, I’ve had consistently low OG readings and have never been able to figure out why, until today.

When I started the recipe I put 2.5 gallons, as measured with a 5 gallon spigot container from Wal-Mart, into the stock pot and followed the recipe. When it was complete I then put the wort into the fermenter and added 2.5 gallons of water, measured from the same container, as the instructions indicated. According to the scale on the side of the fermenter, I was about a quart short of 5 U.S. gallons – I had a differing measure.

So that mystery may be solved. I’ll have to measure the volume of the fermenter when I’m finished with this batch. Here’s to no more weak beer.

Quite the cooking day around here. We made an omelet for breakfast, then pickles (6 pints) and peach jam (4 pints), steak & potatoes for dinner, and a few other things. This is on top of the salsa and tomato sauce that Jennifer and her friend Carrie made and canned earlier this week. Tomorrow I make beer, a nice dark hoppy ale recipe kit that’s been lying around for a while, and maybe a loaf of bread or two.

Heck, I might even break out the cheese kit, just for kicks. It’s amazing what you can make when you have the resources and instructions.

Yesterday was the 150th anniversary of the First Battle of Manassas (First Bull Run, if you’re a Yankee). There is a reenactment at the battlefield that started yesterday and runs through Sunday, if you’re in the area and are interested.

I’ve been to the battlefield and walked both sides of it, North and South. The impression one gets from an initial perspective is one of Northern incompetence, which is hard to dispel by reading the literature. The North was full of pride when they went west over Bull Run Creek. They attacked from one hill towards another, having to cross over a shallow valley where Warrenton Pike runs, with little in the way of cover besides one stone house and a few scattered trees. They had insufficient intelligence on the position and disposition of the Confederate troops, and had barely enough supplies at the soldier level to complete a fight, let alone win it.

The South fared only slightly better, having better leadership, but their average soldier was just as inexperienced as his Yankee counterpart. They also had the mental advantage of defending their homes against invasion, which is what they saw it as, and to a large degree, what it was. We call it the Civil War, but that’s really a misnomer; a Civil War is when two sides vie for control of the same government or territory. A Secession War is when one side merely wants to not be under the control of another. By that definition, both the Revolution and the “Civil” War were wars of secession. The Civil War was only Civil from the Northern perspective, for they wanted to control both North and South, whereas the South wanted to control only themselves and their slaves.

I felt a sense of magnitude as I walked the field at Manassas, not only of the importance of the place in our history, but also of the issues they fought over. They were not fighting over small things, but large things, and not the large things we think of – slavery and liberty. Johnny Reb fought over the large issue of my-homeland-is-being-invaded-by-a-tyrant-who-wants-to-enslave-me, and Billy Yank fought because they-want-to-rebel-against-the-lawful-government-of-this-land. (Except for Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, he fought over his philosophy.)

Sometimes I wonder if our big issues of the day rise to the same level as their big issues. and if they do, does our unwillingness to take up arms make us more cowardly than they, or more patient?

Time will tell.

President to award 3rd Medal of Honor to living recipient (with video). In case you missed it, the second was a guy named Luke Skywalker Leroy Petry (joke reference) and the first was Salvatore Giunta.

If there’s anything the President is doing that I approve of, it is recognizing these men for their actions. Bush did it plenty enough, and correctly so, but he never put one around a man’s neck.

It’s Moon Landing Day, and Atlantis is spending its last day in orbit, landing in less than 8 hours as I write this.

I have decidedly mixed feelings about this odd coincidence of extraterrestrial events. On one hand, I am sad to see the end of American exploration in space (at least for the foreseeable future), but on the other I am glad to see the overdue retirement of a boondoggle pork project that suffered a 40% field failure rate due to a faulty design, all while spending $450 million per flight.

I do not expect Americans to never go into space again. I do expect it will be a long time from now if they return aboard a government-sponsored and run flight, or a shorter time from now if it is on a private business run flight. There are some who have argued that the reason private space companies haven’t been formed is because the government ran a monopoly with naturally high barriers to entry. While this is true, I think a simpler explanation is at hand: there is very little money to be made in sending humans up to fall around the Earth at Mach 25. Unmanned objects, however, are an entirely different matter. That’s why there are so many privately manufactured unmanned satellites in orbit and so very few manned ones up there.

I think the best shot mankind has at making a permanent presence in space is to make it privately profitable. Unless and until that happens, don’t expect much, for a human being will chase a piece of gold across the universe just to possess it.