A friend of mine recently referred to her life as a mountain. Apparently she started climbing it years ago without realizing, then one day looked down and discovered how high up she’d gone. She also discovered that it would be nearly impossible to get down off of this mountain and start the climb up a different mountain. By different, I think she meant the one on which she had assumed she would end up.

Setting aside this whole mountain thing, let me explain it to those of you who are not she and I. The two of us, she and I, have fine arts degrees. When we were eighteen and gorgeous (she is still a knock out), we thought we could quite possibly end up as movie stars, or rock stars, or something equally celestial and fabulous. We both pursued our own versions of this path for a time. Our twenties were pretty cool overall, if not quite as we thought they would be. Then we got married and had kids and bought houses and got regular jobs. And those things are all fine things. Anyone who has done all those things, though, knows how hard it is to do them/have them and still maintain your artistic life.

So now, she says, she is on the top of this mountain, and she isn’t super happy about it. Not ungrateful, just not sure about how to handle it. Well, I am not on any effing mountain. (Wait, this isn’t a family blog, is it?) I am not on any fucking mountain.

I’m not saying I was on one and got down because of the upcoming divorce thing. I am saying fuck that mountain idea. That is crap. I am not at the top of a mountain, looking down a few thousand feet (wait, how tall does something have to be to qualify as a mountain? Nevermind, I couldn’t care less). I am not dizzy at the thought of climbing down and starting all over. I can breathe just fine, thanks, the air here is not thin.

You know why I am not on a mountain? On accounta I can still court and embrace change. On accounta shit doesn’t simply end just because you are almost forty (yep, in November!) Right now, I have some personal things on which to focus. So, no, I am not in a band. No, I do not have an agent anymore. I am, however, writing when I can — working toward some serious goals — enjoying my son’s toddler years. I am a woman with a five-year plan and a knack for sticking to the important stuff. At most, I am on a hill and I can totally see my way to the next one.

My friend refuses to give up the idea that she’s on the mountain. So I advised her to make it look as much like the one she wanted as possible. Maybe re-decorate it somehow. Learn to enjoy the view by changing the scenery.

Meanwhile I am gonna gather up my friends on this hill of mine and start planning a party for November.

My father-in-law recently faced up to the adult equivalent of “there is no Santa Claus.” Specifically, he discovered that, if the shit ever hits the fan, nobody is going to wipe his ass for him. Well … Maybe that’s unfair. He actually realized that, in case of disaster, he can’t count on “the authorities” to charge to the rescue.

Hmmm … I phrased it better the first time.

The wide-eyed revelation he shared with my wife and me over cheap red wine and better cigars was actually a continuation of a conversation dating back about five years. You see, my wife and I live in Arizona, which has a nasty habit of bursting into flames from time to time. Seeing as how the state is so unpredictably flammable, it’s generally a good idea to be ready to bug out if the neighborhood starts to get well-done, and we keep a “go bag” of important documents and the like at hand in case we need to head for less-smoky environs. Dear old dad-in-law’s California digs are similarly combustible, and also prone to slide into the ocean if visited by rain instead of fire. So we thought it wise to inquire as to his preparations for unfortunate events.

“Oh, I’ll just do what they tell me to do.”

When pressed, he grew upset at the idea that he should presume to make plans when there are experts whose job it is to handle such eventualities.

Since then, though, we’ve had Hurricane Katrina, flooding in Tennessee, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and any number of smaller incidents when even the best-intentioned authority figures have been completely overwhelmed by events and unable to play savior to everybody in distress. When authorities aren’t so generously inclined, they sometimes … err … How to put this delicately? Let’s just say that they sometimes act like hungry wolves in a field of sheep — like the New Orleans cops who, apparently for fun, gunned down civilians at a bridge in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Don’t you just love a man in a uniform?

So now pops is ready to throw a water filter and a box of Dinty Moore in the pantry, just in case, right? Not so much. It’s all too overwhelming. How can you prepare when the lights could go out for weeks? Or months? (He’s obsessed with the idea that hackers are going to crash the power grid.) What’s the point of doing anything when even the authorities are overwhelmed?

You see, from a state of abject dependence, we’ve journeyed not to self-reliance, but to despair and resignation. God failed — or at least FEMA screwed the pooch — and the old guy has decided to die in the dark rather than lift a finger on his own behalf.

Actually, the lights did go out two years ago, where I live, for the better part of a week. It was a wild storm that nobody anticipated. We drank water from storage containers and read by the light of a Coleman lantern. Hey, when I die, I plan to have a full belly and some mood lighting. Frankly, it’s just not that hard to get ready for some of life’s little speed bumps.

I’m not saying that it’s necessary — or possible — to prepare for the apocalypse. But I don’t pretend to understand people who are determined, one way or another, to be victims in even the most easily handled circumstances.

My father-in-law is a decent, well-intentioned guy. But if, like too many other people, he’s not prepared to carry his own weight if something goes wrong, he better be really careful where he puts that cigar down.

Because, as the world keeps on discovering, despite promises to the contrary, nobody can be counted on to wipe your ass for you.

The local news informed my mother-in-law that Maytag was recalling dishwashers because a heating element could cause a fire. She has a Maytag dishwasher and so do we, so we googled Maytag dishwasher recall. Maytag had set up a page on its site for the recall. We entered our model and serial numbers and were able to schedule an appointment online for a repairman to come to our house and replace the faulty heating element. They’ve already repaired my mother-in-law’s machine — it took a half-hour — and will repair ours this week. The company seems to have handled this well and tried to minimize inconvenience to customers.

