Diplomats and twitter

Wow. And I thought that diplomacy was a slow-speed game, designed so that hotheads of all nations wouldn't put their finger on the red button. Silly me.

http://twitchy.com/2012/11/26/us-embassy-cairo-continues-its-fail-tweets-glad-mubarak-is-gone-revolution-meant-fellow-democratic-country/

To follow or not, a passion

Cal Thomas, in a NYT oped argues that following a passion is the opposite of what someone should do. Instead, figure out the traits that make you happy and put the time in to really become competent at something. Then you'll feel fulfilled and passion will find you. Worthwhile reading.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/jobs/follow-a-career-passion-let-it-follow-you.html?src=me&ref=general&gwh=526BF172F3237B7EBB37570D5DA6CF53

Obama Phones?

A youtube video of a woman saying she was going to vote for Obama because he "gave" her a phone has recently gone viral on the web.

The truth is that there is a federal program that gives people with specific needs access to subsidized cell phones.

The second truth is that the program is ripe with fraud, and there is a bipartisan effort to get rid of the fraud.

http://mccaskill.senate.gov/?p=press_release&id=1428

Unfortunately, with all the mudslinging, the phone seems to be a black or white issue - keep it or get rid of it. The truth is somewhere in the middle: but how to get rid of the fraud. Both parties need to focus on the real issue: how to help our most vulnerable citizens, and get rid of the freeloaders.

I just discovered this blog: finally, an easy to understand argument about why low capital gains taxes are not a bad thing, and actually help the economy.

http://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2012/09/22/the-wall-street-journals-primer-on-capital-gains-taxation/

VDH on BHO

I love Victor Davis Hanson's writing.

From his column this week, a trenchant observation:

You can scream at, tax, regulate, and berate an employer, but you cannot force him, not yet anyway, to go out and hire and buy new equipment. Obama tried all that and almost single-handedly has ensured that a weak recovery of June 2009 would become a permanent weaker recovery. All the one-percent rhetoric — fat cat, pay your fair share, corporate jet owners, now is not the time to profit, spread the wealth, redistribution, you didn’t build that —  did was to terrify the private sector, flush with savings, into paralysis. 

The false accusation that it is the 1 percent that is holding the country back does nothing to advance us (or even to help those who are literally starving for work. When a government forces employers to do things, the result is famine (Russia, China, Venezuela, Cuba.)


What gets left on the edit room floor? Here are some clips from recent 60min interviews w/ both Romney and Obama. http://www.cbsnews.com/8334-504803_162-57518524-10391709/unaired-excerpts-from-the-obama-romney-interviews

education

Next month, the movie Won't Back Down will be released. The movie is loosely based on the story of parent-activists in Oakland CA who pushed reform on their failing school. When the trailer was shown at the DNC convention this summer, it was applauded. No-one likes failing schools, everyone likes activists. The problem, according to Richard Fernandez, is that the ending to the real story was not happy: there has been no change - the concessions are locked up in court proceedures.

http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2012/09/23/happy-endings/#more-24581

So it is with Chicago. With so many dismal failures, so many children/adolescents that quit school unable to read/compute sums beyond a third grade level, how can it be that the unions have many of their financial "needs" recognized?

I am so glad that I am homeschooling.

Ouch.

French manufacturing hits lows. So what happened? http://www.markiteconomics.com/MarkitFiles/Pages/ViewPressRelease.aspx?ID=10071

supply and demand

From Coyote blog:

http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2012/09/how-government-interventions-affect-health-care-supply-and-demand.html

The discussion in the comment section about physician supply (med school admissions, foreign trained md usage) is particularly interesting. My question: where is innovation in the pharmaceutical world actually happening?

Ie: what combination of US/Canada/EU? Is there a way to suss out the numbers?

Paul Rahe discusses the superbug that has hit 6 percent of hospitals in the US, and mentions that there are no antibiotics in the pipeline. Is this due to limited demand? I think of the abandon of the Lyme vaccine in the late 90s... if this is indeed the trend, without free market incentives, I shudder to think about the consequences for those small minorities that have unusual and difficult to treat illnesses, both acquired and genetic.

It is impossible to mandate creativity and innovation. The countries that tried ended up killing millions of their own people (China, Soviet Union,)  Is this the slippery slope that we want to continue to follow?

3d printers

3d printing just got added to my I want (but don't need list.)

