Here's your sign, Mr. President

The Cleveland Clinic, a worthy competitor to a little clinic we like up here and a supposed model for President Obama's Health Insurance Deform Act, is cutting $330 million from its budget and most likely 3000 or more jobs to cope with the Health Insurance Deform Act.  By the way, word on the street around here is that our little clinic is going to be making major cuts for the same reason, but isn't going public with the rationale yet.

Act in haste, repent at leisure, Mr. President.  And here's your sign.

Thoughts on the "manosphere"

I have been peripherally watching an area called "the manosphere" on the interwebs lately.  In a nutshell, it portrays normal male/female relationships in light of a theory called "game"--and yes, it's based on the same kind of theories that someone playing an ordinary game would use.

More or less, the goal is--as I guess it's been forever--to be the "quarterback," the guy who is "loud, charismatic" and for whom women "exist for the alpha's gratification."  In this movement, there are deep undercurrents of using women sexually--often in rather disgusting ways, be careful about the links--along with bitter complaints about how today's society is more or less encouraging divorce, unwed parenting, and the like. In the same movement are emphatic (or nasty depending on your perspective) denunciations of feminism, as well as quite a bit of mockery of those, male and female, whose physical attributes and personalities do not match what the "manosphere" would endorse.

I guess there is a kernel of truth to this; attractive, confident people--even narcissistic jerks--often do well with the opposite sex, and those who are not conventionally attractive do not do as well on average.  Even many feminists would agree that family law has gone too far in discouraging marriage and encouraging unwed parenting, I'd guess.

That noted, I've got to warn against the manosphere because the Scripture tells us that we are to flee from fornication, that a man of God is to wash his wife in the Word and sacrifice himself for her (Ephesians 5), and that he is to treat her with respect as the weaker vessel (1 Peter 3:7), or else his prayers will not be heard.

Put gently, those who hold strongly to the principles of the "manosphere" will tend to find themselves in about the same position, spiritually, as does Mr. Beale as he uses a ludicrous straw man argument to deny the Trinity; either in the position of not knowing God at all, or in the position of one who will suffer loss in the final judgement.  If you're tempted by this movement, consider yourself warned.

Here's your sign, Governor

....and yours too, Senatress Rosen.  What for?  Well, Mr. Dilettante explains; the electronic pull-tabs (lose your money to the TV monitor!) that were supposed to pay for the new Crystal Cathedral Viqueens stadium have just about "broken even" in terms of profit, which of course means that after the costs of problem gambling are accounted for--divorce, counseling, incarceration, etc..--the program is running a serious loss. 

But it's not like we should have known, because after all, the Taxpayers' League of Minnesota has only been warning about this for a decade or so.  Whatever you think of legalized gambling, the adrenaline rush it creates in its participants does impose societal costs, after all.

Also interesting is a look at ViQueens owner Zygi Wilf's finances.  He, along with other junior partners, owns a portfolio including 25 million square feet of business development along with the ViQueens.  Overall, a ballpark estimate of the value would be around six billion bucks, plus or minus.

However, Wilf's actual net worth is estimated at only $310 million (Sports Illustrated, 2011), indicating that those voting for the stadium bill ignored the fact that, being heavily leveraged, Wilf's finances are likely quite volatile--not a good thing when Wilf and his partners are on the hook (theoretically) for hundreds of millions of dollars more than he's got.

So if you supported the new Crystal Cathedral; here's your sign.

How do you say "here's your sign" in Korean?

Architects are looking to build a tower as high as the Willis Sears Tower with a very interesting feature; it will have a set of cameras and an imaging system that allow it to appear virtually "invisible".  What could possibly go wrong?  It's not like anyone ever accidentally crashed into a building because they couldn't see it, as anyone who's ever visited the 78th and 79th floors of the Empire State Building (hit by a B25 in 1945) knows full well.

Here's your sign.

Here's your sign, Grand-dad

A Kentucky grandfather has built a dream playhouse for his grand-daughter.  It's got beautiful woodwork, furniture, flooring, log cabin style, a porch, windows, a steel door, red steel roof, vaulted ceilings and  a chandelier, and....

.....it's 50 feet off the ground on top of an old silo.  OK, let me think about this; toddler in a playhouse 50 feet off the ground with windows and doors that open.  What could possibly go wrong?

Here's your sign, Grand-dad, as Mr. Foxworthy would say.  Just because you can do something doesn't mean it's a good idea. 

Born that way? Maybe not

According to World Magazine, this year's NEA convention featured the ironically named "Unheard Voices" (how are they unheard if they're on center stage?), which has as its purpose more or less normalizing most any form of homosexual, bisexual, or transsexual behavior.  Particularly interesting was a comment by one such person, Mr. Jamison Green, who noted that his "first lover suggested to me that I might enjoy having a sex change."

