A bit of fun

My children have been taking care of my neighbor's dog, and as children sometimes do, they lost the key to his house while the dog was locked inside. We called the neighbor about the possibility of finding another key or calling a locksmith, and were surprised to hear our neighbor say "you know, you can open these locked doors with a credit card. Yes, our neighbor basically told us to break into his home.

Even more hilarious; he works at the federal prison here in town.

Dog is fine, and thankfully I'm not writing this from behind bars.

Here's a great scientific investigation

Evidently Michael Mann, fabricator of the infamous hockey stick graph, has been exonerated of the fourth and final charge of academic dishonesty by a group of his peers. What did the investigation consist of?

Glad you asked. According to the Fox article:

So the panel asked Mann five questions, spoke with his boss, and interviewed three other climate scientists. Case closed.

Translation:

Well, we asked him and his buddies a few questions, and they all said he was innocent!

They're going to have to do a little bit more thorough work than this to make me believe they're actually doing due diligence.

Here's the union mentality for you....

....right here. Evidently, the new head of the United Auto Workers spent a lot of time growing up in a bar in Detroit (apparently, schools, parks, and movie theaters were not available to her?), and argues that if someone is smart enough to put a bolt on a car, they're smart enough to be sitting at the table of the board of directors making decisions impacting the entire business.

Now while I'm one who firmly believes that the rank and file often have some great ideas, and that management isn't always comprised of the brightest bulbs in the chandelier, the fact still remains that the guy who does a great job putting lug nuts on an F150 may not in fact have anything resembling a clue about how to run the company. This is especially the case when he belongs to a union that apparently does not understand that the cost of retirement benefits for autoworkers is indeed one of the things which caused the bankruptcies of GM and Chrysler.

Maybe Ms. Estrada spent a little too much time at Leroy's U.S. Star Bar when she was a kid.

This says it all about Washington, DC

21 people are dead in a drug gang shootout in Mexico near the Arizona border, and the response of those running our nation's government is to propose comprehensive immigration reform and sue Arizona for daring to suggest that we ought to be deporting criminal illegal aliens. It is as if on February 15, 1929, the Mayor of Chicago had suggested that what really needed to be done was to reduce the number of regulations on used furniture salesmen.

Happy Canada Day, eh!

Today marks 143 years of Canadian independence, so hoist a cool one and eat a few donuts in honor of our neighbors to the north, eh. Don't try to give birthday spankings, though. If you're lucky, they'll check you into the nearest boards, and if you're not, they'll remember our 234th Independence Day is just three days away and return the favor.

Slight modifications have been made to today's posts in honor of the festivities, eh.

And an awful joke; back in 1867, Canada was going to get its independence, but they didn't have a name for the country. They asked around, and finally an old trapper from Manitoba came with a solution. They would draw letters out of the hat, and that would be the name of the country. Having no better ideas, they agreed, and invited the trapper to pull the letters.

Bands played, flags flew, and finally the trapper came out in a new tuxedo. All Ottawa was silent as he drew the letters oot of da hat;

C, eh

N, eh

D, eh

Here's another gem

....from Paul Greenberg of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a reminder that human evil reminds us that there is indeed something far beyond this world to which we must answer. There are still some educated journalists out there, and Greenberg--in his spot-on imitation of C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters--is certainly one of them, eh. Well done again, Paul.

Say what, eh?

Evidently the CBO has released a report saying that the national debt will reach 62% of GDP this year. OK, let's check this out:

National debt: 13 trillion dollars

GDP: about 14.6 trillion dollars, according to government statistics. (not billion, correction courtesy Pentamom)

Now I don't know what kind of math the CBO is using here, but with the arithmetic I learned, that's not 62%, but rather close to 90%. So what's going on, eh?

My assumption here is that the parameters given to the CBO ignore the portion of the national debt held by the government, which is a patently dishonest way of calculating the load--unless we've got plans in motion to repudiate the portion of the national debt held by government--e.g. the Social Security trust fund.