My father-in-law was over the other day — neither of our machines had been repaired yet — and when someone mentioned that we were just about out of silverware, he said something like, “You can’t run the dishwasher until they have fixed it.” He wasn’t adamant or anything, just said it off the top of his head. But I think his initial reaction is a common one and says something about how people respond to the news of some new danger or risk.

According to the recall notice, there have been 12 fires caused by the faulty heating element. There was extensive kitchen damage in one of the fires. There have been no injuries. The recall includes 1.7 million dishwashers. We have been using the dishwasher since we moved into the house last year, with no problems, and the previous owners had been using it for three years before that, presumably without a fire, since the machine and the house were not burned down. 1,700,000 other households have also been using the dishwashers week after week with no fires, minus the 12 fires, of course.

That’s not to say that there shouldn’t be a recall — if a faulty element can cause a fire, that element should be replaced, obviously. But how should we act when we learn about the recall? The recall notice says, “Consumers should stop using products immediately unless otherwise instructed.” But it has to say that — the people writing recall notices always say to stop using the item when there is even a minuscule risk, because they are trying to minimize lawsuits and bad PR that would surely result from any additional fires or injuries. Lower on the same page it also says, “Consumers should immediately stop using the recalled dishwashers, disconnect the electric supply by shutting off the fuse or circuit breaker controlling it…” 

I’m not going to live without clean forks because there were 12 fires out of 1.7 million machines. It’s far more likely for me to be hurt or my house to be damaged by any number of occurrences that I can’t predict or don’t expect. We’re probably all in more danger from the weather, car accidents, slipping in the bathtub, something we don’t see coming, than we are from our dishwasher. Are people really going to shut off the circuit breaker to the dishwasher? For some of us, that means walking all the way down to the basement.

I would be willing to bet that if all 1.7 million owners turned off the circuit breakers as instructed by the recall, since a very large number of those people (some elderly) would have to go up and down stairs in order to do that (in some cases multiple times, since many do not have properly labeled circuit breakers), there would be a much greater chance of someone being injured from falling on the stairs than there would be from a dishwasher fire that could result if no one shut off the circuit breaker. (Though probably you can’t sue Maytag if you fall down the stairs on the way to turn off your circuit breaker.) If we are acting rationally, since there are only 12 cases of fire being caused by the faulty element, we should act exactly as we acted before hearing about the recall. We should continue to use our dishwashers.

It’s reasonable to have a recall and get the heating element replaced, but just because something is on the news, or there is an increased risk, doesn’t mean there is considerable risk, especially over the short span of a week between the discovery of the recall and the replacement of the part. If I knew about the recall and didn’t schedule the repair and just continued to use the machine for five more years, I would be increasing my risk of fire, but by how much I don’t know. I would guess that a fire would still be unlikely even if I ignored the recall and kept using the machine for a few years, but maybe it would no longer be exceptionally unlikely, and in any case the repair is free and easy to schedule, so I wouldn’t recommend ignoring the recall. The more time that goes by, the more chance there is for a fire to be caused by the faulty element. But the chance of my dishwasher catching fire over the next two washes is too small to warrant any worrying or to keep me from using the machine.

This isn’t about my dishwasher, of course. It is about the way people worry about dangers that they hear about on TV, the way their understanding of risk affects their choices, and how they often misjudge the risks in comparison to the scale of time. If you were going to live 5,000 years (barring some accident that could cause your death), you would be taking a great risk to regularly ride in a car. Car accidents are too common, and over that length of time — if you drove in a car regularly — your chances of cutting your lifespan substantially short or suffering a debilitating injury through a car crash would be much higher than it is over the span of a normal human life. (And you’d have to live with that injury for a long, long time.)

It is reasonable for people who expect to live to be 80 or 90 to take the risk of driving in a car along with precautions like wearing seatbelts. People do get hurt and killed in crashes, but you are not likely to die in a car crash before you die from some natural cause. If you were going to live 5,000 years before natural causes would end your life, that might no longer be the case (I didn’t do the math), and you might reasonably conclude that riding in a car isn’t worth the higher risk of losing hundreds of years off of your life. (You might conclude the opposite, if you really like to drive or you value seeing the world more than you value hundreds or thousands of years of additional life.) It’s possible that 5,000 years from now, cars might have really good airbags, or we might teleport from place to place, but that’s not the point.

The point is, an understanding of probability and an awareness of risk in relation to time can help prevent the latest danger announced on the evening news from running our lives. Taking precautions and minimizing risk should be balanced by some understanding of what the chances are of something actually happening. 

The other point is that you can wash your dishes.

10. Once you start driving a Toyota, you’ll never stop!

9. Look out, we’re comin’ through!

8. Toyota. Moving forward! Whether you want to or not!

7. Click! Vroom! Yikes!

6. Have you driven into a Ford lately?

5. Toyota. Get the Feeling. Of Terror!

4. Accelerating the future!

3. Holy cow, even we had no idea the Prius could do 100!

2. The power of dreams! The reality of nightmares!

1. Give us a break!
 

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

10. “Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck both claim paying taxes contributes to socialism.”

