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.

Annals of the practice of sado-masichism

The Fendi company has come out with a mens' high heel.  Check it out. So for just $1450, you too can break your ankles while looking like a total doofus even before you stand up.

(as ladies subjected to stilettos say "hee hee" or "about darned time...")

The old proverb comes to mind; "A fool and his money are soon parted."

Thoughts on "Net Zero Carbon Emissions"

It is getting popular, it seems for companies to announce that in a certain amount of time, they will achieve "net zero carbon emissions."  Let's get a notion of what this means; everybody exhales carbon dioxide, and every building and factory in the world is built with materials that require the use of carbon fuels to get to market.  Every company in the world uses electricity, and hence for a company to achieve "net zero", one must go much further than to simply get one's electricity from solar or wind (impossible at peak demand hours, mind you) while getting LEED certification for their buildings.

No, you've got to somehow compensate for the carbon emitted to build your buildings, make the windmills and solar panels, and the like, and the key idea for that is called "carbon credits".  On one hand, some "carbon credits" are issued to people who fund things like electric cars and windmills, but....the problem with that is that even if these reduce carbon emissions, it still takes carbon emissions to make them.  You can't make steel without using coal, to put it mildly.

That leaves a second level of carbon credits, which more or less amounts to paying people who live in the rainforest not to use a part of the land they inhabit.  Now at best, the land that is so "sequestered" is simply land they weren't going to use anyways, so the net result is zero.  At worst, however, it's land they were, or were planning to, use for supporting themselves, and a key principle arises.

Nobody signs on to let their children starve.

So when one plot of land is "sequestered", they simply go to another, generally one where it's not as advantageous to plant.  In other words, they're going to clear cut more land than they would have cleared to begin with, making the "carbon credit" actually carbon emission positive.

Ouch.  So how does one fix this?  One investigates how one may actually sequester carbon in the soil, in buildings, and elsewhere.  There are plans to inject carbon dioxide into the ground, but....that's incredibly dangerous if it should escape.  Lower tech options are better.

One big way to do this is to consider how "Mother Nature" might help us.  What would happen if cornfields were returned to pasture and alfalfa, where broadleafs like alfalfa have root systems that are up to 30' deep?  What would happen if we stopped using corn for fuel to allow this--and some of those fields were returned to forest? 

Along the same lines, if carbon emissions are really a huge issue, we need to consider not just how to "eliminate" them, but how to reduce them.  Maybe stop paying people to divorce their spouses through child support, alimony, and welfare programs.  Maybe consider prohibiting governments from making buildings from heat-porous masonry.  Lots of good ideas come to mind--none of them involving carbon credits or solar panels.

How do you get there?

The murders and rapes perpetrated by Hamas on October 7 are in many ways horrific even to those who remember the Holocaust, and the question is "how do you find people willing to do this?"  One apparent answer may be potent amphetamines.

And that raises the question of whether one can test for use of these, say for those who might have perpetrated such atrocities.  Answer; maybe.  You can test for amphetamines in hair up to 90 days.  Word is still out about whether one can differentiate the drug alleged here from other amphetamines in hair samples, and how strongly its use correlates with the October 7 and other attacks.

But that said, I do think hair samples from people in Gaza, especially young males, would be appropriate.

Interesting things from the world

Senator Fetterman, on the Colbert show, apparently argued that the nation's best and brightest were not being sent to Washington.   True, Senator, but you of all people probably shouldn't be making that argument, as the voters of Pennsylvania will hopefully catch on at some point, leaving you to do a job more suited to your abilities, say one involving a blue vest.

Students protesting Israel's retaliation against Hamas terrorists hide their identities.  Pro tip, kids; if you have to hide your face to avoid censure for a position you're taking, think twice about what side you're on.  Pro tip #2; the Hamas side's argument really works better in the original German, and it's no accident that Mein Kampf is a popular book in the Gaza Strip.  

Senator Bernie Sanders is arguing that Israel's invasion of the Gaza Strip is a violation of international law because they are cutting off food, water, and electricity to the area.  I guess by that logic, Operation Overlord (the invasion of Normandy) was a war crime against Nazi Germany.  Sorry, Bernie, not buyin' it, and you of all people ought to know the difference here.

More thoughts on the Duluth model

"Control" is the hallmark of an abuser, and the government wants to tell us what appliances, cars, homes, schools, and a lot more we can have or use.  

Just sayin'.  

Always look on the bright side of life

On the light side, don't tell me I never said anything nice about homeless people.

And in other alphabet community news, it turns out (surprise to me at least) that hormones administered to transgender patients--testosterone for FTM and estrogen for MTF--greatly increase the risk of heart disease.  I anticipated that testosterone would increase heart disease risk among those born female, but had thought that estrogen protected its bearer from the same.  Evidently, though, each biological sex has its own set point and design, and disrupting that design has deleterious effects.  Go figure.

An end game in mental health?

A meta-analysis of  166 studies of the emotional and psychological impact of "shouting and screaming" comes to the conclusion that "childhood verbal abuse" can be as bad as sexual or physical abuse, and argues for a separate classification for "CVA" as exemplified by "criticism, name-calling, ridiculing, scolding, and picking on" children.

Now as I look at the list, what I see is, by and large, the same thing I've seen with regards to studies of physical discipline of children; truly abusive behaviors are mixed with non-abusive, non-injurious behaviors, and the results are mixed, as if a spanking is the same thing as being punched or kicked senseless.  

And as a parent, knowing that "folly is bound up in the heart of a child", and knowing how Proverbs is in some ways a book length criticism/scolding of these habits, I have to wonder exactly what the "researchers" think parents can do.  Unless one is fortunate enough to be the Virgin Mary, one's children will always have sin bound up in their hearts, and thus no sane parent would abstain totally from criticism and scolding.

For that matter, I remember my mother's response when I took a road trip without enough sleep; she called me a "fool", and she was right.  Was she wrong to remind me in vivid language that the consequences of tired driving can be lethal to myself and others?

The more I see, the more I think that mental health in our country (world?) is being led by people with complete tunnel vision, who cannot view the secondary consequences of actions.  Almost any parent will be able to tell you about kids who did not get negative feedback from their parents--and the destruction that followed.