Republicans take back the House

Nice to see Steve Chabot back in Cincinnati representing. I have high hopes for John Kasich as Gov, especially when it comes to expanding the Ohio EdChoice school voucher program. I am still committed to vouchers with my heart and soul. Things go slowly but over generations if we take back our schools we can really take back our freedom. So much of the Culture war comes from the government monopoly in education. As long as we have that we will always have the culture wars. It is the belly of the beast as far as I am concerned.

Here is a quote I grabbed from the Corner about Wisconsin Tea Party Republican Ron Johnson:

Ron Johnson is explicit about this. “The reason we’re here,” he says near the end of his speech, in one of his signature lines, “is that we think we’re losing America and we’re a group of people who refuse to let America go without a knock-down fight.” The crowd waves its flags and chants “USA!”

I was a avid Tea Party participant. I went to rallies and even took the family to Washington DC. It has been a great run so far. Now the real challenge begins. Can the people we are sending to Washington carry out the message without getting swallowed by the coruption?

I am not always optimistic about that. But like Ron Johnson I too feel like we are losing America. And if they great lady should fall let it not be said that we let her go down without a fight. And fight we must.

In the name of John Paul Jones, we have not yet begun to fight!

In command of Ranger in 1777 and 1778, he operated in British home waters and made audacious raids on England’s shore.In recognition of his exploits, he was placed in command of five French and American vessels. Aboard his flagship, the Bonhomme Richard, Jones led his small squadron in the capture of seven merchantmen off of the Scottish coast. On September 23, 1779, Jones fought one of the bloodiest engagements in naval history. Jones struggled with the 44-gun Royal Navy frigate Serapis, and although his own vessel was burning and sinking, Jones would not accept the British demand for surrender, replying, “I have not yet begun to fight.” More than three hours later, Serapis surrendered and Jones took command.

Long Live The Tea Party Revolution! Sphere: Related Content

Diversity, Sustainability ~ Campus Ideology

Things I read on the web today:

Jay P. Greene directs us to the Chronicle of Higher Education:

From Diversity to Sustainability: How Campus Ideology Is Born

Here is the money shot as quoted by Greene:

I view this changing of the ideological guard with wariness. Diversity was pretty bad; sustainability may be even worse. Both movements subtract from the better purposes of higher education. Diversity authorizes double standards in admissions and hiring, breeds a campus culture of hypocrisy, mismatches students to educational opportunities, fosters ethnic resentments, elevates group identity over individual achievement, and trivializes the curriculum. Of course, those punishments were something that had to be accepted in the spirit of atoning for the original sin of racism.

But for its part, sustainability has the logic of a stampede. We all must run in the same direction for fear of some rumored and largely invisible threat. The real threat is the stampede itself. Sustainability numbers among its advocates some scrupulous scientists and quite a few sober facilities managers who simply want to trim utility bills. But in the main, sustainability is the triumph of hypothesis over evidence. Its scientific grounding is mostly a matter of models and extrapolations and appeals to authority. Evoking imminent and planet-destroying catastrophe, sustainatopians call for radical changes in economic arrangements and social patterns. Higher education is summoned to set aside whatever it is doing to help make this revolution in production, distribution, and consumption a reality.

Sustainability combines some astonishingly radical ideas with mere wackiness. Many sustainability advocates want to replace free markets (a source, as they see it, of unsustainable growth and exploitation) with some kind of pan-national rule with little scope for private property rights. On the other hand, sustainatopians also busy themselves with eliminating trays from cafeterias and attacking the threat of plastic soda straws. Sustainability thus unites vaunting political ambition and comic burlesque. Both are at odds with patient and open-minded intellectual inquiry.

The diversity movement has always been rife with contradictions. Seeking to promote racial equality, it evolved into a system that perpetuates inequalities. But whatever else it is, the diversity movement thirsts to be part of mainstream America. Its ultimate goal is to make diversity a principle of the same standing as freedom and equality in our national life. The sustainability movement, by contrast, has no such affection for the larger culture or loyalty to the American experiment. It dismisses the comforts of American life, including our political freedom, as unworthy extravagance. Sustainability summons us to a supposedly higher good. Personal security, national prosperity, and individual freedom may just have to go as we press on to our low-impact, carbon-free new order. In this sense, it goes beyond promising to redeem us from social iniquity to redeeming us from human nature itself.

