Doggie Boots—Hound in the Boots

        Texas briars and stickers are driving me to purchase boots for Alkaia—no Puss in the Boots here, just a Hound in the Boots. Now to size what were once her tiny little paws using the sizing guide provided by Dog Boots Active. In this picture her paw is full of horse manure after romping around with the other dogs at Horses on the Beach on Padre Island.  She lay contentedly in the truck for the ride home and half-way there regurgitated her fill of already horse-digested hay!

Alkaia as a Puppy—Where There's Manure, There Must Be a Horsie

Alkaia Running Along Tidal Flats

Beware of the Man with the Sword

          The FED chairman and Treasury Secretary, Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner, are supposedly impartial technical specialists, but have of late become apparatchiks in the best style of former high level Communist party experts of the now defunct U.S.S.R.—the parallel is disturbing given the nature of our unprecedented spending spree and its potential disastrous consequences.  That two individuals, as pointed out by Daniel J. Mitchell in his Why are Geithner and Bernanke Trying to Panic Financial Markets with Debt Limit Demagoguery?, that are supposedly beyond politics, are taking such a biased and partisan stand as to declare that not increasing the debt limit will cause financial meltdown is irresponsible and not conducive to a rational debate on balancing our out of control budgetary process.

Alkaia as Puppy with Light Line

Alkaia & Texas Wildflowers

Alkaia is Antilyssic—¡Straight for the Water!

Alkaia, Vital & Riot Romping in Shoreline Flats

Cado Running a Horse to the Corral for the Evening

American Mavericks—a great place to listen to musical creativity

          A classic website with some of the most interesting and innovative music likely to be encountered in America. ;-)

Ayn Rand—You Can Have it Any Way You Want, as Long as it's My Way

      Joy Pullman's review of the movie version of Ayn Rand's Fountainhaid seems to be a well-balanced criticism of how orthodoxy kills freedom—to the point where the new movie seemed leaden to her.  One of her observations is that Rand was a believer in solipsism, which has logical contradictions involved in believing in only one's self and trying to live within a social contract, and this conflict lies at the heart of the current tension between duties and rights.  For Americans, the explicit enumeration of rights was a necessity under King George III, duties were implicit, but now in an entitlement-minded society perhaps responsibilities need clarification—what does being a citizen mean?


      Do we need to go as far as stopping the automatic granting of citizenship to anyone born on American territory?  Should citizenship be restricted to only those that have served the Nation, as in Heinlein's Starship Troopers?  The fact that everyone can suck on an obese Nanny State's tit means that someone, somewhere has to feed the Beast as well—that's the current battlefield—at least until fat momma has to go on dialysis due to kidney failure.


       In any case, let's see what the movie actually feels like when viewed.

Ai WeiWei—an inspiration for all ages and a criminal in China! :-((

This is a much more graphically realistic image of the Chinese government's crackdown on Ai WeiWei than what I've come across, compare the Telegraph's rather matter-of fact photo: [www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/8432272/China-breaks-silence-on-Ai-Weiweis-detention.html}


If art is living truth, ala Socrates or Moore or Galileo, then this man is a living work of art—a treasure for all ages and an inspiration for all those who believe in the divine spark of each individual's soul.  

From $Billions & $Trillions to an average taxpayer's $Thousands

'... consider a hypothetical Philadelphia area resident who is 37 years old (the median age in the metropolitan region in 2009), has a college degree, and earns $45,565 annually (the area's average per-capita income that year). According to our calculations, based on current tax rates and a projected life span of 80 years, that person will pay more than $420,000 in taxes to finance federal government spending over the rest of his or her lifetime. If invested over the next 43 years, that money could be worth much more than $1 million.

Of our hypothetical worker's $420,000 in taxes,

—$58,658 will pay interest on the federal debt

—$22,972 for administrative costs and personnel benefits

—$53,146 to finance national defense

—$52,238 for Medicaid

—$32,746 for welfare

—$84,272 for Medicare

—$85,637 for Social Security.' [Grasping budget's billions and trillions - Page 2 - Philly.com]

Well I've Already Admitted Lunacy, but Never Idiocy

‎        The Left & the Right throw out the usual ad hominim attacks—in this example, supporters of federal control over the education agenda label anyone not in favor as crazy.  


       'How convenient! Rather than dealing with the absence of education in Article I, Section 8, which lays out the federal government’s specific powers, you just dismiss as nuts those who think the Feds should be bound by the document through which their powers come.' Neal McCluskey.

p.s. If you don't think your tax dollars are being wasted, then take a look at Neal's Figure 2, Inflation-Adjusted Federal K-12 Spending per Pupil and Achievement of 17-Year-Olds, % Change Since 1970. :-((

Video Games—from lack of empathy to killing

‎"We might prefer to see children reading or getting exercise and interacting with the real world by playing outside, but video games are definitely preferable to most television. But video games can also be superb at teaching violence—violence packaged in the same format that has more than quadrupled the firing rate of modern soldiers." LCOL Dave Grossman, 'On Killing', 315.

