what if?

Death and Destruction

First we're told it's a fine idea to kill your newborn if he/she happens to be a bit inconvenient.

Then today, someone's having sport trying to kill folks on a street I often frequent when home in the Twin Cities.

Motorists in one part of Bloomington are being pelted with objects as they drive, with the most recent incident leaving the victim with serious facial injuries, police said Wednesday.

Police said this is at least the sixth such incident in the past month.

On Monday, a man driving south on Normandale Boulevard, about a half-mile south of 84th Street, was hit in the face by a vise that busted through his windshield, police said.

I'm not sure what it all means.  I only know that I sure as hell don't like any of it.

Obama Administration to the American People

Translation here.

 

Viva Las Vegas!

Should our government be betting billions of dollars on projects that economists say have 70% odds of failure?

Solar panel maker Solyndra received a $528 million Energy Department loan in 2009 - and went bankrupt last year. The government's risky investment strategy didn't stop there, as a CBS News investigation has uncovered a pattern of cases of the government pouring your tax dollars into clean energy.

Asked whether he'd put his personal money into Beacon, economist Peter Morici replied, "Not on purpose."

"It's, it is a junk bond," Morici said. "But it's not even a good junk bond. It's well below investment grade."

Was the Energy Department investing tax dollars in something that's not even a good junk bond? Morici says yes.

"This level of bond has about a 70 percent chance of failing in the long term," he said.

In fact, Beacon did go bankrupt two months ago and it's unclear whether taxpayers will get all their money back. And the feds made other loans when public documents indicate they should have known they could be throwing good money after bad.

CBS News counted 12 clean energy companies that are having trouble after collectively being approved for more than $6.5 billion in federal assistance. Five have filed for bankruptcy: The junk bond-rated Beacon, Evergreen Solar, SpectraWatt, AES' subsidiary Eastern Energy and Solyndra. Others are also struggling with potential problems.

If private venture capitalists were to make "investments" like these, they'd soon find themselves with very little capital left with which to invest.  But our government?  If the voters don't stop them - then no one can.

This column ends with economist Morici's opinion of it all:

Tasking a Nobel Prize mathematician to make investments for the U.S. government is like asking the manager of the New York Yankees to be general in charge of America's troops in Afghanistan," Morici said. "It's that absurd."

"After-Birth" Abortion?!?!

First - let me make this clear.  I am not anti-abortion.  Virtually all my adult life, I have believed that in the first trimester, a woman should have "the right to choose."  Although her embryo/fetus is alive and human - in my opinion, it does not yet have the characteristics that would demand that the state protect it.  As development proceeds - it does gain the right to more and more protection.

But, the above being said, reading this leaves me almost at a loss for words.

Two ethicists working with Australian universities argue in the latest online edition of the Journal of Medical Ethics that if abortion of a fetus is allowable, so too should be the termination of a newborn.

The two are quick to note that they prefer the term “after-birth abortion“ as opposed to ”infanticide.” Why? Because it “[emphasizes] that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus (on which ‘abortions’ in the traditional sense are performed) rather than to that of a child.”

These two "scholars" may "prefer" the term "after-birth abortion."  Unfortunately, however, the definition of an abortion is the termination of a pregnancy, resulting in the death of an embryo or fetus.  Somehow, once someone is actually delivered and born, they are no longer an embryo or fetus.  So - go ahead and advocate for the killing of them. But, let's be clear.  It's infanticide.  You can't hide what you are doing or "pretty it up" by planting some made-up phrase to hide what is actually occurring.

And who is it among us who is to decide that, once someone is born, that they really are not "worthy" of living in this world?  Do we start with those who have clear and serious mental deficiencies?  How bad do they have to be?  What about physical deformities?  Does being born female "count" if someone really was hoping against hope for that precious little baby boy?

Sometimes, a baby is born with such enormous burdens and/or so very early, that saving the life of that child is near impossible.  Should a family decide that the odds of life are so slim, and the anguish involved so great, forgoing care is acceptable. 

But, as I understand the argument, such is not the case here.  These two "scholars" simply think that we ought to have the right to kill the "defectives" among us.

I seem to remember another individual who was a proponent of such ideas.  Ultimately, this fellow managed to eliminate literally millions of "defectives" with "after-birth abortion."  Yes, for some it was long, long after birth...  Still, the thinking, I believe, had a lot of similarities.

What Would Doctors Do?

No doubt about it.  Medicine today is an amazing field.  Lives can be enhanced and extended far beyond what was the norm years ago.  Yet, like everything else in the world - there are limits.

What do doctors do when faced with life threatening diseases?  In more than a few cases:  this.