Many campus adherents to sustainability may eventually tire of its puritanical preachiness and its unfulfilled prophecies, but for the moment, sustainability has cachet. Diversity, meanwhile, has aged into a static bureaucracy, and diversicrats increasingly spend their energy polishing the spoons…

Unrelated to this post but still amusing is this from Greg Mankiw's Blog:

Barney Frank, Then and Now

You can tell the man has been playing at the highest level of politics for quite a long time. If Barney Frank claims to love his mother, check it out.

David Brooks on some of the real costs of the State Pension Crisis: (H/T Cafe Hayek)

The Paralysis of the State

Over the past few decades, governments have become entwined in a series of arrangements that drain money from productive uses and direct it toward unproductive ones.

New Jersey can’t afford to build its tunnel, but benefits packages for the state’s employees are 41 percent more expensive than those offered by the average Fortune 500 company. These benefits costs are rising by 16 percent a year.

New York City has to strain to finance its schools but must support 10,000 former cops who have retired before age 50.

California can’t afford new water projects, but state cops often receive 90 percent of their salaries when they retire at 50. The average corrections officer there makes $70,000 a year in base salary and $100,000 with overtime (California spends more on its prison system than on its schools).

States across the nation will be paralyzed for the rest of our lives because they face unfunded pension obligations that, if counted accurately, amount to $2 trillion — or $87,000 per plan participant.

All in all, governments can’t promote future prosperity because they are strangling on their own self-indulgence.

New study: State pensions in dire situation

Cincinnati is on the list. The pain is to come:

A new study by the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and Robert Novy-Marx of the University of Rochester shows that in the not-too-distant future several state-sponsored pensions will fail to provide promised benefits to pension holders.

Five major cities have current pension assets that can only pay for promised benefits through 2020: Boston; Chicago; Cincinnati; Jacksonville, Fla.; and St. Paul. An additional 18 cities and counties, including New York City; Cook County, Ill.; and Orange County, Calif., will be solvent through 2020 but not past 2025.

Philadelphia has the most immediate cause for concern, as the city can pay existing promises with existing assets through 2015, less than five years from now, the study states.

The study also states that state and local governments are not far from the point where pension promises will impact governments' ability to operate. Once the funds are liquidated, promised pension payments will compete with other programs and erode a large portion of many municipal budgets.

"The fact that there is such a large burden of public employee pensions concentrated in urban metropolitan areas threatens the long-run economic viability of these cites, as residents can potentially move elsewhere to escape the situation," said professor Rauh, associate professor of finance at the Kellogg School who helped author the study, in prepared remarks.

Rauh estimates each household already owes an average of about $14,000 to current and former municipal public employees in the 50 cities and counties that were studied. This figure only represents the unfunded portion of benefits that have already been promised — not future promises. In New York City, San Francisco and Boston, the total is more than $30,000 per household. In Chicago, the total is more than $40,000 per household.

Can't say we didn't see it coming...




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What I have been thinking lately:

I should put a post together on this but I am lazy on my little undiscovered blog.

I have a theory of Democrats accusing Republicans of everything that they do.

Lately it is foreign donations, but that is exactly what Obama did when he eased online credit card donations during his campaign. Clinton took the Chinese money as well. I think Democrats accuse Republicans of things because they know they do them so they assume Republicans do them too.

Think about Astroturf. That phrase comes from the left, but who invented it and perfected it? They call the tea party Astroturf and "fake grass roots" because so much of their blather is all faked and they have been doing it for years.

They accuse Republicans or wanting to raid the Social Security trust fund that is already and emptied from their big government spending. They tell people that Republicans want to cut Medicare while passing Obamacare which is destined to cut Medicare. It seems like everything they accuse people of is something that they already have on their own agenda.

