It's All About You

So the NYT's resident hate-filled spinster has spun a new, sneering column against men. It's not particularly fascinating with the exception of this little snippet at the end.

Which brings us to a recent Sarah Silverman tweet: “Dear Men, Just b/c we don’t need you anymore doesn’t mean we don’t WANT you! Love forever, Women.”

An appropriate reply from a similarly misogynistic man would read something like,

"Dear Sarah, thanks to the abundance of other women putting out and making porn, we don't want OR need you any more. Go away."

That's not a very good response as it only applies to the smirking Sarah, something that Sarah herself is unable to see. Her tweet should have read,

“Dear Men, Just b/c I don’t need you anymore doesn’t mean I don’t WANT you! Love forever, Sarah.”

That change is the essence of modern, secular morality. You have found what works for you and do it, regardless of what happens to others when they follow your lead. Dig this.

Children living in households with unrelated adults are nearly 50 times as likely to die of inflicted injuries as children living with two biological parents, according to a study of Missouri data published in the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics in 2005.

50 times is a whole lot. It's kind of telling, actually. If, for example, you looked in a friend's freezer and found two quarts of ice cream, you might not think much of it. If you found 100 quarts, you'd wonder if he was a loony.

50 times difference, illustrated by neckerchiefs*.

Fear not, however, because Sarah isn't bothered by any of this. After all, it's not her kids getting abused. Nor is it Maureen Dowd's. So Sarah and Maureen don't need men. Those abused kids need men, married dads to be exact, but not our two harpies. They're not big on worrying about such things because their time is spent mocking traditional marriage and men in general. There's no need for them to be concerned about it.

After all, they're compassionate and non-judgmental.

Well, when it comes to themselves, that is.

* - You thought I was going to say dogs, didn't you?

Sunset Surfer

This was the scene last night at the appropriately names Sunset Cliffs.

I left the original large, so it's worth a click!

On Failure And Its Lessons

So my daughter didn't make her high school's varsity soccer team. She had played 6 years of club ball, worked out on her skills on her own using what I'd taught her about deliberate practice and even worked with a private trainer on her speed over the summer and fall. I have no doubt in my mind that she put in far more effort than any other girl on that team.

My girl is 5' 3" tall. When we played club games, almost everyone else on the field was a good 4" taller than her. A taller girl means longer legs, longer legs means greater speed. After he cut her, the coach told me that the only thing that held her back was her speed. She just couldn't keep up with the pace of the game.

She was distraught when she learned that she hadn't made the team. She'd missed out on club teams before, but she'd never had a rejection like this one. She really wanted it and had worked like crazy for it. She wondered if all of her work had been a waste of time. As her dad and her biggest fan, I had to suppress the pain I felt and help her pull lessons out of the wreckage all the while letting her know that I couldn't be prouder of her or love her more. I had hoped that her soccer career would end with a celebration of her senior year participation on the varsity team. Instead, it's ended in her junior year before the season even begins.

Ouch.

Among the lessons I'm hoping to help her learn are these:

• How good you have to be to rise to the top of your field
• Hard work doesn't guarantee success, but the lack of hard work guarantees failure
• Deliberate practice works - she saw this in the dramatic change in her skills when she started using it
• Life was richer and more passionate when she was pursuing her goal even if she didn't make it
• Eventually you may be limited by your innate abilities, but you can go a lot farther than others expect through hard work. Her last two seasons of club ball had her facing off against opponents much larger than her and she was always able to hold her own
• You can outsmart many of your limitations. She played outside defender and while she was never able to leap frog the midfielder in front of her and play offensive ball, she learned how to play defense so that her lack of speed wasn't much of a disadvantage

Finally, there is pain and failure in life. You can only avoid it by never trying to accomplish anything and in the end, that way leads to inner despair. She's a tough girl and I'm convinced she's going to have a happy and successful life. This is just a new turn in the road, not the end of everything.

On the plus side, she went full Cheick Tiote on a bunch of girls during tryouts and flattened them. She may not be fast, but, by God, you know she's on the field.

Mission Trails Sunset

I left it big. I think it's worth a click.

Hilarious!

I loved this.

I Wonder If They're Reading Peter Drucker In The White House

With so few Administration appointees actually familiar with running a project where a deliverable other than a research paper was expected, do you suppose they're all taking crash courses in project management right about now?

Dig this.

They are letting it be known that House and Senate Democrats are increasingly frustrated, bitter and angry with the White House over ObamaCare’s botched rollout, and that the president’s mea culpa in a news conference last week failed to soothe any ill will.

Sources who attended a meeting of House chiefs of staff on Monday say the room was seething with anger over the immense damage being done to the Democratic Party and talk was of scrapping rollout events for the Affordable Care Act.

“Here we are, we’re supposed to be selling this to people, and it’s all screwed up,” one chief of staff ranted. “This either gets fixed or this could be the demise of the Democratic Party.

That doesn't sound too good. I'm picturing the icy hand of fear gripping them as they all realize that none of them have ever done anything like this before. Now that the wheels have come off, they're probably desperate to learn how to make this thing work, the way an explorer would be tearing through his translation book trying to communicate with the cannibals who are about to cook him, bouilli dans du vin aux petits oignons.

I would imagine that Compassionate Commie Valerie Jarrett would agree with Heartless Capitalist Pete on this one.

Eventually Things Get Better

... because reality can't be denied forever. Dig this piece over at Cafe Hayek about the link between the breakdown of the traditional family and the rise in income inequality. Good stuff. Once you're exposed to that linkage and you start to think about it, it's pretty tough to go back to using racism / theft / oligopoly / deregulation / leprechauns stealing my money as excuses for the inequality we see.

We prude-bloggers won't be lonely for too much longer. As the State collapses and social safety net budgets get slashed, the smoke screens that concealed the situation will vanish.

A Blind Surfer? Crazy!

Dig this.

Why Reinstate The Canceled Plans?

So King Obama waved his royal scepter the other day and decreed that if you liked your plan you may keep it again and anyway it was never his fault that you lost it in the first place. Now the insurance companies can opt to untie the Gordian knot of risk calculations and regulatory hurdles and reinstate the plans.

Why would they?

Dig this.

The health-insurance companies...would be deluged with lawsuits by insureds who claimed that the policies were illegal and wrongly denied coverage for this or that treatment. The insurance companies themselves would get into the act, filing suits to be compensated for payouts they’d made based on the illegal policies. The Obama “waiver” would avail them of nothing in a court, where a judge would be obliged to follow the law, not Dear Leader’s enforcement preferences.
...
Obama has no constitutional leg to stand on in violating — and, by his waivers, encouraging violations of — the Obamacare law. The insurance companies have no hope of immunity.

