Hey!

1. Apparently the county is having an existential crises. Hyperbole anyone? And no, if you think Obamacare is a existential crises, that’s hyperbole too … it just a big step in the wrong direction.
2. Leftist forever, doing well for them, eh?
3. Not naughty, stupid. Hello, neither side is “giving anything up” that’s the impasse.
4. The problematic essence of the Obamacare.
5. Another view.
6. Writings of the hymns.
7. Hack your car.
8. Confusion … a more everyday useful purpose to put this is using the non sequitur to stop young children to stop crying.
9. Street gangs and facebook.
10. Stock exchange analysis and climate.
11. What your library dreams of at night.

So … government shuts down tomorrow … my prediction is few will notice.

1. Seeing small things.
2. Leaks.
3. Unimpressed by the hostage/terror rhetoric coming from the left.
4. Fer your book inbox.
5. And cinema!
6. The standard model and a small crack. Perhaps.
7. I’m not getting it. Let’s see, abortion makes women “equal to men” in that that can walk away from pregnancy. A man walking away is horrible. How is making it the same for women a good idea by permitting her to kill her child a necessary right?
8. Fear and anger. That’s akin to the mythical “fear” that Obamacare might succeed scares the GOP. Uhm. Who? Who!? Every single person on the right I’ve ever talked to fears it will screw up the country. This other thing is just plain made up.
9. More terror in Africa.
10. Evil.
11. Two hunger strikes.
12. Uhm, duh.

Well, Hi there.

1. Bees and a man.
2. Rape and India.
3. Microclimate accuracy and the global data sets. (not unrelated).
4. Facebook … or at least faces.
5. Worser and worser.
6. So, Christians think some guy is God. How’d (when?) did that occur.
7. A speech. Better than the highly partisan post shooting speech our knucklehead-in-chief gave.
8. Who to save (after Galois, Ramanujan, and Mosely)?
9. Evagrius. One of those whose writings prompted me to cross the Bosporus.
10. Risk and vocation.
11. Because we don’t care to bequeath to our children.
12. Oh, pshaw. Consider possibilities of Klein bottle  noodles. Eat your solitons … how about fried eggs shaped as Siefert surfaces.
13. And for a wrap … just hush.

G’day

1. Belorus hard man and age defeats youth.
2. The exceptionalism gambit turned.
3. And that same essay through other eyes.
4. Criminals and crime.
5. Speaking of which, … how about in verse?
6. Memory and charity. Our parish had a memorial liturgy to remember.
7. Acting ability noted.
8. That’s a request that should be ignored.
9. Another version of realpolitik.
10. Gas methods

Woo. Three days in a row … and three and a half weeks to go and busy busy busy season might be over (except for the clean up).

1. Guns and the racist race baiting left.
2. Here’s a likely suggestion (with material to back it up) … the biggest NSA problem has been journalists and the FISA court judiciary. Another question that came to me is if NSA has cracked https … banking is not secure … and how much money has been stolen?
3. On the other hand, there is likely good fallout from the NSA kerfuffle, to whit codes are always easier for the code users than the breaker from a computability standpoint. Piss off the crypto-crowd and the encoding standards will be computationally safe in the next round.
4. ’cause there’s no there there, allegedly … but if that’s the case, why hide?
5. The way of winning that was left to non-sprinters like me, but rarely ever got … ’cause I sort of sucked.
6. Three words and the pretty much empty set of people who know the meaning of all three (I was not one of those who knew those words, btw).
7. Philosophy.
8. Teuthidian tech.
9. Mr Obama’s speech summed up from the left.
10. A question raised by the same.
11. Explaining the non-existence of philosophers teaching ethics.

For 9/11

1. A tweet noted.
2. A photo.
3. Lyrical.

Links!

1. For the time traveling Obama (not?) fan. (Tip ‘o the hat)
2. Truth to power, 4th century style.
3. Racism and hate crimes.
4. Grist for the abortion debate.
5. A good idea noted in the sporting world.
6. How did it happen? Elysium suggests lax immigration policies … although factors leading to the fall of the two parent household and the rise in divorce figure greatly.
7. Syrian notes from the guy who predicted the Russian response several days before it happened.
8. A dog with a drinking problem. Glub glub.
9. Some damn fine sports reporting.
10. Of interest.
11. For the Biden home defense network.
12. Infrastructure spending.