9. “Wealthy people who are exceptionally good-looking should be exempt.”

8. “On April first, I got an e-mail saying that, as part of the stimulus package, there was a tax moratorium this year.”

7. “Trying to use the Qualified Dividends and Capital Gains Tax Worksheet, I got a severe brain cramp.”

6. “My buddy at the post office said he could backdate my return.”

5. “After I claim all the voices in my head as deductions, it turns out they owe me money!”

4. “This year, in the box labeled ‘For Office Use Only,’ I just plan to write ‘Approved – Send massive refund!’”

3. “Fill out a tax form?! I can’t even get my VCR to stop blinking ‘12:00’!”

2. “My accountant said I could deduct my late fees.”

1. “I just woke up from my New Year’s Eve party.”
 

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

Thirteen Misconceptions Surrounding National Shelve Your Indie Novel in the Superbookstore Month

1)  America did not carpet bomb any lawless tribal regions with remaindered and pulped copies of confiscated counterfeit Indie versions of Sarah Palin’s autobiography.

2)  103,017 bottles and cans of Coke and Pepsi staged a walk out from 7-11 freezer space across the country in protest of the marginalization of indie novelists and collusive practices across the country.

3)  Jeff Bezos follows 213,497 Indie novelists on twitter, includes contact info for 112,239 others on his blackberry, stores 9,212 of their novels on his kindle, but did not tell 139 others that “it ain’t a score if it’s shelved front door.”

4)  Andy Breslin shelved and sold 2,317 copies of Mother’s Milk and used all net receipts to establish a cash-for-ranting scholarship fund.   

5)  In March 2009, Warren Buffet almost bought warrants to “save the collective ass” of large-cap publishing but then undid the deal after an Indie novel brought him laughter, tears, and a feeling of release not experienced since leaving his last shareholder’s meeting.

6)  Southwest Airlines encourages obese passengers to buy multiple tickets unless they can prove Kevin Smith’s movies were an inspiration for their foray into Indie novelizations of independent films.

7)  Mark Rayner flashed “all five fractals” as he was shown the door of a major retail chain in downtown Toronto but remained neutral on Southwest Airline’s policy.

8) In secret negotiations, five big-book executives bought the rights to an authorized Vladimir Putin autobiography that will include pop-up judo scenes but no mention of his secret war against Indie novelists.

9)   213 Christian ministers signed a petition stating that if Jesus returned today he would be with us in the form of an Indie novelist.

10)   The German phrase for Indie Novelist is not pronounced like the Yiddish phrase for “Illin’ Rabbi,” but there is evidence of Indie novelist activity throughout modern Europe.

11)   Self manipulation with your Indie novel is illegal in half the states that require parental consent for gay marriage if partners have been together for over 18 years.

12)   Amtrak union employees voted not to picket superbookstores throughout the Northeast corridor but reserve their right to strike for better lighting for efficiency apartments and parents’ basements housing Indie novelists in other regions.

13)   Contrary to the official position of the United States of Kudera, February is not America’s National Shelve Your Indie Novel in the Superbookstore Month and all shelving cheats caught in national bookstore chains will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

While I wasn’t old enough to have clear memories of Reagan’s Presidency, I’ve heard the stories and read plenty of articles about how the news was almost daily describing the plight of the homeless in America.  To watch the 6 o’clock news, you’d have thought we were all living in a van, down by the river and that only the elites owned double-wide trailers.  Then, almost as soon as Bill Clinton took office, those stories vanished.  A bubble began to inflate.

I’ve seen with my own two eyes the global warming debacle, and I still get a chuckle every time someone demonstrates how similar in dedication the global warming crowd is to the End-Times crowd amongst the Religious Right by telling us that the Earth is cooling because of global warming and how we’re all going to die in some sort of Biblical upheaval of nature and all humanity.

The media has tried to drum up a catastrophe out of thin air before, often involving a flip of their own stories and propaganda.  With that in mind, I think we’ve found our next “crisis”.

We can let the New York Times give us the skinny:

WASHINGTON - Nearly one in five Americans said they lacked the money to buy the food they needed at some point in the last year, according to a survey co-sponsored by the Gallup organization and released Tuesday by an anti-hunger group.

And this isn’t the first story I’ve seen out of them detailing our growing problem with hunger in America.  Back on Jan. 2nd, 2010, they melted our hearts with a story about the rise in the number of people on food stamps in America by treating us with gut wrenching case studies.  Like those of William Trapani:

A strapping man who once made a living throwing fastballs, William Trapani, 53, left his dreams on the minor league mound and his front teeth in prison, where he spent nine years for selling cocaine. Now he sleeps at a rescue mission, repairs bicycles for small change, and counts $200 in food stamps as his only secure support.

“I’ve been out looking for work every day - there’s absolutely nothing,” he said.

 Now, aside from the fact that the New York Times must think of us all as a bunch of drooling retards who would dismiss the idea that the guy having his grill knocked out in a jailhouse scrum, and the federal criminal record that put him in the crowbar hotel in the first place, probably have more to do with this guy’s hardships than the lack of jobs nationwide, we can see from the rest of the bit that the New York Times really feels as though the nation is full of starving people, people living only on the thinnest of margins, eking out a meager existence on the government dole, and that their plight should be realized so that America can raise the amount of “assistance” given to these people.  It’s really quite clear.  The New York Times is pleading for more welfare.