I am going to get more examples of this and I encourage anyone to suggest more. Just a passing thought. Sphere: Related Content

Bring Michelle Rhee to Cincinnati!

From the Washington Post: Michelle Rhee resigns as D.C. schools chancellor

She is going to be out of a job. She did good work in Washington DC. Cincinnati Public Schools have been looking for a good leader for years, and they need someone who can take back education from the teachers unions and give it back to the children.

Start the campaign to bring Michelle Rhee to Cincinnati today! Sphere: Related Content

Entitlement Mentality ~ Obama's Aunt Edition

Malkin: Obama’s Aunt Update: ‘The System Took Advantage of Me’

Breitbart:



"If I come as an immigrant, you have the obligation to make me a citizen."

"I didn't take any advantage of the system. The system took advantage of me."

Onyango came to the U.S. from Kenya in 2000 and was denied asylum by an immigration judge in 2004.

She stayed in the country illegally, living in Boston public housing, where she remains to this day. She also currently receives $700 per month in disability benefits.

She was granted asylum earlier this year by the same judge who said she could be in danger if she returned to her homeland because of her relationship with the president.

"It's a great country," she said of the U.S. "It's nice to live here. You can do whatever you want when you live here."

"To me, America's dream became America's worst nightmare,"

It's a great country! Hell to the yeah it is compared to Kenya. In Kenya the per capita GDP is $1,000 a year. In America she lives in Boston Public Housing and gets an additional disability check for $700 a month. The disability total is $8,400 a year. The free rent total has to be at least that much subsidy in a big city like Boston. The average rent for a one bedroom in Boston is $1,000. $12,000 in rent and $8,400 in disablity checks is $20,400 per year. The cost of living in Boston is 240% the national average. I bet she gets $400+ per month in foodstamps. That should take us up to $25,000 a year.

But it doesn't end there. She also gets free medical care and somebody paid for her lawyer too. And sending her to trial multiple times had to cost a pretty penny, those resources are not free.

"She was paralyzed for more than three months because of an autoimmune disorder called Guillain-Barre syndrome and had to learn to walk again".

Wonder how much three months in the hospital costs? I bet she racked up over $100,000 in hospital bills.

I would estimate that we have already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on her in the form of one subsidy or another. Housing, Government Checks, Food Stamps, Health Care and Legal services add up. And I doubt she has ever paid a penny in federal taxes.

The worst part is she isn't even gracious about it. We have some sort of duty to her to giver her all this stuff. She doesn't thank the taxpayer for her "American Nightmare". Talk about the entitlement mentality.

It is enough to make me vomit.

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Update: The costs in the United States related to Guillain-Barre syndrome (GBS) have been estimated as $110,000 for direct health care

This rental estimate for Boston Housing indicates 1 bedrooms rent in a range between $1,200 & $1,600 per month ($14,400 - $19,200 a year)

And it looks like I was a bit high on the food stamps. She probably gets something in a range of $150 - $200 a month. Who knows what other social services (both public and private) she also takes advantage of.



~ Sphere: Related Content

The Drug Pipeline and the FDA

No RefillsBy Megan McArdle

Over time, critics say, high-profile disasters like Fen-Phen and Vioxx, which killed or seriously harmed some of the people who took them, have encouraged ever-more-stringent review. The number of clinical trials required to support a new-drug application has more than doubled since 1980, while the number of patients needed in each trial has almost tripled. As a result of these and many other factors, the clinical-trial stage now costs more than four times as much, even after adjusting for inflation.

...

This means that clinical trials have unwanted side effects. Because of their astronomical expense, one drug with a huge market is more commercially desirable than 25 drugs that each treat a less common disease, because only one set of trials is necessary. If you’re targeting a disease that affects relatively few people, one of two things will happen: the drug will be very expensive, or the drug will be shelved because it’s unlikely to earn back its R&D investment.


