Chance favors the prepared mind - Louis Pasteur

Monday, March 15, 2010

Every now and then, when i least expect it,(I should know better) I find a story in the Internet that just make me ashamed to me in the same nation as someone else.
In this case it is Donna Simpson, who is attempting to attain a new world record, in being FAT

Take a good hard look at this fat ass, this woman, is setting the goal at 1000 pounds. 1000 Fucking Pounds! Right at this time she can barely walk and she needs a fucking scooter to mover her fat ass around at the store.

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Oh yeah that is her kid too, her Husband like’em big and encourages her to eat.

Philippe, who counts watching his girlfriend eat as one of his favourite hobbies, says: “I’ve always been attracted to big women, but Donna is my fantasy. The more she weighs, the sexier she is.”

Her 49-year-old partner Philippe — who she met on a dating site for plus-size people — was encouraging her to reach her goal, she said.

“I think he’d like it if I was bigger ... he’s a real belly man and completely supports me,” she said.

To put on enough weight, Ms Simpson will need to eat 12,000 calories a day, which is six times the recommended daily intake for women.

In order to pay for the enormous amounts of food she is eating — her weekly grocery bill is $815 — Ms Simpson makes money by running a website where men pay to watch her consume fast food.

This waste of oxygen make a living by eating and letting men watch her on her web cam.......... excuse me while i go throw up, maybe i can get some one to pay me to watch that!.
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OK if that was not enough take a good look here.
And here, if you are brave enough.

Its bad enough that there are millions in this nation that are trying to reduce their waist line, while this woman tries to expand hers, with out regard to the health effects or the cost to her family. I wonder who pays for her health care? Any guesses? Then there is the fact that this woman is getting international attention over this, renforcing the views that America is full of fat disgusting blobs, like on the animated movie WALL-E.

She does not deserve attention or encouragement, she deserves scorn.

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Man, are they getting desperate, or what?  via Mish:

A federally funded ticketing blitz in the state of Virginia landed a total of 6996 traffic tickets this weekend. The blitz, dubbed “Operation Air, Land & Speed” coincided with frantic efforts by state officials to close a $2.2 billion budget deficit. Supervisors ordered state troopers to saturate Interstates 81 and 95 to issue as many tickets as humanly possible over the space of two days.

Jesus--the state police actually treated this like a got-damn military operation, and all because the state government has a hole in their budget the size of Obama’s ears. 

This is sheer desperation, plain and simple.  When you have to resort to traffic tickets to shore up your budget, it’s game-fucking-over.  And the most grotesque aspect of this whole mafia-style skim is that it was federally funded.  In other words, our tax dollars went to pay for this. 

Why are they resorting to measures like these?  A quick reminder:

Watching these states try to grapple with their underwater budgets is like watching a car wreck in real time.  You know it’s not going to turn out well, but you can’t look away.  Ponzi government is coming home to roost, kids.

Democrats ran and won in 2006, and then again in 2008, on the bad behavior of republicans. Republicans were successfully and correctly painted as having lost their fiscal sanity for the deficit spending prior to 2006, only to have democrats gain control of congress and the spending purse after the 2006 elections, and set new spending records they then blamed Bush for. The leftwing machine’s manipulations of the facts, with big-time help from a complicit media that didn’t point out democrats were always worse at that stuff anyway when in charge, allowed them to run on the lack of fiscal responsibility of the republicans in 2008 again, using the crisis of their own making that they then blamed on Bush yet again, to win big, only to then proceed to set new deficit spending records. Here is the graph for those of you that want to dispute the deficit spending facts, so spare us the bull:

