Election Day II

I forgot to mention, I’ve forgiven David Harmer.  The reasons: Every candidate has some goons and/or idiots hanging around him.  I don’t blame Rand Paul for the fight that took place outside where he was debating.  No matter how unfortunate the events were you just can’t blame him!

Also, I don’t think they picked me out.  It’s not like they said “there’s that ‘joe’ – Get him!”   They volunteers were just incompetent morons.

And lastly the Congress of the United States isn’t about my feelings; it’s about electing someone who will make wise decisions and keep us free.

Kagan's abortion stance has both sides guessing

I think it’s completely absurd that anyone can be appointed judge for life and we “don’t know” what she thinks of certain things.  Things that are important to a lot of people.

They should have me interview her.  I’d get it out of her!  Just see the previous video.

Kagan's abortion stance has both sides guessing - latimes.com

We Are What We Watch by Karen Kwiatkowski

…Avatar’s militaristic state corporatism drew an angry response from some Marine Corps defenders, and The Hurt Locker simultaneously dehumanized and minimized occupied Iraqis even as it failed to address why Americans are in Iraq getting blown up in the first place.

We are concerned about the odd bacteria on a leaf of lettuce transported in record time across the country in refrigerated trucks, but not so much about the tons of depleted uranium dust we’ve blown into Iraq’s air, ground and water. We worry that there are deficiencies or dangerous additives in the pet food we purchase, but after seven years, we don’t mind that we still haven’t fixed the urban sewage systems in Iraq we had crushed…

We Are What We Watch by Karen Kwiatkowski

talking points?

I said Christina Romer "knew better" this morning at 7:30 am or so. The comment was picked up by C-SPAN and broadcast. At 12:38 pm Rush Limbaugh said the same thing. Great minds think alike? Maybe. Or maybe he's watching Washington Journal, and reading me. Not that that's a bad thing, I put the comments out there in to the public for anyone to use.

It's just that the next time someone who doesn't know me tells me I "take my talking points directly from Rush Limbaugh" I can tell them, "no, Rush Limbaugh takes his talking points from me!" heheheh

Plunder!: How Public Employee Unions Are Raiding Treasuries, Controlling Our Lives and Bankrupting the Nation - Book TV

Don’t miss this talk about government unions.  The author is from California.  Note how many things sound familiar: from issuing edicts on Friday afternoon and voting then into law on Tuesday night to how we are getting less and less government “services” for more and more taxes we pay.  And how the union’s plan is to simply keep raising taxes – forever.   From the website:

Steven Greenhut takes a critical look at government workers and the unions that represent them.  Mr. Greenhut argues that government employees, who receive salaries, benefits, and a level of job security that far outpace workers in the private sector, have become a huge drain on state and federal coffers.  He spoke at Barnes & Noble Booksellers in Orange, California. 

Economics - Plunder!: How Public Employee Unions Are Raiding Treasuries, Controlling Our Lives and Bankrupting the Nation - Book TV

Click on the “watch” link on the right side of the page to view the video of the presentation.  It’s about an hour.

Study significant in what it doesn’t say

Congressman Alan Grayson put up a sign on the floor of congress listing the “republican plan” for health care as “die quickly.”  The “support” for this statement is a “study” he claims “proves” that thousands die because they don’t have health insurance.  The “study” is on his web site and he invited everyone to read it for themselves.

Well I did look at the study.  First of all, it says nothing about “republicans” but that’s not the point.  There’s some very significant fine print in that study!

The chart does indeed show an increased risk of death among those without health insurance as compared to those with private health insurance. 

Wait a second!  Isn’t the study missing something?  What about those who have government supplied health care?  They simply chose not to include any government health care plans in their study!  Why?

We can’t really know why for sure.  But there are some hints that suggest a reason:  If they had included government supplied health care, chances are it would show that having government health care would cause more deaths than either not having insurance at all or having private health care!  Let me explain why that’s likely.

Let’s simplify things with a little analogy.  Let’s say I want to study how far an athlete can throw various types of fruit.  Let’s say I want know which can you throw farther: an apple, an orange or a pineapple?  Simple enough, right?

So we do our experiment (study).  We carefully control for the strength of the thrower and randomize things so one person doesn’t always throw the apple first or the pineapple last to avoid skewing the results by having a tired throwing arm, and things like that.  No need to go into more details.  Let’s just say the results are in and we read the published, peer reviewed results:  The apple was thrown 1.4 times farther than the orange.  Great study, huh?