Anyone want to bet that the Administration would send briefs in support of the insurance companies to any and all court cases covering consumer lawsuits based on blatantly illegal health care plans? Perhaps it's more likely that the progressives infesting the White House, who hate Big Insurance like it's a tool of the Devil, would relish the chance to finish off those for-profit schweinhund once and for all and would actually encourage lawsuits behind the scenes.

If she wants to hook up with that super cute, vegan guy from the Queer Film Studies class, she can sue her insurer for not providing the necessary unguents, antibiotic poultices and latex doohickeys as required by law.

And then there's this.

“It’s a whirlwind, my friend,” says David Oscar, communications chair of the New Jersey Association of Health Underwriters. “I’ve been dealing with Jan. 1 renewals since the beginning of November. Now I’ve got to go back? For me as a broker, as a person who represents insurance carriers, I have egg on my face, because now I have everybody sending me an e-mail saying, ‘Hey, Dave, I heard on the “Today” show this morning that I can keep my old plan.’ ”

How do you explain to your old customers that they can have their old policies back, but at much higher prices without looking like a predator? The prices will have to go up as the renewed policies will take the place of the overpriced, healthy person policies mandated by the ACA so the insurers can remain solvent. It would be far easier to simply point to the ACA legislation and all of the state-specific regulatory hurdles and wistfully say that as much as you'd like to, there's no way to bring the dead policies back to life.

Meanwhile, you cut off all funding to Democratic candidates and pour money like water into Republican coffers to get this toad of a law utterly repealed. It's either that or bankruptcy and then single payer.

Serving The Underserved

... or is it the undeserving?

Earlier this week, I worked at Catholic Charities Food Resource Center. There was the usual assortment of lovable folks - a 78-year-old Filipina who was delighted to be selected for a Thanksgiving prize basket, a hapless, mid-40s couple who were married earlier this year but were now homeless*, an elderly, obese black woman in a wheelchair who was sunshine itself and so on. There was one guy in particular that stuck out in a different way.

The dude was a Hispanic gangsta. Mid-20s, a real tough guy. He had two tears tattooed under each eye, marking him as someone who had killed a person, served four terms in jail or both. He knew I saw the tattoos and could tell from my face that I knew what they might mean. As I helped him through his choices, I marveled at the surreal aspect of it all. Here was a guy who had preyed upon others coming in to receive love and support from Catholic volunteers. It was like sandpaper meeting cashmere.

For all the windbaggery on this blog about marriage and morality (Dean calls me his favorite moral scold), I was so grateful to God that I had a chance to show affection and warmth to this guy.

I even got him to smile a few times.

I pray that I brought him a little closer to You.

* - More on this in another post. Serving the homeless can be so unbelievably gut-wrenching.

Simplified: Why It's Only Going To Get Worse For Obamacare

Obamacare is coming apart faster and more comprehensively than anyone could have believed, like three Hindenburgs colliding over a melting-down Chernobyl while the Titanic sinks in the Pripyat River nearby. Yesterday, President Obama held a news conference where he offered a fix that effectively added a massive train derailment into the mix.

We can expect more of this. Much more of it. Progressives academics have no clue at all how anything works and the government right now is being run by progressive academics. Every interaction with managing and creating real things provides new shocks to them. Yesterday was the perfect example. People are losing their health care because the monstrous law we passed torched millions of existing policies? No problem! We'll tweak the rules so you can keep your coverage! Now it's off to the golf course for a relaxing round or two!

That particular 175-car freight train of toxic chemicals went off the tracks and crashed in flames within a few hours. State regulators in Washington, Oregon and elsewhere refused to go along and insurance companies, probably using sock puppets and squeaky voices, tried to explain to the graduates of Harvard and Princeton in Washington, DC that the infrastructure behind health insurance plans is slightly more complicated than picking out the right organic endives for Michelle Obama's Victory Salad tonight. You can't turn policies on and off like flipping a light switch.

Again: the president's proposed solution to a total catastrophe was revealed as unworkable within hours.

Obamacare is going to get worse and worse for a very simple reason. It now exists in reality and not in some fantasy world dreamed up by the Committee for Social Justice at Dartmouth. The people proposing solutions don't understand how anything works and they're in charge of the nation's entire health care financial apparatus which is coming apart right before our eyes. There is zero chance that naive, egotistical, ignorant academics are going to manage an insanely complex, multi-dimensional, real-world crisis that's evolving as fast as this one.

On the plus side, the flames will provide light to the workers trying to stop the radiation leaks at the reactor!

Proposition 13 and Obamacare

So Slick Willy came out and said that President Obama ought to allow people to keep their health insurance if they like it, just as he had promised. The President agreed. Say they did that and allowed all policies to be grandfathered in.

What happens to the new policies, the ones with no grandfathering?

Here in California, we have the same kind of thing with property taxes under Proposition 13. Rate hikes and reassessments were limited due to government abuse back in the 70s and now we have identical houses right next to each other with wildly different tax bills because one has remained in the same hands and the other has been sold at least once - selling being one of those times when the state can reassess your property.

Very quickly, the inequities of grandfathered health insurance will be obvious. Some middle-aged men will be paying for Sandra Flukey coverage - birth control, abortions, mental health treatment for delusional disorders - and some won't. How's that going to play out and for how long? Do you get to keep your grandfathered policies forever? Do 70-year-old widowers see gynecologist coverage slowly phased in over 5 years so that their non-grandfathered poker buddies don't get too upset over their higher premiums?

Crazy stuff to think about, man.

The coolest thing of all is that whatever exceptions and modifications are being written, they are happening in the middle of a huge crisis where the time to react is short. That's bound to result in some fun unintended consequences.

Change things? Nonsense! Everyone needs ho-surance!

How I Found Livingstone in Detroit

... or something like that.

After being inspired by the book Willpower to read some of Henry Stanley's African adventures*, I picked up How I Found Livingstone in Central Africa on Audible. I'm a half hour in and the book is terrific. Having marinated in illegitimacy statistics and scoped out the resulting videos from cities where civilization has collapsed along with the traditional family, I was struck by a passage from the second chapter of Stanley's book.

