How bad are the New York Jets?

Sad Sack

So bad that the opposing coach thought they were screwing up on purpose.

Asked about the Jets’ early success stopping the Seahawks running game, Carroll said the Jets were so slow getting off the ball that it messed up Seattle’s zone blocking scheme.

“They weren’t coming off the ball well. We were, so we were out ahead of them,” Carroll said. “I thought maybe they were doing it collectively. … It was really them not playing great technique up front.”

I watched about ten minutes of the game and Pete Carroll isn’t being clever here: they really are that pathetic.

Water you talking about? My house value isn’t sinking!

Stamford light house (photo supplied by our GAR, which urges you to consider safer, calmer Greenwich waterfront homes instead)

Discussion in today’s Hartford Courant on whether two storms in two years will drive down the price of waterfront homes. Time will tell. The waterfront craze is a relatively recent phenomenon; I know of summer houses in Maine, my own great-aunt’s house being just one of them, that back in the late 1800’s were deliberately built a half-mile or more back from the ocean precisely because nature was still respected, if not feared. And I’ve read – don’t know whether it’s true – that Greenwich waterfront sold at a discount to more protected locations as recently as the early 1960’s.

There will always be some people with the desire to live directly on the water and the money to pay the price. One homeowner I know acknowledged to Greenwich Time last week that Sandy had done about $500,000 damage but, he said, “that’s the cost of living here”. This same man told me some years ago that he used to live around the corner and the owners of the waterfront house were forced out for six months after a storm surge swept through. Knowing that, when several years later they told him they were selling (for unrelated reasons) he went ahead and bought it anyway.

Which is fine – in fact, if I had this man’s money I’d be tempted to do the same thing because he lives in one of the most beautiful waterfront houses in town and the views are spectacular. Full knowledge of what to expect and the wherewithal to pay up when the expected happens, I say go for it. People who stretch to their limit to buy on the water and who don’t understand the inevitable flooding and destruction to come will probably regret it. That may have been driven home to buyers these past few weeks and if so, we might see demand, and thus prices drop for the more modest properties.

At least for a few years until memories fade. I doubt there’s been a sea change in buyers’ tastes, yet, but perhaps there will be if a wave of these Irene/Sandy storms hit in succession. Stay tuned, and keep your powder dry.

Even without looking, I knew this had to be about California

Because if it were NYC, it would have been mandatory. City Council asks residents to eschew meat on Mondays.

The resolution, introduced by Councilwoman Jan Perry and Councilman Ed Reyes, cites statistics showing health disparities facing Los Angeles residents, specifically those living in low-income areas with lack of access to health foods.

It also notes that, according to the department of Health Services, more than half of Los Angeles County residents are obese or overweight.

What evidence, you ask, shows that eating meat leads to obesity? The cavemen I know, meat eaters all, are some of the scrawniest folks around. And what evidence, you ask, does access to “health food” – an undefined term – produces better health? And finally, how will avoiding a chicken leg on Monday provide better access to that health food the rest of the week?

None, none and don’t bother me with logic. As is always the case in these matters, it’s about good intentions and appearing to be up on whatever passes for current conventional wisdom. Ain’t it grand? We’re governed by the idiot class.

Land of the free

Putin may imprison those who embarrass him to four years in the Siberian gulag but here in Obama World we only hand out one-year sentences, and the food’s better. I’m waiting to hear some protest from the left over Friday’s incarceration of that Anti-Taliban filmmaker but so far …crickets. Of course, they aren’t complaining about the return of a dictatorship in Russia, so why expect more from them as it happens here?

Got a generator in Greenwich? Don’t plan on using it

I just learned that a new Greenwich regulation now forbids testing generators for twenty minutes each week (as installed, they are programmed to run such a test automatically) . As dozens of New York City building owners, including hospitals, discovered two weeks ago, neglecting that testing leads to very unpleasant, even catastrophic results. And by the way, disabling the auto-test switch voids your generator’s warranty, so good luck with that.

