A bit of math of interest

I've posted before about how I'm pretty sure that Planned Infanticide and other abortion providers can't possibly pay the bills with abortion,  but just out of curiosity, I took a look at what Planned Infanticide's total revenue was in 2022, which was about $1.3 billion, approximately half of which came from goverment sources, and a good portion of the rest was "charitable" donations.

For comparison's sake, in 2020, Planned Parenthood performed about 345000 abortions, as well as about a million other procedures like breast exams and pap smears.  Now Planned Parenthood itself notes that the actual cost of their other visits is $115-135, so we can assume that something like $150 million to $200 million of the total is the actual cost of their other services.

Which means that the cost of abortions committed by Planned Infanticide is about $1.05 billion divided by those 345,000 abortions, or about $3000 per abortion.  Now part of this is overhead--they've become rather infamous in many circles as their old strip mall/storefront clinics are replaced by rather palatial abortion centers--but it does point out here that abortion is not quite the "low cost option" that "helps the poor" in the way that abortion advocates would like to claim.

Rather, it's a practice that can only continue with massive subsidies, so if we end those subsidies, abortion will end in most places.  

They say that...

...Biden's birthday cake was dropped on the White House by the Enola Gay.  Or at least it looks like it was. 

Thoughts on the upcoming Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade

They haven't stepped in it this well since they hired a drunk as Santa in 1947.   Sad to say, Edmund Gwenn and Maureen O'Hara are no longer available to bail them out.

Thoughts about a game I hardly care about anymore

I used to love watching football, but over the years, I've grown rather cold for a variety of reasons.   You've got Dr. Bennett Omalu's discovery of CTE in the brains of deceased football players, various concepts in the "Cialis" commercials, and then you've got the general Macchiavellian nature of the sport at the college and pro levels, seeming to concentrate on how freakish the players can be, how grotesque their tattoos, how abundant their sexual conquests, and the like.

And the target of my ire today is going to be (naturally) the University of Michigan, which is now embroiled in a cheating scandal where a supporter funded an employee's trips to buy plush 50 yard seats and steal the opposing teams' signals.

Now part of me says "you know, if football players had a little bit of intelligence, one could swap out the signals and totally throw the Michigan defense off", but we are, alas, still living in a world where D1 college football programs are allowed to create "general studies" programs to keep mentally deficient players on the roster while giving them little in terms of marketable skills.  It's not like you can change things up and confuse the opposition easily in the way that the Ivy League representative often confuses the #1 and #2 seeds they meet in the NCAA baskeball tournament, as Princeton did to Georgetown in 1989.

And hence it is a big deal that Michigan is stealing signs, and the question is, then, what ought to be done about it.  What we know is that information regarding the practice appeared on several coaches' computer files, which suggests it was coordinated from the top.  Only one coach, the linebackers coach, has been fired so far.

That much is appropriate; defensive plays are sent in to the interior linebackers, so the person most guilty would be the linebackers coach.  That noted, who else ought to have noticed?  My take is that every coach watching tape each Sunday and Monday ought to have noticed that the Michigan defense is in a nearly perfect position a lot more often than their opponents, and not all of that can be attributed to brilliant defensive schemes.  In the same way, I'd expect all of the skill players (basically everybody but the linemen, and probably even them) to figure out the same thing.  Even those who do not clue in that something was "off" would probably have heard "did you hear what we just did to Ohio State with their signals...?" and the like.

I don't know exactly what the solution ought to be, but what I'd suggest is simple; Michigan gives up all of its wins since Connor Stalions started making his trips to the stadia of opponents, and Jim Harbaugh becomes the second Big Ten/14/16/whatever coach in the state of Michigan to lose his job this year.

Addendum: given that I had hopes that Harbaugh would follow up on his experience at Stanford by reining in abuses like "General Studies" at Michigan, I am obviously very disappointed at the clear resurrection of his mercenary spirit.

