Ken Nelson

Bergeson said he’s a firm believer in AYP, but just doesn’t think it’s an accurate measure.

The quotation is from The Spectrum newspaper, quoting Larry Bergeson Principal, Dixie High School on why his school was identified as failing on the Annual Year Progress test of the No Child Left Behind Act.

I’m not sure who to question more on this quotation. The principal who “firmly believes” in an in-accurate measure, or the reporter who didn’t feel the need to question further such an oxymoronic statement by someone entrusted with thousands of kids education.

11 schools in Washington County failed the AYP goals.

I disagree with the NCLB, mainly because I don’t think the Feds ought to be sending money to local schools. Secondarily because I think it squelches what little teacher initiative is left in our overly bureaucratic and large school systems.

Short version:  Run away!

Long version:

I assumed this movie was a film rendition of the recent popular novel “The American”. It isn’t.

It has been some time since audience members have left a movie I’ve attended. The viewing I saw was sparsely attended, but lost about 1/3 of the audience before the movie ended.

It wasn’t that it was so bad… just that it was BORING.   Really boring.  At least I had some onscreen gun assembly / silencer building that could interest me, pity the rest of those suffering with me.

Anway, don’t go.

I think mocking and humor, like this, will get libertarian and conservative issues farther than engaging liberals in shout fests on talk-TV/radio.

70% of iPhone apps cost money. About the same percent of Android apps are free.

So as a professional developer… where should I invest my company’s resources?

Oddly… when I consider mobile projects, I lean towards the Android. Why? It is easier to program, and I don’t have to get Apple’s permission. Plus, I think the iPhone’s glory days are nearly ended.

The acid test will be the DroidPad, which I think will kick the snot out of the iPad both on price and features.

In the near future Apple will be hard pressed to be as totalitarian as they have been and I expect longer term that the iPhone will be marginalized like the BlackBerry rapidly has become.  Since phone turnover is extremely rapid, this can happen quicker than you think.

I didn’t notice til I was a grownup and my kids started watching, but… exactly what crime did most of these fools commit?

Via awesome viral site “I’m bored”.

The most dangerous and powerful people you never heard of

That question is essentially what Michael Pento is talking about in his article, Bernanke Out of Bullets but not Bombs.

But what are bombs?  Well, bullets are the traditional way the Fed exerts influence – controlling the cost of its money. But what does it do when that money is free?

Basically, it finds new routes to get it to you, stepping around the pesky banks that are taking the free money but not loaning it out due to profit and reserve goals (and common sense).  They could, in fact, just print up a few trillion and then cut out the middle man:

The Fed could buy a trillion-plus dollars worth of S&P 500 stocks. Consumers that sold stock to the Fed would receive funds that didn’t previously exist. M1 money supply would boom as demand deposits surged

or since things seemed kind of good in the go-go housing days, maybe they could:

guarantee ‘no down payment’ loans of any amount to any borrower, with a promise never to foreclose or seek compensation in the result of default. By making home purchases risk-free, such a policy would surely re-energize the housing sector.

I’m sure they are getting huge political pressure to do just these sort of things. And they have signaled strongly that they do not want… cue ominous music… ‘deflation”.

So… do you prepare for deflation, or inflation. Inflation, of the hyper-kind, seems likely.

I just wish we didn’t have a Federal Reserve, private money seems much more secure.

I enjoy the Letters of Note site.  Sometimes the letters are silly, maudlin and just wrong. But usually they hark back to a kinder, slower, and more polite mode of communication.

Today, for instance, it has a letter from Hugh Hefner responding kindly to a collector who thought Playboy was important enough to collect:

A copy of the issue Hugh sent him is now hawked for $30 grand.

And.. I think I need to spruce up my letterhead.

Our family writing on the Tea Party Express.

I’d add “except for the 16th amendment” if I had to write it again.

Note that we are above the “gun toten redneck radical from Overton, NV”

How little did that radical know that I was probably packing bigger heat than him (-:

Brian explains to Santa his wish for a scorpion free world.
(showing him where a scorpion got him on his finger)
Dec 2001.

A recent finding by a New York researcher could be an important step to stopping Alzheimer’s Researchers have been trying to prevent growth of the plaque that causes Alzheimer’s by preventing a core component of it (gamma secretase which is used to make beta amyloid) from being made.  But the methods found so far of stopping it had too many other side effects elsewhere in the body.

Dr. Greengard has found a way of stopping gamma secretase  in the brain only.

That was what he had found: a targeting protein that sets in motion the activity of gamma secretase, which makes beta amyloid. To further test the discovery, he genetically engineered a strain of mice that had a gene for Alzheimer’s, but he blocked the gene for the gamma secretase activating protein. The animals appeared to be perfectly healthy. And they did not develop plaques in their brains.

As usual, more work is needed. Primarily in how to keep the drug in the brain. 

I hope this work is fast tracked, and I hope the FDA pulls its act together and realizes and permits Alzheimers and cancer drugs to market much quicker.  Time is running out for tens of millions entering the years of life where these diseases take hold.

After seeing my grandmother suffer from Alzheimer’s I do not think there is a pill or shot I wouldn’t gladly risk to avoid that fate. Almost any side effect would be better.

The latest from Merle Hazard America’s blue grassin’ist economist!

After watching this I want to get my mandolin out and chop a bit.

 
Bigger than any bank, but you didn’t know it was a bank

You may think British Petroleum is an oil company. And it is, sort of. What it really is is a finance company. It leverages its huge asset base (cash, cash flow, oil rights, physical assets) to get cheap credit that it then loans out to others at a higher price.

You didn’t know this?  Well, that is understandable. Do you think Obama and his crew know it? Or care?  They should. By trying to take down BP for their own political gain they could mess up  a precariously balanced, extremely leveraged,  and highly interconnected international finance system where BP is a major player in the 615 TRILLION dollar company to company finance market (also known as OTC or over-the-counter).

OTC is where the real work of global business happens. It is where money is loaned, risk managed, and profits made.

If trillions in BP backed financial instruments, such as derivatives, credit synthetic options, credit default swaps, and other global arbitrage instruments, fail the result could be a deleveraging and liquidity crisis that makes the Lehman Brothers event that precipitated billions in government bailouts look like a hot spring versus Krakatau.

For more on the risk BP financials threads pose, read this helpful article, Sultans of Swap, by Gordon Long.

You can ignore or take to heart his predictions. I find it useful to really know what BP is and why we need to tread carefully in what we impose on it.  This isn’t to say that companies can grow too big to be accountable, but with the good of large companies come plenty of risks. We can’t really have one without the other.

What I suggest is that Obama’s political skin isn’t worth, to the rest of us anyway, another, bigger, 2008 deleveraging event.

We can really only go one of two ways on these things. No controls, but make sure the players are playing with their money (not ours). OR do not permit these types of markets at all.  Government half regulating, 1/4 crony, and 1/4 witless cannot keep up with the pace and complexity of these markets that in many ways welcome regulation as just another thing they can arbitrage.

I favor letting them do their own thing, with their own money. They will learn to not dig holes they can’t climb out of if we aren’t there to bail them out.

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A golfer claims his swing, hitting a rock, caused a wild fire in California:

On his next swing, his club snagged a rock, causing a spark that lit the rough ablaze and eventually attracted 150 firefighters to the scene

Now if I were a betting man, I’d bet that this golfer was a smoker.  Or possibly that this guy had a gas golf cart that had a hot muffler. But I’m VERY dubious the spark off a club hitting a rock can start a fire.  Mao Tse-tung may believe it, but I don’t. Mythbusters… make a show!

Ah… the good old days. 

I don’t understand all this “combat troops” out of Iraq talk.  It still is dangerous there. 50,000 troops remain, all with significant combat capability and with real world patrolling and defense missions. Sounds like “combat” to me.

Reports like this remind me that our newspapers and media outlets just have no idea what they write about. In this case, they just go along with what the Obama administration wants to tout.   The touting, btw, is in support of 100 billion in budget cuts, not “we won”.  It’s “yippee, it’s okay to cut”.  It is okay to be a tool, but at least know it. I doubt the media really get it.

I supported the initial invasion of Iraq. Maybe this was just me being patriotic, but also a lot of it was that I thought we would be smart in victory, not dumb. So after the first three weeks, I supported very little of what went on.  We did not need to drive around getting ourselves blown up. We did not need to defend Sunni against Shiite against Kurd against Wahhabi. Far better would have been to just seal off any WMD sites, and then go to the Iran border and let Iraq sort itself out.

Our military has done an amazing, but unnecessary, and unsustainable, job in Iraq but ultimately the Iraqi culture is not up to the task of being our democratic ally in the region.  Maybe I’ll be proven wrong, hope so, but… I’m usually right and expect to be here.

So at a cost of trillions, 4,000 US deaths, and thousands more casualties we now have a new, sort of democratic nation where only a few hundred are blown up each month in car bombings.  We now have a near nuclear Iran, and we now have a true ally (Israel) mortally threatened. And instead of a forward base against Iran we have a nation we are plotting to retreat from as soon as possible.

All in all… I’d have to say, if this is victory, losing must REALLY suck. Clearly, it wasn’t worth it, and all in all, I’d have to say it is just more evidence that we aren’t the country we once were.  Is it unpatriotic to say this?  Maybe. I’d certainly hate to have a son killed there and read stuff like this.  But… I’ve got a son getting older every day, and I’d like to avoid him being wasted on ventures like this.

Put another way… if I knew then, what I know now, I’d have never supported doing anything other than trying to assassinate Saddam Hussein, or possibly invading and making a sharp right turn.

And… it will take Pearl Harbor II to convince me that anything other than targeted assassination and massive bombing should be our next response against countries that act against our interests.

Not unexpected. Enough peer pressure will get to anyone. Now the “skeptic” wants to declare global warming a “a challenge humanity must confront” and, here is the unshocking shocker, tax YOU to confront it.

In a Guardian interview, he said he would finance investment through a tax on carbon emissions that would also raise $50bn to mitigate the effect of climate change, for example by building better sea defences, and $100bn for global healthcare.

Yeah, like that would a) help and b) not be raised infinitely, c) not hurt way more people than imaginary global warming ever would.  Dumb move Lomborg, but alas, not surprising.

Anyway, Bjorn… I’m sorry, but not surprised, to see you become just another shill spreading fear of global warming to pump up and fund policies you prefer.

May your Danish winters be colder than normal now.