I remember what Capt. Webb, the American Consul, told me on my first arrival, when I expressed to him my wonder at the apathy and inertness of men born with the indomitable energy which characterizes Europeans and Americans, of men imbued with the progressive and stirring instincts of the white people, who yet allow themselves to dwindle into pallid phantoms of their kind, into hypochondriacal invalids, into hopeless believers in the deadliness of the climate, with hardly a trace of that daring and invincible spirit which rules the world.

"Oh," said Capt. Webb, "it is all very well for you to talk about energy and all that kind of thing, but I assure you that a residence of four or five years on this island, among such people as are here, would make you feel that it was a hopeless task to resist the influence of the example by which the most energetic spirits are subdued, and to which they must submit in time, sooner or later. We were all terribly energetic when we first came here, and struggled bravely to make things go on as we were accustomed to have them at home, but we have found that we were knocking our heads against granite walls to no purpose whatever. These fellows—the Arabs, the Banyans, and the Hindis—you can't make them go faster by ever so much scolding and praying, and in a very short time you see the folly of fighting against the unconquerable. Be patient, and don't fret, that is my advice, or you won't live long here."

Modern translation: don't be too harsh on the folks who live in Detroit or East St. Louis or Newark. Immersed in a culture of self-destructive behavior, you'd find it pretty hard to resist the tide, too.

* - Stanley is a first-ballot inductee into the Willpower Hall of Fame.

Thanks, Obamacare!

It looked fake. It wasn't.

The road to Detroit is paved with stuff like this.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

Hahahahahaha!

Like generations before them, many young women like Ms. Gadinsky are finding that casual sex does not bring the physical pleasure that men more often experience. New research suggests why: Women are less likely to have orgasms during uncommitted sexual encounters than in serious relationships.

Hahahahahahaha!

"Haven't you read," he replied, "that at the beginning the Creator 'made them male and female,' and said, 'For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh' ? So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate." (Matthew 19:4-6)

Hahahahahahahahaha!

Devout, married Catholics have the best sex of any demographic group, the Family Research Council said at an event Wednesday, pointing to a collection of studies from the last several decades...

The notion that Catholics have better sex isn't a new one, especially coming from Catholics. In 1994, Andrew Greeley, a Catholic sociologist and priest, published "Sex: The Catholic Experience," which released a litany of new statistics: 68 percent of Catholics professed to have sex at least once a week versus 56 percent of non-Catholics; 30 percent of Catholics had bought erotic underwear versus 20 percent non-Catholics; and 80 percent of devout Catholic women approved of having sex for pleasure alone.

Winning.

Cheezburger of the Day

I thought this was sweet.

Source

Good Morning

This morning's skies here in San Diego.

Well, That Explains The Guy With The Eyepatch Following Me On Twitter

Time Magazine has a site where you can find out how much you're worth to Twitter. I'm worth $114, but the more interesting thing is the potential eyeballs per day for my Twitter feed.

It's an odd number.

Well, OK then.

Comment Of The Year, Finalist

This comment is as full of teh awesome as you might hope to find on the web.

Preface: Article about only one person in North Carolina managing to sign up for Obamacare.

Standard Progressive Comment: Quit complaining...why have the Republicans not unveiled a Health Plan?

The best reply of all time: The plan for freedom does not require a website. Bite me.

My day will be full of sunshine and happiness because I read that.

Married, Middle Class People Are Racists

... and here's the proof.

1. Extremist teabaggers are racist.
2. Ken Cuccinelli is an extremist teabagger
3. Married people voted for Ken Cuccinelli 

   

   Extremist teabaggers in red, fact-based people in blue

4. Middle class people voted for Ken Cuccinelli 

   

   Bigoted rednecks in red, open-minded people in blue

5. Ergo, married, middle class people are racists.

It's a good thing we're working so hard to destroy traditional marriage. When you think about it, this makes the gay marriage thing a double win for civil rights!

H/T: Mollie Hemingway

Sanctus Real - Lead Me

I heard this on Pandora, found the YouTube video and thought I'd share it with you. I thought it was a beautiful testament to what a man ought to be.

Enjoy.

Negative People Are Bad For Lambs

Have you ever noticed that whenever you're around people who want to tell you how lousy things are - their jobs suck, the traffic was horrible, the weather is unbearable, etc., you feel like you've got to go along and tell them how awful something is in your own life? It's like they're Serious and Important and if you're not suffering as well, you live life like a lamb playing in a meadow. For me, at least, it's a real effort to remain cheery under such conditions.

Personally, I prefer the lambs playing in the meadow.

Image Of The Day

I was going in a totally different direction today when I came across this blog post with the image below.

Awesomeness squared.

God Help Me, But I Think This Looks Pretty Good

This Is Me

... with my Newcastle United mug, my Jonas Gutierrez jersey, my daughter's NUFC baseball cap, our son's Newcastle wool cap ...

I think life is best lived with many passions - your teams, your kids, your spouse, your faith, your parents, your hobbies, whatever you can put your heart into. Howay the lads.

The Best And The Brightest

... created Obamacare and it ended up a total train wreck.

In watching the Obamacare catastrophe evolve, one thought in particular has been going through my mind: there aren't any excuses this time. The law was passed without any need to negotiate or compromise with the infidels on the right and then it was implemented by an Administration full to the gills with Ivy League (and equivalently credentialed) geniuses. If this sort of thing was ever going to work, this was the time.

I've read the comment threads of many articles describing the unfolding chaos and there's an undercurrent of excuse-making that suggests the implementation was somehow polluted by conservative impurities or profit-mongering on the part of the insurers and contractors. That leads to the question, just how perfect did the world have to be in order for Obamacare to work?

Maybe we just don't spend enough money on colleges and the people creating Obamacare weren't sufficiently educated. (Image source.)

Nothing Says "Compassion" Quite Like Blowing Our Kids' Money

The Chicago Tribune has a must-read piece today on the Windy City's massive debt problem. They've borrowed and borrowed and borrowed and it turns out they've been spending the money on normal operating expenses. That's like using your credit card to buy groceries week after week and not paying it off.

Chicago. Because Detroit was lonely being the only big city to declare bankruptcy.

I don't have time to do this right now, but an interesting graphic would be to take the debt projections for Chicago and mark the years when the city leaders retire and then also mark typical life milestones for someone who is currently, say, 22 years old - marriage, kids, buying a house, etc. It might bring home the point that Rahm Emmanuel and Richard Daley will be gone and on our kids' tab when the debt bomb goes off.