Tougher safety and efficacy standards may also be keeping good drugs out of the public’s hands. Most people agree that today’s FDA would not have approved aspirin; even penicillin, the miracle drug that helped dramatically extend the human lifespan when introduced in the early 1940s, is questionable. Allergic reactions to penicillin kill a higher percentage of its takers than Vioxx ever did, while the gastrointestinal bleeding produced by aspirin means it probably would have flunked while still in animal testing.

Interesting stuff. We are killing ourselves with regulation.

Here is Milton Friedman on the FDA:



TAKE IT TO THE LIMITS: Milton Friedman on Libertarianism

DRUG-STALL COWBOYS

ROBINSON The Food and Drug Administration which regulates everything from the drugs that pharmaceutical companies may put on the market to the ingredients in items we purchase off the grocery store shelves. Let me give you an example- Thalidomide [FRIEDMAN Everybody's favorite example...] Well I may be leading with my chin on this one but I'm going to lead with it anyway. 50's and 60's it is marketed in Europe as a drug to help women get through the nausea that they sometimes experience during pregnancy. The Food and Drug Administration said it had been inadequately tested in the United States and forbade it to be marketed in this country with the result that thousands of children were born with horrible birth defects in Europe to mothers who had used Thalidomide but that didn't happen to American children, because the FDA had intervened and kept that drug off the market. Thank god for the FDA, right?

FRIEDMAN Wrong [ROBINSON Alright, why?] this is a case in which they did save lives, this was a good case, but suppose they are equally slow in adopting a drug which turns out to be very good and beneficial. How would you ever see the lives that are lost because of that? You're an FDA official, you have a question of whether to approve or disapprove a new drug. If you approve it and it turns out to be a bad drug like Thalidomide, you're in the soup, your name is going to be on every front page [ROBINSON cost me my job, I get hauled up to Congress to testify..] right. On the other hand if you disapprove it, but it turns out to be good, well then later on you approve it four or five years later, nobody's going to complain about the fact that you didn't approve it earlier except those greedy pharmaceutical companies that want make profits at the expense of the public, as everybody will say. So the result is that the pressure on the FDA is always to be late in approving. And there's enormous evidence that they have caused more deaths by late approvals than they have saved by early approval.

ROBINSON So your view is abolish the FDA..

FRIEDMAN Absolutely [ROBINSON And what comes up in its place?] what comes up? It's in the self-interest of pharmaceutical companies not to have these bad things. Do you think the manufacturer of Thalidomide made a profit out of Thalidomide or lost? [ROBINSON I see, ok.] And you have to have..people should be responsible for harm that they do. It should've been possible...[ROBINSON So tort law takes care of a lot of this.] Absolutely, absolutely..

Sphere: Related Content

Bankrupt California Paying Lifeguards $150k a Year In Retirement

A Tsunami Approaches: The Beginning of the Great Deconstruction
by Robert J. Cristiano 09/05/2010, New Geography

By 2010, the general public received a series of shocks. The first shock was the jobless recovery of the Great Recession that cost 8 million jobs. Most of the job losses occurred in the private sector yet the majority of the $800 billion Stimulus Bill went to “save and create” public sector employment. The second shock was learning that civil servants earned twice that of private workers. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, Federal workers received average pay and benefits of $123,049 while private workers made $61,051 in total compensation. The third shock was revelation of incredible retirement plans doled out by politicians since 1999. In 2002, California passed SB 183 that allowed police and safety workers to retire after 30 years on the job with 3% of salary for each year of service, or 90% of their last year’s pay. During the Great Recession, fireman began retiring with $150,000 pensions at age 52 despite a life expectancy approaching 80. In Orange County CA, lifeguards, deemed safety workers, retired with $147,000 annual pensions. The Orange County sheriff, recently convicted of witness tampering, will receive $215,000 annually while in jail. Bob Citron, the Treasurer of Orange County who pushed the county into bankruptcy in the 1990s, receives a pension of $150,000 per year. A tsunami of anger and resentment is building.

New Geography is a great site with lots of interesting material on the front page and in the archives. Highly recommmended. Read the whole thing here.