Let's go through the obvious first; sensible people would respond  to a suggestion to sexually mutilate themselves by ending the relationship and would probably get a restraining order and perhaps even an emergency carry permit.

That aside, Mr. Green's boyfriend has actually said something very important about his "homosexuality"; he thought it would be really cool if Mr. Green looked superficially like a Miss Green..  So is Mr. Green's boyfriend really homosexual, or is he actually heterosexual, but cannot connect with women--and thus his best option is to make a homosexual male (with whom he can connect) superficially "female"?  It's a question I hope researchers, not to mention specialists in genital mutilation ("gender reassignment surgeons"), start to ask.

And, for that matter, if the NEA can let such an obvious implication of Mr. Green's testimony go unnoticed, are their members really qualified to educate your children?  Or are they more interested in indoctrination?  I'm afraid the answer is pretty obvious here.

Random thoughts......

Fox had two "serves you right" moments this morning.  First, a UK rapist discovered his victim was HIV positive--possibly administering the Biblical death sentence for forcible rape--and next, the AFL-CIO lost a longshoremen's union as an affiliate because they're not taking a strong stance regarding the Health Insurance Deform Act, aka "Obamacare."

In Chicago, the chief of police has noted publicly that his department will be shooting any armed person seen holding a gun.  Sounds like a great way to enrich lawyers who specialize in wrongful death, to get police officers and innocents killed, and to end up spending a term in jail.  However, not so hot when it comes to, say, "law enforcement" or "public safety."  One would think that a chief of police might be educated on these matters--how carry permit holders do not pose a threat to their neighbors--but apparently learning "facts" is outside the scope of his terms of employment.

Finally, spent Labor Day with a group of at least 50 fellow homeschoolers, and it was a huge blessing to be around dozens of teens without ever seeing anyone inappropriately dressed.  We also noted that there were more infants in attendance than you'll see in many maternity wards these days.

In which I (almost) agree on somthing with Michelle Obama

Or, rather, I actually do; I would agree that instead of the "Real Italian Pizza" I endured as a young skull full of mush, that it would be a good thing for schools to serve something more along the lines of the "Mayo Clinic Diet" to students.

Of course, feeding wheat bread, milk with 1% butterfat, and vegetables to children is more easily said than done, and both school districts and students are increasingly rejecting the "Obameals".  

School districts unsurprisingly are finding out that real food is more expensive than the "imitation food" I grew up with, laden with white flour, sugar and high fructose corn syrup, and various forms of vegetable fats.

The students, on the other hand, are very interesting in how they respond.  Many complain about the 750 calorie target (adequate for most grown men) while throwing away not only broccoli, but also things like apples, pears, and milk.

Now having run cross country and track, I would concede that 750 calories is a bit on the lean side for a competitive runner or swimmer, but for non-athletes, it's perfectly sufficient.  What's really interesting is that Dennis the Menace's "let me give you more reasons I won't eat my carrots" has been transformed into today's "I won't eat anything but a short list of fast, refined, food."

Now the likely answers to this are where I part company with Mrs. Obama.   Her "top down" solutions run into the reality that, since the 1930s, the government has been telling us to eat our vegetables and providing a school lunch with a slab of mystery meat, bread, starch, vegetables, and fruit, along with a carton of 2% milk.  As far as it goes, it's not a bad plan.

However, Dennis learned to eat his carrots, historically speaking, because Alice responded to his "I'm hungry" with "your carrots are waiting."  Government, on the other hand, throws the carrots into the dumpster after lunch and offers him a cookie when he finds he's hungry around 2pm.  Maybe instead of reworking nutritional advice, government simply needs to get out of the business of promoting family breakdown (and subsidizing corn and dairy) and see what happens.

A very interesting question on Syria

Lost in the hubbub over the atrocities in Syria is something very telling; our intelligence services (see Mr. D.'s blog for details) are claiming that there is "very little doubt" that Syria has used chemical weapons on her own people based on the number of people injured and killed, as well as the pattern of injuries suffered.

Now that's very interesting, but that's something I don't exactly need James Bond to figure out.  I can glean that from the newswire reports.  It raises a very interesting question; can it really be true that 12 years after losing nearly 3000 innocents in the attacks on the World Trade Center, Pentagon, and elsewhere, we do not have enough spies in the Middle East to get better information than we can get from the AP and Reuters?

Granted, the CIA can't show all their cards at once for fear of revealing their sources, but one would expect that they would at least be able to say something that the AP hadn't already reported on.