I wonder when the youth of America will get wise. Soon, I hope.

A Magpie Miracle?

True story. This morning, Newcastle played the early game. I was able to watch the first half before I had to get ready to go to the Cursillo Mass and get together. Newcastle were playing Chelsea. You had to figure Newcastle was going to lose by at least four goals, Chelsea is that good. Thanks to a very gutty performance by the Magpies, at the end of the first half it was still a scoreless tie.

I got ready for church and drove down to Chula Vista for Mass. I checked Twitter before I got out of the car and found out that Newcastle had scored a goal and was leading 1-0 with 8 minutes to go. I went into church and debated whether or not to leave my phone on to secretly check Twitter for game updates. I decided not to, so I turned the phone off, figuring I was offering it up to God.

Three minutes later, a shaft of light no bigger than my chest comes in through the stained glass window on the far side of the church and the only thing it illuminates is the Newcastle logo on my t shirt. At that moment I knew exactly what had happened. And sure enough when I checked the score after church on Twitter it had. Newcastle had scored another goal and beat Chelsea 2-0.

A sign from God? A miracle? Total, ridiculous coincidence? You decide. All I could do was laugh.

:-)

Obamacare Is Fascism

I was clicking around the Interweb Tubes this morning and I came across Charles Krauthammer's latest piece. Here's the snippet that jumped out at me.

Sure, you freely chose the policy, paid for the policy, renewed the policy, liked the policy. But you’re too primitive to know what you need. We do. Your policy is hereby canceled.

Because what you really need is what our experts have determined must be in every plan.

The essence of fascism is that you can keep your private property and personal decisions, so long as you do what the government wants you to do.

You're out of line with the Supreme Health Board, citizen. We cancelled your policy and have issued you one appropriate for you.

Forward.

Libertarian Jesus

I saw this image on Twitter and loved it.

H/T: Dan Mitchell

I think it hits home, not for political reasons, but because it represents reality. Obamacare, education spending, gun control, whatever your favorite government-based solution might be or a combination of all of it plus total socialism and printed money isn't going to make a change here. You're going to have to do that yourself, one person at a time.

A Moss Bathmat

This is so incredibly cool!

Want!

The Coming Obamacare Recession

I'm going to go out on a limb and predict a recession in the near future. First, there's this.

WASHINGTON—A drop in auto purchases weighed on U.S. retail sales last month, though underlying figures show that consumers picked up the pace of spending on electronics, eating out and some other nonessentials.

Retail sales fell a seasonally adjusted 0.1% in September from a month earlier, the Commerce Department said Tuesday. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had forecast a 0.1% rise.

The analysis at the end of the article has this to say.

(M)ore recently job creation has stalled and consumer confidence has taken a hit, raising concerns that spending could fall off. The Thomson-Reuters/University of Michigan consumer-sentiment index fell for the second straight month in September. This month it dropped again, falling to its lowest level since December 2012.

Consumer attitudes soured as Washington gridlock worsened, leading to a government shutdown that ran from Oct. 1 through Oct. 16. It's not yet clear if that darker mood will translate into less spending.

Millions of people losing their health insurance and almost everyone having to pay more than they used to is going to necessarily lead to less consumer spending and less consumer confidence. In an already weak economy that is driven by consumer spending, that sure looks like a recipe for a recession.

These Ivy League, society-reshaping ideas never work out the way they did in the faculty lounge bull sessions.

H/T: Flopping Aces

Krugman: All I'm Saying Is Give Communism A Chance

Normally, I consider Paul Krugman and Robert Reich to be fascists. I may have been wrong all along about these two. Dig this.

It’s true that the Affordable Care Act isn’t as complex as opponents make it out to be. Basically, it requires that insurance companies offer the same policies to everyone; it requires that each individual then buy one of these policies (the individual mandate); and it offers subsidies, depending on income, to keep insurance affordable.

Still, there’s a lot for people to go through. Not only do they have to choose insurers and plans, they have to submit a lot of personal information so the government can determine the size of their subsidies. And the software has to integrate all this information, getting it to all the relevant parties — which isn’t happening yet on the federal site.

Imagine, now, a much simpler system in which the government just pays your major medical expenses. In this hypothetical system you wouldn’t have to shop for insurance, nor would you have to provide lots of personal details. The government would be your insurer, and you’d be covered automatically by virtue of being an American.

Ah, how much simpler things would be if the government decided to simply own every element of health care. As the fascist Obamacare solution unfolds into a total catastrophe, it makes Krugman long for the communist solution of universal Medicare. How efficient! How just! Everyone covered and it's all paid for by the government.

Sort of like the old GUM department stores in the Soviet Union. None of that wretched "corporate greed" getting in the way, just pure, efficient, government-provided goods and services.

The SAT Test Formulation Of The Issue: Government health care is to modern medicine what this is to Nordstroms.

Into Space Via ... Balloon?

Dig this.

More info here.

Nobody Tells Me Nothin'

... is what President Obama must be saying all the time.

First, he thought if you liked your doctor and health plan you could keep it, only to find out you couldn't. Then he thought the website was going to launch just fine, but it didn't. After that he was peddling a 1-800 number where you can sign up for health care except that you can't. Now we find out he had no idea the NSA was bugging Angela Merkel and other world leaders.

The account suggests President Barack Obama went nearly five years without knowing his own spies were bugging the phones of world leaders. Officials said the NSA has so many eavesdropping operations under way that it wouldn't have been practical to brief him on all of them.

They added that the president was briefed on and approved of broader intelligence-collection "priorities," but that those below him make decisions about specific intelligence targets.

Roger Simon has a great post about this today. Here's an excerpt.

No wonder Obamacare and practically everything else from foreign policy to energy policy is an unmitigated mess. This president and his administration have taken hands-off leadership and leading from behind to unprecedented levels.

What exactly does our president do for a living? What’re we paying him for?

That's kind of what I was thinking, too. He has lots and lots of meetings and lots and lots of briefings, they just don't seem to contain any actual, you know, information.

Weird.

The Party Of No

... no rainbow unicorns, that is.

Surfing around the Interweb tubes, soaking up the excuses for the cataclysmic disaster that is Obamacare, I've come across three general classes of whining.

1. It hasn't been implemented yet. Err, well, yes it has. That's what a roll-out is. It's the start of implementation. Saying that it hasn't been implemented because it crashed and burned upon release is like saying you didn't give our new car a chance, we'd have put the fires out eventually and besides, you don't really need all that molten upholstery on the inside anyway.