Why the Farm is not a Good Metaphor for the School

The metaphor of SCHOOL is a FACTORY or SCHOOL is a FARM  in which standard products are manufactured or harvested; and that EDUCATION is a MEAL which is CONSUMED or PREPARED are part and parcel of the 19th century (19C) Zeitgeist.  These ideas had currency and led to the 19C factory school model—cookie cutter students produced by standard methods using standard curricula (n.b. this was not usually the case in Prussia!  Vide-Henry Barnard's reports on foreign education available through Google Books.)  Mr. French seems to have fallen into these metaphoric fallacies.


We do agree that a government monopoly in education, like most monopolies is not often productive of the variety a modern economy requires, and in fact can be a dangerous machine, not only for training or education, but for indoctrination (especially given the 19th century factory school model currently being used in most schools.)


Nevertheless Education is the ability to self-learn; or, in other words, the art of inducing and producing critical thinking in an individual.  It is a lifetime endeavor and can have both formal and informal periods. {Vide—J. Zull, 'The Art of Changing the Brain'}


Mr. French mentions Luke Nosek's "20 under 20"—watch Salman Khan explaining the idea of self-learning in this video [http://youtu.be/gM95HHI4gLk], he'll discuss the 20/20 vision as well. Khan Academy videos and interactive exercises allow Palo Alto schools to flip the school day—kids watch lectures at home and do exercises in school.  Additionally, as you'll see, there is 'no child left behind'—there are 5th graders doing calculus while others are working on 4th grade material—advancement is purely on mastery not age cohort.


Lastly, Andrew Warwick in 'Masters of Theory' makes a strong case for the importance of mentorship in developing professional competence in Mathematical Physics—others have argued similarly to explain why certain universities developed expertise and specialized in certain fields, e.g. German 19th century organic chemistry [J.B. Morrell's works refer]—the point being that personal example and motivation have an important place in training and education, after all, we are emotional creatures not computer programs.  The most important aptitude in scientific endeavours, which curtails messianic closure, is technical and professional competence.

Don't pay for the EU pet travel forms (EU Form 998)

         Travelling throughout Europe with your pet is relatively easy and so is taking your pet there and back, if you figure out the paperwork, which is not necessarily a trivial undertaking to the uninitiated.  The basis is the EU Form 998 which is available at the official European Commission's website [EUROPA > European Commission > DG Health and Consumers > Overview > Animal Health and Welfare], but a simple Google search for EU form 998 doesn't get you there without at first encountering all the hucksters that want you to pay for the free form.


         The EC's website is not to be lauded for facility of access though, or at least its banner—
      does not lead one to believe that there's going to be something in there for the pet lover and not the pet connoisseur (they do eat puppies in Korea after all!)


          In any case under the tab labelled 'Movement of Pets (Dogs, Cats and Ferrets)—Non-Commercial Movement from Third Countries' you will find all the documentation and regulations for pet travel in Europe that your veterinarian will need.

Where do all the knuckle-heads come from?

    Ludwig von Mises opined that the progeny of capitalists become the greatest opponents of the system!  'The cousins derive their revenues from the firm or corporation. But they are foreign to business life and know nothing about the problems an entrepreneur has to face. They have been brought up in fashionable boarding schools and colleges, whose atmosphere was filled by a haughty contempt for banausic money-making. Some of them pass their time in nightclubs and other places of amusement, bet and gamble, feast and revel, and indulge in expensive debauchery. Others amateurishly busy themselves with painting, writing, or other arts. Thus, most of them are idle and useless people.'


     So, in order to redress  the wrong of not having inherited the reins of the corporation, they drift into politics and seize the reins of the State—a confiscatory monopoly with the exclusive right to use power over its citizens and to wage war.  Is it any wonder that the progressive agenda has resulted in so many wars?—War Against Poverty, War Against Drugs, War Against Ghadaffi, War Against Sadam Hussein, ...  And that the hawks are such grandiose mediocrities like Sir Edward Kennedy ... 

Is staging Fabianne Cherisma's corpse a laudable image?

The next time you feel moral outrage at an image or a news report, you might think about venting a bit of that anger at the news 'provider' or 'writer' or 'photographer'.  The news media is an industry, a business, with an aim to provoke a reaction, and garner profit—i.e. by presenting a view that will invoke emotions.  


The nature of news 'gathering and presentation' in unstable and violent areas, of necessity, often implies the need for personal courage and risk by reporters—at least that's my underlying assumption. And of course, there's underlying 'bias' depending on organisational politics, the pose or frame or angle selected to tell the story or present the image, which does not of necessity imply moral turpitude.


But there's a line of transgression when exploitation is premeditated to such a degree, as in the image in this article of reporters squatting like vultures around Fabianne Cherisma's corpse, that the lie of a random image becomes a violation of decency and humanity. 


I'm currently so enraged that I'm of opinion that the fabrication of 'a scene encountered in a chaotic land by a reporter seeking to expose crimes' is such a falsification as to  make the messenger worthy of having her tongue pulled out or his eyes seared—at least their camera trigger finger lopped off.

Claude Frédéric Bastiat— the Broken Window Fallacy

The Broken Window Fallacy—that war, tornadoes, tsunamis, governments create wealth by employing people to repair damage, was countered by Bastiat's showing the alternative: keeping what you currently have and using the money to make something else.  This collection has Bastiat's major works, you can also go to Google Books and view them for free since the English translations were all done in the 19th century and the copyright has expired. ;-)