Thursday, July 30, 2009
Idiots in Commercials
I just heard some voice-over numbskull saying that “because you only have to take two pills of pain reliever ‘A’, while you would need eight pills of pain reliever ‘T’, you would take four times fewer pills”.
You fucking moron.
There is no such thing as “four times fewer”. Even the kids on “Are You Smarter Than A Fifth-Grader” know that when you multiply by a number larger than 1, it is NOT “fewer”. I’ll leave it to you to determine whether four is larger or smaller than one.
This kind of imprecise mathematical language - such as “200% cleaner”, or “150% less” - drives me up the wall.
“200% cleaner” than what, pray tell? Cleaner than the sewer? Your average kitchen? My mother’s kitchen? An operating room? And what kind of standard is being used - number of germs killed (and who gets to do the count?), number of germs remaining (without a germ census before, such measurements are worthless), or is it how much of a pine oil aroma you have?
And since we will have “150% less”, that means that there is 50% less than zero, right?
Only when it comes to the IQs of the idiots writing those ads, pal…
Monday, July 27, 2009
People just can’t grasp large numbers
With all of the talk about the large numbers being bandied about, it strikes me that people aren’t nearly as angry at the spending as they should be, and I think one reason is because we cannot grasp such numbers emotionally - y’know, down deep where our emotional responses come from.
I’ll give you a case on point.
Imagine that you own a piece of land measuring one square mile - a mere 640 acres (or approximately 259 hectares, if you prefer - 258.9981, to be precise). Imagine still further that it has rained, and exactly one inch of rain has fallen on your land. Imagine still further that you have miraculously collected every drop of that water, and bottled it away for the coming apocalypse.
At the rate of one gallon per day (eight pints, or 3.8 liters), every day, how long would it take you to drink all that water?
Before you skyoodle off to get your calculator, I want you to think about it first, and tell me what standard of time you think you will end up with. Minutes? Hours? Days? Weeks? Months, years, decades?
Take a rough guess before you do all the calculations, and then do them, only to be amazed at how far off your estimate actually was. (There are exactly 231 cubic inches in a gallon, just to make your number-crunching easier.) Let me give you a hint: you are very likely guessing WAY too low.
Can you see why people just aren’t paying attention to the professional liars politicians and lawyers spending literally trillions of dollars on a subject that intimately affects every single person on the continent? (When our health care system is as bad as Canada, where will those Canadians go for prompt care? Cuba?)
There is just no emotional connection for such large numbers.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
I wonder how many people would support
the repealing of the 16th and 17th Amendments?
There are two different ways of getting an Amendment to the Constitution ratified - either 1) through the Congress voting it out with 2/3rds majority in both chambers, and getting ratified by 3/4ths of the various State Legislatures; or, 2) a Constitutional Convention (which requires 2/3rds of the State Legislatures to request one), and then have any of its changes and Amendments ratified by that same 3/4 majority.
I cannot understand why the States would have ceded their autonomy by voting to ratify either of those two Amendments.
The 16th is the one that gave the Federal Government the right to tax incomes, which gave it a whole new power to punish individuals and businesses it deemed as “unpopular” (cv, the 100% punitive taxation on bonuses paid under perfectly legal employment contracts, or “windfall profit taxes” on oil companies), or to use the self-contradictory tax codes to punish political enemies (cv Clinton’s use of the IRS tax audit against popular conservative figures).
The current tax code is harder to understand than Bob Dylan reading Finnegans Wake in a wind tunnel.—Dennis Miller
Remember, folks, the initial tax rate was only 1% on taxable net income above $3,000 ($4,000 for married couples), less deductions and exemptions. (It rose to a high of 7% on incomes above $500,000, a veritable fortune a century ago.)
But as Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in McCulloch v. Maryland, “the power to tax involves the power to destroy”. Every dollar given to the government is one dollar less than can be used to improve the standard of living of the citizens living under that government.
Admittedly, there are necessary functions of government - roads, national protection, fair treatment under the law for all, etc. But, just like any parasite, now that it has been given control of the rate at which it can grow, it will choose to grow unimpeded, looking for ways to justify its size and complexity.
Government does not tax to get the money it needs; government always finds a need for the money it gets.—Ronald Reagan
Add that to the 17th Amendment - taking control of the States away from the actual government of those States and making those races subject to the whims of the populace - and there is now nothing to stop the government from treating the States the same way that the States treat the county governments - as an essentially unnecessary level of bureaucracy.
