There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it.
Denis Diderot
Motown Goes Bust
My maternal uncle, the son of a mom-and-pop grocer, was an amazing pastor whom was also a born businessman/administrator; he didn't really discuss the minutiae of running a parish with me (it was none of my business), but in a sense his career was like a number of DBA gigs I inherited--one's predecessors kick the can down the road, and the client has no idea of the status quo. I won't go into a lot of examples here, but I've seen application software literally years behind in necessary patching, and I remember asking a client DBA whether a certain production error/warning he was asking me about had occurred in his test environment, and it turned out the test database had crashed weeks earlier (something he wasn't even aware of)--because someone (I suspect the DBA because of the missing file's unusual location: Oracle complained unable to bring up the database) deleted a key database file. In other cases, databases had not been updated as required by contract for the client, certain configurations were done incorrectly, Oracle standards were not being followed, etc. I have a knack for turning around situations like these.
My uncle has a similar knack for "the buck stops here" and turning around drifting parishes. It seemed he always had some long-overdue infrastructure to repair, parking expansions (including getting zoning permits, etc.) In many cases, he inherited parish schools, almost always a drain on parish finances. More importantly, and this is the point for raising the example, he was facing unfavorable demographic trends; I recall one of his parishes was in New Bedford; now the population drop is not nearly as dramatic as in Detroit, but it has gone from the 120K's in the 1920's to the mid 90's. But you have city parishes thinning out, say,yuppies moving to the suburbs, You have big older churches with significant repair costs, with fewer, older, often fixed-income parishioners. It's hard to make ends meet, say, if people can only offer a buck or two for the collection plate (but I've never heard a pastor complain). Now take into account sensationalized sex abuse scandals, and many parishioners signify their displeasure at the collection plate (My uncle has never discussed that topic; I've picked it up from other stories.)
Detroit, of course, is far more complicated than running a parish or application systems. I discussed Orr's selection by Gov. Snyder as emergency manager in my March 18 post. Although I did not explicitly predict failure of Orr's ability to negotiate necessary concessions from creditors and especially unions, my skepticism was clearly implied ("if Orr can somehow" vs "when Orr.does such-and-such"). I think that the public unions think the crony Obama Administration has their backs in corrupt bankruptcy proceedings Remember less than a year ago how Obama vowed he would never let Detroit or Toledo go bankrupt (Obama's tweet here)? Not one penny of federal money for a Detroit bailout! Detroit put the Democrats into power, and the day of reckoning has arrived.
Follow-Up Odds and Ends
- Gov. Perry Signs Late-Term Abortion Reform, There's some evidence a few of Planned Parenthood's most notorious clinics are shutting down.
- I checked at Safeway today to see if Twinkies were on sale. (Not to buy, you understand. My doctor has me on a low-carb regimen so I was stocking up on 3-lb packages of turkey burgers for $5.) I did see a rack for Hostess products picked clean. A lot of competitors were seriously discounting prices, very predictable. I assume that they sold out--I don't see the purpose of maintaining empty racks with posted prices.
Every recent national poll I've seen shows the House Minority Leader Pelosi the most unpopular national figure. But my patience for the uncivil, condescending demagogue is wearing thin:
“I don’t know if my [GOP] colleagues need a lesson on the birds and the bees. I really don’t get it,” Pelosi said.On the Cover of the Rolling Stone
You would think that the iconic music/culture publication would stick to their tried-and-true formula, say, featuring the cleavage of Nicki Minaj (sorry about that--I just read Geraghty's piece which in passing mentioned one of the magazine cover's recurring themes (celebrity bosoms), and I did not like the rap artist's role as judge on American Idol). But even given bad publicity is good for the magazine business, why exactly are they featuring "Terrorist McDreamy" on the cover? This guy helped kill innocent people and many more people lost limbs. I don't mind a story on the suspect but I don't like the sympathetic cover. Does the magazine really want to reinforce monsters that they might get a flattering photo on the cover of a national magazine if their actions are atrocious enough? Appalling precedent!
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| Courtesy of Rolling Stone: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev The Remake of a Terrorist as a Glamor Icon |
More Military Family Reunions
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Michael Ramirez and Townhall |
The Beatles, "Yellow Submarine"