UPDATE: I was overly alarmed. A ban on testing was briefly imposed but was rescinded after appropriate outrage (imagine trying that stunt after Sandy). As regs now stand, you can test your generator on weekdays (only) between 9-am – 5pm, which seems like a reasonable compromise between neighbors’ desire for peace and quiet and homeowners’ desire for a working generator. Of course, when everyone has a generator, no one will hear their neighbor’s noise.

Obama and his rich friends want tax increases on the rich? Give it to them

Just make sure it’s not the usual, tax increases now, spending cuts never – uh, we mean later. Uh huh. Here are some suggested fat cat targets:

[L]et’s hope the Speaker and the rest of the Republican negotiators are smart enough to propose revenue increases that will hurt liberals the most.  Start by taxing the ever-loving crap out of Hollywood.  I’ve suggested this before, and the esteemed Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds, was on the same wavelength last August when he suggested bringing back the 20 percent excise tax on motion picture gross revenue from the 1950s.

“The movie excise tax was imposed in response to the high deficits after World War Two,” Reynolds recalled.  ”Deficits are high again, and there’s already historical precedent. Of course, to keep up with technology, the tax should now apply to DVDs, downloadable movies, pay-per-view and the like. But in these financially perilous times, why should movie stars and studio moguls, with their yachts, swimming pools and private jets, not at least shoulder the burden they carried back in Harry Truman’s day – when, to be honest, movies were better anyway.”

As Reynolds noted, one side effect of such proposals is that it causes far-Left Hollywood types to suddenly begin babbling about the depressing effects of high tax rates upon economic growth, as though they had been suddenly possessed by the ghost of Milton Friedman.  That’s fun even if the tax proposals end up getting defeated.  Especially now that we have YouTube to disseminate and immortalize their panicked bursts of “trickle-down economic” wisdom.

Reynolds had other suggestions for revenue proposals – many of them involving the elimination of deductions, which seems to be the spirit in Washington at the moment – that would hurt blue state political machines and liberal institutions the most.  Capping the mortgage interest deduction at $250,000, for example, would hurt those rich blue enclaves with high property values – 8 of the 10 richest counties in America voted for Barack Obama in 2012.  Taxing trust funds and hoards of foundation money would hurt the Left, as outside of Hollywood, rich liberals are more likely to be sitting on piles of inherited assets, while conservative millionaires tend to be actively generating and re-investing income.  Ending the federal tax deductions for state and local taxes – an idea prominently advocated by Newt Gingrich during the Republican primary – would end the practice of federal taxpayers subsidizing the government greed of those big-spending blue states.  It’s actually a form of inter-state redistribution as it stands, so let’s do away with it.

The point is that anyone can tear pages out of Barack Obama’s beloved Alinsky playbook.  He can be forced to live up to his own standards.  His ideology can be bent into shapes that will enrage his loyal constituents.  The President says he wants a “balanced approach?”  Let’s jump on the see-saw with gusto, and give him one hell of a ride.

I’d also add a special surcharge – 150% sounds about right – on jet fuel used in private jets when carrying their owners to global warming conferences around the world. We could probably erase our entire deficit right there.

Free of the specter of the Angel Moroni, Queens residents now afflicted by simple morons

LIPA executive tells customers without power to go on the Internet to download repair forms. His suggestion was not well received.

A Long Island Power Authority official told a crowd of 300 Rockaway residents that they would need to hire a licensed city electrician to inspect their homes before LIPA could restore power, and suggested the homeowners print out inspection forms — from the Internet.

But the idiocy was just starting – how’s this for corporate (and Nanny, “Big Gulp” Bloomberg) rule making?

[H] omeowner Jim Silvestri, asked whether he could use a Nassau County-certified electrician and was told no.

“There’s not enough licensed electricians in the City of New York to take care of this,” Silvestri whined. Just another ungrateful homeowner refusing to see the imperative for keeping everyone safe.