No big shock.

But that they would use hunger, now that’s the shock.  That’s freaking epic.

In the New York Time’s own words:

Advocates for the obese and overweight, a group that now includes two-thirds of the American population, hope that the over-the-counter availability of Alli and the approval of Acomplia will provide new options, and suggest that the drugs might even be used together by patients who want help losing weight.   Jan, 2006

 More than three years later, they were still hyping the obesity epidemic:

“Obesity, and with it diabetes, are the only major health problems that are getting worse in this country, and they’re getting worse rapidly,” Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, director of the C.D.C., said.

The average American consumes 250 more calories per day than just two decades ago, Dr. Frieden noted, and the rising obesity rate is the single greatest contributor to a national epidemic of diabetes.  July, 2009

And to this very day, they still tell us of the massive levels of obesity that are destroying our entire health care system:

If he can take credit for nothing else, the city’s mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg, can rightfully claim to have launched a national effort to help people live more healthfully. He began with a prominent campaign to curtail smoking, the single leading killer of Americans, by banning it in restaurants and bars, and followed that with a campaign to get heart-damaging trans fats out of packaged and restaurant foods.

Next Mr. Bloomberg attacked rampant obesity (though New York, being a walking city, is leaner than most other metropolitan areas) by promoting a requirement that chain restaurants prominently display the calorie content of all their offerings.  Jan. 25, 2010

So what do they want us to believe?

That the bulk of the US population is rapidly coming to resemble Mojo, or that vast segments of the population are getting ready to keel over from lack of being able to wrap their mitts around a burger?

Why do we need to give out more welfare?  It sounds like the problem that has been destroying our health care system, obesity, is about to get solved without government help!  Happy days, right?  No need to raise taxes!

Seriously though.  I have a really hard time believing that people are going hungry, especially in the numbers the original publication says they are.  I don’t care if they called half a million people, something is goofy here.

For instance:

I live in Congressman Marion Berry’s district.  The report says that 22.4% of the people in this district report “food hardships”, meaning that they have struggled to buy food at any point over the last 12 months.

No way.  I go to Wal-Mart, I don’t see distended bellies.  I don’t see anyone that looks hungry, not like you see when you look at pictures of starving African orphans, that’s for sure.

To be perfectly honest, the fattest people are the ones who usually look the poorest!  I mean, seriously, you know the stereotype!  450 pound woman in a pink moo moo with a pair of slippers that look like she’s walked halfway around the Earth in them, dirty, missing teeth, stinking in the heat with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth as she waddles towards the door?

Naw, I don’t buy it.  One fifth of my district isn’t wasting away, they’re almost to an individual getting bigger, if my public forays mean anything…

Here’s how I think you should interpret the results:

America is getting bigger.  Fat people eat more food.  Food costs money.

Thus, as the price of food rises, more fat people are going to be missing meals, or cutting way back.  But it’s not as disastrous as it may seem.  To someone used to eating four or five McDonald’s burgers in a sitting, but who is now reduced to eating a small salad at home for dinner, why, they probably do think they’re starving!  They probably told the pollster the truth, “I’m f’ing hungry!” 

But if we’re over-weight, and used to being too full, is that a bad thing?

I know you’ve all heard about the calamity which is about to descend upon the human race.  The visions of death and destruction are downright Biblical. The seas will rise, the plants will die, the four horsemen of the apocalypse will reap a mighty harvest of flesh and bones. It’s the coming of man-made global warming!

I know that you’ve all seen the temperature graphs showing the steady rise of global temperatures over the last 100 years. If you haven’t, allow me to introduce you to the infamous roller coaster of potential devastation, the rise in global temperature!

(Fig. 1)

The graph shows a rise in average global temperature over the last 100-150 years. The scale of the graph is -.7 degree Celsius up to .7 degree Celsius.  It’s a regular toaster oven here on ye olde Terra!

Now, this is a graph that has been used to hype a religion based on junk science, and there is a serious flaw we all need to understand. The Mainstream Media won’t discuss it, the politicians are too stupid to know anything about it, and the communists the world over ignore it in their haste to destroy progress.

Here’s the dirty little secret: The Earth is 4 billion years old.

In geologic time scales, 100 years isn’t even the bat of an eyelash. It’s certainly not a long enough period of time for us to have gathered enough data to yield statistically significant values for historical averages or the historical standard deviation of temperatures.

Let’s examine this with the promised illustrations. I’ve picked an illustration which, unlike the HAD CRU’s version of climate change, has easily accessible, original data.

This is the graph of the US’s economic growth from 1945 to 2005 (source):

(Fig.2)

This graph shows 60 years worth of economic growth in the US.  See all the peaks and valleys?  The rises and the falls?  The line of best fit (average) is somewhere between 3% and 3.5% growth per year.

Now, imagine that Fig. 2 is the graph for the average global temperature, across all 4 billion years that the Earth has been spinning around the sun.

But this isn’t the graph the man-made global warming communists are showing you. Their graph looks something like this:

(Fig. 3 Data  source)

Based on the graph of 1961’s GDP growth, if that was all you knew about the US economy, it would look as though the US had roughly 105% growth, on average.  Not even close to the truth, is it?

But that’s not even right because they’re only showing you the 100 years worth of data, out of 4 BILLION years worth of climate.

That’s .000000025% of the total graph of global temperatures.