I wish I was a retired lifeguard making $150,000 a year. When California goes before the judge and asks for a federal bailout we are going to have to all pay for that lifeguard's lavish retirement.

I will do whatever I can to fight bailing them out for that type of spending. When you read the numbers it blows your mind. Sphere: Related Content

Bed Bug News ~ Use Malathion!

From the AP:

US grapples with bedbugs, misuse of pesticides

The problem has gotten so bad that the Environmental Protection Agency warned this month against the indoor use of chemicals meant for the outside. The agency also warned of an increase in pest control companies and others making "unrealistic promises of effectiveness or low cost."

The Agency may be warning against it, but if you have bedbugs that is exactly what you should be doing. Buy some Malathion. They still sell it. It was used for years against bed bugs indooors. It is still recommended by the World Health Organization. See this.

Ohio authorities, struggling against widespread infestations in Cincinnati, Columbus, Dayton and other cities, are pleading with EPA to approve the indoor use of the pesticide propoxur, which the agency considers a probable carcinogen and banned for in-home use in 2007. About 25 other states are supporting Ohio's request for an emergency exemption.

The Federal Government is to blame for Bed Bugs coming back, and they won't let you do anything about it. A majority of states support teh repeal of the EPA ban of propoxur, but it doesn't matter to the EPA. So buy some Malathion instead. Get some at Lowes or the Home Depot.

Here is an article from Jonathan Strong at the Daily Caller:


Is the EPA to blame for the bed bug ‘epidemic’?
By Jonathan Strong - The Daily Caller

Eradication can take months and cost thousands of dollars. There’s also the stigma — many high-end New York residences, for instance, keep their bed bug infestations secret to avoid embarrassment.

But why are bed bugs back? Though they’ve been sucking humans’ blood since at least ancient Greece, bed bugs became virtually extinct in America following the invention of pesticide DDT.

There were almost no bed bugs in the United States between World War II and the mid-1990s.

Around when bed bugs started their resurgence, Congress passed a major pesticides law in 1996 and the Clinton EPA banned several classes of chemicals that had been effective bed bug killers.

The debate isn’t over long-banned DDT, since modern bed bugs have developed a tolerance for that chemical. But in the pre-1996 regime, experts say, bed bugs were “collateral damage” from broader and more aggressive use of now-banned pesticides like Malathion and Propoxur.

And now that we have banned our most effective course of action, Bed Bugs are becoming more resistant to the remaining available pesticides:

the economic impact to victims can be severe. In many cases, victims discard most or all of their furniture and other belongings in a desperate push to rid themselves of the problem. There are extermination costs and expensive preventative measures like mattress encasements as well.

Compounding the spread of bed bugs are several factors other than EPA regulations, including the increased levels of travel and growing resistance in wild bed bug populations to the pesticides that are still allowed by the government.

According to research at the University of Kentucky College of Agriculture, academic headquarters for studying the six-legged beast, some strains of bed bugs can survive, zombie-like, for up to 16 days after being directly sprayed with currently used pesticides.

Do yourself a favor and break out the Malathion! Don't listen to the government!

If you consider that in most instances insects are intended to die shortly after coming into brief contact with pesticide residue, that’s pretty dramatic.

Meanwhile, tests at the University of Kentucky show the EPA-banned pesticides are still deadly effective at bed bug mass murder.

Notably, pest controllers can still rid your house or apartment building of bed bugs. It’s just way more expensive and time consuming since they’re using nerf guns instead of nukes.

Malathion is still deadly effective at bed bug mass murder! You can buy it at the hardware store for outside use. It is better than anything your exterminator is allowed to use. Call an exterminator and expect to pay hundreds or dollars for multiple treatments with a nerf gun, or just pay $8 for some Malathion at Lowes and kill them all in one application. It really is that simple.


Previously on the Cesspool:

Malathion Will Kill Your Bed Bugs!

Cincinnati ~ Bedbug Capital of the World! ~ Blame the EPA!

. Sphere: Related Content