Ken Nelson

http://www.calwatchdog.com/2011/08/27/existing-pensions-also-will-be-cut/

It’s obvious that pensions for future government workers are being cut, and will be cut further. But California state and local governments’ unfunded liability for future pensions now is so large, $884 billion, that those already retired will see their pensions cut as well.

It will be very difficult, politically, for politicians in a California town to spend 70% or 80% of their budget on retirees they never met and that often live in other states.  Especially when many of those are young enough to continue working.

Is this unjust?  I’m not sure that matters. If they don’t have the money, something has to give.  But philosophically, I’ve got no problem ditching pensions that were political payoffs. Sure a “contract” is a “contract” but I, as a citizen, am not interested in contracts made between corrupt public unions and corrupt politicians bought by corrupt public unions.

Public money needs to be spent on the public good. That test doesn’t end just because some union boss and the politician he owns signs a “contract”.

My family homeschools. This year we’ve decided to try something called a Thomas Jefferson Education (http://www.tjed.org/). 

TJED follows these keys:

7 Keys of Great Teaching
There are seven principles of successful education. When they are applied, learning occurs for any learning style or interests. When they are ignored or rejected, the quantity and quality of education decreases.
keyinkeyhole2

    Classics, Not Textbooks
    Mentors, Not Professors
    Inspire, Not Require
    Structure Time, Not Content
    Simplicity, Not Complexity
    Quality, Not Conformity
    You, Not Them

I can tell you that my son is not digging the “classic” Uncle Tom’s Cabin… but decoding 18th century slave jargon must build something – character perhaps?

We’ve only been doing it about a week now, other than a short prep period, so the results are a bit early to decipher.  It has its plusses, a bit more social interaction than they’ve had in the past couple years, for instance.

And it’s cool that my son built a sextant and computed our latitude.

One drawback is that they meet on Thursdays. And I’d forgotten how “used” I’ve gotten to not having to factor our family schedule around pretty much anybody else.

I’ll update periodically on our experience with TJED.

Sums it up, doesn’t it?

H/T: The Corner

I found this article, “Confessions of a Car Dealer Service Manager” interesting:

Q: What’s the smartest thing you can buy from the dealer?

A:  A brand-name extended service contract. So if you’re buying a Ford, get a Ford contract. If it’s a Toyota, buy the Toyota contract. The opposite is also true. Never buy the extended service contract that’s generically offered through the dealer but isn’t backed by the brand of car they sell.

Also, take your car in on Monday morning, early, never Friday afternoon!

H/T: Instapundit

This chart may have the most implication of any chart you will see this week – and it is not even about economics!

http://chartsbin.com/view/2338

Basically, there is one woman for each man in the US. And 106 men for every woman in China. And 92 men for every woman in Russia.

And 127 males for every female in Saudi Arabia!

What does it mean?  IMHO…

Lots of unhappy men in Saudi Arabia, this is only important because that culture also provides money and boys to terrorists.

Although the % if lower, the sheer quantity of unhappy men in China will cause geopolitical angst.

Happy, choosy, men in Russia, as woman compete for a declining pool of available men.  Similar behavior happens at colleges in the US now.

The 2010’s could be the decade of the Russian Bride.

90% of the U.S. population doesn’t know about Ctrl-F.

What is “ctrl-f” ?

Let’s say you are in a web browser, say Internet Explorer. If you push these two keys at the same time:

You will get a seach box that searchs in the document you are reading.  So, for instance, if you want to search a Google search results for the query “help desk” for a link from Wikipedia. You would do the search and then hit “ctrl-f wiki”  and you would find it!

Note… on the Mac it is the “Alt-f” key sequence. Unless, of course, you are running a Windows app in an emulator on your Mac. Then it’s “ctrl-f”.

Simple! 

Via Instapundit

Since Rick Perry is starting to do well, you can expect plenty of attacks on him and Texas.  I’m sure he has his foibles, but Texas… it really doesn’t. At least not compared to most states.

Take education.

Paul Krugman and the Economist recently both poopoohed Texas education results. Texas ranks low in per pupil spending and about 47th in ACT/SAT test results.

John Debyshire and blogger Iowahawk point out that actually Texas does a lot better…

White students in Texas perform better than white students in Wisconsin, black students in Texas perform better than black students in Wisconsin, Hispanic students in Texas perform better than Hispanic students in Wisconsin. In 18 separate ethnicity-controlled comparisons, the only one where Wisconsin students performed better than their peers in Texas was 4th grade science for Hispanic students (statistically insignificant), and this was reversed by 8th grade. Further, Texas students exceeded the national average for their ethnic cohort in all 18 comparisons; Wisconsinites were below the national average in 8, above average in 8.

So they spend less and get GREAT results.  What’s not to like?  Nothing, except that apparently, they spend less and are run by Republicans?

Krugman is a long time fool. So if he says something, ignore it, or choose the opposite. 

I used to read the Economist and I wondered if the errors they made in things I know a lot about (tech, military) might also be happen in other areas.  In this case, education analysis/statistics, it sure seems wrong.   I suspect this is because most journalists (but not all) understand grammar but very few understand statistics or any of that “hard” stuff from school.

Journalism would improve if it was handled by mathematicians like Derbyshire. Or by anybody smart enough to get through a hard science college curriculum.

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I woke and saw that life was duty. I acted, and behold, duty was joy.

Rabindranath Tagore
Poet

H/T/  for quotation to David French of the National Review. He submits it in context of news of woman selectively aborting one of the twins they carry because they don’t want two college payments, or generally, the hassle of having two children.

In other words… they want it to be about them.

I like to work.  I like to get things done. I like to learn through study, travel and experience. I can’t imagine life on the dole. I wouldn’t call it a life I recognize.

That is what is so dispiriting about modern America, and especially modern England.  Sure, I’m irritated at pulling the wagon, but the bigger concern, to me at least, is that the people in the wagon seem to have such pitiful lives.

Frankly, I’m quite ready to throw folks without serious physical or mental disabilities out the wagon and into the water to see them swim. I’m pretty sure they will swim, and frankly, I don’t really care if they sink.

I don’t know if this is what Tagore had in mind when he wrote the lines above. I suspect not. He may view duty as paying for those on the dole.

I want to give those on the dole the chance to see the joy of duty.  It will give their life more purpose and meaning than the latest reality show on a state provided flat screen.

This story from the Warsaw Ghetto of WW II… inspires and frightens at the same time.

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/aug/05/local/la-me-survivors-20110805

He lay Natalie on their front step. Tears ran down his cheeks. You will make it, he thought. She had blond locks and blue eyes. They will think you are a Gentile, not one of us.

The inspiring part is obvious. What is frightening about it?  Well, to me it is a reminder that the specter of absolute tyranny is never far away, and it is always reaching, grabbing, and trying to ensnare.

Related… The Atlantic has an excellent ongoing series of photo essays from WW II:

http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/ww2.html

Not a protein in sight.

This morning I went out to my hotel’s common room to read in its comfortable chairs.  The large space also serves as the breakfast room. 

Of the approximately 40 adults I counted, most were fat. Not ‘plump’, but fat. The rest were just overweight, except for one guy who was very skinny.  I suspect he was a meth user (based on tattoos, dress and other mannerisms).

So, including the meth guy, I figured… yep, all of them are going to be pretty expensive for the “free” health care I was forced to fund in 2010.

Since most of them likely aren’t spending their own tax dollars on their health care, they are spending my money  to cover their biscuit and gravy induced diabetes.  And I can’t say I’m too happy with their choice for my money. Nope. Not at all!  Not personally. And not as a nation.

If you want to force me to pay for nuclear plants so we can have cheap electricity… heck I might even chip in more than you ask.  But putting a gun to my head and forcing me to cover your pastry and Frosted Flakes habit… doesn’t that seem wrong even to you?