In reality, giving you the year of 1961 as all of the economic data for the US economic growth over that 60 year period gives too much information compared to the hoax that is man-made global warming.

Over 60 years, we have 21,900 days. In each day, there are 1,440 minutes. Thus, in 60 years we have 31,536,000.00 minutes, which would represent .0000000315% of the total time. 

In other words, 1 minute’s worth of economic data would be more information about the US economic growth over that 60-year period than the 100 years worth of climate data gives us about the Earth’s historical global temperature.

Over that 60-year period of economic activity, for this illustration to hold, we would have to look at roughly 3/4 of a single second’s worth of economic data to approach what the man-made global warming crowd is urging you to get upset about.

That would be similar to seeing the stock market ticker now, and 3/4 of a second later, seeing it go up less than a single point, and then advocating the complete destruction of the world’s economic system.

Wake the **** up, people!

The best scientists can determine, the Earth’s temperature in the Cretaceous Period was anywhere from 5 degree C to  8 degrees C warmer than it is today.  During the last Ice Age, the best guess is that the global temperature was about 5 degrees C cooler than it is today.  Thus, a graph of global temperatures that tries to reflect reality would show a range on the Y axis of at least 5 degrees C down to -5 degrees C. 

We have a graph that goes from .7 down to -.7, or 14% of the total variation in temperature we believe the Earth has seen. 

And that graph is based on manipulated data, as everyone who doesn’t live under a rock and has heard about Climategate, knows.

Junk science and fear mongering, all the way around.  Al Gore is like the liberal version of Hal Lindsey.

We’ve been dealing with health care reform for the better part of a year now, and progress today is still as iffy as it was before the “Summer of Angry Town Halls”.  The Senate is debating amendments and provisions, jockeying for votes, and trying to keep together the fragile coalition which allowed for debate on the Senate floor to occur.  The average American, having long ago made up their mind, is probably becoming tired of the same speeches, the same talking points, and the intolerable actions of Congress people on both sides of the aisle.

In an AP_article running in the Philadelphia Inquirer we hear the tale of the on going fight in DC:

WASHINGTON - The fate of President Obama’s health-care overhaul is in the hands of a dozen or so political moderates in the Senate. What makes it unpredictable is that they don’t agree on two critical issues - abortion and whether to allow the government to sell insurance in competition with private insurers.

Floor debate continued yesterday, and it was hard to see how Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) could put together 60 votes to overcome a Republican filibuster and get a final bill off the floor. On abortion coverage and a government health-insurance plan, the moderates were lining up in different places. Reid has 60 senators in the Democratic caucus, and nary a vote to spare.

How did this happen?  During Obama’s Presidential Campaign, we were given the story about the destructive potential of our health care system.  Obama has given the same health care speech at least 3/4 of a billion times over the last year, each time highlighting the destruction and devastation the American health care system was wreaking.  This speech is summed up in the official whitehouse.gov infomercial:

Comprehensive health care reform can no longer wait. Rapidly escalating health care costs are crushing family, business, and government budgets. Employer-sponsored health insurance premiums have doubled in the last 9 years, a rate 3 times faster than cumulative wage increases. This forces families to sit around the kitchen table to make impossible choices between paying rent or paying health premiums. Given all that we spend on health care, American families should not be presented with that choice. The United States spent approximately $2.2 trillion on health care in 2007, or $7,421 per person – nearly twice the average of other developed nations. Americans spend more on health care than on housing or food. If rapid health cost growth persists, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that by 2025, one out of every four dollars in our national economy will be tied up in the health system. This growing burden will limit other investments and priorities that are needed to grow our economy. Rising health care costs also affect our economic competitiveness in the global economy, as American companies compete against companies in other countries that have dramatically lower health care costs.

It’s obvious, listening to Obama and the Democrat team that health care reform is of the utmost urgency.  They insist that health care reform is a brave, courageous, and financially sound choice for our nation to make.  They spout off rhetoric about duty and compassion.  They claim that their plan will be deficit_neutral.  They tell us of the $500_billion in waste and fraud they will squeeze out of Medicare and Medicaid (though not why they haven’t already squeezed that waste and fraud out).  In short, they have been painting a picture for over a year now, a picture in which health care reform is so vital that it goes beyond America’s self interest to pass it.  In fact, to listen to them, it seems as though we’re all a bunch of drooling idiots if we don’t throw a ticker tape parade down the Canyon of Heroes for every member of Congress who votes “yea” for the bills…

But.  They’re still having trouble passing the sucker.  Why?

To answer this, I propose that we all become students of history for a minute.  I’m going to quote from one of my favorite books of all time, Niccolo Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy:

If we consider now what is easy and what is difficult to persuade a people to, we may make this distinction: either what you wish to persuade them to represents at first sight gain or loss, or it seems brave or cowardly. And if you propose to them anything that upon its face seems profitable and courageous, though there be really a loss concealed under it which may involve the ruin of the republic, the multitude will ever be most easily persuaded to it. But if the measure proposed seems doubtful and likely to cause loss, then it will be difficult to persuade the people to it even though the benefit and welfare of the republic were concealed under it.

With that passage in mind, I find it interesting to see the decline in support for the reforms as time progresses.  It’s not unsurprising, once you take a reasonable look at the facts, but it is interesting.  From Rasmussen:

While advocates say the plan is needed to control the cost of health care, 56% of voters now say it will have the opposite impact and push prices even higher. Just 17% believe passage of the plan will lead to lower costs.

