The Truth About Cats & Dogs
I've been pretty down lately. I know, big surprise. My dog knows when I'm depressed; he usually does something funny to make me laugh or he'll just lie down next to me and put his little head on my leg or hand. He looks at me (I use that term loosely; since he's blind he doesn't really "look" at anything anymore) with an expression that just says, "I dunno what's the matter, but I'm here."
Anyway, the other night I was really depressed and something interesting happened. My dog was already snoring away and the cat jumped up on the bed. This cat in particular is...well, he's gorgeous. Soft and silky and beautiful and he knows it. So I was sitting there, feeling like crap, and ToPu starts rubbing his head against my hand, demanding to be petted. So I petted him. After rubbing his belly for about five minutes, I thought, "Wait. What just happened here? You don't love me, you just wanted belly rubs!" But I did realize that by demanding my attention and making me focus on him, he did distract me from my own problems and actually made me feel better. I chuckled to myself, thinking that was pretty clever on his part and that only an animal could pull that off. If a person had done that, I'd be pretty pissed.
And that's when I realized the difference between cat people and dog people. I love and have cats and dogs; if someone asked me if I were a "cat person" or a "dog person" I wouldn't have an answer. But as I thought about it, when my friends are sad, I do one of two things: I try to make them laugh or (well, this usually comes after trying to make them laugh fails miserably) I just tell them I'm here, to listen if/when they need listened to, to give them support.
So of course I thought of those "cat people" I know. These people prefer cats over dogs and sure enough, when I start talking about my problems, they interrupt to talk about theirs. They do the "one-up your problem" game. What I'm going through is insignificant because, geez, I should be grateful my situation is so simple compared to theirs!
However, I feel I should confess I kept taking breaks writing this post to pet ToPu's belly.
Obamaist Union Thug Slugs Tea Party Protester
Protests are terrible, when other people do them. Punched guy to be interviewed momentarily.
I've emailed YouTube to try to get a response regarding how the video violated terms of service, which is what it now says.
FBI Probes Rotten ACORN [UPDATE: Related Census Fraud]
From The Daily Caller:
One employee told the FBI that ACORN headquarters is “wkg [working] for the Democratic Party.”
According to one report, an ACORN employee said the purpose of “[f]raudulent cards” was “[t]o cause confusion on election day to keep polls open longer,” “[t]o allow people who can’t vote to vote,” and “[t]o allow to vote multiple times.”
Another report quotes an employee saying, “Project Vote will pay them whether cards fake or not – whatever they had to do to get the cards was attitude.” Project Vote pays based on the number of cards and “that’s why they were so reckless,” the report says.
A report quotes an employee saying, “I don’t like our system. I don’t think we should do voter registration.” The report also notes that employees were “[c]onstantly threatened” and that the staff were “instructed on what to say to FBI.”
Another report indicates an employee told the investigator, that ACORN “[t]old employees not to talk to the FBI.” The FBI is “‘trying to intimidate you.’”
“These documents show the need for a national criminal investigation by the Obama Justice Department into ACORN,” said Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch.
“Is Attorney General [Eric] Holder doing nothing because of Obama’s close connections to ACORN and Project Vote? The information in these new documents has national implications that cry out for further investigation,” Fitton said.
Related:
UPDATE:
On the last three days of March, teams of temporary Census Bureau workers visited the types of places, including what the bureau calls “targeted non-sheltered outdoor locations” (TNSOL), where homeless people are known to congregate. These workers were carrying out the “Service-Based Enumeration” (SBE) phase of the Census, which counts the nation’s homeless population.
The bureau gave these workers two instructions that seemed peculiar: When they counted a homeless person, the workers did not need to take the person’s name or date of birth, and if a presumed homeless person insisted he or she had already been counted by the Census, the workers were supposed to count that person anyway.
These orders raise an obvious question: Is the 2010 Census counting some homeless people twice?
The issue has not escaped the notice of the Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Commerce, which oversees the Census Bureau. During the effort to count the homeless, officials from the IG’s office visited 13 local Census offices to observe first-hand how the count was conducted. On May 5, the IG published a report for Congress on Census operations during the first quarter (January-March). It included the IG’s observations on the homeless count.
More UPDATE: "Prima facie evidence" of wrongdoing in Sestak, Romanoff scandals.
Going to the corporate dark side
I saw this piece by Thomas Sowell recently, and it reminded me of one of the biggest decisions I've made, at least career-wise: giving up on academia and joining the corporate rat race.
To be sure, a big part of my decision was my total failure on my thesis. I was modeling neurons. The details don't much matter, but I realized that there was a small group of people in the world doing what I was doing, they had their own models, and even if I got to publication, at most maybe 6 people would care about my research.