A week in the middle … the last few weeks big push is over … and I’m in cleanup mode for traveling to Alabama next week and the next push.

1. Jesus’ maternal grandparents noted.
2. Badum, bing.
3. I’m missing where this is a problem.
4. This is not unrelated.
5. Zombies and brainz.
6. Hum drum home drone.
7. A book list.
8. A fistful of (not dollars) but something else mindful of dirt.
9. The last frame is the kicker.
10. A teaching method with results.
11. A question, the answer … ambition.
12. A question regarding  Syria.
13. A protestant (I think) sees an Eastern Paschal celebration.
14. Not just one “red line” in the Middle East.
15. Israel not the only frakking country in the Middle East either.
16. Three essays on Syrian intervention: here, here and here.
17. On scientific malpractice.

G’day

1. Some Olde English history.
2. How to ride heroically.
3. Angry parent doesn’t think about what they are doing.
4. Biological diversity and human ability.
5. Alas, the cost of moving, fiscal and psychic is so so very high … or not. Regardless, sounds good.
6. Frodo for President.
7. Amuzing.
8. STEM shortage.
9. Who is at fault?
10. Yikes.
11. Limited liability means what?
12. And why is this not completely obvious?
13. One reason why not to bomb Syria.

A while back, I gave my cautious approval to an NSA program that said it was just collecting phone call metadata; information about calls – like the phone numbers, and date & time – but not the calls themselves. We can get this same information about government phones, so keeping ours didn’t seem that big a deal. Still, it seemed a bit of overreach.

Well, we now have more information coming out of the NSA telling us that, well, they did make a few oopsies. They told Bloomberg News that, over the past decade, very rare instances of willful violations of NSA’s authorities have been found. Clever use of the passive voice there; no actual names of agents were mentioned. Another spokesman said that the actions were the work of overzealous NSA employees or contractors. Yeah, and just a few “overzealous” IRS workers in Cincinnati were responsible for the entire scandal of targeting conservatives.

Like most government wrongdoing, this is going to come out in dribs and drabs. Had it stopped with the revelation of phone call metadata, I could have been OK with it. But now we’re hearing about a few slipups here and later a few there.

I know, I know. Give government power and they’ll first take more, and then abuse it. Wow, now who could have anticipated that?

Blogger Donald Sensing noted that someone writing at the very liberal Daily Kos website was rather irked that, due to ObamaCare, she’d wind up paying over $8000 a year for what she called “crappy, high-deductible insurance” in New York state. The writer notes, “This means we will all be required to pay steep premiums and deductibles but may not have the financial resources to actually access healthcare.”

You mean ObamaCare is not going to be the panacea its proponents claimed it would be? Color me meh.

She concludes , “I am reminded on days like today, that President Obama campaigned on the idea that people like me would see something like a $2500 reduction in health insurance costs. What was I thinking?” Don Sensing surmises that thinking didn’t enter into it. I’d say, wow, now who could have anticipated that?

The magazine The Nation is a liberal-leaning publication; that much is certain. What’s not so certain is whether or not they really understand the topics they cover.

Here’s a case in point. It recently asked it readers to sign an open letter to Wal-Mart demanding that they pay workers at least $12 an hour. However, another web site, ProPublica, reported, as good news, that, this fall, interns at the Nation Institute, who put out the magazine, will be paid minimum wage for the first time in the history of the 30-year-old program. Up until now they’d been paid at less than minimum wage, when all the while they railed against those who did just that.

But anyway, that’s good news, right? Those overworked interns will now get the federal minimum wage and have more to spend in our economy. Well, consider this. In a statement to ProPublica on the report, The Nation said that, “We are not yet certain how this will work out long term, but for the fall we are anticipating hiring ten interns rather than twelve.”

So they’re raising the pay, but hiring fewer workers in response. Wow, now who could have anticipated that?

Links?

