First, pictures of the "Water Bug" are coming soon. Hopefully Tuesday.Next, I'm struck by something very interesting. Let's look at the really big problems we have in our society, things like breakdown of families and neighborhoods, failure to learn morals and crime, failure to learn basic life skills, lack of aesthetic sensitivity, and general health travails like obesity linked to diet and a failure to exercise. If you look at statistics on crime, medical costs, and welfare costs, these are the big issues we have to face.In my life, I've become aware that a certain kind of person does incredible work to mitigate these problems by cooking meals, hosting block parties, contributing to church potlucks, disciplining children and training them in the truth, educating children and ensuring they do their homework, and telling them to get away from the television and go outside to play. What does our society do with such a person?It tells her that staying at home with her children and doing all this is demeaning, but it's admirable if she spends all day away from those she loves in a cubicle.
...that peer review of academic work and earned doctorates are becoming very poor indicators of quality, take a look at Mike Adams' series on the academic travails of some Mormon students at Purdue University-Calumet's "Marriage and Family Therapy" program. A quick summary of Adams' findings; those who are religious face fairly systematic discrimination in all areas of the program, and the field of "sex therapy" places great stock in "desensitization" via the viewing of pornographic films. Are these the people we should be looking to for our mental health, or some very lonely people whose practice of logic is more than a little bit rusty? Hopefully my home state will get a hint and de-fund this group.
...is defined as either a man who kills his parents asking the court for mercy because he's an orphan, or a man with a 28,000 square foot home who flies in private jets virtually every day chastising average Americans for driving a sport utility vehicle. Of course, this is the same guy talking about predatory lending and excessive medical costs while gaining huge sums of money from subprime mortgage companies and medical torts. I'm not sure, but I'd have to guess that the definitions for "chutzpah" and "hypocrisy" have been torn out of his dictionary.
My family & I took our homemade flat-bottomed rowboat "Water Bug" to the lake this weekend, and as I rowed two of my daughters back to the shore, I was surprised to see a group of young people in a $30,000 ski boat admiring my $200 johnboat. Evidently I was not only getting more exercise than they were, I was also in a cooler "ride." If you need to look cool at the lake, let me know. A small gift will suffice to rent the "Water Bug." Just promise to wear a life vest in case gawking teenagers accidentally run the little craft over.Equally surreal to me would be anyone who is able to read this book (which I'm reading now) and not have some desire to take part in the great conversation.And a final surreal thing for the day--and very encouraging--is Michael Vick's apology for his crimes. Whether he means it or not, I cannot tell (I'll assume he does mean it), but it's really nice to see someone offer a real apology these days.And sad to say, also surreal in a way.
If work done by Steven Milloy is indicative, parents may be able to relax about letting their children watch "Baby Einstein" videos, and the Journal of Pediatrics and the AAP may have some apologizing to do to Disney. Apart from illustrating the limitations of peer review and applicability of data, it unfortunately illustrates something I've noticed with the American Academy of Pediatrics. Specifically, they've been willing to publish articles that probably should never have been published--at least without major revisions and qualifications of their conclusions.Some examples? Sure. On the basis of a discredited study claiming you were more likely to be killed than saved by your own gun (the victims in the Kellerman study were actually killed with someone else's gun, by and large), they've come out against firearm ownership by parents. The proper conclusion of the Kellerman study is that you shouldn't live in a bad neighborhood and have criminals among your friends.Also, on the basis of a few dozen reports of "failure to thrive" among babies subjected to Gary Ezzo's "Babywise" feeding schedule, they've issued a warning about this program. I am no fan of Ezzo or "Baby-Foolish", but I took a look at the actual data, and there is no significant difference; the overall % for "failure to thrive" is about 1%, so a few dozen cases would be statistically significant only if a few thousand people used his schedule.Finally, the AAP came out recently with a recommendation against parents sleeping with their babies on the basis of one study that did not attempt to separate different variables related to SIDS and baby smothering. Unfortunately for the AAP's credibility, there are dozens of other studies that do control for these variables (smoking, couch vs. bed, intoxication, etc..) and demonstrate that co-sleeping is not a significant hazard.Now don't get me wrong; I appreciate pediatricians and their work, and I'm very glad that they are good at recognizing diseases common to children. I just think that when they start telling parents how to live, they're in deeper than they can swim.Which is, by the way, one statistically significant thing they can tell parents that is more significant than the four things I've mentioned combined. Be careful around the water.
If you read the papers these days, you'll see an abuse of the term "free trade." More or less, the assumption is that "free trade" means "no duties on imports" --unless those imports are "unfair" or dumped. It turns out, however, that the old economists meant exactly the opposite thing was free trade. No kidding; when Bastiat mentions "free trade," he simply means that the power of the state is not used to prohibit certain items from being imported, and that duties are calculated to generate revenue, not to prevent items from being imported. Examples from Bastiat include French laws to prohibit the importation of British cloth, and duties designed to make Belgian iron cost more then French iron. The moral argument behind this is simple; the circumstances of another nation, be it blessing or foolishness, do not require us to curse ourselves by refusing to accept the blessings that we are offered from abroad. At the same time, if a tariff is the most efficient means of raising revenue, by all means use it.The bitter irony here, of course, is that supposed "free trade" agreements like NAFTA and GATT prohibit a revenue tariff, but endorse the use of heavy duties to prevent "dumping." With 28000 pages or so in GATT, would we expect any different?Personally, I favor a return to free trade with a 15% revenue tariff on all items entering our country, accompanied by elimination of corporate welfare and a huge cut in income taxes. Good luck getting modern "free traders" to agree to such a scheme, though.