 Fifty percent (50%) believe passage of the legislation will lead to a lower quality of care while just 18% believe the care will get better.

…

As Scott Rasmussen, president of Rasmussen Reports, wrote in the Wall Street Journal: “The most important fundamental is that 68% of American voters have health insurance coverage they rate good or excellent. … Most of these voters approach the health care reform debate fearing that they have more to lose than to gain.”

 Obama and the Democrats started off on the right path.  They knew their politics and tried to convince us of the moral imperative of health care reform, tried to tell us of all of the good that it would do for the needy, the victims of the evil capitalist health insurance industry, and the doctors who are amputating people to line their pockets.  They told us that they would make all of our health care desires reality without costing us any money, without denying anyone access, and that they were taking over Disney’s job as the organization which “makes all your dreams come true”!

But they didn’t remember that the average American realizes that “if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is”.  They spent the first 8 years of the decade attacking a Republican administration for painting an unrealistically rosy picture, reminding us over and over again (and rightly so!) of the horrors the GWB administration was committing.  Torture, lying to and spying on civilians, unwarranted wars, the body count of soldiers, on and on, ad nauseam, until the minute their guy was elected.  Then they expected us to swallow their BS without a peep?

Whatever happened to “Question Authority”?  Now we’re supposed to believe that this group of popularity contest winners has all the answers when the last batch of imbeciles had none?  Why?  Nothing has changed with the election of Obama and the Democrats!  Still just a bunch of un-experienced empty suits up there on Capitol Hill.  Why would things be any different?

No, the Democrats have forgotten another of Machiavelli’s more memorable quotes from the Discourses, one which is plaguing them more and more as time passes:

The quickest way of opening the eyes of the people is to find the means of making them descend to particulars, seeing that to look at things only in a general way deceives them.

If they wanted health care reform without a fight, they should have passed it when the lemmings were still stuck on undefined “hope” and “change”.

This is not a post about global warming, nor is it about energy conservation. Although what follows is a quote from Energy Secretary Steven Chu and is about environmental policy, I am not posting it here to start a debate over whether or not he is right or justified in his comments.

Speaking on the sidelines of a smart grid conference in Washington, Dr. Chu said he didn’t think average folks had the know-how or will to to change their behavior enough to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

“The American public… just like your teenage kids, aren’t acting in a way that they should act,” Dr. Chu said. “The American public has to really understand in their core how important this issue is.”

Chu’s meaning is plain: Americans are like teenagers who aren’t acting like they should. But I didn’t post his quote to start a discussion about whether or not government officials should think of citizens as misbehaving children, fun as that might be.

No, I posted it to highlight the blatant lying by public officials, right to our faces. Some of the lies are so bold, so obvious, I would be embarrassed to tell them.

Perhaps realizing that it is not wise for public officials to compare voters to misbehaving teenagers and trying to do damage control, Chu’s office gives us this incredible lie:

Energy Department spokesman Dan Leistikow added: “Secretary Chu was not comparing the public to teenagers. He was saying that we need to educate teenagers about ways to save energy.”

Are you kidding me? Just how stupid does Dan Leistikow think people are? Chu’s intended meaning can’t be disputed. Chu’s entitled to his opinion, and some might agree with him that Americans are like misbehaving teenagers. But no one can read his statement and think “he was saying that we need to educate teenagers about ways to save energy.” Don’t try to convince us that this is what he meant. It’s insulting. We know what he meant. We can read.

This is brilliant.

As I was searching through the Internet today, trying to find something to write about in this virtual wasteland of interesting, I came across this headline: “A Castle at the White House.”

“Intriguing,” I thought, at first nonplussed. I’d always wished our country had castles, like other countries, but was I willing to turn a blind eye to an act of such frivolity in this bleak economic time? Was I willing to ignore the anachronism? Was I willing to fund this castle with your tax dollars?

I was.

Building a castle, I thought, would provide a whimsical quality that our nation’s capital has heretofore lacked. Not to mention many jobs for the castle-builders who’ve recently had to close their doors. A castle, I thought, is perhaps just what this nation needs. Would it have a moat? Of course it would. A big door that makes a clicking noise when it comes down over the moat? Certainly. A dragon? A rescue dragon.

“Yes,” I thought, “this is an idea I can get behind.” I then clicked on the link to the article, thrilled to read what was to surely be an exciting turn of events in our boring, castle-less nation.

Much to my chagrin, this is the image with which I was greeted:

This is either the worst castle in the whole world or somebody’s idea of a big fat joke. Where’s the moat? The clicking door? The dragon? How is that canvas roof going to shield us from arrows? Why are there so many viable pathways to the keep? What is the thing in the lower left? Is it a punching bag? What is the need for the steering wheel? I’m not sure if this castle could sustain a heavy storm or rain and wind, let alone a heavy storm of cannonballs. What is it even made of? Wood? What, did we run out of cloth and tissue paper? I just hope the European press doesn’t get wind of this. This thing looks about as stately and intimidating as baby new year.

This is not the image of the castle I had in mind for the United States of America.  We need to go back to the drawing board. Maybe check out the Wikipedia page about castles and go from there. But I do applaud the idea, Obam’. Its foresight is admirable and its boldness is inspiring. You just kind of let this one slip away from you. 