As this projection showed Obama’s deficit spending in his first year ended up being more than all 8 years of Bush. Oh sure, as I already pointed out Obama is blaming Bush for having to do so. Democrats have successfully convinced so many that the financial crisis we are in isn’t tied to those idiotic collectivist economic lending practices they forced upon the market in the last 3 decades. Even worse, they successfully have covered up the rigged games Franks and Dodd set up with Fannie and Freddie to keep those faulty economic policies afloat, and how those trading scams then led to the implosion of the housing market and then the financial sector. But that “It’s Bush’s fault” excuse is wearing thin as people are slowly seeing the truth. Almost $2 trillion of the tax payer’s dollars has been funneled to democrats and their friends, through one collectivist economic scam or another promising salvation, but delivering nothing but a drastically growing government bureaucracy, while the private sector continues to bleed jobs and contract. And the WH remains focused on tacking on trillions more in new taxes and debt so they can give government control of healthcare moneys and decisions, with a scam which purports to reign in costs and be fiscally responsible by of all things taxing us for 10 years to provide 5 or 6 years of coverage, while ignoring the economic disaster they are leaving in their wake. And the one thing they should be addressing, the lack of jobs, gets nothing but some meaningless political play. In the mean time the hole is growing deeper and the spending of money we simply don’t have continues to rise. This year is looking like it will set even higher and wasteful deficit spending records as this February’s $220.9 billion single month record is showing. This seems to be our economic future thanks to the democrats and their economics. But the fact that democrats are destroying our economy, and are trying hard to destroy healthcare, is not the thing I want to address here. I want to talk a bit about one of the other lies they told to get themselves elected.

If you have been following the whole Eric Massa fiasco, you know this stuff has turned into a soap opera writ large. Frankly I do not know if Massa is telling the truth. He is a democrat after all, and lying is second nature for them. However, I do not put it past this WH to do what Massa has accused them of doing either. Based on what I have seen them do in just this first year, I have no doubt that this bunch is probably the most corrupt crew I have ever seen. We are dealing with Chicago politics here, and this – hope & change! - is SOP for these people. My bet is that since Obama wants this monster passed, his team is going to make it happen. Even if they have to do what Massa has accused them of. In fact I do not put it past them to resort to openly committing felonies to do so considering the vested interest they have in making this the law of the lad. After all, they control the levers of power and the press, so whose gonna be able to do anything about anything bad they do? If the stuff that has been going on so far hasn’t made the case yet, I doubt anything they do will.

And that brings me to my point about this whole Massa thing. If you don’t remember Nancy promising to drain the republican swamp and end the culture of corruption back in 2006, here is just one of the instances the sympathetic press gave her words play. Unfortunately, as case after case proves – Chris Dodd, Barney Franks, Charley Rangel, and a plethora of others – Nancy lied, and the corruption and criminal behavior, like the deficit spending and the fiscal irresponsibility I talked about before, is also setting new records. Don’t take my word for it. The case with Massa is more of the same. Even more important is the fact that while Pelosi is now claiming ignorance that’s a blatant lie because Nancy knew months ago about Massa’s behavior. And while Nancy is playing dumb, just a little research would have made it all obvious from records going back to Massa’s NAVY days showing that Massa was a time bomb waiting to explode.

As is the case in all these other stories of corruption that the MSM is ignoring or down playing, we are being lied to by these democrats that want to pretend real criminal activity and serious ethics violations, stuff that makes what happens when the republicans were in charge look tame, isn’t their modus operandi. And keep in mind that it is this scandal driven congress which is ignoring the will of the people and pushing forward with an unpopular government takeover of healthcare. Why isn’t the MSM up in arms about all this corruption and the will of the people being ignored? I guess that’s more of that hope and change for you.

Thursday, March 04, 2010

With a caveat that the sequel is rarely as good as the original....

I wanted to follow up on Hal’s post from a couple of days ago on the financial turmoil that’s been going on in Greece.  This has been an object of somewhat obsessive attention over at Zerohedge the past few weeks, and the focus has largely been on the similarities between this and what happened when TARP was being debated.  While I can certainly see this as applied to a continental rather than national scale, I think the implications here are far greater.

In my opinion, what is going on in Greece marks it as a bellwether on the survivability of the EU in the short-term, and the welfare state in the long-term. The EU has two choices--1) come up with some sort of bailout plan for a member nation who, economically speaking, is something of a red-headed stepchild due to its lack of economic diversity (most jobs in Greece are in government or tourism); or 2) tell them “Sorry, we can’t throw good money after bad,” and Greece ends up leaving the EU to go back to a vastly devalued Drachma.

If the EU picks the first option, it’s going to open the floodgates.  Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Ireland are all in way over their heads in government debt, with France, the UK, and Germany not too far behind.  It will be impossible for the more stable members of the EU to justify denying bailouts to the the other PIIGS, when they spent all this time agonizing over how to fix the problem and came up with a bailout as the way to fix things.  The “austerity measures” put in by Greece are a joke, because it doesn’t change the fundamental culture of entitlement that’s infected the populace, so they’ll likely end up having to come back to the trough again in a year or so begging for more.

If the second option is chosen, what motivation would Greece or the other PIIGS have to stay in the EU?  The whole idea behind the EU was to create an economic superpower that could compete with the US and Russia for global trade.  If the EU won’t prop up a member of its own economic alliance, why should Italy or Spain or Portugal bother staying in?  Better to just cut loose and try to figure things out on their own without subjecting the country’s citizens to endless agonizing uncertainty on the economic direction of the nation.

Either way, count on what happens with Greece to eventually filter over to the United States at some point.  As Hal pointed out, Greece’s welfare state, like most European nations, is quite robust and the populace has come to depend on entitlement programs--specifically, the national pension system--as their means of survival.  In the same way, Social Security, Medicare, and pension systems here in the US are seen as necessary by most Americans--an entitlement that comes with putting money into a system and expecting financial compensation at a later date.  The problem is that these programs have finally reached the breaking point of sustainability.

Why?  Check out these graphs, the first from Zerohedge and the second from Mish:

Tuesday, March 02, 2010

Let’s see if the media holds Algore and the AGW panic-mongers responsible for this:

A seven-month-old baby girl survived three days alone with a bullet in her chest beside the bodies of her parents and toddler brother.

Argentines Francisco Lotero, 56, and Miriam Coletti, 23, shot their children before killing themselves after making an apparent suicide pact over fears about global warming.

Their son Francisco, two, died instantly after being hit in the back.

But their unnamed daughter cheated death after the bullet from her dad’s handgun missed her vital organs.

Paramedics rushed her to hospital covered in blood when police alerted by worried neighbours discovered the massacre three days later.

I’ll repeat what I said with last week’s IRS attack—these people were clearly mentally unbalanced.  If it wasn’t global warming, it would have been the Argentine economy or the Falklands or the monsters under the bed.  But will the lefty media that instantly proclaimed the Austin attack to be the work of the tea parties now proclaim this to be the work of An Inconvenient Truth?

I ain’t holding my breath.

I’ll note that, batshit crazy people aside, this is why I have my guns aimed in both directions on the AGW issue.  It’s not so much that I think people are going to kill themselves over global warming.  It’s that I think the constant cries of doom and gloom do not, as the left hopes, spur people to action.  Rather, they give people the idea that nothing can be done, that the situation is hopeless.  Why make an effort to save the world when it’s already gone to hell?  This killing, while clearly the work of a deranged mind, is the tip of the (melting) iceberg—million of people who aren’t even trying to work the problem because they think we’re doomed.

But the situation is not hopeless, even if we accept the most dire (and unlikely) “scenarios” (not models) from the IPCC.  As Gregg Easterbrook like to say, there’s no need to panic.  There will plenty of time for that later.  Human ingenuity is incredible and resilient.  Environmentalists have been predicting doom and gloom forever and the world—the capitalist part of it anyway—has been two steps ahead of them.  It’s not that the problems didn’t exist; it’s that we solved them—sometimes prompted by government (e.g., acid rain, lead) but often on our own (e.g., reforestation, energy efficiency).  And the command-and-control economies the left loves so well have the worst environmental records.

Friday, February 26, 2010

I did not watch that 7+ hour freakshow that the democrats were hoping to use as a vehicle to paint the republicans as evil “no sayers” with no ideas or plans on healthcare with the help of the usual suspects in their controlled MSM – while anyone that had the ability to navigate a web browser and Google could see these donkeys were full of it – and I am glad I didn’t waste my time. The democrats pretended to care and to want bipartisanship, only they meant by bipartisanship that the republicans should do what they wanted and be happy about it. The leftist twits are now threatening reconciliation – a process that has never been used in the way they intend to abuse it, but we are talking about the party of the end justifies the means after all here – despite the public objection to this debacle. It is now or never and all or nothing with these fools. And they are continuing to pretend that they are doing it to help the country and the people economically, while also providing care to all those poor people that can’t afford it. How noble, but al bullshit. The end game still is to have government literally take over and control 1/5th of our economy. Not to mention get the power over life and death decisions. Fun stuff, but I want to talk about the cost to us tax payers.

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

In the age of “Hope and Change” deficits no longer matter it seems. This even as a Tax Policy Center released a
detailed 40 page report of the key tax proposals in President Obama’s 2011 budget, and if you look at their numbers they are projecting a whopping $4.9 trillion shortfall, which eclipses the $1.1 trillion claimed by the Obama people. Here is the killer quote:

The budget assumes a baseline in which the 2001-2003 tax cuts are permanent (including the estate tax at its 2009 level), the exemption in the alternative minimum tax (AMT) is permanently indexed for inflation from its 2009 level, and that temporary expansions of refundability of the child tax credit and of the earned income credit are permanent. Those provisions would reduce revenues by $3.8 trillion over the 2010-2020 period. TPC’s analysis measures the impact of the tax proposals not against the administration baseline but rather against a current law baseline that assumes the 2001-2003 tax cuts expire as scheduled in 2011 and that the AMT exemption maintains its permanent level. Against that baseline, the administration’s tax proposals would cause much greater revenue losses than official budget estimates show [$4.9 trillion v. $1.1 trillion].

For those that are numerically challenged, this means that the difference between all the goodies that the collectivists want to farm out reported in this analysis and the tax intake of Uncle Sam in this business hostile environment are going to leave us with an unbelievable additional $4.9 trillion in new debt. Of course, knowing the way collectivists operate, they will simply raise taxes - and likely also spending - and then be flabbergasted when we end up with something close to a $7 trillion gap.

Monday, February 22, 2010

So now it looks like the drastically rising oceans, the apocalyptic end game the AGW church has warned us would happen if we refused to accept the collectivist government takeover of our freedoms and cash, was also, erm, exaggerated?

Scientists have been forced to withdraw a study on projected sea level rise due to global warming after finding mistakes that undermined the findings. The study, published in 2009 in Nature Geoscience, one of the top journals in its field, confirmed the conclusions of the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It used data over the last 22,000 years to predict that sea level would rise by between 7cm and 82cm by the end of the century.

At the time, Mark Siddall, from the Earth Sciences Department at the University of Bristol, said the study ”strengthens the confidence with which one may interpret the IPCC results”. The IPCC said that sea level would probably rise by 18cm-59cm by 2100, though stressed this was based on incomplete information about ice sheet melting and that the true rise could be higher.

Many scientists criticised the IPCC approach as too conservative, and several papers since have suggested that sea level could rise more. Martin Vermeer of the Helsinki University of Technology, Finland and Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany published a study in Decemberthat projected a rise of 0.75m to 1.9m by 2100.

OK, so now we are told that they are unsure of the rise. That’s bull of course because what was likely found is that they have no science to prove this idiotic claim. So now even the threat of Waterworld is gone? No melting glaciers, no disappearing North Pole or ice in the Himalayas, no oceans rising… WTF? What’s left? What’s the impending catstrophe that should scare us all into letting them take away our freedoms and cash in return for, well nothing but an overarching government that has control of every aspects of our lives by limiting our access to energy and controlling our purchase power?

All the fear mongering we used to say was bunk and based on bunk science, is now proven as bunk. That’s why it was retracted. Asked to prove with science their claims, one by one, they are being retracted, or drastically revised, to a point that the end result is a statistical insignificance. And yet, the defenders of the AGW cult are still hard at work trying to make not only like they still have the science behind them, but that the onus is on the “deniers” to disprove the AGW claims, even though now it is a given that the underlying data, methodology, and the projected damage all are outright falsehoods or exaggerations. Even worse, people are starting to see that the real big money influences were not from the people that the AGW cultists demonized, but by the very priests of the AGW cult, which have all made millions, and stood to make billions more, scamming us all.

If the AGW watermelon cultists had any sense, they would drop this lost cause and go invent the next big lie they are going to glom on to try and convince us to let them create their global wealth redistributing collectivist government for the elites by. Of course they will not. They will continue to try and lie & bluff their way through this – after all, they have a complacent and willing media that has so far ignored the scandalous behavior by them – and in the process make sure we all know this is a fanatical cult based more on faith than any kind of science.

Sunday, February 21, 2010

Ever getting more desperate to lay blame on everything but the failures of the collectivist ideology and the stupidity of those that actually think they can make the wealth redistribution scheme work, we now have Zapatero in Spain -another one of the collectivist hell-holes in Europe that after the Madrid bombing took a turn for the worst, abandoned the changes instituted by the previous administration to reverse the damage done by dumb collectivist economics, and destroyed its economy in the process - blaming, hold your horses cause this is a doozy, the Anglo-Saxon media?