The Federal Government was supposed to be a unifying force between the various States, who were independent and sovereign unto themselves. It guaranteed rights throughout its coverage, so that if you had the right to vote in one State, you couldn’t be denied the right to vote in any of the other States. Each State would get to pass its own laws on anything not specifically mentioned in the Constitution, such as marriage laws, licensing of various occupations, educational standards, speed limits, etc., etc. And if a person living in (say) Nebraska didn’t like the laws prohibiting him from hiring a prostitute, he could go to one of the other States where such things were legal (such as Nevada). If he didn’t like the schools teaching his kids about Intelligent Design, he could move to where such things are kept in Comparative Religion college courses.
The States were supposed to be left as laboratories for Historical comparison, where each State tried out a slightly different system and set-up, and those that worked were kept, while those that didn’t work as well as their neighboring States were scrapped and their neighbor’s ideas adapted and tried out.
Each State had its own government, and the Senate was supposed to be the State’s representation at the Federal level, while the People, Deity bless their grubby little hearts, were represented in the House of Representatives (also known as The People’s House), based entirely on collections of population, without regard to occupation or religion or age or gender or educational level, just groups of people as close to the same number of people as could be managed. That is why Senators are elected for six year terms, and House members are only elected every other year. People will change their minds much more quickly than bureaucracies will.
But when the 17th Amendment was ratified, the States lost that voice, and their moderating influence, in the Federal Government.
Massively expand the size, remove any moderation, and allow the Federal Government to decide what kind of things it will get to control, and you have what we have today, where the Federal Government is now trying to tell us what kind of light bulbs we are allowed to put in the lamps in our homes.
That kind of intrusiveness would have been met with a suspicious glare and a shotgun a century ago.
Maybe it’s time to tell DC to go fuck themselves.
Maybe it’s the website, Drummy….
.....but on Friday, I started having vertigo.
Yep. Add me to the list of strange maladies that are temporary crippling, but cannot be fully explained to the uninitiated.
Mine is a benign sort of vertigo that is caused by particles floating around in those inner ear canals that work to balance you....when these particles touch of collect on the sensory cells, my world goes bouncy-spinny.
Yep...it sucks. The good thing is that if I stay upright, I avoid the vertigo. It’s only occurring when I lay down flat and turn my head. It’s then I snap into vertigo, and it is rather disconcerting.
There is a therapy for it, and I tried it on Friday, but I wasn’t successful. I think the doc will have to do it on Monday, after I get some Advert into my system (that’s anti-nausea medicine).
Here’s a link to what BPPV is, and I’ll keep you posted. If there isn’t a big-time problem with me (brain tumor, ear infection, head injury I don’t know about) this should resolve in short order with the therapy.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Mind Your Business
If you play with fire...
Here’s the long and the short of this story. Some dingbat professor goes a little bit nuts and acts a little bit weird and gets a little bit aggressive with the cops. As a result, he is taken into custody. The fat around the edges of this Porterhouse of a story is that the professor was at his house, yet there was a call for service to the police of a suspect fitting the description of the professor who was attempting the break into the house. When the police arrived, they saw a man fooling around with a door and trying to force his way into a house.
The professor dings-out on the police, and instead of simply saying “this is my house, and here is my identification,” he decides to stand his ground and get feisty. Getting feisty with the police means you’re going to get arrested.
I see weird stuff like this every darned day. Only it’s in the ghetto, where bad people do bad things with really bad weapons such as fully-automatic rifles and handguns. Yet the citizens of the community know an understand that iif they are acting shady and doing something in front of or to a house or car, we’re going to stop them, question them, and if everything checks out, they’re good to go. We hop in our car and move on to the next call. How half a million people in the ghetto can understand this plain and simple course of logic, yet a college professor cannot, is beyond me.
But back to the story. The professor dings-out and is arrested for disorderly conduct. That is a very fitting charge for someone who looks like they are breaking into a house and refuses to give the police identification when asked. If my book, he would have been arrested for attempt burglary.
And as with everything, there is a speedbump in the road. Or a monkey wrench in the gears. The professor happens to be a friend of Barack Hussein Obama. Barack Hussein Obama gets word of what happened, and decides to say the police officers “acted stupidly.” Of course they did. No police officer in their right mind would respond to a call and arrest someone for breaking into a house. Or at least ask them questions when they fail to present idea. I jest, but you get my point.