As a college professor I believe that most students are hard working and honest, but invariably there are those who are not. My official policy is as follows: If I catch you cheating, you fail the course, not just the assignment. Harsh? Yes. Unfair? No.

Why? Because one chooses to cheat — it’s not like cheaters don’t know they are cheating. In my experience students who cheat think they are smarter than the teacher, smarter than the system, and of course smarter than their classmates (who are so silly as to actually do the reading and the work — God forbid!).

On occasion a student will cheat when caught in a tough spot: the workload becomes overwhelming, or one’s personal problems get crazy, or life in general just drags on you, all to the point of desperation.

But does that give you the right to cheat? No. A cheater must fail — again, for the course, not just the assignment — because all the work the student did before getting caught is now in question, and all the work that might come after cannot be trusted.

As cliché as it might sound, you (prospective cheater) are better off ‘doing your best’ and getting the grade you deserve. Even if it is a C or a D, isn’t that better than failing? Or drop the course and take it again later when you are in a better position. It might hurt your wallet immediately speaking, but it will hurt less in the long run than that big fat F and the huge drop in your GPA.

I would also argue that whatever the course, chances are the material is not as difficult as you might think. Hell, even I, creative writer to-be, managed to squeeze through Microeconomics with a B minus.

Did you choose to attend college so you could shortchange yourself by cheating for your grades? Doesn’t that contradict the whole point of going to college and being challenged, earning an education, ‘enriching your life,’ etc.? Sure, some of it is marketing mumbo-jumbo, but I believe in learning, sharpening your sensibilities, growing, maturing, changing for the better. Regardless of the grade, just in the act of trying — legitimately, honestly — do you not learn something?

I am particularly hard on cheaters and enforcing deadlines because I have seen too many students work too hard. A student once brought me a paper two days after giving birth:  yes, giving birth. Another student, just last week, came in with pneumonia to hand in her short story. This is why I have no mercy for those who make excuses, because that is ultimately what cheaters do when they are caught.

Instructors could help by sending the message that, A) we know it’s happening, and B) we don’t like it. I tell students on the first day of class that if they cheat, I will catch them, not just with my own vindictive skills, but with technology. They hand in papers via SafeAssign, an online tool in Blackboard 8. It is basically Turnitin.com for Blackboard (for those of you who may not know, Turnitin.com is essentially a database of sources that students might use to cheat. It matches the student work against the database and flags any questionable lines or passages, and then notes the plagiarized source).

If you have access to Blackboard and SafeAssign, use it — it’s your friend. Some academics haven’t quite accepted this about technology yet, but we must because our students are using technology, i.e. the Internet, mostly for good and sometimes for evil, and so we must use it to our advantage as well.

Of course, technology is not a catchall and even the biggest and best databases will not have catalogued every possible source for plagiarism. The best tool is still one’s intuition. Chances are if you suspect someone is cheating, they probably are. Technology can help you prove it.

Teachers can’t be afraid to call a student out if caught cheating. Don’t look the other way, and don’t give second, third, and fourth chances. You’re not doing anyone any favors.

To the cheaters out there who are saying, “I can still beat you,” I ask: if you are going to work so hard at cheating, why not work just as hard on the class material? I’m telling you, sooner or later you will get caught, because us teachers ain’t as dumb as we look.

As the Industrial Age recedes farther into America’s past and the Information Age becomes our universal experience, municipalities are understandably concerned with lowering the high school dropout rate.  There are fewer jobs for dropouts than in the past, and communities are worried about what it takes to prepare their youth for the future.  They are also worried about their own progressive images, but let’s not be so cynical as to focus on that side of things… let’s focus on the genuine concern that the system is failing; that large numbers of students are dropping out and forming a population of criminals or, at best, helpless government wards living on the dole.

For years now, the news has been out that many city schools in particular have a graduation rate around 50%… unless you actually read the articles closely enough to see that they are talking about “on-time” graduation rates.  This method counts a student who repeats a grade and eventually graduates as the same as a dropout.  These headlines are misleading, alarmist, and detrimental to urbanites who are trying to take pride in their communities.  They are also extremely unfair to those urban students, parents, and educators who work their asses off in order to keep kids from dropping out.  For a more honest look at the numbers, consider the Economic Policy Institute’s publication, Rethinking high school graduation rates and trends, which skewers the methods used in most reports on graduation rates.  For example:

…this study examines a wide array of measurement issues including: the extent of bias in household surveys from a limited sample (excluding the military, prison, and other institutional populations); the growth of high school completion by equivalency exams; and the bias arising from the inclusion of recent immigrants (most of whom were never enrolled in U.S. schools) in some measures.

The study shows that actual high school graduation rates have consistently gone up and continue to do so.  Yes, the overall has been on a bit of a plateau over the last decade or so, but progress is still clear.  The overall rate is currently between 80% and 83%, not including GEDs (which obviously send the rate up even higher).  Racial gaps still exist, but they are closing.

In other words, the dropout rate is lower than ever, and it is continuing to fall.  The “dropout crisis” just doesn’t show up when the numbers are examined.  Alarmists will kindly move to another topic.