2. It was all your idea anyway. This is the position of our favorite little fascist "thinker," Robert Reich. Like the equally demented Paul Krugman, Robert is closer to a minister of propaganda than he is to anything else. From the comments in that post, it's clear Robbie has plenty of cannon fodder in the Obama Youth* to back him up.

3. OK, smartypants, what's your plan? This is the most common and my own personal favorite. It's the "Party of No" accusation. Having failed to deliver on their promises of rainbow unicorns through Obamacare, they now demand that opponents come up with a plan to deliver rainbow unicorns. It doesn't seem to occur to them that, their deepest wishes aside, there aren't going to be any rainbow unicorns. Ever.

But I want one! I want it, I Want It, I WANT IT!

* - It's worth nothing that the term, Obama Youth is used quite loosely. As the Youth discover how ferociously Obamacare screws them, the demographics of the Obama Youth is going to become much, much less youthful.

Cheezburger of the Day

Consumer Confidence And Obamacare

Just had a thought wander into my head. What's going to happen to consumer confidence, consumer spending and business spending as the turmoil and uncertainty of the Obamacare disaster continue to grow? Personally, I'm going to be paying at least $1000 more each year for health care, but at least I'll have it. What about the hundreds of thousands or millions of people whose health care is being terminated because their policies don't meet Obamacare standards?

Would you be out there buying a new car or new washing machine under those circumstances?

Link Of The Day

This is spot on.

"Obamacare was designed to fail; to fail slowly and incrementally; to fail in a way that would convince people that private, for-profit health insurance companies are the reason why America's catastrophically overpriced and malfunctioning health care system hasn't worked, doesn't work, and will never work. The architects of the Affordable Care Act wanted to 'prove' that third-party private insurance should be scrapped entirely and replaced with a single-payer system: straight socialism.

"The ACA was supposed to fail slowly and painfully over the course of two or three or four presidential election cycles (which is why Obamacare's namesake, Barack Obama, saw to it that it wouldn't be implemented until the second half of his second term). When the backlash came, it was supposed to come on some other president's—preferably a Republican president's—watch.

"But instead of failing on schedule, four or eight or twelve years from now—it has failed instantly, upon contact with reality.... Obama, Reid, and all of the other architects of the Affordable Care Act have created a problem for themselves that was designed to be insoluble."

Read the whole thing.

The Biggest Advantage Of DSLR Cameras Over Pocket Cameras

... is the viewfinder.

We've got two of the newer, relatively high-end pocket cameras. One has excellent optics including a 22x zoom. However, you frame the shot by looking at the LCD screen on the back. If the lighting isn't good, that image is washed out and you're essentially firing blindly. I've brought it with me a couple of times in the car for photos of opportunity and struggled with that. I end up backing the zoom out until I'm guaranteed it's going to capture the image I want somewhere in the shot.

My Nikon D60 artillery piece is another thing entirely. You look right through the camera lens with your eye shielded from glare and know precisely what you're getting. You shoot with confidence. It makes a huge difference to me.

Every Husband A Planned And Wanted Husband

Link Of The Day.

While divorce may be an attractive alternative to murder for hire in most cases, some women do not have the emotional and financial resources to go through a divorce. A contested divorce can take more than a year to resolve. After attorneys drain the couple's finances, the woman will be left with little money to get on with her life. Additionally, a discrete and well-timed hit protects a husband from the pain of discovering that he is no longer wanted. A truly skilled assassin can take his target painlessly in an instant, without any suffering. The end of a marriage can potentially ruin a woman's life, but if her husband can be taken out quickly and cleanly, it can be a new beginning for her.

Read the whole thing. I thought it was hilarious.

H/T: Rev. Cary Gordon

If You Sleep With Hogs

... you wake up with a lot more than fleas.

http://t.co/m5bQWriUGO @KTcat This must be some more of that "consults with businesses" I keep hearing about. #Peronism #Justicialism
— Dean R. Riehm (@deanriehm) October 23, 2013

I would bet that right now, the insurance companies and the Obama Administration are terrified of many of the same things, not least of all this.

Health plans are sending hundreds of thousands of cancellation letters to people who buy their own coverage, frustrating some consumers who want to keep what they have and forcing others to buy more costly policies. The main reason insurers offer is that the policies fall short of what the Affordable Care Act requires starting Jan. 1.

For the Administration, they could very easily see more uninsured as a result of Obamacare as insurance companies, enforcing the law, terminate policies which cannot be replaced because the exchange websites are broken. For the insurance companies, that's a lot of premiums to forgo.

What Good Is An Obamacare Website If You Can't Read?

Yes, yes, I know. The website is an expensive catastrophe. The law is having monstrous unintended consequences as insurance companies are cancelling policies that don't comply with the mandates, possibly at a faster rate than people can sign up, meaning that O-care is actually increasing the ranks of the uninsured. There aren't enough young idiots signing up to pay huge fees for health care they don't need. It's all snowballing into disaster. But consider, for a moment, what will happen if it all works.

In Detroit, 47% of the adult population is functionally illiterate. That number is disputed, but it hardly matters when the real number is almost certainly within 10 points of it. Just what are these people going to do with an insurance policy exchange website?

Racism Is A Luxury

Working at Catholic Charities for the last several months has given me a chance to spend time with homeless and destitute people of many races. Our clientele is fairly evenly divided between blacks, whites, Hispanics and Asians. The people mingle together in a courtyard or in the main room while they wait to be served.

Even during the Zimmerman trial, when our self-styled "elites" were telling us we all needed to have a conversations on race, there was no hint of racism. If you were visiting from another planet and hadn't been told to look for it, you would have guessed that skin color meant absolutely nothing.

A few weeks back, I served a black man. I don't think he was homeless, but he certainly was in a bad way. He got his bags of food and was about to leave when a homeless Hispanic guy came to the counter where we usually have free bread. We were out of the bread and we couldn't serve the Hispanic dude because he had been in too recently*. The black guy took some out of what little he had and gave it to the Hispanic man. It was natural, it was loving and it was beautiful. It was straight out of Mark 12:41-44.

He sat down opposite the treasury and observed how the crowd put money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums. A poor widow also came and put in two small coins worth a few cents. Calling his disciples to himself, he said to them, “Amen, I say to you, this poor widow put in more than all the other contributors to the treasury. For they have all contributed from their surplus wealth, but she, from her poverty, has contributed all she had, her whole livelihood.”

Watching this happen time and time again, with all combinations of races, it makes me think that racism is a luxury. In a practical sense, our customers can't afford to throw away anything, least of all relationships. Making someone else an enemy or missing a chance to make a friend when you're vulnerable is dangerous.

There's a part of me that says there's something more to it than that, though. Something that doesn't relate to the racism in the title of this post. There's an air of love and kindness to the place that penetrates everyone and leads them to share themselves with others. Maybe that's one of the most important things we provide.

Maybe it's even more than that. Maybe we have Help.

"For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” - Matthew 18:20

* - We simply don't have the resources to serve anyone more than once every two weeks and have set limits on how many times per year you can come in. We're supplemental food assistance and not intended to be your primary source of nourishment.

My Goose Was Not Cooked

My wife has been away working a women's retreat weekend, so that meant ... time for British cooking!

Hurrah!

Due to other commitments, I only had Saturday available for culinary creativity, so I decided to put on a full Christmas dinner with stuffed goose, Brussels sprouts and roast potatoes. The potatoes were good, the sprouts disappointing and the goose was a calamity.

It was a calamity, I tells ya! A calamity!

The recipe called for an onion and ground pork stuffing. I was to roast the bird for 2 1/2 hours, basting every 15 minutes. No problem there. It came out of the oven a delicious golden brown.

An underdone delicious golden brown.

Goose is unlike chicken or turkey. There isn't much breast meat and, being thin, it cooked through. My first cuts to determine if it was done showed the breast was ready to go. A guest noted red juices at the bottom and we all debated if that was just what geese did when they were done or if it was still a little raw.

We put it back in the oven for 15 minutes.

When it came out, we emptied the cavity of stuffing. (Geese have enormous cavities for stuffing.) The stuffing wasn't even remotely ready, as determined by a thermometer. The goose's legs were still undercooked, too. Back into the oven for another 30 minutes.

By this time, everything else was ready, dished and served at the table. Some of the guests were seated.

Hurrah.

We covered the side dishes and opened more wine and beer. I'm fortunate that the guests were all close friends, accustomed to my culinary experiments, so it wasn't too much of a social faux pas.

When we finally determined the goose and the stuffing to be done, it was brought out, dished up and ... we sliced and served the breast meat and sent the unstuffed bird back into the oven for a third time to finish off those darn legs. By the time the legs were done, dinner was over. Two of the guys pulled the finally-fully-cooked bird out and sampled the legs. They were outstanding, probably worth the price of the bird and the effort. They brought me a piece and it was delicious. Subtle, crispy, fatty, everything I'd hoped.

I've been bitten by this kind of thing before with Cornish game hens. Only that time, it wasn't the stuffing that was the problem, it was the number of hens. Where it takes 4 stuffed hens 60 minutes to cook, it will take 12 hens much, much longer.

In this case, it was the stuffing that got me. The book was just flat-out wrong in the timing. There was no way on earth that bird was going to be ready in 2 1/2 hours and that's a fact. That the stuffing was a huge dud to me (a few guests liked it a lot) tells me to never, ever do that again.

Unlike turkey or chicken, goose is an expensive meat. Mine was $10 a pound, making this a meal you really don't want to screw up. In the end, the meat was good and I might do it again, but I'd never stuff another one.

Oh, and I mucked up the gravy, too, but I'm out of time so you'll just have to imagine what mucked-up goose gravy is like.

An Amazing Own Goal

I've always wondered if something like this could happen. That it happened to that wretched brute, Martin Skrtel, is icing on the cake.

While The Wife's Away

... the husband will, err, play?

So my lovely bride is working a women's retreat this weekend and I've been able to batch* it since Thursday. Thursday afternoon my daughter had her first behind-the-wheel lesson en route to her driver's license. Thursday night, I took the Catican Guards out on maneuvers as they hadn't had any PT in a long time and were starting to rough-house in their barracks.

Today was Catholic Charities and errands, tomorrow is my daughter's soccer and cooking for various people, Sunday is a trip to see my son at college and then a sprint up to the retreat to see the closing of the event and drive my wife back home.

Ahh, relaxing! That's what we bachelors like!

* - Is the shortened, verb version of bachelor bach or batch? It's pronounced "batch."

We Are The Demons We've Been Waiting For

I'm re-reading (re-listening) GK Chesterton's The Everlasting Man right now. It's his masterful takedown of comparative religion studies. There's a tiny portion that brought to mind Miley Cyrus at the recent MTV VMA awards where she did the over-the-top slut routine.

No, really!

GK points out that when we (in our pagan era) talked of dryads and went into the forest to seek them, we did so in the hope of finding them. It was a bit of a lark and a cheerful one at that. When we wanted to make deals with demons, it was a very different thing altogether. It was a much more businesslike proposition, sort of like hiring an attorney. You provided something, expecting performance in return. You explicitly and knowingly did evil in order to get something back from the demon(s). Some child sacrifices in return for victory in battle, perhaps.

Enter Miley Cyrus.

Her performance at the VMA awards was knowingly evil. Repugnant and distasteful and hideous, if you prefer. I'd suggest it was evil. She performed it in front of a crowd she wanted to propitiate and hoped for rewards from them in return.

That it failed to bring her great rewards from them was not because it was evil, but because it wasn't the right kind of evil. It wasn't tasteful evil. Had she styled it differently they would indeed have showered her with praise and acceptance into their ranks.

A Little On The Obamacare Website Fiasco

In my time, I've done a bit of coding and some software team management. Looking through the problems on the Obamacare website and hearing horror stories from the insurance companies that own the systems fed by that monstrosity, all I can think is that the site is months away from being even vaguely usable. Probably many, many months.

In my experience, problems with browser versions (I'm looking at you, Internet Explorer!) are the kind of thing that would take a week or three to fix. Massive architectural failures, user account creation disasters and passing untrustworthy data to downstream servers aren't things you can fix over a weekend shutdown.

No biggie. We'll have this cleaned up in half an hour, tops.

These Ivy League faculty lounge ideas never seem to work quite right in the real world.

Sorcery Is The Only Reasonable Explanation

... for this.

Cheezburger of the Day

A Fundamental Flaw In Obamacare

... is the customer model which assumes people are intelligent, rational and educated.

What if people are poor because they have a tendency to make bad decisions? What if the Bell Curve of intelligence is accurate and there are a lot of folks in the 70-80 IQ range? What if people don't go to the doctor because they're not good at cost-tradeoff analyses or because they're just lazy?

