Sherman's Cowlick

Dr Michael Carr-Gregg Is an Idiot

EMBED-Chubby Kid Bodyslams Bully - Watch more free videos

Was going to post about Libya, but in the process of researching I somehow ran into this.  The video above was taken at a school in Australia.  From what I've been able to discern from various news stories, the chubby kid, Casey Haynes, has been a victim of bullying in his school.  On this day he finally had enough and body-slammed his tormentor.  The subject of bullying keeps popping up with the usual bullshit "answers" from school authorities and psychologists implying that all fighting is wrong, "encouraging" the victims to report the bullies.  Now most anyone with an ounce of common sense knows that such action is not likely to help and more likely to encourage the bully.  Yet on the Australian television program Sunrise, consultant  adolescent psychologist Michael Carr-Gregg said the increased focus on his case was likely to trigger even more victimisation.  Carr-Gregg said studies had demonstrated that children who retaliated were victimized more, saying that there are better ways of dealing with this such as holding the boy in a bear hug “or just walking away”.  Yes, the old "studies had demonstrated" argument.  Wonder if these studies are in anyway similar to the "studies" years ago that told us that bullies suffered from "low self-esteem" and that they were the real victims.  I love the "just walk away" argument.  Most victims are already walking away when they get attacked.  You really need an advanced education to be this stupid.  What irks me most is that after this kid finally screwed up the courage to fight back and won and rightly earned the chops to be walking tall around school the next day, yet what happens?  Poor kid gets a 4 day suspension (granted, the bully got 22 days but still) and some worthless POS psychologist tells him he needs to live in fear of more victimization.  Bear hug...gimme a break.

 

A Pencil Is Like A Ferrari

 

Angels

Why a Duck?

 

With the rise of Rand Paul, the subject of the gold standard also rises.  When choosing a standard of any kind, one must ask what makes that standard special. Gold has value beyond paper money because gold has held its appeal across civilizations across centuries and thus has a track record that transcends politics or any other human-conceived entity. Gold is also a nearly finite resource and thus its tradition as a hedge against inflation, but could conceivably be influenced if someone were to hit the Mother of All Mother Loads (see more below). Thus the desire for a gold standard is inversely proportional to the faith and trust we put in our governments, and ultimately reflects our trust in our fellow man.

Crude oil had very little value throughout human history and often could be found bubbling to the surface in places (even outside of Arkysaws), but once modern society found a use for it, its value increased dramatically.  Increasingly gold’s practical uses are on the rise as it is an excellent conductor of electricity, it is very malleable as metals go, it does not corrode easily, it is a good reflector of radiation, yadda-yadda (see Wiki). As it becomes progressively valuable to industry, its value will begin to increase disproportionately to its traditional use as just a pretty ornament. This could hold significant implications for its traditional use as the last refuge for storing wealth. Also perhaps digging too deeply into science fiction, as technology advances we could reach a point where we can turn lead (or something else that is not gold) into gold. While the implications of that breakthrough could far exceed the impact on using gold as a wealth storage, it certainly would upset the apple cart of its traditional usage.

In today's world gold is usead as a financial utility as a hedge against inflation.  As an "investment", gold doesn’t produce anything.  It is simply a commodity. It just sits there. Worse, it costs money to keep it safe. Businesses produce the wealth that is temporarily stored in money and/or gold.  Of course businesses have assets that must be maintained and protected, but they also produce wealth well beyond their maintenance value.  If not for this business economic productivity, gold’s value would hit a ceiling and stay there.  Personally, I feel that investing in gold is just short of investing in bullets so I would prefer to stay ahead of the curve. The implications for such a perception by governments is scary. 

Ultimately, money doesn’t matter. Nor does gold. They are just middlemen, so to speak. What ultimately matters is the productivity of a society. The ability of a society to manage its wants and needs against its abilities is what is important. The only thing that really matters for an economy is the exchange of goods and services via some stable value-holding medium. If whatever that medium is, be it dollars, gold, or pairs of Paris Hilton’s underpants, its value can be expected to remain somewhat stable through the umm…period of the transaction, all is well economically.

 

Ain't that a shame

 

It's good to remember, it's just a football game.

No one was hurt, nobody died.  Life went on.  Though one wonders if the drug abuse problem was greater before or after...

 

Silence is golden

  

One for the crickets

This is interesting...well I can't embed the video for some reason, so here's the link

Not much outrage in the US mainstream media.  Not any mention that I could find, anyway.  Have to look pretty far down the Google News list to find anything at all, and that being from the UK.  Looks like fascism.  Smells like fascism.  Ahh, but there’s an apology.  Well, that makes everything alright.  You can all go back to your lives, nothing to be seen here.

On another note, found on Michael Eriksson's Blog discussion of GPA’s vs. SAT’s (or more generally described as CT’s) rather interesting.  To wit:

1.      “Whether a CT or GPA is the better predictor for academic result will depend on a variety of factors, including the proportions of head-work (CT) and leg-work (GPA): Future mathematicians will likely be better filtered by a CT; lawyers by GPA.