But wait a minute, what happened to the pineapple?  In the fine print, it says we didn’t include the pineapple because the throwers couldn’t seem to throw the pineapple right.  Good excuse?

Why couldn’t they make a glove or something to throw the pineapple or a machine to throw all the fruits?  Or something?  Maybe they say they had to “adjust” for the different weights of the apple and the orange.  So if they could “compensate” for one of them, why couldn’t they adjust for confounding factors for the pineapple?  Something is wrong.

Also, from the comment in the notes “not able to throw the pineapple right;” doesn’t that suggest that the pineapple didn’t go as far as the others?  Isn’t that the implication?  Because if the pineapple flew farther than the others, the note would say something like “the pineapple seemed to be too aerodynamic and flew too easily” or something like that.

Furthermore, let’s say there’s a political debate raging over the issue of if pineapples or apples fly farther.  Doesn’t that make it all the more suspicious when the pineapple is mysteriously excluded?

Back to the health study.  They write that the reason they excluded the “government health care plans” is that, well, those people must be really sick already.  Doesn’t that imply that the results were that people on government insurance did poorly, but they aren’t going to report that?

They even mention they had to do all sorts of adjustments to “even out” various factors for the differences between the “insurance” group and the “no insurance” group.  Things like income, smoking rates, rates of obesity, different patterns of exercise among the groups, even assessments of their current health.  So, we are to believe that the study authors were able to compensate for all these factors, including current health, (the very reason cited for not including the government insurance in the results) but were somehow unable to do these same compensations to get an accurate view of government supplied health care?

I smell a rat!  What would congressman Grayson’s sign say if they included the government health care in the study?

Who said it?

Quick quiz for you.  Last week at a meeting with the congressman, this was said:

(they) … complained about illegal aliens playing the system for funds; who see people drive into the parking lot in a Cadillac Escalade clutching cell phones with fake fingernails but claiming they don’t have the money to buy their child asthma medicine;

Who uttered this non-judgmental non-elitist non-arrogant insightful commentary?  Choose one:

a)  An idiot

b)  Directors of Doctors Hospital in Manteca

c)  The Manteca Country Club membership committee

d)  Lou Dobbs

For the answer, see the report in this weeks Sun-Post.  (link below)

SunPost.net - News, businesses, classifieds, sports, events in Lathrop and Manteca, California.

Politician training simulator

If you have some time to kill, or you want to try your hand at redistricting, you can play this exciting and challenging game!  It’s based on real political science.  See if you can get your candidate elected!  And you’ll learn a lot about this otherwise esoteric way politicians stay in power.

(click on link below to start game)

The ReDistricting Game

CBS News - Apollo 11 Moon Landing, July 1969

CBS News - Apollo 11 Moon Landing, July 1969 - part 1!!
Uploaded by videohollic - Check out other Film & TV videos.

Most think of the achievement of the “moon landing” as Neil Armstrong stepping on the lunar dust. I don’t; I chose this 10 minute time period because I thought it’s the most significant achievement of the “moon landing.” It was “Buzz” Aldrin who said the landing was the hard part. After all, once you have landed then it’s a simple matter to get out and walk around.

Even getting to the moon was not that hard. As soon as Robert Goddard build his first liquid fueled rocket in the 1930’s he realized that it would be possible to travel to the moon. (So did Nazi scientists such as Werhner Von Braun, who helped design the Saturn V rocket used to go to the moon).

No, the real achievement was that last 10 minutes of “powered descent” where the landing craft had to slow down from “space travel speed” to a near dead stop just at the surface of the moon. This technique was perfected by none other than semi-madman Howard Hughes, who built the first spacecraft to land safely on the moon.

In this clip you’ll hear some drama that we didn’t know much about at the time. You’ll hear those pesky “program alarms” indicating the computer was overloaded. Notice there’s a long pause where they ask about their “delta h” and “what do you want us to do with that alarm?” What he was asking was “are we gently descending to the moon or are we plummeting to our deaths? Um, any time you’d like to tell us would be great.”

Notice also the CBS “animation” is great, but at the end it’s off by almost a minute. These things are supposed to be figured to the microsecond! So what was going on?