Socialist Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero has ordered Spain’s official intelligence agency, the National Intelligence Center (CNI), to investigate whether the “Anglo-Saxon media” (aka English-language press) is conspiring to undermine the Spanish economy. According to the center-left newspaper El País, which is close to the Zapatero government, the CNI is investigating “whether attacks by investors and the aggressiveness of some Anglo-Saxon media are being driven by market forces and challenges facing the Spanish economy, or whether there is something more behind this campaign.” In recent weeks, the UK-based Financial Times newspaper and the Economist magazine, as well as some publications in the United States, have all published stories that have been highly critical of the economic policies being pursued by the Zapatero government.

Let me get this straight. The Spanish PM has sicked the Spanish intelligence service on the Anglo-Saxon media, in particular the financial media, for having the temerity to point out that the Spanish economy is a basket case due to the collectivist policies that simply are unsustainable? Where are the calls of fascism from the left on this? Cause you can’t get more fascist than concocting a phony conspiracy for the reason your economic practices fail and then using the power of the state to make it look like you actually have a case. I am sure the Spanish are now all feeling better that their PM has figured out who to go after while the unsustainable collectivist house of cards implodes around them. If you dig a little deeper though you find out what the problem really is.

Spain now faces the prospect of a downgrade of its government debt, which would make it more expensive for Spain to finance its debt. Indeed, investors anxious that a debt crisis in Greece could create a domino effect in Spain are already demanding higher interest rates to hold Spanish debt. As a result, the Zapatero government is working overtime to try to reassure debt markets that it will quickly return to fiscal prudence

We once talked about the domino effect when addressing the expansion of collectivism in the form of communism. The left hated that then, and has done its best to discredit the idea, or the danger posed by said communist expansion. The bad guy was always the west for fighting it. Communism was no threat at all! It is hilarious, at least to me, that we are now seeing a similar terminology applied to the collapse of another collectivist ideology that has crippled the western world. If man would but learn the lesson that stealing from those that produce to buy privilege and power through the redistribution of the ill gotten gains, all under the guise of helping the less well off, is a recipe for disaster, we would have a chance. Of course, with the left hell bent on doing the damage no matter the resistance, we might just be doomed no matter what. Maybe Obama can blame the economic implosion he is presiding over on Bush too....

Thursday, February 18, 2010

I can’t believe the many levels of irony wrapped up in the Greek anger at the German refusal to bail the m out. Literally class warfare at its best! The poor Greek are now angry at the rich and well off Germans for not feeling obligated to save them from decades of their own mistakes, mismanagement, and misfortunes. And this is going on in collectivist Europe! Greece is broke, but because it is part of the EU, it can’t simply use the old standby of the pre EU days, and devalue its currency. So the other EU states demanded austerity measures. Germany’s leaders which just recently upped the retirement age from 65 to 67, in large part to address the unsustainable costs of the nanny state and the looming fiscal disaster, simply decided that handing the Greeks, whom can retire at 61 and were refusing to even go along and only promising (one that they would not keep I bet) to do something around 2015 by going to the hard age of 63, a wad of cash was not going to be well received by the German voters, and decided to put their foot down. And that pissed of the Greeks.

The Greeks feel that the greedy damned Germans don’t want to do their civic duty and pony up cash. Conversely the Germans are pissed that the lazy Greeks just want to make them pay for their sweet life. You have the Greeks – whom aren’t very well known for any kind of work ethic and love to party – angry at the Germans for not wanting to subsidize their ride. Where have we seen this before? I mean, is this hilarity or what? This kind of economic model was doomed from the start, but the evil ones are the ones that do not feel obligated to part with the fruits of their labor for whatever sad story the other side wants to use to keep the cushy life. If we were not heading the same way, this would be classic comedy. As for the future of the EU? My guess is the Euro goes bye-bye soonish. The Greeks are not interested in changing the way things are. The better off Euroepean countries are drawing the line because if they do this for Greece now they will have to do it for Portugal, Spain, Ireland, maybe Italy, and sooner than later Greece again. The end result is the same though: sooner than later the golden goose dies off, or cuts off the parasites feasting on it.