And I wasn't one of them.
Now, I like to solve problems, and I like to seek problems, but I decided that the way to tell if someone really REALLY wanted something solved, there would be some good $$ attached to it. Money is the signal that they really care.
I've tried to lure some of my old comrades over to the dark side, but the race for tenure, the promise of the golden ring, and the comfort of the familiar [hey, being in school your whole life ain't a bad deal if you can swing it] have kept many there. Some have gotten tenure, some have failed in that quest and are academic nomads. Maybe some will join me eventually.
It just so happens the types of problems I solve involve large sums of money. And you better bet, outside of the government, when your "deviations" are on the order of millions of dollars, people pay attention.
I'll let the good professor have the last word:
The wonderful places where you are supposed to go to do “public service” are as sheltered from the brutal test of reality as you have been on this campus for the last four — or is it six? — years. In these little cocoons, all that matters is how well you talk the talk. People who go into the marketplace have to walk the walk.
Colleges can teach many valuable skills, but they can also nourish many dangerous illusions. If you really want to be of service to others, then let them decide what is a service by whether they choose to spend their hard-earned money for it.
The New The B-Cast
If you're a follower, or you're just nosy, you'll want to take a look at this video in which Scott and Liz announce that they'll be taking up new digs on Monday and give a foretaste of what's to come. They've sold back their Breitbart TV shares to Andrew, and they're setting up house at http://thebcast.com beginning Monday.
Much remains to be announced and seen, but both Liz and Scott are going to have their independent blogs at the new digs, and for the time being, at least, they're moving to a one-hour format to accommodate all of the other initiatives they've got going.
Larry O'Connor from Big Hollywood has taken over their part of Breitbart.com's operations. I'm hoping that this might provide an opportunity for my friend Charles Winecoff over there, too. I'm sure Larry will do a great job, so you should just keep them on your feed.
Meanwhile, Liz and Scott have the chance to integrate and expand their web presence. Undoubtedly, there will be bugs and glitches along the way, so if you're so inclined, please help them shake the place down, provide feedback, and get the word out. If you're a videographer, especially, send them something they might be interested in and put yourself on their radar.
Elementary, dear reader
A real sense of civic responsibility
Now there is some folks that take their second amendment rights seriously. Beware of dog? Heck, beware of well armed owners!
Tales of a math geek chick
So, once again, someone decides it's time to open the lid on disparities in math/science achievement by sex – to wit, there's a lot more dudes out on that right-hand tail. Duh. No, it's not due to discrimination. Not now, sorry.
I'm probably part of that study they're mentioning: back in January 1987, when I was 12, I took the SAT. I remember the score I got: 720 on math, 530 on verbal. This was before the score “recentering” that boosted the average score, so my scores could be directly comparable with my Dad's scores – he took it in 1970 when he was 18. He got a total of 1230, I think, and I don't remember the exact breakdown except my math score was higher than his. He ribbed me for having such a lower verbal score than he did, and my obvious retort was I was 12 and hadn't even studied foreign language at that point [by the time I graduated high school, I got the verbal score above 700, but I can't remember how much above.]
Anyway, at the time, I was part of a special math class, where we had 2 hours of class time per week in a countywide class. There were 4 girls in the program, and about 20 boys. We went through Algebra I & II and geometry in 2 years, 7th and 8th grade. I think we all took the SAT when we were in 7th grade: result – only 2 of the entire group scored >700 on the math portion …. me and another girl.
Now we weren't taking this test for our health [indeed, I didn't want to take it again when I was 17, as I figure the score I got when I was 14, 1440, was good enough for the colleges I was applying to... the SAT gave me a massive headache]. It was for Johns Hopkins CTY program. Because I scored higher than 700, I got a scholarship to go to the residential program that summer. My parents forbade me from taking any math classes, as they thought I was too far ahead. So I took Computer Science [aka discrete math... bwa ha ha – fooled you, parents! I learned algorithm theory and propositional logic [“How YOU doin'?”.... ok, not that]].
Funny thing is, I can't remember if there were any other girls in that class. I never noticed. I don't think so, but I could be wrong. There were plenty of other girls in the CTY program, some even taking the “real” math classes, but on the whole they tended to be in the soft sciences or humanities courses.
Fast forward to my senior year in high school. I get on the U.S. Physics Olympiad team, which is 20 high schoolers, and 2 of us are girls. More interesting is that I think 4 on the team weren't U.S. Citizens [legal residents, of course... one guy was a citizen of nowhere, b/c he had left the Soviet Union, and in 1992 there was no more USSR.] Now, of the 20 people, only 5 get to go to the international competition to represent the U.S. Within a day or so, I realized I was in the bottom half of the group, and basically had a good time for the 2 week training camp – several other people made the same determination. It was mainly the top half who were competing for those 5 spots.