They were supposed to land at the time the animation shows. And it’s confusing because you hear the astronauts call out “lights on” just as the animation shows a light coming on. But those are different lights! The animation shows the “contact light” but the light they were announcing was the low fuel light and they were nowhere near landing in reality. You can hear a guy on the ground give a terse “sixty seconds” (one minute of fuel remaining). What had happened, unknown to anyone on Earth at the time was that the computer was guiding them right to an unsuitable landing site; so Armstrong had to take over control and slide forward a little and then land. Just before they land you can hear that guy scream “thirty seconds!” He was reminding them, in NASA speak, that bad things would happen in 30 seconds.

There’s actually a film of these same events from inside the lander. I like that video too. But this one shows Walter Cronkite who died today at age 92.

Dailymotion - CBS News - Apollo 11 Moon Landing, July 1969 - part 1!! - a Film & TV video

Video – God’s planning commission

I find the comments from McCorvey starting at about 1:40 fascinating:

What she seems to be saying is that it’s a mystery why Roe V. Wade hasn’t been overturned; after all it’s God’s will. But they must be missing some “key element.” So they are looking for that “key element” that will cause Roe to be overturned.

Does every generation view God as a reflection of the current culture? If you go back through books or movies, you’ll see during the 2nd World War, God was seen as a supreme general with angels and heaven organized like an army (e.g. It’s a Wonderful Life). During the ‘60’s-70’s God was seen as the great hippie, full of peace, love, rainbows, butterflies (e.g. Woodstock). Today, can it be that we view the world, and our God as the Supreme Bureaucrat?

She is suggesting that God isn’t granting the overturning of Roe V. Wade (and presumably permitting the slaughter of millions) because some form isn’t filled out correctly or some prayer isn’t being said properly or in the right order? Did she accidently submit the canary copy of her prayers and keep the blue copy for her records? Maybe it’s kneel-pray-chant-pray-chant not chant-pray-chant. Is there some department head that needs to sign off on something?

It just seemed odd to me that someone would talk about God like that, the same way I hear people talk about the City Council or the Planning Commission. Like, you never know what you have to do to get a permit for your hot dog stand, one is granted, one is denied.

Have we entered some sort of cosmic age of caprice where we view our world, and our God as the Supremely Particular Bureaucrat that demands we navigate a forest of rules and regulations and forms and procedures and “key elements” before our prayers and His will is done on earth?

Video - Roe v. Wade Plaintiff Disrupts Sotomayor Hearing - WSJ.com

Office of behavior modification

I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard the phrase “we” (who’s we?) “have to get people out of their cars.” Usually it involves not funding road repairs and funding a high tech bus station (multi-modal station) instead. Or creating a subsidized bus service that travels two miles through Manteca and costs roughly $25 each trip. (The passenger pays $1, the taxpayer pays the rest.)

How many times have we heard about incorporating “smart growth” into something they call the city’s “general plan?” It’s about fighting something called “sprawl” and its evil proponents, “the developers.” Here, the “sprawl” is defined as what occurs precisely after the point in time that I move in to an area (i.e., sprawl-fighters want to move to an area and build a home for themselves, but it’s “sprawl” if anyone else does the same.)

Paradoxically, Manteca has a set of regulations outlawing building small houses and using less than a minimum amount of land while simultaneously providing taxpayer money to certain builders if they build below that minimum. It's called “high density.” Remember “density” is the inverse of “amount of land used.” So the city outlaws building on small lots, then wonders why people aren’t building on small lots, then decides to fix the problem by paying a developer to build on small lots.

Manteca also complains about traffic congestion. And at the same time it builds speed bumps, “bulb outs,” wide medians with trees in the middle of roads, and caps roads with dead ends just yards from the cross street so that road can’t be used to relieve traffic congestion. The policy is to force you to use the congested road. Then they do “studies” before giving out building permits and charge homebuyers huge extra taxes to fix the “congestion” they say they “cause.”

Come to think of it I think I just answered my own question. It’s the “cycle of money/laws/favors” in Manteca. But that really wasn’t the point of this entry, I just found the following article by George Will interesting:

Why Ray LaHood Is Wrong Newsweek George F. Will Newsweek.com

George F. Will - A Quixotic Pursuit: Green Energy Jobs

 

“…each new job entails the loss of 2.2 other jobs…”

George F. Will - A Quixotic Pursuit: Green Energy Jobs

Any similarities are purely intentional

Today:

Then: