Free kibbles

FEDERAL RESERVE:

"Other than food, gas and rent, prices haven't risen." That's too funny.

EDUCATION:

It's good to find an oasis in the desert of education. Students build life-size model of the Trojan horse on their own initiative.

"VanVorhees says they’re pretty pleased.“We’re hoping that this kinda makes the younger classes step up and do cool stuff,” VanVorhees said."

Now that's learning. Nice job.

HEALTH CARE:

Healthful behavior is key to health care system. Yes it is, and the biggest institutional obstacle to healthful behavior we have is the federal government which promotes a bad food supply, bad exercise and bad health care. There's two ways to reduce health care costs. One is by people becoming more healthy. Two is by reducing the cost of production of health care. The best thing we can do to promote both is to abolish the FDA and Health and Human Services get government at all levels out of our food supply and health care system.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Even though Americans have reduced their CO2 output to 1995 levels, the greens are coming for your refrigerator.

Solar cycle 24 has taken a big leap forward in activity.


The good news is, if this keeps up, this might keep the climate from falling into a Dalton-minimum-like cold spell. The bad news is, a return to high activity will warm the planet and more people will fall for the global warming fraud. Let's hope for something in between.

POLICE STATE:

TSA singling out people who complain about their abuses. Because that's what terrorists will do, drawing lots of attention to themselves. This is just a natural response of thugs.

"CNN has obtained a list of roughly 70 "behavioral indicators" that TSA behavior detection officers use to identify potentially "high risk" passengers at the nation's airports.Many of the indicators, as characterized in open government reports, are behaviors and appearances that may be indicative of stress, fear or deception. None of them, as the TSA has long said, refer to or suggest race, religion or ethnicity.
But one addresses passengers' attitudes towards security, and how they express those attitudes.
It reads: "Very arrogant and expresses contempt against airport passenger procedures.""

So how many of the 70 behavioral indicators did that 5 year old little girl set off? This is a load of crap.

WAR:

Theory on why the US military can't nation-build.

"Different jobs attract different personalities. The Mike Tysons of the world do not go into ballet, nor do the Mother Teresas become tank commanders. The career military attracts people who run from the merely abnormal to the frankly weird. For example, they place extreme value on ritual and ceremony, on ribbons and medals and colored things more appropriate to a Christmas tree than to a human being. They are authoritarian by nature, comfortable in a rigid, hierarchical, and conformist society that most of us would find equally unbearable and absurd. Suppose your boss told everyone in the office that they had to wear exactly the same clothes and stand at attention in the morning to that he could determine whether they had dressed themselves correctly. Militaries start with odd material."

I think this is a secondary effect. The authoritarian, bureaucratic nature of the military attracts people who like authoritarian, bureaucratic structure. And that's fine when the military is fighting another authoritarian, bureaucratic military. But that isn't the kind of enemy the military faces when nation-building. The root problem is the authoritarian, bureaucratic nature of the military, not the people who are naturally attracted to that structure. This is why I keep stressing we should go to our strength to hunt down terrorists, and our strength is entrepreneurship: people who come up with creative solutions to problems. People who are flexible so they can adapt to fluid circumstances. We should do this by issuing letters of Marque to hunt down Osama bin Laden, al Zawahiri, and others who are funding and training terrorists to attack us. Our military shouldn't be nation-building anyway.

"Constantly they are told that they are “the best trained, best equipped, most powerful and effective fighting force the world has seen.” This is not a statement of fact but of mandatory enthusiasm. The Pentagon’s record since WW II has been a sorry one. Further, effectiveness, training, and so on are relative to a particular situation: a force well-equipped for desert war against aging Iraqi armor is not necessarily equipped to fight guerrillas in Quang Tri or Helmand."

That's problem isn't caused by the personality of the officers. It's structural. Granted, the officers who are best suited for this structure rise to the top, and they naturally resist any changes to the structure.

"The norm is a wild overestimation of one’s own powers, disdain for the enemy, and inattention to tactical facts. Why? Not because soldiers are actually stupid, but because they prefer martial ardor to thought."

This is another failing of the system.