So Inspector Obama is off to find out what’s going on. In the meantime, the lead officer, a Sergeant, is getting hammered by the willing-accomplices in the media who proudly back every one of Obama’s play, and has his entire history torn-apart as he is called everything from corrupt to a racist. And then it is revealed that early in his career he performed mouth-to-mouth on a young, promising, black athlete who was passed-out. And one of the officers who was part of the arrest cadre when the professor decided to get a little bit nutty, who happens to get black, willingly steps forward to support the Sergeant and tell the world that everything is kosher. Obama realizes that he messed-up and that his buddy, the all-knowing, all-wise, all-perfect professor might have been more than a little out of line that night. So what does BHO say?
“This has been ratcheting up, and I obviously helped to contribute ratcheting it up,” he said. “I want to make clear that in my choice of words, I think I unfortunately gave an impression that I was maligning the Cambridge police department and Sgt. Crowley specifically. And I could’ve calibrated those words differently.”
As far as I could tell, he was “maligning” the police department and the Sergeant. When the president of the most powerful nation in the world steps forward to call you out and call you a incompetent, it’s a big thing. I don’t take many things on the job personal, but I think I would take that one to heart. Instead of “calibrating” the words differently, Barack Hussein Obama should have had a different speech written on his teleprompter that detailed a full apology to the Sergeant, his team, and the entire police department. The fact of the matter was that his friend, the nutty professor, was wrong, and Obama took his word at face value. In the meantime, the career of that entire team could have ben ruined, their lives could have been put in danger, and no one would ever look at the Cambridge police department the same way again. If that isn’t playing favorites in politics, I don’t know what is.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
From the Conservative Grapevine
I plotz over there every few days, just to see some of the interesting shite out there in the real world.
But these two are too interesting not to share.
First is the list of 100 things that our kids (and grandkids) will never have known.
Consider: until this last January 20th, there has been either a Bush or a Clinton in the White House for 20 years. People who are old enough to vote now don’t know any other way, except in the history books. They’ve never seen a phone without push buttons, or a TV without remote controls. Or a black-and-white TV, except for those covered in layers of dust in grandma and grandpa’s attic. Or anything using vacuum tubes.
So how could they be expected to know what kinds of things we had to entertain ourselves with?
And another is one person’s idea of how the recent vampire romance movie, Twilight, should have ended. I’d have paid for tickets for the IMAX version… (For what it’s worth, I much preferred the earlier Twilight with Paul Newman and Susan Sarandon.)
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Funniest Commercial I’ve Seen
(Recently, at any rate. It did make me laugh so hard, tears were flowing.)
Better swallow first.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Drummy asked…..
...I heard.
Had a family reunion this last weekend, along with golf outing and long afternoon with kids, cigars, and good times.
I hate to see and hear that the Great and Powerful Drum is feeling like fecal material. That sucks. Hell, in late April/early May I had mediocre tendinitis, and I felt craptacular. I can’t imagine what it feels like when your nerves have the consistency of crumpled paper.
But...along with this short, somewhat apologetic post, is my promise that I will be posting this week and next...making up for being busy at work and at home. I’ll also break kayfabe and tell you about what’s going on at work....the joy of looking at the dismantling of your division.
Oh, yeah. Great times. I’ll share more with you over the next few days.......but one tidbit....
Today, I think I heard that Barack ‘Hopenchange’ Obama, the President of the United States, and the arbiter of all good things, didn’t know what was in the ‘public option’ (i.e. single payer/universal/socialistic) health care bill?
WTF?
“Mom...what are you making for dinner?”
“I don’t know, son.....I have no idea what’s in it, but it’s supposed to be really good for you, and you need to eat it as fast as you can.”
“But it made the other kids sick. In fact, they don’t want to eat it anymore.”
“Well, mommy’s a better cook than they are, son.”
“You said you don’t know what’s in it.....”
“Shut up and eat what I tell you to eat. You’re not the mommy, I am.”
Gawd-awful.
In Like a Pea, Out Like a Porcupine
Slicing like a fucking sledge-hammer, he is…
Stuart H. Schwartz takes the hickory switch to Peggy “New Conservative” Noonan in a column that is as nasty as it gets, yet never a single insult is issued, just specific references to things that I am sure La Noonan would just as soon forget…
You’re Peggy Noonan and you’re jealous. But it’s not the normal kind of jealous, the kind reserved for girlfriends who can squeeze into size 2 jeans. No, it’s the kind of jealous that hurts, that grabs your gut and twists, that has you howling with rage into your pillow in the middle of the night, screaming “It’s not fair” like a two-year-old denied another piece of cake. It is Sarah Palin jealous...and it is consuming you.