An interesting leap of logic

The Monday New York Times had an interesting article--linked--noting that the IPCC's confidence in the hypothesis of man-made global warming is higher than ever.  Upon looking at the article, however, no clarification is made about how the IPCC calculated this likelihood.

There are of course two ways that such a likelihood could be calculated.  The first, honest way is to have a model with demonstrated reliability in predicting climate patterns, and to do a sensitivity analysis while analyzing the residuals. 

However, I am sure that the Times would have trumpeted models that indeed had a proven track record of matching historical data--no such model has been trumpeted to my knowledge.  So we ought to conclude that the honest method of calculating this likelihood is excluded.

That leaves the usual IPCC method; appeal to authority leading to what clearly appears to be a politically and professionally motivated guess.  In other words, exactly the kind of "rectal data extraction" that the skeptical have been complaining about for decades.

Pure Brilliance in California

Apparently, the Golden State has just passed a law to "protect" confused young skulls full of mush by allowing them to use the opposite sex's bathroom and even  play for the wrong sex's sports team.  Because, of course, a lustful young person wouldn't possibly use the "rights" this law confers to ogle the opposite sex in the bathroom or fornicate there, even though people are arrested for exactly that every day.  And certainly young people wouldn't harass the young person who does this, even though that is exactly what happens every day.  And by no means would a marginal male athlete choose to join the girls' team so he could actually win a little bit, and by no means would teenagers make use of the officially "unisex" locker rooms to have illicit relations there.  Girls on sports teams certainly won't object to competing against the boys, and there's absolutely no chance they'll ask their male friends to not-so-gently "remove the fake girls from the playing field".  And of course, it is absolutely certain that no teenagers would ever brutally abuse someone who joined the wrong sex's sports team, because the very rationale for the law is....

......that teenagers will brutally abuse other teenagers who are different from them in terms of "gender identity" and sexual orientation.  No matter what your view on these matters, I'd hope we can agree that Sacramento has really outdone themselves in terms of stupidity, and sad to say, it's going to be the very kids they're trying to "protect" that will suffer the most.

Public service announcement

It appears that a "famous important person" named Oprah Winfrey has gotten rather unhappy because a salesman in Zurich refused to show her a plasticized canvas bag because, at $38,000, it was "too expensive" for her.

Now let's concede some obvious facts; it's insane to spend that much for a piece of vinyl, and it's probable that whether race was involved or not, the salesman probably thought Oprah was just another tourist lookenspeeper whose handling of said precious merchandise might not be good for business.

Let's assume, however, that Ms. Winfrey is correct and she received exquisitely bad and racist service.  Is the proper response to go to the media?  Of course not.

The proper response is to ask for the manager, and to explain to him that because of poor service, his store will be losing out on business.  Then walk out before the manager calls the offending salesman aside for a "talk."

Admission of guilt?

Three months after the IRS revealed their "enhanced interrogation" of conservative and "Tea Party" groups, here's the score.  No one who wasn't scheduled to retire has lost their job.  No one has been indicted.  The IRS has provided less than 1% of documents requested by Congress, and many of those are redacted to the point of being unreadable.

One would have to assume that the White House isn't terribly interested in getting the people who committed these crimes to justice, and the best explanation for that is that whoever started this works in the White House. 

Here comes your brain dead city council

Apparently, the San Antonio, Texas, city council is considering passing an ordinance that says that no one shall be appointed to any position if the city council finds that they have "demonstrated a bias" against any group based on race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, age, or disability.

Now I'm against bigotry, but quite frankly, if I can't make a credible claim that any Joe or Jane off the street has demonstrated some sort of bias after getting to know them for ten minutes or less, I've got to conclude that either (a) I am brain dead or (b) Joe or Jane is brain dead.  So what the city fathers are doing is to insist that new employees and/or city council members be either (a) fantastic liars or (b) brain dead.

I don't know whether that's a prescription for upcoming disaster, or possibly just a late admission of what already had become the case in that fair city and too many others.  I'm leaning towards the latter.

Picture of problems with student loans

Today's edition of WorldNetDaily linked an article from the New York Times about a Puerto Rican immigrant who was duped into taking large amounts of student loans to become a hairdresser.  Now, given that there is a need for hairdressers, I'm not against student loans to become one if that in fact will tend to give someone a good paying job.  However, one thing in the article stuck out; Ms. Tejada was interviewed with a translator.

OK, so we're giving student loans to people who do not even know the main language of this country well enough to explain their loan situation to a reporter--a situation any banker with green eyeshades would tell you is not conducive to being able to repay student loans.  If we wonder why we have double-digit default rates for loans that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, it's insanity like this.