Sunday, February 14, 2010

Children should be educated and instructed in the principles of freedom.

John Adams, Defense of the Constitutions, 1787

There is arguably no more dysfunctional institution in this country than the American education system.  Outside of the recent bank bailouts, I can’t think of any other constituency that’s had more money thrown at it, for so few results, than our schools.  That’s why when something like this happens, it’s rather stunning (via Mish at Global Economic Analysis):

The teachers didn’t blink.

Under threat of losing their jobs if they didn’t go along with extra work for not a lot of extra pay, the Central Falls Teachers’ Union refused Friday morning to accept a reform plan for one of the worst-performing high schools in the state.

The superintendent didn’t blink either.

After learning of the union’s position, School Supt. Frances Gallo notified the state that she was switching to an alternative she was hoping to avoid: firing the entire staff at Central Falls High School. In total, about 100 teachers, administrators and assistants will lose their jobs.

Gallo blamed the union’s “callous disregard” for the situation, saying union leaders “knew full well what would happen” if they rejected the six conditions Gallo said were crucial to improving the school. The conditions are adding 25 minutes to the school day, providing tutoring on a rotating schedule before and after school, eating lunch with students once a week, submitting to more rigorous evaluations, attending weekly after-school planning sessions with other teachers and participating in two weeks of training in the summer.

Apparently, the city’s economy resembles a lot of former manufacturing towns back east, with a crumbling infrastructure that resembles Detroit’s or Newark’s.  Central Falls has an average income level of $22,000 a year, yet the average teacher’s salary at the school, in an article that Mish linked to in the same post, was $78,000 a year--for the teachers, not the administrators, who often get paid substantially more.  Yet the graduation rate is about 48%, and I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the whole student body could barely read above a 3rd-grade level.

Now, there’s no question that a town with such a low average income is going to have great difficulty paying these instructors the kinds of salaries they are getting in “good” times, let alone Great Depression Part II.  But in a lot of ways, I think falls on the entire community.  The one thing that was lost in the all the fatuous praise over Hillary Clinton’s “It Takes A Village” philosophy is that, by itself, the state is incapable of raising children--without support and involvement from the parents, grounded in an ethic of discipline and strong morals, those state institutions are going to fail no matter what kind of legislation is passed, what kind of programs are established, or how much money is shoveled into the system. 

For all of his accomplishments while he was teaching mathematics to poor Hispanics, Jaime Escalante would never have been able to get such a program off the ground if the kids’ parents hadn’t been supportive of the changes as well.  The best teacher in the world is going to have their feet cut out from under them if the kids are getting poor examples of citizenship from their parents.  If charity begins at home, so does education--and in communities where education and knowledge (among other things) are considered to be entitlements rather than the core responsibility of a moral society, there will be very little incentive to give children the foundation they need to succeed in life.

As this depression continues, don’t be surprised to see similar stories like this emerge.

Saturday, February 06, 2010

What is wrong with New York schools?

A 12-year-old Queens girl was hauled out of school in handcuffs for an artless offense - doodling her name on her desk in erasable marker, the Daily News has learned.

Alexa Gonzalez was scribbling a few words on her desk Monday while waiting for her Spanish teacher to pass out homework at Junior High School 190 in Forest Hills, she said.

“I love my friends Abby and Faith,” the girl wrote, adding the phrases “Lex was here. 2/1/10” and a smiley face.

But instead of simply cleaning off the doodles after class, Alexa landed in some adult-sized trouble for using her lime-green magic marker.

She was led out of school in cuffs and walked to the precinct across the street, where she was detained for several hours, she and her mother said.

She’s still suspended.  Believe it or not, this is not the most offensive part of the story:

Alexa is the latest in a string of city students who have been cuffed for minor infractions. In 2007, 13-year-old Chelsea Fraser was placed under arrest for writing “okay” on her desk at Intermediate School 201. And in 2008, 5-year-old Dennis Rivera was cuffed and sent to a psych ward after throwing a fit in his kindergarten.

A class action lawsuit was filed by the New York Civil Liberties Union last month against the city for using “excessive force” in middle school and high schools. A 12-year-old sixth-grader, identified in the lawsuit as M.M., was arrested in March 2009 for doodling on her desk at the Hunts Point School.