My Truth

Your propaganda.

So.  Liberals don't seem to like movies that show the military in a good light and use real military personnel in the film?

The rest of us have been putting up with movies for decades now from the left.  These movies depict America as a lousy nation, mock traditional values and applaud the slimier side of life.

Don't get me wrong.  I'm neither a religious conservative nor am I someone who thinks everything outside of apple pie and Mom is wrong or not worthy of being the message of a movie.  Still.  I, like John Hinderaker, find it amusing that the left suddenly has found "religion" about excluding "propaganda" from movies - when it was their side who perfected it to an art for the last couple of decades.

Irony

From a top level bridge player:

"Isn't It Ironic? The food stamp program, part of the Department of Agriculture, is pleased to be distributing the greatest amount of food stamps ever.

Meanwhile, the Park Service, also part of the Department of Agriculture, asks us to "please do not feed the animals" because the animals may grow dependent and not learn to take care of themselves."

Necessary for Talent

Many of us ooh and aah - and complain (accurately, in my opinion) about some of the gigantic compensation of big business executives.

But what about the public sector?  You know - the folks whose paychecks ultimately come from us, the taxpayer.  Some say that Big Compensation is needed in this venue, too, to attract fine talent.  Are they correct?

Our Man Bob

Perhaps the greatest player ever in the history of bridge.  And - not exactly chopped liver in the business world, either.

HAMMAN IS a deep thinker, the king of the long pause, long enough that you often wonder whether he's still on the other end of the telephone. In the 1950s, he enrolled at UCLA five different times but spent most days in the student union, learning about probability and human behavior while playing bridge. He eventually dropped out of college for good and started his own insurance company, and he has spent the past half-century among the top-ranked bridge players in the world. When Bill Gates and Warren Buffett want a game, they call Hamman, who says of his off-and-on brainy partners: "They are not in my league. It would be like me trying to race Usain Bolt."

But although he might not share their bankrolls, Hamman does share their math-whiz perspective. He views the chances of making a standard free throw, for example, like a ballistics problem. "You're dealing with elevation, azimuth and the required force behind it," he says, as if any old rec leaguer takes azimuth into account on every shot, much less knows that the term refers to an angular measurement in a spherical coordinate system. "I start with the probability of someone who walks up cold and tries to sink a free throw. Then I use the inverse 2.7 power of the distance to come up with the probability."

Duh.

In the mid-1980s, when Hamman was first asked to insure the cost of a hole-in-one promo, his method was more, as he describes it, "SWAG. Scientific wild-ass guess." After that contest, recognizing a niche in the market, he started SCA. He hired two employees and in 12 months grossed $100,000. Now Hamman is considered the promo-insurance-biz grandfather, with SCA employing about 70 people scattered in offices from London to Calgary to Dallas, covering everything from golf to hoops to cricket and generating $30 million in revenue in 2011. The sports division, which covers events like half-court shots, makes up about 30 percent of the business. The remaining 70 percent focuses primarily on marketing promotions for casinos and retail stores. All told, his company is behind an average of 500 to 700 sports contests a year. David Poteet, vice president of the insurance company J. Smith Lanier & Co., calls SCA the New York Giants of their industry. "Bob Hamman is one of the smartest guys you will ever talk to," says Poteet, who's worked with Hamman for the past 13 years. "When you're talking about an actuary, he is one of the best."

I'm Sorry

Our president apologized to Afghanistan for our military.

This young woman issues her own apology.

A Nation of Immigrants

Policies and laws dealing with illegal immigrants has always been a "hot button" issue in our nation.  Emotions run high.  Accusations fly back and forth.

My personal belief is that we are a nation of immigrants.  Yes, we must have laws governing who is welcome, how immigrants can become citizens and workers, and so forth and so on.  Nevertheless, overall our policies should be one of acceptance, rather than building a high wall and barring the door to those who wish to come in the future.

What does Marco Rubio believe?  This.

Mountains

Some muse about whether another president would ever be added to Mount Rushmore.  What achievements would it take? 

We can ponder that question.  In the meantime, however, President Obama has achieved "mountains" of his own, in a way that no president prior to him has.

Slouching Toward Europe

One pundit thinks it's too late; we're already there.

This year, the fourth straight year that we borrowed more than $1 trillion to support the U.S. government, our budget deficit will top $1.3 trillion, 8.7 percent of our GDP. If you think that sounds bad, it’s because it is. In fact, only two European countries, Greece and Ireland, have larger budget deficits as a percentage of GDP. Things are only slightly better when you look at the size of our national debt, which now exceeds $15.3 trillion, 102 percent of GDP. Just four European countries have larger national debts than we do — Greece and Ireland again, plus Portugal and Italy. That means the U.S. government is actually less fiscally responsible than countries like France, Belgium, or Spain.