1. Recounting Mr Obama’s shifting sands and the Middle East. Even if you don’t know what we should vis a vis Egypt and Syria, what we did do remains amazingly stupid.
2. Speaking of Syria … somebody needs to update their RSS/news feeds, ’cause that criteria touches not a single comment on the matter that I’ve read anywhere.
3. Oh, welcome back Mr Schraub … even if you abandon the Constitution in the name of defending it. A fourth of the colonies at the time of ratification felt that “Freedom” meant the authority to make local decisions about how to order their life (reference, “New England folkway and the section on “Freedom ways” in Abion’s Seed by David Hackett Fisher). My guess is that Mr Schraub knew that because he has a keen interest in American political history, so he has to have read that seminal book. It seems incoherent to argue that what is meant by freedom held by a quarter of the founding population is actually not Constitutional.
4. Slick gun tech.
5. For your failing memory, future promise.
6. Killing “to make a statement” seems on its face unethical. Yes or no?
7. Epic fantasy ranked. I’d move #3 up … possibly to the top. I’d move down #4 … don’t know how far. #17 shouldn’t even be on the list, it was so bad.
8. Uh, what the heck?!
9. This not news, guy works at spy agencies … and, erhm, spies.
10. That. Is. Amazing.
11. Discussing racism.

Still busy, but trying to make time for y’all

1. Bzaaaap!
2. Hmmm, two ways to go on that … yes censuring both is in order, but only one was a family hour/children’s TV hostess/actress.
3. Here, however, is a third way you probably haven’t considered.
4. “I have not yet made a decision” and the subtext is that we all remember “I’m the guy who spent knew for 9 months where Bin Laden and it took all that time for me to make up my mind to go after him.” Somebody should remind him, not to draw a do not cross line if it is just a bluff. Like the bin Laden attack, we’ll have to wait for a wag-the-dog domestic prompt to get us to move.
5. Related to the above. So, prior to being elected President, Mr Obama was firmly against Presidential unilateral military action, now he’s for it (indeed done it). Stupid or evil (that is, was he so dumb he didn’t anticipate reasons for doing so, or was he lying when he said he was against it?) Liberals keep telling how smart they are, which alas, leaves the “evil” alternative.
6. I think this belief noted (that racism is the motive) is common on the left. It remains interesting (ironic?) that that assumption is itself  the essence of bigotry.
7. Guns and legal control. Back when I was in school, a very good cartoon was on a door in our dorm … “People don’t kill people, Toasters kill people.” with the image of a guy falling down dead with toast impaling his back and another holding a toaster like a mortar.
8. “Noble cause corruption” isn’t noble but it is indeed corruption.
9. Chemicals to leave for the professionals.
10. Academic potential.
11. Who done it?
12. A short way from surrealism is hyper-realism, both I will admit to liking.
13. A mistake I’ve made.

Good morning.

1. Foreign policy excuses.
2. Coming to the dance, and darn it all, but someone else has the same dress.
3. And then … have a cup.
4. Oddly enough, I have an LED bulb in my bathroom because it is brighter than the incandescent (the fixture limits because of heat to 60 watts, I put a liquid cooled LED 75+ watt equivalent which draws under 20 watts … and voila … more light than ever).
5. Them folx are serious about their drinking (and avoiding taxes).
6. Wow.
7. Syria and gas … and who dun it … so cui bono? Al Qaeda or an equivalent?
8. Sweets and athletes.
9. Anti-Semitism as proof of the devil.
10. Rape and vigilantism.
11. One explanation …
12. Luxury and academe.

Mr Taranto highlighted a Yglesias post in which Mr Yglesias opines against educational meritocracy. Mr Yglesias is wrong in assuming that “white people” would have problems with Asians getting more places in higher education based on their higher grades and test scores. I offer myself as one white person who sees nothing at all wrong and a lot right with more people with better grades and test scores regardless of the color of their skin getting into the better schools. Furthermore he concludes:

But rather than dedicating the most resources to the “best” students and then fighting over who’s the best, we should be allocating resources to the people who are mostly likely to benefit from additional instructional resources.

I wholeheartedly agree. We should allocate more of our educational resources to those who are most likely to benefit from additional instructional resources. Who are those people most likely to benefit? We call them the gifted students (at least those gifted students who are also willing to work hard).