Now I think I’ve heard it all! Many of you who have read my blog for a while know what I think of the global warming scare - it’s just that: a scare. There’s loads of scientific data to back that position. The sad thing is that those who began the global warming scare are abandoning it now because it’s been taken over by people who try to shape political policy via scare tactics (the far left). In other words: “If you don’t stop [some activity that everyone does], global warming will continue.” or “You need to reduce your carbon footprint.” or some other kind of nonsense. Listen, when Ed Begley, Jr. says something like this, I will take it more seriously than when Al Gore says it; at least Ed Begley, Jr. is LIVING his decision and not just telling others how to live.

Anyway, I came across an article first on Hot Air, later on other blogs and news aggregates that is pretty…… well…… you decide. It seems that global warming is the cause for…… you guessed it…… kidney stones. Well at least that’s what Science Daily, US Department of Health and Human Services, and a host of newspapers and news services are saying. They tell us there will be an increase of kidney stone surgeries by the year 2050. Heck, we can’t even predict next week’s weather and they’re telling us something that will happen 40 years from now? AND they expect us to BELIEVE what they tell us?

I can’t believe this. The Daily Iowan (the University of Iowa’s daily newspaper) is all worried about the environmental aftereffects of the flood. What a load of BS! Environmental aftereffects!? What ever did we do before there were environmentalists to cry about natural disasters? Really, people! Floods have happened for millions of years to the Mississippi valley in the Iowa/Illinois area and it has led to some of the most fertile soil in the world. Then in the past century or so, man has come along and put up levees, dams and other structures to prevent flooding. So the hundreds of centuries before the past century was all damage and loss of phosphorus? Really? And the Mississippi valley has had poor topsoil until then? Really? Let’s keep our eyes on the ball here, people. We need to get the thousands of displaced families taken care of. We need to clean up the downtown area of Cedar Rapids (Iowa’s second largest city at about 125,000). We need to reconstruct many of the roads that were washed away in the flood. Heck, we need to find out where the small town of Oakville (population 438) is - we have heard it was last sighted about 40 miles downstream from where it was originally located. We have an entire “laundry list” of items to tend to before we worry about the phosphorus in the topsoil. Of course, they don’t call it “The People’s Republic of Iowa City” for nothing. It’s a “beehive” of political correctness, misguided leadership and lack of common sense.

I’m certain everyone has heard Barack Obama’s message of hope and change. Well, here’s something to think about that I got from Ron. It’s supposed to be funny, but to me it’s a bit frightening.

A little over 2 years ago:

• Consumer confidence stood at a 2 1/2 year high
• Regular gasoline sold for $2.19 a gallon
• The unemployment rate was 4.5%

In 2006, we were told a lot of things by the media and by the politicians running for office that may or may not have been true - as it usually goes with the media and especially with politicians running for office! Since voting in a Democratic Congress in 2006, we’ve seen:

• Consumer confidence plummet
• The cost of regular gasoline soar to over $3 a gallon
• Unemployment is up to 5% (a 10% increase)
• American households have seen $2.3 trillion in equity value evaporate (stock and mutual fund losses)
• Americans have seen their home equity drop by $1.2 trillion dollars
• 1% of American homes are in foreclosure

America voted for change in 2006, and we GOT it!
The most significant accomplishment by the Democratic Congress in 2007?

So I haven’t been feeling on top of the world for a while. In fact, I’ve had a sore throat for about two weeks. Yeah, I did have a cold earlier but it went its merry way last week some time. The sore throat has lingered. Not that it’s all that bad; it’s just that I have to talk for my job. You really can’t provide phone tech support if you can’t talk, now, can you? So I’ve had this sore throat - well a dry, scratchy throat anyway. It really has been all that’s been going on. I’m not really running a fever or feeling bad or anything else.

Well, today I got fed up with that and got in to the clinic. I called about 8:30 and was told they could get me in at 11:30 this morning - what a break! Usually it’s the next day or later in the afternoon. So I get there at 11:30, and honestly the last time I was there was over 8 years ago. I didn’t really know how to get exactly where I needed to go. So I figured it out and showed up at my physician’s office at about 11:25 - not bad, I thought. I had to fill out a couple of forms but I was ready at 11:35 or so…. and was “immediately” accepted by a nurse at 11:50. That’s right - 20 minutes AFTER my appointment. Then, after being weighed and admitted to an examination room, I waited until 12:20 before the doctor came in. 12:20! Then after a quick check of my throat and ears he prescribed amoxycillin. That’s right, an hour later I got out with a 10 day prescription antibiotic! I felt the entire thing was a waste of everyone’s time - mine, the nurse’s, the doctor’s and even the receptionist!