....you'll love the Mises Institute's free books, especially their two collections of the writings of Frederic Bastiat. Why?One big reason why has something to do with something a pastor told me; all too often, religious people who get involved in politics lose their spiritual edge. I think Bastiat indirectly nails the reason why; too many have gotten so caught up in the "pragmatics" of politics that they forget that politics and economics are (Romans 13) at their heart a moral exercise.Bastiat does this by predicating the arguments he makes against protectionism, high taxation, and government spending on the basic Biblical premise "Thou Shalt not Steal." It's also wonderful writing, even in translation. I commend Bastiat to you, especially if you were corrupted by the likes of Rousseau and such when in school.
Whatever you do, don't buy her one of the DeLoreans that the guy who bought the company is making out of the spare parts. Granted, the early 1980s were not exactly a high point in the history of automotive styling, but the DeLorean is horrendous even on that scale.Maybe I should go into rebuilding Yugos and Chevettes. Makes about as much sense as selling DeLoreans to people.
Take a look. Almost 180,000 foreclosures were filed in July. While certainly not all of these will go through, it is sobering to think that the rate per year is around 2 million homes annually, and even more sobering to think that this occurs when there are only 44 million homes with mortgages nationwide. In the local paper, several pages are devoted to foreclosure notices each week--and this for a town of only 20,000 souls.Notice, by the way, the use of the wrong units in the article. It should not be foreclosures/households, but rather mortgages/ households with mortgages. Moreover, it's calculated on a monthly basis, not an annualized basis; this obscures what's going on by dividing it by 12.Whatever units are used, it will hopefully become clear that a cartel of government with banks colluding to set money supply and interest rates has a downside.
One of the chief objections to enforcing immigration law is that, by sending home the parents of children with U.S. citizenship, we're breaking up families. What's not mentioned, however, is that these children also have Mexican citizenship. See Article 30, section 2 of the Mexican Constitution. Their parents are fully entitled to take them home when they are deported.So who is heartless? That would be the parents, in my opinion.
According to Dr. Robert Epstein, as interviewed by the HSLDA, we train children to be rebellious by putting them into schools where they will be bored out of their minds, and more generally by refusing to treat them as the young adults that they are. Epstein notes in particular that his reading of the Scriptures (I don't know what faith, if any, he is) leads him to believe that the regime of limiting people by age, rather than by physical, spiritual, and emotional maturity, is not Biblically sustainable.We might do well to consider not only where we put our children in school, but how we treat them at home, and what kind of children's programs our churches sponsor, if any.
It turns out that it wasn't NASA, but rather a blogger, who found the shifts in U.S. temperature data since 2000. Here is his site. It also turns out that NASA, when they learned that McIntyre was downloading their data in sequence (which is perfectly legal), blocked his IP to prevent him from taking a look at it. It was only the fact that his site has millions of readers (willing to send a note to NASA) that got his access to this data unblocked.We have here a very nasty problem; NASA "scientists" are forgetting, evidently, that science is supposed to be reproducible. Refusing to share data in science meant for public consumption is more or less a concession that you're not doing science.Worse, remember my earlier post about the "heat island" effect and global warming effects? Well, McIntyre and others have a decent estimate of the percentage of weather monitoring stations corrupted by this; 75% showed a jump in the year 2000. It is believed that our country does better than most others at monitoring weather and climate, so it would seem to follow that global climate estimates are even less reliable.Remember this the next time someone tells you that global warming is "settled science," and remind them of this when they try to argue "consensus" to prove it.
He defines "moral hazard" and points out that one of them is the Federal Reserve's habit of bailing out problem debtors. When you subsidize an activity, as the Fed clearly is doing here, you get more of it, and the Fed is doing this in the worst possible way; by buying mortgage backed securities. Look for the housing crisis to deepen, and another one to occur in about a decade as another inflationary cycle persuades borrowers to contract risky debts.
Walter Williams provides the details.And it's also noted that NASA has quietly revised their estimates of temperature in the United States, apparently by as much as 0.27F. The result? Well, nobody "in the club" is admitting that uncertainty in temperature estimates might lead to uncertainty about the overall global warming hypothesis, sad to say. It's the same story we hear when it becomes apparent that many temperature monitoring stations are located near thermal anomalies and heat islands; "oh, that's just an inconsequential shift in the data."In short, the researchers are either unable or unwilling to come to grips with the fact that when serious flaws in methodology like this are found, the consequence is not primarily in the shift in data when the flaw is corrected. The consequence is that the credibility of all the data is impaired.