So cool,

What kinds of apps? (custom legos??)

http://www.wired.com/design/2012/09/how-makerbots-replicator2-will-launch-era-of-desktop-manufacturing/all/?pid=911

Thomas Sowell on Redistribution

I love Thomas Sowell's clear and concise explanations. Here, he speaks out on the video that just surfaced about Pres. Obama's views on collectivism and the common good.

The key quote:

If the redistributionists were serious, what they would want to distribute is the ability to fish, or to be productive in other ways. Knowledge is one of the few things that can be distributed to people without reducing the amount held by others.

That would better serve the interests of the poor, but it would not serve the interests of politicians who want to exercise power, and to get the votes of people who are dependent on them.

My question, asked by the interviewer, was not really answered. Who decides best practices, media control, investments? It's all well and good to state that everyone must be involved, that one must practice democracy with a small "d," but really, that presupposes that everyone is perfectly matched to their job, that everyone's needs and desires are not only taken into account, but fulfilled... The Soviet model tried selling this idea, and 20-30 million lives were lost. Mao TseTung, too, tried the Great Leap Forward, and up to five times more people lost their lives. I'm not ready to advance the hypothesis that we, as a country, are headed down that particular path, but then again, who would've thought, 20 years ago, that Venezuela would be the basket case that it is today? All it takes is one small step and a slippery slope....

college bubble

Megan McArdle weighs in on college costs.

Colleges are collusive oligopolies. It is not until the market is truly open to free choice that the prices will stabilize or fall. What incentive is there to do this, currently, outside of pride? We need to realize that these institutions of higher learning are not providing education because it's a good thing, but rather, because they make money, provide prestige to their faculty, and in general do all the things that a for-profit corporation does. To pretend otherwise is disingenuous.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/09/09/megan-mcardle-on-the-coming-burst-of-the-college-bubble.html

Chicago school strikes

The teachers in Chicago are on strike this week, and Richard Fernandez discusses that the sticky point is not the pay raise, offered, not accepted, but rather how the teachers are going to be evaluated (the weight of testing) and who will be hired first (the unions want first fired first hired.)and not about the children.

Klein notes that the “2010-11 annual teacher salaries ranged from $47,268 for teachers with bachelor’s degree with a year’s experience or less, to $88,680 for those with doctorates who have at least 16 years of experience … All told, teachers in Chicago make an average of $74,839 a year.” And a 16% raise is not bad in a recession economy.

But with 80% of Chicago students unable to meet the Department of Education standards in both literacy and mathematics, it not obvious that taxpayers are getting a lot of value for money. All the same, it’s good theater.

As Fernandez' discussion moves forward, he observes the irony of Rahm Emmanuel taking on the unions. Is it a "Richard Nixon goes to China" moment? Perhaps not, but at some point, the rule of law needs to be upheld, even by those that don't necessarily adhere to it.

Politics is a rough world. That’s just a fact. Why is it so? Perhaps Mammon has something to do with it. The Bible — that two-thousand year old book of delusions — observes that “the love of money is the root of all evil.” Ironically, many in DNC agree that money is the problem, especially when somebody else has it.  Peter Schiff, interviewing delegates during the Democratic convention, noted that disdain for money was so great that many were eager to ban profits altogether, the better to transfer it to themselves.

http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2012/09/10/harbinger-2/?singlepage=true

Unless you have money in the US, your children are stuck in public schools: whether they are good schools or not seems to depend on your neighborhood (so again, on what you can afford to rent/buy.) Both in Germany and in France, private schools are subsidized, so that even though parents don't have too much influence on curriculum, they have a choice on how it is taught. In the US, there are two ways to get around this problem, neither which are mainstream/acceptable options. Homeschooling and vouchers.

If you accept that this strike is about maximizing income and job security, and not about job conditions, it is clearly not about teaching children. Most teachers begin their career, I would suspect, because they truly love to work with children, and then they get sucked into a system when Mammon is key. What is the way out? What truly helps out children?

The Big Economic Debate

Yup.  

Organic Foods

A new study shows that organic foods are not necessarily higher in vitamins. OK, we know that plants don't care about the origins of their minerals. What is important here is:

1. Organic farming methods are  better for the soil, and thus longevity for the farm.  Not too many people talk about this, but how long can industrial farmers keep working on soil that becomes increasingly barren, without running the risk of a new dust-bowl era?