So now I will be taking 3 amoxycillin pills a day for 10 days. All that for an antibiotic!

The Tax System, explained with beer (so even a moron like me can understand it! Thanks, Jason.)

Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:

• The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
• The fifth would pay $1.
• The sixth would pay $3.
• The seventh would pay $7.
• The eighth would pay $12.
• The ninth would pay $18.
• The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.

So, that’s what they decided to do.

The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve. “Since you are all such good customers,” he said, “I’m going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by $20. “Drinks for the ten now cost just $80.

The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free. But what about the other six men - the paying customers? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his ‘fair share?’

They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody’s share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer. So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man’s bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay. And so:

• The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).
• The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings).
• The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7 (28%savings).
• The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).
• The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 ( 22% savings).
• The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).

Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to drink for free. But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings.

“I only got a dollar out of the $20,” declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man,” but he got $10!”

“Yeah, that’s right,” exclaimed the fifth man. “I only saved a dollar, too. It’s unfair that he got ten times more than I!”

“That’s true!!” shouted the seventh man. “Why should he get $10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!”

“Wait a minute,” yelled the first four men in unison. “We didn’t get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!”

The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.

The next night the tenth man didn’t show up for drinks, so the nine sat down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They didn’t have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!

And that, boys and girls, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.

David R. Kamerschen, Ph.D.
Professor of Economics
University of Georgia

For those who understand, no explanation is needed.

For those who do not understand, no explanation is possible.

It’s the government again. As I said to a friend Saturday, “The government is already up my ass. I don’t need them so far up it they come out my mouth!”. This time it has to do with smoking. Please, don’t misunderstand. I am AGAINST anyone smoking! I don’t want to promote smoking in any way, shape or form. However, I am even MORE against the government telling me I can’t do something. The government already tells me a number of things I can or cannot do - most of them are common sense, but why should the government be telling me this?

It makes sense to wear a seat belt. I’ve seen the statistics and I wear my seat belt. I hate the fact that the government tells me I HAVE to wear a seat belt or I’ll get a ticket. WHY? Aren’t there enough people robbing or vandalizing or other more serious crimes? We have to have the government in our asses checking that we have our seat belts on?

It makes sense to not drive after you’ve had drinks (alcoholic drinks, that is). Again, I’ve seen the statistics and I don’t do this. However, AGAIN, I hate the fact that the government tells me I will lose my license and go to jail if I drink and drive. WHY? Don’t they have enough to do?

Now they’re doing it with smoking. No, I’m not a smoker. No, I’m not in favor of smoking. I think people who smoke are either stupid or stubborn - they are too stupid to stop smoking or too stubborn to stop smoking. In spite of all this, I don’t think the government should be telling businesses that they have to ban smoking. It should be up to the business. And before anybody chimes in with “second hand smoke kills”, you need to check out the commentary on the World Health Organization study done in 1998 that ran contrary to the “facts” they wanted to present so they buried this report (as detailed on the web site). Most studies and laws are based upon an EPA study done in 1992-1993 but it is a statistically flawed study, as detailed on the same web site. Again, I don’t like second hand smoke, either. But that’s not a reason for the government to jump up my ass. That’s not a reason for the government to get up in the face of businesses either. I say let the market place decide. If a place decides to go smokeless, then great! Let the market decide. If a place decides NOT to go smokeless, then great! Again, let the market decide. DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT LET THE GOVERNMENT TELL THESE BUSINESSES HOW TO DO THEIR BUSINESS!

The title of this post is with my apologies to Monty Python. But I’ve hit 100,000 spams. Actually, I’ve SURPASSED 100,000 spams blocked by Akismet. Thank God for Akismet. My poor blog would be overrun by the dreaded spam. However, on to other points.

I think the blog is attracting more spam than anything else, and it’s not growing linearly. Here’s a kind of timeline:

• 09/06/2006 - Installed Akismet
• 02/05/2007 - Reached 6,000 spams
• 05/09/2007 - Reached 7,000 spams
• 08/28/2007 - Reached 12,000 spams
• 12/17/2007 - Reached 50,000 spams
• 02/07/2008 (today) - Reached 100,000 spams

I should do a statistical analysis and figure out the rate and project when I’ll hit 150,000 or 200,000 or (well, you get the point). I look at spam as a necessary evil on the website, but this is ridiculous. It makes you wonder how much faster the internet would be if there weren’t billions upon billions of spams floating around out there taking up our bandwidth.

So Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards are each raving about how good their own health care plan is and how everyone will be covered. Why should everyone be covered? The underlying question is this: since when is health care a RIGHT? We are not guaranteed health care, nor should we be. We are not guaranteed a driver’s license - it’s a privilege to have a driver’s license. Should we change that as well and guarantee everyone a driver’s license? (Don’t answer that! There’s already enough morons behind the wheel.)

The kicker is that they are all going to pay for this by “taxing the very rich”. Well, the top 5% of the wage earners in the USA pay 53.25% of the tax burden already. The top 10% of the wage earners pay 64.89% of the tax burden. And finally, the top 50% of the wage earners pay a whopping 96.03% of the tax burden. So we are going to make the folks who pay over half of the taxes already pay even more? Of course, they don’t exactly say who the “very rich” are; at one time (during the Clinton years) it was defined as any family that made over $32,500 per year.

NOOOO! Don’t vote for these people who are going to fold health care into the government! Compare it to government housing - do you know ANYONE who WANTS to live in government housing? Of course you don’t. No one does! It’s mismanaged and poorly implemented. So why do we believe that the government will do so much better in health care?

Here we go again. It seems that Jill Gaulding, a former University of Iowa associate professor of law (now “practicing” law in Minnesota) is on the warpath again. And she is joined by former University of Iowa professor of law (now on the faculty of the Western New England College of Law) Erin Buzuvis. It seems they are offended that the football stadium’s visitor locker room is pink and she “represents” a “group” who thinks (and I quote) ‘the pink color is derogatory toward women, intending to make visiting teams feel like “sissies.”‘. OMFG! Read the full article in the Daily Iowan here. Of course, Ms. Gaulding and Buzuvis don’t know the first thing about WHY the locker room is pink. They just knows it IS pink and that they believe it shouldn’t be. (This kind of begs the question: What the heck is a former or current female law professor doing in a MEN’S locker room?)

For those of you who don’t know, former University of Iowa coach Hayden Fry asked that the locker room be painted pink because according to many psychological studies on colors, pink has a passive and calming effect. From the Wikipedia article on Hayden:

And Fry had the visitors’ locker room painted pink. Fry, a psychology major at Baylor, knew that pink is occasionally used in jails and mental institutions to relax and pacify the residents, and Fry claimed that it might have the same effect on the visiting team. Principally, though, Fry hoped that the unusual color would distract and fluster the opposing players and coaches.

I know that Bo Schembechler came to Iowa each year with posters and plain white paper to cover all the pink walls. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that other coaches did the same thing.

And now, the famous Pink Locker Room is just supposed to change overnight? Because a few vociferous people think it’s demeaning to women and homosexuals to have a locker room painted pink? I get wound up about many things, but REALLY! The color of a locker room? I agree with what Pat at Knife Party has to say:

Wait, what? Maybe this comes as a result of my education at Florida State as opposed to Iowa, but I fail to see the connection between painting a locker room pink and demeaning women or homosexuals. I’ll concede that pink is not the most masculine of colors, but in a time when frat boys and business professionals alike wear fashionable pink shirts and ties, I fail to see how such a color is insensitive to anyone.

While written when Gaulding, Buzuvis and their cohorts first got wind of the color pink in the locker room, Sally Jenkins’ article in the Washington Post is no less meaningful. Two separate places are key in her article. First off:

Fry, for those who don’t remember him at Iowa, was a cagey good old boy who enjoyed teasing the opposition, as the title of his autobiography, “A High Porch Picnic,” suggests. Fry’s attitude was, if some opponents considered those walls a “sissy” color and it bothered them, that was their own fault. The whole point was to discomfit people who were insecure enough or dumb enough to take it seriously.

So according to Hayden in his autobiography it’s only works if someone is insecure enough or dumb enough to let it work. So what does it say about at least two learned lawyers? And later in the same article:

Fry understood something Buzuvis apparently doesn’t: The people most likely to be undone by pink walls are not straight men, women or gays, but misogynists and homophobes.