If you inherited diabetes, or had an accident, hey, …I’m happy to help. But paying for your Type 2 diabetes caused by a pancreas blown by a syrup and cola induced perpetual sugar load hardly seems “charity”. It’s theft.

As an aside, I asked myself, “What would happen if the hotel put out good food to eat?”. Sadly I knew the answer… A lot of chunky folks griping. Sigh.

Am I safer because of the FDA?  I think not. I don’t want to buy snake oil medicines, but, frankly, I’d rather depend on yelp.com to tell me what works and what doesn’t than have the FDA hold up promising drugs and treatments for decades.   And it isn’t just the delay that hurts. By raising the cost of a new drug so high the FDA keeps ideas from being explored.

Since 9/11 2001, almost 11 years ago, nothing had been built to replace the Twin Towers. A hole in the ground remains.  Why didn’t we build a tower twice as big? Why didn’t we call it “FU” Towers?   Most American’s would concur with this sentiment.  Why didn’t we? Our government.

The largest thing created since 9/11 was the Homeland Security department, and our mountain of debt that yielded no return on investment.

I’m traveling, but a couple of days ago my wife called me saying that the non-profit organization I’m President of had gotten a nasty letter from the state of Utah, including a $15,000 lien. This was because, even though we had no sales yet,  we hadn’t filed our sales/use tax report for the 2nd quarter, which as it happened was our 1st quarter of existence as a non-profit entity.  I wondered about the state’s demand for money. What had they done to earn it?  They’d provided no service. They’d done nothing but make it hard to get setup and extract fees and make us pay for expensive legal and accountancy services. When I had a question about hiring people they took a week to answer “you need to ask somebody else”.  They were quite prompt, however, in noticing we hadn’t done some minor paperwork with them.

When I drive back home, I’ll have to run a gauntlet of police, nominally there to “protect me”, but really just modern day highway man eager extract money from me as I drive thru.   When I actually get home my threat of being stopped and extorted will actually rise, as my home town police live to stop and take.  They call it “community policing”. I call it… theft. These are the police, by the way, that certainly weren’t very eager, alas, to prevent my truck from being stolen.  Or to catch who did it. Or to prevent who did it from roaming about hoisting cars at 3AM.

At the root of all this nonsense is the bureaucrat.  You know them, they get pay raises during a recession. They audit my company in the winter when it’s cold in Northern Utah. They live to stop. They live to extort.  They live to micro-regulate everybody else, and then go home at 5 o’clock and pretend they accomplished something productive.

How do they do it? How do they justify such an existence? Preying on the productivity of others. Stopping. Halting. Plundering. Is human rationalization so powerful that they just don’t see it?   It must be because they get up each morning, hit the Starbucks drive-thru, and get to the office to move a pile of paper from one spot to another. To say no a thousands more times.  It’s enough to make one wonder if maybe we already met St. Peter and this was the judgment.

I’ve been traveling in Southern California for a couple weeks now.  My short dip back into SoCal culture fully confirms why people leave here. Yes the weather is nice. But the traffic and the discouraging and tawdry culture make me eager to head anywhere else.

Parents here seem confused about their role and duties.  The confusion manifests publically in two large ways:

• over-sexualized clothing on pre-teen and younger girls
• uncontrolled behavior in public by toddlers and young children.

I’m not a prude by any means, but letting your pre-teen daughter dress in fishnet seems odd and a clear indicator of trouble in a few short years.  Over sexualized attire seemed centered in Hispanic youth and families. I don’t know why.

Dressing to attract male interest at an age where male interest should not be attracted seems an odd thing for a parent to pay for and permit.  I don’t, and wouldn’t permit it in my home.  Yet it was not uncommon to see fishnet wearing Mom walking around with fishnet wearing daughter.

They were trying to be their best friend, not their parent.  Bad idea.