Emphasis mine.  If true, and I’ve always suspected such (see my post on my jury duty experience), is it any wonder that a society that relies more and more on technology and thus success and failure measured against the real world, has so many absurd and burdensome laws?

Off to Ireland for a week or so.  Might check in if convenient.  Then again, might not.  TTFN.

My little problem...

So my mother-in-law (you know this isn't going to turn out well) has some recipe or other that she tells the wife we simply must try.  One of the ingredients is supposedly "tandoori spice".  Being moderately familiar with Indian food, we have both had Tandoori Chicken, and while not my favorite Indian dish, I have a pretty good understanding, by taste, as to what this refers.  It's obviously that stuff that was used in the 1996 movie "Mars Attacks" to turn Americans into tasty treats.  Whilst mother-in-law claimed to have found such spice at her Publix grocery in Atlanta, apparently the people at our Publix in Oviedo, FL are not familiar with the concept.  Now I know there are Indian grocers in the area, but it wasn't all that important that I was going to drive 5-10 miles out of my way.

Anywayz, in my routine travels to the local hardware store, I stops in to the gourmet foodz place nearby to inquire as to mebbe they might have some of this, seeing as they specialize in spices not found at the local Publix.  (Heavy sigh).  In the process of the cursory look around, the butcher guy asks if he can help me.  I tell him what I'm looking for and I get what sounds like a rehearsed routine on where all of the spices are (I already looked there) and that if I can't find what I'm looking for, to ask one of the "girls behind the counter".  As I have already looked where "helpful boy" suggested, I now must ask.  Engineers hate to ask.  We only do it as a last possible resort.  This is why....Of course "behind the counter" girl doesn't seem to have heard of tandoori, and me being an engineer, I've already looked everywhere anyway.  But such is my fate that she asks that I wait while she goes to ask her manager.  After about 60 seconds, manager-boy appears.  I repeat my request.  At this point manager-boy informs me that "tandoori" refers to the oven, a "tandoor" in which the chicken is cooked.  At this point, this does sound familiar to me, as I am not a complete ignoramus, but I am also aware that every Indian restaurant I have been to, on three different continents, pretty much servers "Tandoori Chicken" prepared with the same or very similar spices. I tries to point this out to manager-boy, but he then tells me that he has had "Tandoori Chicken" prepared in many different ways.  I says, yes, technically that may be true, but in my experience there might, maybe, sorta, could be a specific spice that is most commonly used to prepare such.  Again, as if I am an idiot and couldn't possibly be related to "the customer who is always right", I get the etymology of "Tandoori Chicken".  OK, OK, just let me out of this conversation, but noooo, I gotta hear more about how I don't understand what the words "Tandoori Chicken" mean.  When I get home, wife looks it up on the intertubes and finds this:

Now my question is, do I smack my wife, my mother-in-law, or manager-boy?  And in what kind of a recession does one continue to get such crappy customer service?

The Immortatlity of Horses and Ideas

On May 10, 1933, thousands of books were burned and tens of thousands of people gathered around Germany to hear speeches by the likes of Joseph Goebbels and other Nazi leaders.  Many, if not most, of the books were pillaged from libraries.  The stated purpose was to rid the German state of un-German books and un-German thought.

The threat made by pastor Terry Jones this weekend to burn copies of the Koran has of course been compared to this event.  Notably (well, to me) different is that the pastor's plans were to burn copies of the Koran that he acquired legally.  It would be quite a stretch to reasonably believe that there was any threat to burn every Koran in America, though some people insist on couching their argument in those implied terms.  As a result of this man's stated intentions, he has received death threats and had hundreds of people marching outside his church chanting "Pastor Jones, you’re a clown. We don’t want you in our town”, some while also carrying signs saying "Love thy Neighbor".  Well, I guess if he leaves town, he's no longer a neighbor so no need to love him.  Though he chose not to go through with his despicable act, he continues to be vilified.  

The question that I have is, while burning books is quite an obnoxious use of one's free speech, kind of like burning a flag or putting a crucifix in a jar of urine for an "art" exhibit, why the overreaction?  My thinking is that the mobs allied against him are trying to feel powerful in reaction to fear.  Not fear of Pastor Jones, but fear of the reaction of radical muslim extremists.  Like any mob, they are weak but feel powerful in numbers.

My other, more open question is, would it have been "right" for those whose books were being burned back in 1933 to have issued death threats against those Nazis?  Would H.G. Wells, Heinrich Mann, Ernest Hemingway, etc. have been justified in hiring hit men to kill Goebbels, etc. at that time, given only what was known at that time?  Would this have been a justified "preemptive" war?  Again, this was 1933.

Also of note is that during the Allied occupation of Germany after WWII, thousands of Nazi books and works of art were collected and destroyed.  But such was the process of de-Nazification.