I am one of those people that cringe when others complain about the economy going in the toilet. Sure things have tightened up but that just means you need to make good choices about your money. But my line I use is, “the economy can’t be that bad if they are selling iPhones at Walmart”. Well I may need to get a new line. How bad is the economy if they can pay $2500 a ticket to go to a Yankees game in New York?
Apparently back in the 1920’s people didn’t take blood rivalry’s quite so seriously? I am not sure what to think about this old newspaper clipping over at Jeffrey Goldberg’s site but it is entertaining.
So I was walking on the treadmill and they have different tvs going. A news story came on about the economy really hurting people who have kids who are in private schools. Apparently many people are taking out 2nd mortgages in order keep their kids (elementary aged kids were the ones shown here) in private school. You have to be kidding?!?!?
Tell me why homeschooling isn’t a better option than this? Is it really better to have to have both parents out of the home working (possibly 2 jobs)? Wouldn’t your kids be better served to have a parent around every once in a while? I have known a few families where mom has worked just for the private school tuition and that was before the economy issues. They are sure that this is the better education and experience for their kids. This is the thing that angers me about anti-homeschooling parents. It is the mentality that the personal financial sacrifice is the nobler one. I wonder if it is that they don’t actually value the personal position of parent. The impact you have on your child’s life simply by being present. And that doesn’t even account for the clear academic benifits to having the small group learning environment (which has been proven repeatedly) and the over all desirability of homeschoolers to colleges.
Ugh! This is what happens when I go to the gym at 6am;).
Find out the winner of this year’s Dream Home 2009 by tuning in on Sunday, March 15, 2009 at 8pm/7c on HGTV.
Since we the people apparently own 80% of AIG I vote we don’t dump another $30 million into it. Fire all the people running it and what ever we do, don’t let someone who works for the federal government run it either. Ugh!
I guess Obama really is the press savy President. So press savy that he is employing the press in odd positions. At least the is what I thought when I heard the announcement of Dr. Sanjay Gupta as Surgeon General. For those of you not familiar with Dr. Gupta he is a corespondent and commentator on CNN. But that didn’t bother me as much as Leon Panetta for the head of the CIA. Panetta was in the House from Monterey, CA and was Bill Clinton’s chief of staff. Did you notice there was not 1 mention of intellegience work (and possibly no intelligence in his work, but that is a separate issue)? I asked NerdDad what stopped me from being the head of the CIA and he said I couldn’t because I never helped Bill Clinton hide dead bodies in the trunk of my car. If I would have known that was all it took;).
Yeah, you read right. If the US, Israel, and the UN recognize the Palestinian state it changes all the rules. When Hamas wants to bomb Israel in the name of the Palestinian state then Israel just declares war. Does that mean that civilians can get hurt? Yes, that is what happens when you declare (or commit acts of) war on a neighbor. That is something we Americans don’t think about because we haven’t had a war on our soil since the Civil War. But it is the cost of war and if the Palestinians didn’t want to play that game they should have behaved. Other countries have learned that lesson. Just ask Egypt.
The Egyptians have sent 300 border guards to keep Palestinians on the Gaza Strip side of the border. In order to do that the Egyptian soldiers opened fire and wounded several people. Very interesting.
Yes, I said Viagra. It only took 4 Viagra to bribe an Afghan chieftain. I think we are all familiar with the fact that the CIA sends in agents to find informants. And the fact those “assets” aren’t giving us information out of the goodness of their hearts but due to some payoff be it money, women, or weapons. But that can have it’s downside.
The usual bribes of choice — cash and weapons — aren’t always the best options, Afghanistan veterans say. Guns too often fall into the wrong hands, they say, and showy gifts such as money, jewelry and cars tend to draw unwanted attention.
“If you give an asset $1,000, he’ll go out and buy the shiniest junk he can find, and it will be apparent that he has suddenly come into a lot of money from someone,” said Jamie Smith, a veteran of CIA covert operations in Afghanistan and now chief executive of SCG International, a private security and intelligence company. “Even if he doesn’t get killed, he becomes ineffective as an informant because everyone knows where he got it.”
The key, Smith said, is to find a way to meet the informant’s personal needs in a way that keeps him firmly on your side but leaves little or no visible trace.
In this case it was a 60 year old man with 4 wives. It took 4 little sample pills and he was ours. I am cool with this because they can’t shoot us with our own weapons or really do us any harm with bribes like this. And maybe they will share and the enemy will be, how do I say, otherwise engaged;)?
(HT: Neatorama)
Everyone who knows me knows that I am a hugely cynical person. I, unfortunately, am very rarely shocked by the bad behavior of politicians. But, it has happened.
The governor of Illinois brazenly put up for sale his appointment of Barack Obama’s successor in the United States Senate, federal prosecutors said Tuesday.
In recorded conversations with advisers, the governor, Rod R. Blagojevich, seemed alternately boastful, flip and spiteful about the Senate choice, which he crassly likened at one point to that of a sports agent shopping around a free agent for the steepest price, a federal affidavit showed. At times, he even weighed aloud appointing himself to the job, the prosecutors said.
Now I am not shocked that a governor was selling a Senate seat, per se, but that he was doing it so blatantly. I mean, there is the implicit bribes. You might pick someone that will pay you back someday but to open up bidding? Ugh!
But I am not the only one that was shocked. All of this has made Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) re-examine the whole idea that conspiracy theories could be plausible.
So in the light of the whole Senate buy off attempt, what conspiracies suddenly make more sense to you?