Alas, there was only one dark spot during my time there: one of the coaches asked my opinion about not having any girls on the international team, and I said: clearly we're not in the top 5, and it wouldn't be fair to the guys if you picked one of us girls because you wanted to fill a quota.
That was that. I didn't go to Finland, and I've got the signatures of all 20 of us, plus the coaches, plus several Nobel Prize-winning physicists [one of the prizes that still means something] in a quantum mech textbook by A.P. French [who also signed the book, which is how the signature thing got started. Since then, I also got John Wheeler, Dan Piraro, and Roger Penrose to sign the book]. Maybe one of those guys will be a Nobel Prize-winning physicist some day.
But not me. I majored in physics, and decided that didn't suit, and I also did grad work in math, and that didn't work out, but now I'm an actuary, and that's going pretty well so far. That's a different story.
I'm getting tired of the boo-hoo-ing of the various grievance bitches [and yes, men can be bitches, too] decrying the lack of female participation in certain fields. First, it is a lot more comfortable for them to do this boo-hoo-ing over sex disparities, because to raise the racial disparities will be real uncomfortable. That's a much harder nut to crack, and they can raise the female percentages very easily by simply cutting out some men....just like is happening with how Title IX is applied to college sports.
Forget about interest, which is the obvious issue with Title IX and sports, there simply are not enough female math freaks sitting out on the right-hand side when you stack them up against the male math freaks. The good news is that the gaps out there aren't as wide as with height... doesn't that make you feel all warm & gooey inside?
Still, should Title IX applied to math and physics come to pass, I see it as a business opportunity to partner with some of the guys who will get kicked out of academia so the ratios are “right” [because they can't forcibly draft women, this is what would happen]... some very good people would be booted, and I bet I could do a lot with that intellectual firepower.
Hat tip:Hot Air.
Background: my old writings on MATH NEEDS CHICKS
Bin Laden located?
Tally Ho!
According to DEBKAfile, a Kuwaiti newspaper published a story on Monday stating that the Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Erdogan, and his intelligence chiefs know that Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri are living in Iran:
Osama bin Laden's hiding place was pinned down for the first time Monday, June 7, by the Kuwaiti Al-Siyassa Monday, June 7, as the mountainous town of Savzevar in the northeastern Iranian province of Khorasan, 220 km west of Mashhad. He is said to have lived there under Tehran's protection for the last five years, along with Ayman Al-Zawahiri and five other high-ranking al Qaeda leaders.
Debkafile's intelligence sources disclosed Monday night that Turkish prime minister Recep Erdogan and his intelligence chiefs are well aware that Bin Laden and Zawahiri are hiding in Iran. The leak to the Kuwait paper was intended to show the Obama administration that the Turkish leader's ties with Iran had grown intense enough for him to be fully in the picture of Iran's secret sanctuary for the authors of the 9/11 attacks on the United States.
Savzevar, a small town of about a quarter of a million inhabitants, is connected by road to Tehran and Mashhad and has a small airport. A center for producing grapes and raisins, its location is remote and difficult to access because it is enclosed by lofty mountains and a salt desert 50,000 square kilometers in area.
I've personally suspected this for some time, but, what do I know, really. And, while Debkafile is considered by some to be a propaganda outlet for the Israelis, I'll leave that judgement to you, kind readers.
If true though, this begs some interesting questions. Foremost is why, if Iranian and Turkish relations are warming so, would Erdogan leak such sensitive information to a Kuwaiti newspaper. Is it indeed to lure the President into attempting some kind of dramatic SpecOps action; perhaps even a trap of sorts, assuming that Turkey is working in concert with Iran? Is it plain old fashioned realpolitik. That is, with all the talk of a resurgent Ottoman empire among Turkish nationalists, and Iran itself openly seeking regional hegemony, is this a thumb in Ahmadi-Nejad's eye? Or could it be that Turkey wishes to signal to the Obama administration that, because of it's cultural connections throughout the region, it is a much more solid and useful ally than the Israelis could hope to be?
A lot of questions and speculation to be sure. But what is certain is if Osama has been using Iran as sanctuary, and a base for operations in both Iraq, Syria, and proxy actions against Israel, coupled with Iran's single-minded defiance of all in their pursuit of nuclear weapons, wouldn't that be all the more reason to reconsider dropping the hammer on them?