Then we go to the opposite issue… parents that aren’t being anything. Every time I’ve eaten out here I’ve encountered parents with toddlers and pre-kindergarten age kids that ignored their children. They didn’t talk with them. Didn’t engage with them. Didn’t give them guidance. And the kids ran amok. If they bothered to pull their nose out of their phone call, or texting, they would tell the kids to “stop that” or “get back here”, which the kids would ignore, and the parents would go back to their electronic interest, while the kids continued their screamfest running amok. 

Parents… Tell your kid something once, and then enforce it.   You aren’t their friend, you are their PARENT.  You aren’t there to “hang out” or “socialize” with them but to SOCIALIZE THEM.

If California is our national canary, then debt isn’t the only thing it sings a warning about.

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I reserve the right to change my mind… but of the folks running now I’d pick Michele Bachman for President, and Rick Perry for Vice-President.

Why not reverse?  Why not 14 years Texas Governor Perry on the top of the ticket?  I don’t trust him to not to something REALLY stupid on immigration. I do, however, trust him to attack Washington D.C. where it deserves.   If he weren’t for amnesty he’d have my full support based on his results in Texas.   The last thing we need is Perry getting rolled by lying Democrats and trading 25 million new Mexican Democrats for fake spending cuts. Nope… I’ve read that book, don’t need to try the sequel…

And I definitely think Bachman will hold the line on things I care about. No compromise. That is over!  It never worked, and it just made things worse. No MORE!

Oh sure, I’d rather have Gary Johnson, but hey, if he can’t even force himself into the debates, how is he going to force his way through Democrats on the Hill?

Let’s get Diabetes!

http://www.letsmove.gov/learn-facts/epidemic-childhood-obesity

Has facts that aren’t facts, but are plain wrong.  Science doesn’t back them up. Logic doesn’t back them up.  Most of what is there is pure poppycock, written in correct grammar.

I suspect that Michelle Obama’s genetics let her eat whatever she likes, in copious quantities, and not gain weight.  I’m similar. I’ve put on a bit of weight after my pituitary failed due to an accident, but I’ve spent most of my life eating everything I could and staying the same weight. Others aren’t so genetically fortunate.

About 60,000 generations of humans shaped human evolution during the Stone Age. Perhaps 10 have occurred in the Industrial Age. Maybe 600 in the age of agriculture.  Put another way, 99.something % of our human evolution and adaptation happened when we were hunter gatherers.

What do hunter gatherer’s eat?  Meat.  The fattest yummiest meat they can get their hands on. In percentages ranging from 80% to 100% of their daily nutrition.  When they eat fruit it, it is typically during a short period of the year, prior to “hard times”, also known as “winter”.  The plant material they gather is not dense in nutrition and is wrapped, generally, in hard to digest fiber.  Hunter gatherers are not fat.

Hunter gatherer’s do not have “western” diseases. Heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s are unheard of in their cultures. Yet, when they begin eating like us their rates of those diseases hit Western levels quickly.

So it would make sense, logically and historically, to want to eat as they do. And science backs that logic up. When you eat like a hunter gatherer you don’t get fat, you lose fat if you are fat, you are not lethargic, and your risk of many Western diseases such as diabetes and heart disease disappear.

So why would Michelle, and the USDA, and other parts of our government recommend this food plate:

Why would they recommend this really bad advice:

Make half your plate fruits and vegetables.
      ●     Make at least half your grains whole grains.
      ●     Switch to fat-free or low-fat (1%) milk.

Why?  Do they want us to get diabetes?  Do they want us to have heart failure? Do they want us to be fat, lethargic and tired?

I don’t think they want us to do have those problems. But I think they care less about us than about their preconceived notion of how the world works. They treat nutrition like they treat economics – what works need not apply.

So my advice to the nation…. if you want to live a happy, healthy, economically prosperous life… DO EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT MICHELLE OBAMA and YOUR GOVERNMENT TELL YOU.

Eat this folks:

Fatty meats, some seaweed, and a few veggies

Or this:

(minus the corn chip)

or this:

Whatever you do… AVOID what Michelle and her USDA buddies recommend!

For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what LBJ’s Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population”.

Mark Steyn
In “After America”

Via Polipundit