So what is poverty, anyway?

http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/07/what-is-poverty

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