And as bad as things are right now, we are on an even worse course for the future. If one adds the unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare to our official national debt, we really owe $72 trillion, by the Obama administration’s projections for future Medicare savings under Obamacare, and as much as $137 trillion if you use more realistic projections. Under the best-case scenario, then, this amounts to more than 480 percent of GDP. And, under more realistic projections, we owe an astounding 911 percent of GDP.

Meanwhile, counting both official debt and unfunded pension and health-care liabilities, the most indebted nation in Europe is Greece, which owes 875 percent of GDP. That’s right, the United States potentially owes more than Greece. France, the second most insolvent nation in Europe, owes just 549 percent of GDP. Even under the most optimistic scenario, we owe more than such fiscal basket cases as Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain.

All my life, I've been fiscally responsible.  No material goods are more important to me than knowing that I have funds for what is really necessary in life.  Reading the above statistics makes me ill.

Nevertheless, I also am an optimist.  I am hoping - against hope - that our nation will come to its senses and start undertaking the hard work necessary to return to health.  Still - at some point, the burden may be too great.

Here's hoping that we are not beyond the "too late" point (even if we are Europe!)  And that we have the strength and courage and wisdom to do what is necessary.

 

 

Jeans and Genes

Having trouble fitting into your favorite jeans?  Part of the problem might be your other set of genes....

For the past 200,000 years or so, fatty and sugary foods were hard for humans to come by and well worth gorging on. Fats help maintain body temperature, sugars provide energy, and craving such food is hardwired: Eating fats and sugars activates reward centers in the brain.

Scientists are finding that the degree to which we experience those cravings can also be influenced by genes. Obesity runs in families, and although scientists still don’t know just how much of craving is hereditary and how much is learned, they have located more than 100 genes that seem to be linked to the disease. To evolve out of cravings, we’d need to stop passing down these genes.

Au Revoir, Workforce

What's one way to get your unemployment numbers looking a bit better?  Call a bunch of those not working disabled!

The sputtering economy has fueled those ranks. Around 5.3 percent of the population between the ages of 25 and 64 is currently collecting federal disability payments, a jump from 4.5 percent since the economy slid into a recession.

Mental-illness claims, in particular, are surging. During the recent economic boom, only 33 percent of applicants were claiming mental illness, but that figure has jumped to 43 percent, says Rutledge, citing preliminary results from his latest research. …

The jump in successful disability claims also is making the unemployment picture look extra rosy because those folks are falling off the jobless rolls.

“If they’re on disability they’re generally not counted,” says Feroli, who estimates that a quarter of those dropping out of the job market are getting disability. “It’s no trivial number.”

Right now, I know a father and adult child combo who are now "disabled."  They've headed for an island retreat, collecting roughly $3,000 a month in "disability" payments between them. 

Not sure what makes me angrier.  People taking advantage of the system while others bust their rear ends to stay afloat - or the whole scenario propping up The One's re-election opportunities while his minions crow about the improving economy.

"Let Speech Breed Speech"

Most of us say we're in favor of free speech.  Nevertheless, too many of us, when push comes to shove, really aren't.  They're for "good speech"....  In essence, we're all for "good speech!"  It's the speech that many of us dislike - or do not want to hear - that needs protecting.

Many people seem to think that political speech that is funded should be limited.

They're wrong.

Eliot Spitzer explains.

Eliot Spitzer broke with liberal tradition, saying the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission was the right call.

"I am with the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] on this one. I think as a First Amendment principle, Citizens United was correct.”

He told Maher that there is no distinction between some shows on the airwaves — all owned by corporations — and a company’s participation in politics through paid advertising.

“Your show is owned by a corporation,” Spitzer said to Maher. “You have a First Amendment right. And so I don’t know how you distinguish between the New York Times editorial page, The Rachel Maddow Show, George [Stephanopoulos]‘s show — all owned by corporations.”

“The First Amendment,” he reminded Maher, says government “shall pass no law abridging the right of speech.”

And why is this superior to limiting speech?  Again - Spitzer states why.

But as a First Amendment principle, people should be able to say what they want, how they want with their own money. I don’t care if it’s [Sheldon] Adelson or somebody who is of my political views on the left. Let speech breed speech.

“‘You never defeat speech by limiting speech’ is the First Amendment principle by which I live. I just think we’ll be a healthier democracy for it.”