It's an object lesson; the "nonpartisan" CBO only calculates number using the methods prescribed for it by a clearly partisan Congress and a clearly partisan White House. Pelosi in, Reid out, eh.

A classic from John Taylor Gatto

....his 1990 acceptance speech from the New York City Teacher of the Year Award. He had a bit of chutzpah in pointing out to the educational establishment his belief that the schools exist to do anything but educate.

And, I think he's right. As I work to train my children in character, I warn them that the quickest way to become a slave is to develop laziness and covetousness, the precise things that the government schools relentlessly inculcate in children.

How not to demonstrate someone's innocence

When 11 people are arrested for spying, and their names have not all been released yet, and furthermore some of those released are U.S. citizens, it would probably be prudent for the foreign service of the country they're accused of spying for NOT to demand access.

And yet, the Russian foreign service has demanded access to the 11 arrested and proclaimed their innocence without even knowing for certain their identities, and despite the fact that at least a couple are not Russian citizens.

Translation: G-U-I-L-T-Y. We'll see what the courts say, of course, but this (inadmissible in court) piece of evidence suggests that the reason the foreign service wants access is because they need the last bit of data from these people before they visit the graybar hotel for a good long time.

Now here's a scary thought.....

....no less than four members of the Supreme Court cannot parse out a very simple clause "shall not be infringed."

I kind of expect, for example, that the mayor of a city where the average public school graduate reads at a 6th grade level might have trouble with this concept, but among the Yalies of the Supreme Court?

Maybe we ought to rethink that the phrase "elite law school" means, eh?

Now that was different

Just got sent to Quebec in part so I could speak and translate German. By the way, if people tell you how Canada's economy is in great shape, just tell them to take a look at the industrial area around Montreal's airport. It's a ghost town, sad to say.

And no, bummer, didn't get a chance to go to Tim Horton's.

How not to refute a claim

Apparently, Arizona Senator John Kyl (GOP) has made the claim that the Obama administration is holding border control hostage until "comprehensive immigration reform" (meaning "amnesty" as the Democrats tend to phrase things, of course) is passed. With such an inflammatory charge, the White House had to respond, of course.

And how did they respond? After saying the claims were false, they noted that "truly securing the border will require a comprehensive solution to our broken immigration system".

In other words, Kyl is 100% correct. The Democrats are holding up efforts for adequate border security until they get comprehensive immigration deform, and it appears that to hide this fact, they're also counting on inadequate instruction in the government's schools to addle our reading comprehension.

Too often, of course, they're right, but in a world that knew how to read, this would be a slow ground ball right to first base--and not with Bill Buckner there, either.

A good Father's Day column

....by Mitch Albom, who reminds us what is at stake in whether a father is involved in his children's lives or not, and counsels young ladies to withhold something from the proverbial young man who wants a drink of milk, but doesn't want to buy or care for the cow.

Now this could be profitable....

Palm Boy links an interesting column by P.J. O'Rourke advocating the end to the government schools, and one figure therein is that nearly half of the employees of the government schools are not teachers--a disturbingly large portion of them (300,000) employed apparently to comply with"Most Children Left Behind." It's also worth noting that the national teacher to student ration is 15.4, and that average spending per student is about $15,000. Now if only a homeschooling parent of five could get this--or better yet what they're spending in DC--to educate one's own children......

Seriously, if we could only figure out a way to see about getting more of that funding to the "point of use," letting kids do a lot of the cleaning (they're making the mess after all), one could reduce school funding by over half without hurting the teacher's pay at all. Another interesting fact about those days; the rate of illiteracy was actually quite a bit lower.

Another triumph of government!

Evidently, the national flood insurance program is about $19 billion in debt. Apparently not only did they not figure out that there was a reason insurance companies were charging high rates for flood insurance in many areas, they also didn't bother to hire any good actuaries to figure out what the proper rate ought to be.

It's as if people will be more likely to live in a flood plain if you subsidize their house insurance or something, and that change in behavior will tend to bankrupt the subsidy program.

Memo to Congress; incentives matter!