2. Produce sourced from far away is subject to many transportation problems - contamination (eg listeria, salmonella), bruising (and lack of taste due to early harvesting.) The cost of such transportation is not incidental, either. Do we really need to buy fruit from South America? Or peaches in Nov.? Personally, I have never been able to home-ripen the rocks that pass for peaches in the grocery store, despite my best efforts, and I have finally concluded that the only way to enjoy them is if I buy them at the local farm, and can them myself.

3. This article points out that residual antibiotics and pesticides were more commonly found on the conventional foods. Yet these traces were still below FDA guidelines. What does that mean? Some organic pesticides are just as bad as inorganics. And a question: is it better to put a lot of pesticides on your crop (eg corn,) or use a small amount because the seed is a gmo? Is that trade-off even necessary?

Organic Food

The most interesting line on this video from the NYT's interview with Michael Potter, founder and CEO of Eden Foods is that organic is much more than ingredients. "Organic means the health of the soil, the quality of the soil that produces the plant." (1.50)

What do you think when you hear the word organic? Does it mean simply no added inorganic components (pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers?)

Several years ago, I decided to spend a semester studying plants at our local agricultural college, and it was there that I learned how plants "eat." Basically, the process is called translocation, in which the roots suck in molecules such as K+, and Na+ and deliver them up the plant. Combined with water and CO2, using the power of sunshine, the plant produces simple sugars with mineral componenets.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/business/organic-food-purists-worry-about-big-companies-influence.html?pagewanted=all

About that tax hike...

Maybe I'm not seeing clear this am, but people like Sergey Brin, Walter Buffet, and others cited in this article seem to be making money through their shares of stock. Remember, stock is not taxed until it is sold. So, it is probably safe to say that the most that they will pay would be the AMT -- which is vastly reduced by charitable contributions. How does increasing the tax rate on earned income change this for these 1 percent??

Arafat - victim of polonium poisoning?

From USA Today: Tests show that Arafat might have been a victim of polonium poisoning. This is the same stuff that killed Livechencko, the Russian billionaire, several years ago. So, does that mean that the KGB offed Arafat? If we believe Ion Pacepa, the former head of the Romanian secret service, granted political asylum by the Americans in the late 70s, Arafat was a creation of Andropov. This information came to public ears in March 2004. Arafat died in October of that year. Layers upon layers upon layers...

On Schooling

I spent the better part of Sunday afternoon sitting on the floor listening to the dreams and aspirations of many young parents. Their questions: what characterizes a good education, what is the value of education, do schools provide a good education?

My question: what are the skills and tools that we (parents, community) can give our children in order to enable them to live independent, healthy lives as adults?

In no particular order: grit, (determination, work ethic); self-confidence tempered with a dose of humility, compassion, drive.

Then, ability to pull diverse pieces of a puzzle together (creativity). Skills to see the big picture, as well as to look for the small details. Patience.

Others?

The Way Back Machine

As various politicians and pundits amuse themselves slinging mud at each other in an adult version of the playground wars, it becomes more and more clear how historical data saved somewhere in the cloud has become a powerful tool for the least empowered members of our society. No longer forced to pay large sums of money to Nexus-Lexus, nor to sit in libraries pouring through microfilms and micro-fiches, the average voter can, possibly for the first time, find out what was truly said, rather than rely on blanket statements of "He said, she said" from the chattering class. The power of memory seems to frighten those who live and work in DC - at least when it happens here, rather than Tahir Square, but for the rest of us-- we live in exciting times.
Here's the direct link - give it a try! http://archive.org/web/web.php

The Reverse Gender Gap

Ever since I plunged into the world of children's literature, shortly after the birth of my first child,  I've been struck by the absence of strong, positive, male role models in the stories that they most love to read. As a child, the moment I realized that my cousins had the Hardy Boys was when my copies of Nancy Drew went into the attic. Today's boys however, have the anti-hero: Artemis Fowl; or the hero in search of himself: Harry Potter; or the clueless hero: Percy Jackson. The really interesting books all involve groups of boys and girls: The Mysterious Benedict Society.

  Anecdotally, I've heard that it's easier for a young man to get into certain competitive colleges - even in stem disciplines.

And once you enter the work force, it's the young women who have pulled ahead. Citing higher motivation and better work ethic from young women, the NY Times points out the lack, at the top, of young men.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/us/14iht-letter14.html?_r=1&src=recg

What does this mean for my sons? For our society in general?