The best way to combat speech you don't like is with more speech.  Not by squelching someone's else's freedom.

From Germany to Minneapolis

And back again.

He was proud to wear the jersey but also solemn about what history had done to the name on the back. His great-grandfather starved to death by the Nazis. His great-grandmother herded to extermination on a train to Auschwitz. His grandfather shuttled between ghettos and concentration camps, surviving somehow, finding a displaced sister after the war, pushing her from a hospital in a wheelbarrow after her lower left leg was amputated because of frostbite.

On Feb. 10, Kaufmann finished dressing and skated onto the ice at a tournament in Belarus. With his initial shift, he became one of the few Jews to represent Germany in elite international sports since World War II, the first in ice hockey since the 1930s and perhaps the most visible to have had family members murdered in the Holocaust, according to sports historians and Jewish officials.

“It was almost surreal,” said Kaufmann, 27, a forward who was born in Minnesota and is the second-leading goal scorer here for the DEG Metro Stars of the German professional league. “From an achievement standpoint, it was amazing to represent the country. But it was pretty insane to think about what my grandpa had to survive to allow me to be where I am today and how it’s come a long way from then to now.”

Should Evan Kaufmann play hockey for the nation that murdered so many of his ancestors?  Clearly, a most personal decision.  I must admit, however, that I share this viewpoint:

“Obviously, you never want to forget,” Kaufmann said. “But everybody deserves a second chance and a right to rectify their mistakes. Most people today had nothing to do with it. I’m not going to hold it against a whole country for what happened long ago. You’re never going to move forward if you keep doing that.”

Never, ever forget.  Yet, do not blame future generations for what was done by their ancestors.

 

Miss Manners

Remember when Gabby Giffords and others were attacked and some killed in Arizona?  The President rightly spoke out about how we all ought to have civil discourse following that terrible incident.  Though we found out that the attacker was mentally disturbed, the message still stands as an important one.

Well; about a year later, how's that civility campaign coming?  Not so good, so it would seem.

On Thursday, Charles Koch authorized employees of Koch Industries to reveal the contents of “hundreds of e-mails that the Kochs and employees have received in the last year, some of them containing death threats.” The Wichita Eagle, Koch Industries’ home-town newspaper, reported:

Charles Koch, his brother and employees have in recent months been getting death threats, hundreds of obscenity-laced hate messages, and harassment from some far left-wing groups, Koch said on Thursday. …

“I hope you all DIE,” one e-mail, received last year, said. “You people are ruining our country, and all for $$$.” “Choose your expiration Date, Brothers…” said another. “The Koch brothers will DIE!!!!!” said another.

There were hundreds more — some from Wisconsin, where the Kochs were accused of aiding Gov. Scott Walker in his disputes against unions. Most of them were signed with what appear to be real names, many contained obscenities, and some Koch employees said these messages had made them nervous. …

What Cannot Continue

Will not.

About seven years ago, this principle continued to run through my head.  As a Realtor, I'd go to see newly listed homes for sale, and wonder "How is it possible that this house is selling for so much?!?"  It wasn't just a few houses here or there.  It was many houses, day after day, week after week.  Homes that I thought were overpriced by at least 10% - if not more - would sell in a week.  At their asking price.

I'd meet with homeowners who were considering putting their homes on the market.  "I'm not sure we should sell," many would muse.  "After all, we're making 10-15% a year on the house."  "Oh, yeah," I'd think to myself.  Your house goes up 10-15% annually - while incomes are increasing only 3% or so a year.  This cannot continue to happen.

I wasn't even aware of the gross fraud and incredibly lax lending standards in some states.  Yet, just on the math alone, our real estate world of the last decade couldn't continue.  And - as we know - it did not.  We ended up with the debacle that continues on today. 

Many ended up on the road to bankruptcy because of the real estate bubble.  Why is it so difficult for our nation to see that we are marching toward another bankruptcy because of our government's incredibly unsustainable fiscal policies?

What a Way to Go

Zelda Kaplan, a philanthropist and energetic - if geriatric -Manhattan nightlife fixture, known for her African print dresses and oversize sunglasses died Wednesday after collapsing at Fashion Week on Wednesday. She was 95.

 

Kaplan fainted in the front row of the Joanna Mastroianni runway show as the models began walking, just moments after she had posed for photogs wearing a festive red skirt suit.

She was carried out by security and rushed to the hospital where she died.

Zelda was no relation (pity).  But, she went out just as I hope I might.  She was doing what she loved, right in the thick of things - then gone.   Of course, we don't get to choose.  Yet, just in case someone up there  is listening - sounds good to me!