I recently had to visit a local emergency room to deal with an infected elbow bursa sac. The thing swelled up over a few hours and felt like either a broken elbow or like I'd torn some tendons. I was blessed that it was only an infection. A quick poke and drain by the doctor and a tsunami of antibiotics dealt with the problem.

While I was there, I sat in the waiting room and later in the treatment room seeing the same thing I see when I work at Catholic Charities. There were plenty of people who were in a bad way because they made lousy decisions. There was a diabetic with legs missing, a kid with food poisoning from bad tacos and who knows what else. At Catholic Charities, we routinely get overweight people missing half their teeth who opt for the pastries instead of the bread.

One of the keys to Obamacare reducing health care costs in the US is the assumption that people will avail themselves of preventative care if it's available. That's a pretty accurate model of the population with degrees from Brown and Cornell, but much less so among the poor and uneducated. Example: If the "less fortunate" were really good at that kind of planning, would they really have such high levels of illiteracy in places like Detroit? What kind of idiot wouldn't take advantage of free public education*?

If the model of the customer base is wrong, then the whole thing is just a mammoth waste of time. We'll still have people ignoring their health and getting treatment in the emergency rooms, but we'll be doing it with a stifling layer of government wrapping the economy like a shroud.

These brilliant, Ivy League ideas never work out the way they did in the faculty lounge bull sessions.

* - Answer: A common, every day, ordinary idiot.

One Of The Best Sports Manager Interviews You Will Ever See

... can be found here.

Alan Pardew of Newcastle is the EPL's second-longest serving manager right now. The league, like most sports leagues, devours managers at a tremendous rate and probably much faster than most. Alan's been at Newcastle for almost three years. Contrast that with the second-longest serving NFL head coach, the Bengals' Marvin Lewis who's been around for 10 years.

Howay the lads!

I've always liked Alan and until today when I watched that video, it was just a feeling I had that the guy was cool under fire. In the interview linked above, Alan gently criticizes the fans, the owner and the team's general manager. The criticisms aren't done to throw anyone under the bus or make excuses, he's just being himself and being honest. He's so comfortable with who he is that he's able to go on local TV and say what's on his mind. Anyone who can openly say that the owner is sometimes confused by the way the game works has tremendous self-confidence.

Unlike someone untouchable like Bill Belichick of the New England Patriots, Alan has been rumored on British sports talk radio as one of the likely early firings for the season. Despite that, he tells you exactly what he thinks. Certainly not everything he's thinking, but what he does say is done fearlessly and calmly.

If you're a sports fan, the interview is worth at least a few minutes of your time even if you don't watch the whole thing.

Newcastle United Tidbit Probably Only Of Interest To Me: After watching that interview, I now understand why he has the team play such an aggressive style of football, one that has frequently cost them games.

H/T: Ed Harrison at The Newcastle United Blog. Ed is the single most prolific single-topic blogger I've ever seen.

Leadership

From this weekend's retreat where I'm working:

A man's leadership starts with his family. Get that right before saving the world.

I needed to hear that. It's easy enough to make commitment after commitment outside the family, each worthy and individually low-effort, but they can quickly add up into a whole that takes you away too often from your chief duty.

Could There Be A Better Reason To Redefine "Parent" For The Whole State?

Sigh.

"Leno's measure grew out of an appellate court case involving a biological mother, her same-sex partner and a man who had an affair with the mother while she was temporarily separated from her female lover."

http://blogs.sacbee.com/capitolalertlatest/2013/10/jerry-brown-signs-bill-allowing-more-than-two-parents-in-calif.html

Stewart And Sebelius

I'm blogging from my Galaxy S3 while working a retreat weekend, so please forgive the reduction in html quality.

Over at our Monestary of Miscellaneous Musings, link available to the left, Dean posted the video of HHS Secretary Sebelius on Jon Stewart's show. Jon asked a few tough questions on the crony capitalism angle and then went full socialist. Whatever.

Had it been me, I'd have shown some ghetto videos and brought up Detroit, Japan, the Obamacare website and the national debt. Seriously, why do these people get to avoid reality? They produce rubbish, their model of the citizenry is all wrong and they're going bankrupt.

The crony capitalism of Peronist fascism is bad, but the accusations are too indirect. I'd go nuclear right off the bat and never let up.

Running The Printing Press From The Faculty Lounge

I can't say I'm surprised at any of this.

The incoming Fed chairwoman, Janet Yellen, is a big fan of Weimar and Zimbabwe and fully intends to follow their lead to prosperity. She's been one of the loudest voices on the Fed for printing more and more and more money. If you care to look deeper into the horror that is Janet Yellen, the New York Times has a laudatory profile of her. Here are a few tidbits.

BERKELEY, Calif. — When the economists Janet L. Yellen and George A. Akerlof hired a baby sitter for their son in the early 1980s, they decided to pay more than the going wage. They reasoned that a happier baby sitter would provide better care.

The decision not only attracted a series of excellent sitters, it also inspired the couple, both professors at the University of California at Berkeley, to develop a new theory of the labor market that remains an influential justification for the Federal Reserve’s ability to stimulate job growth.

Awesome. So she learned that in a fatcat, ivory tower, two-income household she could overpay for occasional, menial labor and that led her to grand theories of business. No need to run a, you know, actual business or anything, she's hired people!

Ms. Yellen is also a more assertive leader than Mr. Bernanke and appears less averse to conflict. While both encourage open debate and seek to make decisions by consensus, Ms. Yellen has been a more vocal and persistent advocate for her own views. Mr. Bernanke has allowed Fed officials to air their views freely, while Ms. Yellen has expressed concern that the cacophony undermines the Fed’s effectiveness by sowing confusion about the direction of policy.

“I think she is fundamentally committed to continuity, that we still have a problem and we still need monetary policy to be doing a fair amount,” said Christina D. Romer, a former chairwoman of Mr. Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers and a close friend of Ms. Yellen. “There’s a toughness there. And I think there’s a toughness to her that there isn’t in Bernanke.”

 Double awesome. She's authoritarian.

I look forward to her analysis and response when Japan collapses.

And now, a video from Janet Yellen's babysitter's live-in boyfriend*, someone who is all about the Yellen Theory of Investing.

* - Well, I think that's him. I didn't look too closely. I was mesmerized by the beauty of high-denomination Zimbabwe banknotes.

Image of the Day

... found on Facebook.

So The Obamacare Website Is A Train Wreck. So What?