At the very least I hope that this is being looked into further. Because if they could locate Bin Laden in Savzevar, or acquire his trail if flushed out by these revelation, the very least we could do is return his courtesies and reach out and touch him-so to speak...
I mean, why not dial 1-800-GPS-PGMs; when it absoluely, positively, has to be there-on target. And show him we still care.
PROGRESS! [UPDATED]
Yesterday, Reuters ran a story on a report by Treasury sent to Congress, with all the usual fanfare of a Friday afternoon, under-the-radar, data dump, detailing their projection, based on current levels of spending and revenus, that the US national debt should reach 19.6 trillion dollars by 2015; an amount that will represent 102% of GDP. Of course, the increase in GDP assumes growth in the economy, and may not include any "double dip" downturn as many economists are predicting. And, in fairness, it also can't take into account any serious spending reductions that may me legislated by Congress in the intervening time. I may be cynical and jaded, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for that to come to pass.
And what's the cause of the near soubling of the debt in that timeframe? According to Reuters:
The U.S. debt has grown rapidly with the economic downturn and government spending for the Wall Street bailout, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the economic stimulus.
Yep...Just as I noted the other day; it's because of the wars, don't you see? Never mind that the combined cost of those actions are exceeded by the cost of the bailouts and the spendulus. And surprisingly Reuters makes no mention of the dramatic increase in discretionary spending that resulted from the Democrats enacting their 15 year "wish list" of expenditures once the won! had ascended to office. Nope, it's all because of Booooooooooooooosh! and his elective military campaigns-natch...
Nice try, but folks are wising up to this whole connivance. They know that spending is out of control, and that the day of reckoning is near unless as a nation we begin to act responsibly and live within our means.
But I will hand it to the Obamacrats, they have dramatically increased the rate at which our tax dollars, as well as our children's and grand-children's, are squandered. It's no mean feat to double the national debt in less than 2 Presidential terms, especially when it starts out at such a large number; remember, with the left percentages and multiples mean nothing, it's sheer magnitude baby! And by that, their favorite measure to demagogue, I figure they will have increased the debt by nearly as much as all the preceeding administrations since our nations founding.
Is that change you can believe in ? Or even believe?!?
Thanks to the 52% of voters who gave us this palavering putz President, and especially to all the RINOs, Brooks, Noonan, Buckley et al, and the entire MSM, who instead of being properly skeptical of the man with now avowed past, acted as a cheering section instead; the RINOs gave him cover from the right and helped sway the independents votes, because they too thought he was a good man...
[Update] Just as I suspected, the treasury projection not only assume that spending will in no way exceed the "sharp pencil" projections, based on budgeting, but also uses an unreasonably optimistic assumption that GDP growth will outstrip the historical average for the period of 1990-2009. Tyler Durden at Zerohedge provides both the razor sharp snark as well as bone-crunching analysis:
In a nutshell, the attached report pretends to forecast US debt and GDP levels. What it doesn't pretend to do, is to be the work product of a variety of pathological liars. Even as Geithner anticipates US total debt to hit $19.6 trillion by the end of 2015, somehow, in some parallel universe, he also anticipates US GDP will rise at a 5% CAGR for the next five years! Total US GDP, which was at $14.2 trillion for 2009, is expected to ramp up by 2.7% in 2010, and then really put on the afterburners in 2011 through 2015, averaging almost 6% each year, and hitting a stunning $19.2 trillion in 2015. The ridiculousness of this assumption is beyond comprehension. And even so, total debt/GDP will still be over 100% per the government's baseline assumptions. Alternatively, if one assumes, as PIMCO does, a GDP growth rate of 1.5% for the next 4-5 years courtesy of the 10% unemployment "new normal", total debt-GDP will hit 126% in 5 years. And this obviously excludes GSE, SSN and Medicare off balance sheet debt. Lastly, the Treasury assumes that even with 100% Debt to GDP, the funding cost on US market debt in 2015 will be only 4.7%, compared to the 1990-2009 average of 5.9%.
The chart below shows the US Treasury's baseline estimate. Keep in mind total debt will realistically be much higher than what is projected here. One notable observation is that the Treasury assumes that Intergovernmental Debt (i.e. funding for trust funds such as SSN etc), will only rise at around 4.5% each year. This is another chimera that will promptly blow up in the administration's face, now that SSN is net cashflow negative for the first time in history, and will need constant cash replenishment from the Treasury.
His post contains a really detailed analysis of the report, a link to the report itself, and more realistic projections. It contains a number of charts and, as always, excellent explanation. It's succinct, to the point, and a must read as the issue becomes more prominent in the political zietgeist.
I mean, if knowledge is power, this is the equivalent of nuclear weapons...
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