Still, it may be worthwhile to continue to work to bring the dropout rate ever closer to 0.0%.  After all, what dropout rate would we consider “acceptable”?  In New Jersey, even 2% has been declared not low enough… but at that point, it’s about keeping teen criminals off the streets.  While that may be a worthwhile goal, there are probably better resources for at-risk teens than the local public high school.   There is some percentage of people for whom it is inappropriate to remain in a regular school, or even any school.  The goal should not be to make the dropout rate 0.0%.  The goal should be to provide an opportunity for every student, and to ensure that those students who contemplate leaving school have a full understanding of their options, and of the true value of a high school education.  Every time a student asks “why do we have to learn this?”, it is an indication that the teacher, the school, the parents, and society as a whole have failed to communicate something important to the student.  It’s also an indication that the student is trying to understand something about what’s going on.  It’s a much better question than most people realize, and it shouldn’t be shrugged off.

As a teacher, I don’t worry as much about the graduation rate as I do about what my students are actually going to do when they leave school.  Whether they graduate or not, some young people have a decent plan, and I support those individuals and wish them the best.  But overall, few dropouts leave school for a career that has any kind of decent wage prospects or upward mobility.  That is the real concern.  When a teen feels that school is not working for them, the odds are that dropping out won’t actually be their best option.  But when they feel that hopeless, what can we do to convince them?

Some communities are experimenting with paying students to stay in school.  I think that will prove to be ineffective and obviously ripe for corruption and abuse.  But it does highlight a very important issue: Motivation.  Students who lack the motivation are not necessarily lazy.  They simply don’t yet know the value of education.  Even with dropout rates at historic lows — possibly because of that — even those students who stay in school and graduate and go on to college are generally unaware of the value of their education.  Few people recognize the value of education until they find themselves in need of some that they don’t have.  It’s pointless to bluster that you have to learn it because we said so, and it’s pointless to engage in a blame game with your political opponents about what is taught in schools, and whether standards are high enough.

In order to truly educate more students, and in order to educate them better, we need students to want to be educated.  This will not occur by government fiat, but by social values and norms.  Unfortunately, it will require our society to value education more than dogma, which will be difficult.  Parents would have to be prepared for their children to disagree with them.  Teachers would have to encourage their students to surpass them.  And political groups would have to understand that we aren’t going to swallow their lies about how bad things (like graduation rates) are, nor fall into line with their proposed solutions just because they proclaim that it’s “for the children.”

But that’s a start.

The pop-culture columnist Richard Roeper once said something to the effect that wearing a baseball cap backwards lowers the wearer’s apparent I.Q. by 15 points. 

I think the same principle applies to using e-mail to forward unfounded, out-of-context, or patently absurd political rumors to your friends in order to terrify them into voting for, or against, a political candidate. 

I’ve sworn off reading these e-mails — I don’t think I’ve seen a single one so far that I felt added to, rather than detracted from, the human condition.  They’re worse than spam, because they’re from your friends, so you feel as if you have to read them, and then, having read them, you sometimes feel obligated to reply.  Especially if the e-mailed rumor is particularly illogical or unfounded, in which case it becomes a delicate matter indeed to point out just how benighted it is without at the same time seeming to criticize your friend, who after all (probably) didn’t write the original e-mail and, caught up as they were in the pleasurable process of flexing their forwarding skills, perhaps didn’t even read it all that carefully. 

So from now, I’m going to avoid the “reply” button just as assiduously as I’ve always eschewed the “forward” button.   

It would be nice if I could rely instead on more “official” forms of punditry, but I’ve sworn off pretty much all political commentary in general, because (unless I’ve been looking in all the wrong places) it is literally impossible to find any that can’t be characterized as polemic, jeremiad, screed, snark, doctrinaire hectoring, screechy partisan propaganda, panicky hyperbole, ugly personal attack, lumpy masses of malignant rumors, embittered excoriation, or funhouse mirror distortion. 

True, if you decide to wade into the the smeary, bleary world of ink- and paper-based reportage, you can find a different kind of political commentary, which is to say the bland, balanced, fair to both sides and interesting to neither wallpaper paste known as the “editorial.”

But between these two extremes, there’s only a yawning gap.  If there’s a political commentator out there who’s well-informed, tough-minded, provocative, and informative, with a distinctive point of view but at the same time completely unpredictable and unclassifiable — so that you literally can’t tell at first glance or even second glance if the writer is a liberal or a conservative, a Democrat or a Republican (in other words, not Frank Rich) — I’d love to know about him or her.   

In the meantime, having stopped reading about politics, it wouldn’t make much sense for me to write about the topic either.  So when it comes to posting on this site (this is my first post), I think I’ll stick to my other interests — great music and books, retro and roadside Americana, food in all its forms, Japanese culture, certain sports, the business world, advertising, marketing, the movies, and so forth — pretty much anything but politics.

Although…before I leave the topic entirely, I found the following inexplicably hilarious item in today’s paper, from a gossip columnist named Bill Zwecker:

“George Clooney’s deep interest in world conflicts is leading him to put together a new film about Iraq, about a secret U.S. Army unit that attempts to create soldiers with paranormal powers.”

I think, if Zwecker and/or his editor hadn’t fallen asleep at the switch, that this item should have read:

“Although George Clooney claims to have a deep interest in world conflicts, his new film about Iraq will nonetheless focus on a secret U.S. Army unit that attempts to create soldiers with paranormal powers.”

And let me close by saying that not only will I never again post on a political topic, I will never, ever, ever, ever, ever, post again on the topic of George Clooney.