Leadership

http://theinnovativeeducator.blogspot.com/2012/05/traits-of-effective-online-community.html

http://connectededucators.org/community/powerful-learning-practice/?interview=1

After Slow Food, slow reading

When the boys were in the early elementary school years, there was a program called DEAR - drop everything and read. They loved it. I did too, but often wondered why they were left to read whatever they want, and why their reading (in school) wasn't a bit more guided. Artemis Fowl, Deeper, ... are all interesting reads, but they are quite shallow. Since we have begun homeschooling, I have tried to focus DS2 a bit more on classical reading. In the last couple of months, for example, we have read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, The Time Machine, and A Christmas Carol. At first, I got a lot of blowback (complicated storylines, vocabulary, ...), but now I notice that he really likes to read the classics, and will turn to the popular paperbacks only when very tired and bored.

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/03/a-slow-books-manifesto/254884/

Rue Copernic redux?

It was 30 years ago that a wave of brutal terrorism hit France. The first major bloodshed came from Paris, and just the names of the streets - rue des Rosiers, rue Copernic - are enough to remind everyone of what went on to be over 60 attacks during the course of the next 10 years. Interestingly enough, since the attacks were unsigned, and since the victims were Jewish, the assumption was made that the perpetrators were members of a fringe Neo-nazi group. Much of the police work that followed was based on that assumption, and it was not until 2011 that French justice conclusively identified Fatah (under Abu Nidal) as the perpetrator of these attacks.
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusillade_de_la_rue_des_Rosiers

I read about the horror of the murders in Toulouse, and I wonder what will happen next?
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/72055f4c-7278-11e1-9c23-00144feab49a.html#axzz1pka6xs1t

The oh so liberal Dutch

I wonder what Stephen Hawking thinks about this.

Approximately 21 percent of the infant euthanasia deaths occurred without request or consent of parents. 

The Swamp is draining... maybe?

It appears that Solyndra was just the beginning.

Overall, the Post found that $3.9 billion in federal grants and financing flowed to 21 companies backed by firms with connections to five Obama administration staffers and advisers.

Health Care

The Daily Caller tells us that Jonathan Gruber of MIT, and a key player in the Obama health care plan design, has done a 180 in the estimation of costs. Key quote:

“After the application of tax subsidies, 59 percent of the individual market will experience an average premium increase of 31 percent,” Gruber reported.

It seems that Gruber was referring only to three states. However, it seems unrealistic to believe that economies of scale will fall into place across a population of 350,000,000. The costs of administrating a national plan can't be negligable.

Equally disturbing is the amount that Gruber received in non-competitive bids: nearly a million dollars. When political figures are accused of selling out for half this amount or less, I wonder how sincere his analyses were prior to the adoption of ObamaCare. And how accurate they are now.

As I currently negotiate the detours set up for our small family with our new insurance plan, I can't help but being resentful that Teddy Kennedy - as a legal resident of MA - was able to get the best care that he could, at Duke. The ordinary person, without that extraordinary wealth, can't do the same. ObamaCare, although in theory a way to provide insurance for even the poorest, is in fact, a plan that strangles far more than it helps.

Read more here.

Jack Abramoff Spills the Beans

In a nutshell, here's an argument for term limits.

Generally, however, legal analysts say that Wall Street insider trading laws do not apply to Congress. As an open and public institution, the legal assumption has long been that any member of the public can have access to information about how Congress works. In practice, though, that's simply not true, as powerful members of Congress come into contact daily with market-moving tidbits. That gap between the law and the reality has made Capitol Hill a virtual free-fire zone for insider trading. Over the years, academic studies have found that members of the House of Representatives beat the market by as much as six percent per year and members of the Senate do even better than that.

Guess that explains why so many people start off with little personal wealth, and end up multi-millionaires. And it's not a partisan issue. Interesting that much of the research was done by the Hoover Institute, rather than, say, Brookings. Spending time in jail, a la Martha Stewart, is sooo 20th century, apparently.

Update: The Senate has passed a bill called the STOCK Act. It's about time. Now let's see the House follow suit.

Making a pact with the devil

For much of the last 15 or so years, we have not had to pay for our internet use outside of connection minutes. Email, web-browsing, Facebook, (MySpace), Twitter-- all have been free for the user, subsidized through outside advertising. Little by little, the barrier between those who pay and those who don't has been reduced. Recently, Google announced a significant change in their privacy policy that allows for cross-platform sharing of data, Twitter announced recently that it will allow government censorship (something Google did years ago).
Should we be surprised that there is no such thing as a free lunch?