If the latest iPhone burst into flames the first time you used it, AAPL would tank.

If Google's new search returned wombat photos for every search term, everyone would move to Bing.

If the new version of Microsoft Outlook was a horrid mess, corporations would still buy it because they're run by dinosaurs who don't know any better, but normal humans would move to gmail.

So Obamacare's website is hopelessly screwed up on launch. Almost no one can get through to create a user name and password and if they do, the login credentials don't work. So the techies have found monster architectural errors as servers pass huge numbers of files between each other for every click of the mouse. So what?

Seriously, what's going to happen to the government because it failed miserably?

This Is Just Wrong On So Many Levels

Seen at Costco:

Just the sort of thing I want my 6-year-old daughter playing with. A dollhouse for the undead that folds up into the shape of a coffin.

I didn't check to see if it had a room where they summon evil spirits and drink the blood of the living.

Defund The National Park Service, Part II

Here's something new for the Park Service apologist from my previous post to clarify. Apparently, the NPS was "forced" by "law" to wreck their own websites. I'm guessing they've now been "forced" by "law" to put orange cones all over the roads so people can't pull over and enjoy Mt. Rushmore.

Greasy weasels.

Candidate excuse for the greasy NPS weasels: "I was only following orders!"

Duct Tape And Japanese Bonds

I'm working on cars and preparing for a men's retreat this weekend, so I didn't have time to do the research I wanted to make this post more than a couple of notes.

First, according to Bloomberg, Japan's got $250B of government bonds rolling over every month this year. That's huge. If, as some have suggested, Japanese investors will start fleeing Japan by simply not renewing maturing bonds, that's going to be a lot of Yen for the BOJ to print so it can buy them. I don't have the figures for the current BOJ printing, but it's nowhere near $250B a month.

Meanwhile, the BOJ, to stem volatility, is increasing the frequency of its bond purchases. Dig this.

TOKYO—The Bank of Japan plans to increase the number of days per month that it buys domestic sovereign debt and reduce the amount of each offer, in its latest attempt to mitigate market turbulence...the bank would release the details of future purchasing operations on Thursday and would plan to make purchases on 10 or more days in June, up from eight in May.

So if the BOJ leaves the market for as much as 3 days, the place starts getting jittery. (~21 working days a month, 8 purchase days, works out to roughly one BOJ purchase day every 3.) That's insane. It's like kids who start ripping the house apart if mom goes next door for 15 minutes to chat with the neighbor. Pretty soon mom can only be gone for 10 minutes and then 5 and then she's got to be there all the time and then she's duct-taping the kids to their chairs even while she's there.

I'm not sure I'm looking forward to seeing the population of Japan duct-taped to chairs.

Update: The BOJ is purchasing around $75B worth of government bonds every month which works out to be about a third of the total supply.

Thanks, Obamacare

Yesterday, I got my rate changes for the upcoming health care season. My premiums are going up by at least $1000 per year. Many of the plans on our list had increases much higher than that. All so we can turn America into a part-time worker economy as companies shed full-time employees.

These Ivy League faculty lounge ideas never work out the way they did at the university.

Lather, Rinse, Repeat

The Japanese government has decided to raise taxes and increase government spending.

TOKYO—Prime Minister Shinzo Abe took a long-awaited decision to raise Japan's sales tax by 3 percentage points, placing the need to cut the nation's towering debt ahead of any risk to recent economic growth, as he now focuses on crafting a broader package of measures to address both problems further.

Mr. Abe on Tuesday promised more stimulus to cushion the impact of the sales-tax rise on the economy, stressing the nation needs both fiscal consolidation and economic growth to end 15 years of debilitating deflation.

Meanwhile, the Bank of Japan, already about to melt down their printing presses, is considering printing money even faster.

The BOJ pledged in April to inject some $70 billion a month into the economy to meet a target of 2 percent inflation in two years. Some economists have said they expect the BOJ to deliver more easing measures as early as next spring, to keep the nascent recovery on track.

Can you push on a rope until you accidentally hang yourself with it?

Cheezburger of the Day

Defund The National Parks Service

This is along the lines of something WC Varones posted earlier today.

A friend of mine is planning a trip to Pinnacles National Park. Here's what their website looks like today.

Can you say, "extortion," boys and girls? Of course you can. I knew you could!

Defund the lot of them, the greasy weasels. They can't keep a website up because of the government shutdown? Maybe they shouldn't be trusted with anything.

Japanese Investors Quietly Flee To Safety

From Reuters.

TOKYO, Aug 8 (Reuters) - Japanese investors piled into foreign bonds in July, making their biggest net purchase in three years - providing early evidence that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's expansionary policies are having the desired effect.

Japanese investors bought 3.482 trillion yen ($36 billion) of foreign bonds in July, the largest amount since August 2010, data from the Ministry of Finance showed.

It also marked the first net monthly purchase since January, as investors sought higher returns overseas after the Bank of Japan launched its massive bond-buying stimulus campaign.

Emphasis mine.

Whatever statist fantasy world the author lives in, this most definitely does not show that Abe's expansionary policies are having the desired effect unless the desired effect happens to be driving all investors out of Japan in a mad rush for the exits. What it shows is that savvy investors are fleeing the Yen, getting into anything they can get their hands on, even manipulated, depressed instruments like foreign government bonds.

Only a desperate person would deliberately buy US Treasuries right now when the Fed is holding rates low by printing money and monetizing government debt. The Japanese investors are fleeing because they know the jig is almost up for Japan and the Yen is going to depreciate. They also know that Japanese Government Bonds at 0.22% are a lousy investment when the Bank of Japan (BOJ) is committed to printing money until inflation hits 2%.

No word on how the BOJ is going to stop the inflation freight train once it hits 2%, crashes through the barricades and hurtles on to much, much higher numbers. In the meantime, anyone who can do basic math and isn't blinded by patriotism or rose-colored glasses is getting out of the country.

I have no doubt the the combined force of all of the BOJ board members could stop this with their bare hands. No, really. They'll hit 2% inflation and it will just glide to a halt.

Back To School Night

... obliterates the myth of "hard-working American families struggling to survive."

I've reported this before on the 'Post, but this year it was the same story at my daughter's public high school. only about 10% of  the parents showed up for back-to-school night. At our sons' Catholic high school, it was close to 95%.

That nauseating, recurring line in political debates about "hard-working American families, struggling to make ends meet, unable to chase the American Dream blah blah blah" is just a canard. Most of them expect success to fall in their laps.