Musings on the world situation

If Russia is so intent on de-Nazifying countries--one might assume this means "punishing countries that willfully attack Jews in pogroms"--maybe...they ought to re-consider their partnership with Iran (which funded the October 7 atrocities)?

Just sayin'.

So "proud" of my alma mater

As my readers well know, it's been hard for me to be a Michigan State Spartan over the past few years, with the Nassar case and the firing of the football coach for sexually harassing an advocate for ending sexual misconduct (I am not making this up), and this article here  doesn't make it any better.  The general gist of the study is that if one spends about $400 more on welfare spending or $700 more on public school spending per student, graduation rates will go up 1%.

Fair enough, but it doesn't explain why a lot of suburban and rural school districts have excellent graduation rates despite low funding, and of course if you've got a 30% gap between your district and other, better districts, that amounts to $12000 to $21000 more in per student funding annually.  More or less, to get one more graduate, we are talking about an investment of something like half a million to a million bucks.  Suffice it to say that the ROI is pretty bad.

Also of note is that "graduation" in an urban district like Chicago or Baltimore doesn't mean what it does in other districts, as about 80% or more of Chicago Public graduates....do not read or perform mathematics at grade level.   So the ROI is likely, believe it or not, even worse, as these schools which are "juicing" their graduation rates are simply doing the oldest trick in the book; social promotion.

Unfortunately, employers are going to catch on, and the end result is going to be that they're going to do what a former employer of mine did with aspiring electronic interconnect assemblers; give them a reading test before hiring, and the young people of the big cities would be, despite massive public investments in their development, basically unemployable.

This is especially sad given that there is a time-honored way of improving student performance; take steps to promote ordinary nuclear families, including a father and a mother.  Yes, it doesn't play well with the progressive left, but it is one of very few things that sociologists have ever learned--and is apparently something that the College of Education at my alma mater has yet to learn.  Of course, intact families don't get huge funding for NEA and AFT members, which is probably the real aim of the study.  I'm guessing the researchers went in knowing full well what correlation they were going to find, and the real reasons for it.

True

The newspaper of record notes that pretty much any man's day would brighten with a fly-by by an A-10 Warthog.   Well, I have only watched the A-10 on YouTube, but I do remember what a thrill it was when I walked outside and saw a B-17 flying right over my home.  

Read the article carefully

This article from CNN claims that moderate reductions in salt will have a major effect on blood pressure, working "as well as blood pressure meds".  Reality? Well, they took a standard American diet's intake of sodium (about 4000mg), added a teaspoon's worth of salt to the mix (2300mg), and then the next week,  cut sodium intake to 500mg (about as low as you can go without going into sodium deficiency, ahem).

End result?  Blood pressure readings dropped by about 8 mm of Hg.  To draw a comparison, my very low dose (5mg) of licinopril drops my blood pressure by about twice that, and my wife is taking a dose about 10x higher.  Typical diagnoses for high blood pressure are in the 160/110 range and up, and the target blood pressure is 120/80.  

Don't get me wrong; I'll take an 8mm or even 1mm reduction in blood pressure with reasonable measures, but this isn't going to let anyone drop their blood pressure meds, and may even be somewhat hazardous.  When you drop your intake of a vital nutrient (sodium is one of those things that keeps your heart beating) to the absolute minimum, you're getting into the realm where small errors can make a huge difference in your health.

Chalk this one up to an adage I like: Nobody gets their PhD, tenure, or big promotion in research by retaining the null hypothesis.  Read the article and look for the actual numbers, not the claims by the editor who wrote the headline.

Update: even more interesting is the lead investigator's claim that it's the first study to show that people already on blood pressure medication can further drop blood pressure by dropping sodium. I know from experience that cardiologists have been recommending patients with high blood pressure drop sodium for at least the past 40 years, and I suspect that I'd see the same going back at least 60 years if I look carefully at 1960s era insurance company ads in National Geographic.  If the claim is true, it's long past time for this study to have been done.