Pipeline Politics

So it has come down to this: denied the Keystone extension,  Canada will look elsewhere for customers.

Does the average anti-pipeline environmentalist truly believe that this is a good thing? Looking past the short-term lack of job creation, it ultimately means that Americans will be paying a higher price for oil coming from such environmentally-conscious areas such as Venezuela, Nigeria, Mexico... This price increase will not touch the 1 percent, it probably will not even touch the 10 or 15 percent. But it will hit a lot of people who cannot afford the extra 1-2k per year. People who live in cold areas: New England, for example. People who commute via car or bus to work. True enough, the population is shifting to warmer climates - Texas, Arizona to name but two - but that move brings other problems with it. Water use, for example. And as far as living more than a bike ride or a walk away from work... is it realistic to shut down the suburbs?

It is far too facile to think that raised prices of fossil fuel will shift demand to alternative energy sources - even in the long-term. Think of France where high energy prices are a de-facto way of life and have been for over two decades. Public transportation used to be a way of life. Today, and for the last 10 years, investment in train transportation has diminished in every area but one: the long-haul TGV. Yes, people drive diesel-engine cars - but that does not mean that they are particularly environmentally friendly. Nearly the only way that France is independent of oil is in the energy sector: over 90 percent of electricity is provided by nuclear power. Given that there are no plans for nuclear plant production in the US, it's a no-brainer to see that our economy will not be weaned from fossil fuels in the near future, if at all.

This desire on the part of a vocal, wealthy minority to avoid potential environmental damage in the US only pushes development into other areas of the world where skill and infrastructure are not as highly developed in the US. It increases the potential for environmental damage. Is that truly what is desired - or are the vocal few simply NIMBYs?

Update: Cuba is now in the process of developing their deep-water capacity in the Gulf of Mexico. We get the pollution - who gets the energy?  http://gcaptain.com/billion-barrels-undiscovered-oil/?30418

Etta James

One of the hardest things to do as a musician (and maybe this is true of life in general, now that I think of it,) is to maintain a story at a slow tempo. In this live version of At Last, Etta James succeeds  in a way that keeps you on the edge of your chair.

A decade earlier she was captured live at Montreux with Damn Your Eyes

I hope I have such passion when I'm past 70.

RIP Etta James.

American Exceptionalism?

In a provocative article, Charles Murray, writing in the New Criterion, makes the argument that the increasingly divided society of today's America threatens the definition of American exceptionalism.  
What is American exceptionalism? 

Historically, Americans have been seen as different, even peculiar, to people around the world.1 I am thinking of qualities such as American industriousness—not just hard work, but the way that Americans have treated their work and their efforts to get ahead in life as a central expression of who they are. There is American neighborliness. Many cultures have traditions of generous hospitality to guests, but widespread voluntary mutual assistance among unrelated people who happen to live alongside each other has been rare. In the United States, it has been ubiquitous. I am thinking also of qualities such as American optimism, present even when there doesn’t seem to be any good reason for it; our striking lack of class envy; the assumption by most Americans that they are in control of their own destinies; and our famous naïveté in assuming the best of a random person that we come across. Finally, there is the most lovable of exceptional American qualities: our tradition of insisting that we are part of the middle class, even if we aren’t, and of interacting with our fellow citizens as if we were all middle class.

This last sentence is particularly important, and one that had been remarked upon from the earliest days of the Republic. Murray explains: 

Tocqueville, when explaining why the American system ensured that a despot could never successfully divide Americans against each other, wrote that “local freedom . . . perpetually brings men together, and forces them to help one another, in spite of the propensities which sever them. In the United States, the more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people. On the contrary, they constantly keep on easy terms with the lower classes: they listen to them, they speak to them every day.”

The problem, however, is that over the past half century, people have grown increasingly isolated from each other - and no longer understand each other. The end result - a class-based society that is not so different from other "complex" societies.

When people are making decisions that affect the lives of many other people, the cultural isolation that has grown up around America’s new upper class can be disastrous. It is not a problem if truck drivers cannot empathize with the priorities of Yale law professors. It is a problem if Yale law professors, or producers of the nightly news, or CEOs of great corporations, or the President’s advisors, cannot empathize with the priorities of truck drivers.

The whole article is a must read.

Demystifying the Koran

Really interesting take from the Economist:

http://www.economist.com/node/21542162?fsrc=scn/tw/te/ar/inthebeginning