You’re Peggy Noonan and you’re jealous. You are a card-carrying member of the intellectual conservative elite, a PBS-anointed expert on family values who worked for both Ronald Reagan and Dan Rather, a talented speechwriter and wordsmith. And you are fuming: Sarah Palin refuses to be yesterday’s news. You just can’t get her out of your mind.
And, what’s worse, everyone continues to talk about her. You’ve tried everything, using your mainstream media platforms, your Wall Street Journal columns, and powerful friends—so many of them—to savage her, to give her a rhetorical beating so fierce that it would bring a smile to the face of Vince McMahon—if you knew who he is, and if you had ever watched a WWE wrestling match, which he heads. “She is a complete elite confection. She might as well have been a bonbon,” you wrote, your $300 manicured fingers shaking on the keyboard.
And ohsomuch more. Go forth and finish reading.
Democrats are lying to you
In other news, water is wet.
(In fairness, I suppose that I should correct that to read “Not all Democrats are lying to you - just the ones that are talking.")
I hear these Democrat politicians and other spin-meisters-slash-spokespersons going around and asserting that their single-payer health care plan can easily be paid for by coming up with savings throughout the system, and other cost-cutting measures.
I remember reading a while back (I wish I could remember where) that if Democrats could really come up with a trillion or more in savings in the health care industry over the next decade, then they have to power to create these savings without spending those savings on other things, and that these savings are, therefore, a good unto themselves, worthy of serious effort.
Instead of “Why shouldn’t we correct a failed status quo?”, the question should be, “Why aren’t Democrats actually just implementing these cost-cutting and massive savings programs on their own, just to show that the money is actually there to be saved?”
Seriously, if these savings were so easy to come up with, shouldn’t they be willing to push them through their fully-owned-and-operated franchise of “Liberal Politics, Inc.” (aka “The White House, the Filibuster-proof Senate and the Democrat-dominated House of Representatives"), before they try to come up with new ways to spend money they aren’t even sure exists?
But no, Der Vun needs to get this multi-trillion-dollar spending program passed within the next week, or the whole economy will collapse!!!!!one!eleventy!!
Monday, July 20, 2009
Fibro Fog
I fucking HATE this condition, I really do. Either I am in too much pain to sit and type more than a few sentences, or I can’t concentrate to come up with much of anything worth typing, much less reading.
I had hopes than John and Helo would fill in the gaps a little, but they each have lives too, and even if I were to double their pay, it’d still be the cube root of Fuckall (plus the number of intelligent beings in Congress). This blog is a labor of love, and there is neither deadline nor quotas involved.
However, if any of you have the occasional opinion you wish to post, I would be happy to donate both the bandwidth and a small-but-loyal readership.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
The California Cash Flow
I was getting ready for court this morning and watching the news. I saw a commercial starring Governor Arnold, where he is asking for support to lower taxes, reduce spending, and balance the budgets.
It really makes you wonder what kind of politicians we put in power when our own state leader has to make a commercial begging and pleading for the citizens of this wonderful state to understand that we have no money, that we spend the money on stupid things, that crooked unions and socialist politicians are calling the shots, and that our taxes are the highest in the nation.
We need to get our act straight and take the governors advice for once.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Socialism - it’s not about the society
It’s about the power. Plain and simple, it is the urge of those who see themselves as somehow “better”, “smarter”, or “wiser” to run society along the ways they think society would be run, if only it weren’t for all those mean people who want to do something different than everyone else. Now, if everyone were marching to the same beat, doing the same things, liking the same foods, enjoying themselves in the same ways as everyone else, then life would be perfect. Societal justice would prevail, and it would be a Utopia, with the basis being “from each, according to his abilities, and to each, according to his needs”. (Yes, I know that is Communism’s mantra. What’s your point?)
Now, if you were to ask a modern liberal what they believe in, they might respond as did Hillary Clinton, when she described herself as a “progressive”. I hear that word, and I want to ask “what is it that you are progressing towards?” The only thing that these so-called “progressives” have in common is their belief that we should scrap everything that made America the only remaining superpower and start over again. Anything that has already happened is “bad” because it failed to bring about this new heaven-on-earth, so it should therefore be done away with, and something new put in.