Get a grip. You want the University of Iowa (who at the time paid both of you about $100,000 in salary) to cough up enough money to replace the plumbing (sinks, urinals and stools), the carpet, the floor tile and the lockers and then also paint the walls? Because YOU are insecure enough to let something like a pink locker room affect you? A locker room, I might add, that you have NEVER set foot in? And all in the name of political correctness? I sure am glad that both of you “ladies” have moved on to other universities to instruct our future lawyers, and that you aren’t getting any more of MY tax dollars as your salary. And isn’t it kind of funny that both chose to resign here and continue with their cause from afar AFTER the University of Iowa and the Board of Regents consider this subject closed? Ladies - it’s time to move on; this fight was over last year.

I use a signature at work. Nearly all of us do. It has vital information about contacting us and many times it has a cutesy little tag line saying something “profound”. Also, more and more signatures have a confidentiality statement at the end. Some have every voice method of contact in their signature: phone number, extension, cell phone, IM, Skype, etc. I personally have my phone number on my official signature at work (not by choice, mind you, but by decree).

We can debate the usefulness of having all this stuff in our email until we are blue in the face and get absolutely nowhere. The thing is, when I send a 10 word email and I’ve got my name, company, title, address, phone number, fax number, cell number, tag line and confidentiality paragraph…. my signature is longer than my email. Much longer. How much space in my mailbox (that we are limited to 100 megabytes) is actually being taken up by all this signature clutter? And then there’s the graphics included in some signatures. Yeah, they look nice but are they really necessary? Many are scaled TIFFs that are HUGE and take up a lot of space in my mailbox (and the sender doesn’t even realize what they have done, they just like the look of the graphic).

And here’s the kicker: WHY do people include their email address in their signature? When you get an email from someone don’t you already HAVE their email address just by receiving the freakin’ email!? What, are you going to add someone’s email address to your personal address book (Contacts in Outlook lingo) that didn’t actually send you an email but you saw their email address in the chain of forwards and replies and thought it was a good idea to add it? Are we THAT hard up for email addresses or do we just want to seem important by having more entries?

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Now playing: Romeo Void - Never Say Never
via FoxyTunes

Labor day is a holiday unique to the United States. It originated as “a creation of the labor movement and is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers. It constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country”. Well, at least that’s what the Department of Labor has to say about it. However, if you asked the average American you’d find that the holiday has been devalued to a simple three day weekend. People stay home from work and grill their meals and enjoy the extra day off work as it usually is one of the last really summer-like days of the year.

Isn’t it funny how the American labor movement has devalued holidays into simple days off of work? Memorial Day, Columbus Day, Labor Day and now even Martin Luther King Day. How many of us still honor their veterans on Memorial Day? How many of us ponder the “discovery” of the continent of North America on Columbus Day? How many of us thank former labor leaders to get us the lenient working conditions we have here in the United States? And how many of us remember the great Dr. King who gave his life simply for what was already in the Constitution? And how many of us take these holidays for granted and simply enjoy one day off of work?

That’s right. I just don’t get it. You can add this to the list of things that I don’t get.

At work, we used to have paper towel dispensers in the men’s restroom; remember that our men’s restroom is shared with the plant. Now these were cheap, harsh paper towels (would you expect anything else in a public restroom?) that were downright irritating. The other thing that was even more irritating than the rough towels was the dispensers. It seemed that they couldn’t work for more than about a week at a time. It seemed that someone took delight in breaking them, jamming them and in general just making them not work. (Probably the same guys who seem to enjoy spreading their boogies on the backs of the stall doors.)

The company, in response to the paper towel dispensers not working more than they were working removed the paper towel dispensers. No, we weren’t left with nothing but our pants and shirts to dry our hands on… the company installed the hot air blower hand dryers. These dryers are much more powerful than any I’ve seen. It actually takes less time to dry your hands with these hot air dryers than with paper towels. Cool! So now I can wash and dry my hands after I handle my business even faster than before. You gotta like the progress. Also, now there’s no paper wadded and tossed on the floor, most likely from guys not being able to drop their used paper towels in to the waste can (no they’re not full).

What pisses me off is that some dumbass continues to bring the paper towel rolls into the bathroom to use to wipe his hands off. This is incredibly stupid as there are no dispensers in the men’s bathroom so the towel roll sits on the counter near the sinks and soaks up any spilled water. This means that when you use a paper towel you will be grabbing it with your wet hands and the towel will already be wet from the water on the counter. STUPID! Why not just use the hot air hand dryer? DUH!!!