This sounds like “scared straight” bullshit run amuck.  There’s exercising proper discipline and there’s citing like nutcases.  Someone in the Big Apple needs to learn the difference.

Friday, February 05, 2010

Yesterday I discussed the fate of Greece and the collectivist culture that took over nad has gotten them where they are today. Today I will tackle the next likely domino, Portugal. d

Portugal moved towards a political crisis on Thursday night as its finance minister appealed to opposition parties not to defeat the minority Socialist government over a regional finance bill that he said would undermine the country’s international credibility. In a televised address, Fernando Teixeira dos Santos said opposition proposals to allow the Portuguese islands of Madeira and the Azores to increase their debt would have “grave consequences for Portugal’s public accounts” and send “the worst possible message” to financial markets. Fernando Teixeira dos Santos said opposition proposals to allow the Portuguese islands of Madeira and the Azores to increase their debt would send ‘the worst possible message’ to financial markets.

His warning came as Portuguese bonds and shares came under fire for the second day running as concerns over sovereign debt spread from Greece to other high-deficit countries in the eurozone. The Lisbon stock market fell almost 5 per cent on Thursday, the biggest daily fall since November 2008, and bond yields rose to new highs amid doubts over the ability of Portugal to consolidate its public accounts. The cost of insuring Portuguese debt against default also rose to a record high.

Like the economy of Greece, that of Portugal is living on borrowed time. The same problems that are threatening to bring down Greece are doing the same in Portugal. Only unlike the current socialist Greek government that has realized the fit has hit the shan, and is doing something to try and delay the inevitable, the current socialist government of Portugal is being accused of manufacturing a crisis to prevent their parliament, which is dominated by a coalition that actually wants to make change of direction and avoid the inevitable and complete collapse of the Portuguese house of cards, from doing anything.

The world is watching and reacting to the Greek and Portuguese meltdown going on. And I am sure that what is happening here in the US is influencing the run as well.

Looks like the people that produce American Idol know how to capitalize on controversy. I have to admit I don’t watch any reality TV. If I recall correctly the first reality show was Survivor. My wife wanted me to watch it with her. 15 minutes into it I told her I had had enough. She asked why and I told her that a show called Survivor was a joke unless the morning after the first night spent wherever the camera panned to a bloody and battered survivor cooking some jerky over a fire after a hard night of making sure there was no one left standing, asking for his booty. Not this stupid stuff. If we are going to do the whole bread and circus thing to distract the masses, I want it to be done like the Romans did. I doubt that even Howard will make me want to watch this brain damaging stuff though. 

Thursday, February 04, 2010

Look, I’m a fairly tolerant guy.  I think we are way over-protective of kids these days.  I think people freak out way too often when it comes to kids and ... well, just about anything.  Just today, I read about an absurd SWAT call-out for a kid with a cap gun and a near suspension over a lego gun.  I’m an avid reader of Lenore Skenazy’s Free Range Kids blog (from which I’m getting this story).  So you’re not dealing with a nervous nellie here.

So it means something when I say: Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot:

And yet, that’s what the world it is getting: A new line of lingerie for girls 9-14 aunched by Miley Cyrus’ little sister, Noah, and Miley’s Hannah Montana co-star, Emily Grace Reaves. Or so sez BoingBoing.

Does anyone else remember the furor when Miley took those sexy, shirt-free photos with Annie Leibovitz? Basically claimed she had no idea she had no shirt on, and daddy had walked off to make a malted or something? Back then, I blamed Annie. Now I blame Disney. Sexy young girls sell and don’t they know it. Apparently it’s a hop, skip and a jump from princess to pole dancer.

The salient Free-Range Kids issue here? It’s the KIDS part. Kids love to play dress up — they even love to look grown up and alluring. I sure loved wearing my mom’s old evening gowns! But why foist upon girls this tawdry ideal of sexiness, dredged from the strip club?

I’m hesitant to post this link, which has pictures of the offending apparel.  But these really look trampy.  If I had a teenage daughter who dressed that way on her own, she’d be grounded faster than you can say “Hannah Montana”.  If I dressed my pre-teen daughter like that, I’d hit myself so hard I’d never know what hit me.

I disagree with Skenazy in part; I think the problem is the parents, not the evil corporation.  You have to wonder the thinking of someone who hears the words, “We want to use your daughter to hock tawdry clothing at kids” and says, “OK!”