That isn’t “progression”, that’s “regression”. They are moving away from something, with no new goal in mind. While that may have been called “exploring” in days of yore, there is no new territory to find when it comes to how humans treat their neighbors. It is a spectrum, ranging from Anarchy at one end and Despotism at the other.
Thomas Sowell said it well: “Out of every hundred new ideas, ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for those are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.”
Those societies that were better able to adapt to new realities than their neighbors continued to prosper and survive, while lesser-able societies failed and died away. (A microcosm of this phenomenon is the KKK. That’s such a rare breed nowadays that the only place where you can find a member is in the US Senate!) Sometimes this “new reality” involves the brutal exercise of warfare, such as what the Romans did to the Carthaginians. Sometimes it is more subtle, as when the US started shipping blue jeans and rock-and-roll to Russia.
It is to society what Evolution is to the organism.
But to deliberately try to alter the most basic parts of society would be like an individual trying to perform plastic surgery on himself to gain a pair of wings.
However, to increase the power of the government (at various civil levels from neighborhoods to Federal) over ever more intrusive portions of society - over such things as building codes, the education of our children, the interest rates charged by banks, the amount of clothing that must be worn in public or displayed in ads, and a bajillion other ways, both large and small - requires that there be someone who gets to decide what the standards are, as well as the whole army of bureaucracy to make sure that those rules and whims are enforced.
Like I said, Power. The ability to tell your neighbor “no, you getting to do that bothers me, so you are no longer allowed to do that, and you should thank me for protecting you from yourself.”
The moment anyone feels that he has the authority to tel his fellow man what he can and cannot do, without bothering to follow those same restrictions themselves, it is no longer a classless society, and that is a basic ingredient for revolution, just like wheat is a basic ingredient for almost everything we eat. (Another necessary ingredient is knowledge of that non-classlessness. Think about it - if those in the underclass don’t know it, or are being lied to about it, why would they feel the need to change anything?)
Happy, happy, joy, joy.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Capitalism - it’s not about the money
It’s about the Capital.
Money is just the medium of transfer between companies and individuals, and the wide variations of currency and coinage being used among the various countries around the globe - dollar, pound, franc, yen, whatever - shows that they are only worth what people think they are worth.
It’s the capital - the machinery, the natural resources, the hard work and ingenuity of the workers - that makes it possible for value to be added as the raw material is processed into finished goods that people need.
And while value can be created out of nothing at all by skilled craftsmen, capital is necessarily limited, and the monetary and societal system that uses those raw materials most efficiently is the one that will have the highest standard of living.
If Farmer A is more efficient at using his tractors and threshers and all of the other machines - capital assets, each and every one of them - than is Farmer B, then giving scarce capital to Farmer B will result in a lower output for the capital cost incurred, and that will lower the standard of living for everyone, since there will be less grain available, and the costs of everything made from that grain will be driven upwards, and the money spent on those things can not be spent on other things, which reduces the economy in ever widening circles by exactly the amount of the difference between what Farmer B produced and what Farmer A could have produced with the same effort and expenditure.
The money that the citizens could have saved on the cheaper bread and cakes could have been further spent on other goods, which would have driven up the demand of those goods, providing additional jobs (and additional taxpayers, which makes the government richer).
Y’see, the most common fallacy in discussing economics is to pay strict attention to the specific group or company being discussed, and ignoring the potential effects on the remainder of the economy.
Nothing, and I emphasize NOTHING acts in a vacuum in an economic sense, because Economics is nothing more than the study of scarce resources which have alternative uses. The instant you posit a potential use for capital goods, you immediately exclude any and all other uses for that resource. Milk that has been used to make butter cannot also be used to make ice cream, for example. Apples that have been baked into pies cannot also be used to make applesauce. Fields that are being used to grow wheat cannot also be used to simultaneously grow rice.
And the people that use their share of capital most efficiently are given lots and lots of those little pieces of paper that everyone seems so obsessed with.
But since value can literally be created out of nothing at all (Pet Rocks, anyone?), we need to keep our eyes on the use of capital, not the aggregation of those little green pieces of paper.
Any questions?
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Heat Wave Hits Oklahoma!
The newscasters are bemoaning the sorry state that Oklahoma is in, with temperatures hitting as high as 102F.
As I am sitting here typing this, my indoor/outdoor thermometer shows that it is 105.4F on my front porch.
In. The. Shade.
Cry me a freakin’ river, Sooners…