The Opinionated Bastard

Even though I think he’s a whiny little media bitch, I have more ten times more respect for people on the ground doing the actual reporting then I do for the pretty boy anchors who steal all the glory.

Anyways Here’s his latest:

I returned to Baghdad on Monday. The city is as chaotic and choked as ever, but the level of violence in the last few days has been less than I expected. I’ve only heard two explosions near my house in eastern Baghdad, and they were far away. I get the impression that the Green Zone is not attacked as much. Perhaps I was wrong to pooh-pooh the Fallujah offensive… Or perhaps the insurgency has just gone to ground for a while.

Read the whole thing if you’d like some ground truth. His description of going along in a “protected convoy” for the Minister of something or other is pretty funny…

So the first time I ever met this guy, he didn’t bother to introduce himself, he just broke into a tirade because I was walking my dogs and they ran over and peed on his tires.

During Monsoon season in Flagstaff, where every day at 2PM it rains for 10 minutes.

But I tried to humor him by keeping the dogs out of his yard. Never mind that coyotes used to go through his yard all the time (and still do), but whatever.

The next time I met him, I was walking the dogs again, and I went to throw something away in his dumpster. (He was still building his house.) My wife went up to introduce herself, and the dogs ended up following her. He lost it again. Seems he’s allergic to dogs, which he didn’t tell me the first time. He was also upset because I threw something in his dumpster. Then he ended up calling Animal Control on us, which we thought was kind of dickless.

Anyways, we tried to keep the dogs away from him and his yard, which was pretty easy, because we’ve spent a lot of time training our dogs so they just do what we tell them to do.

A week later, his next door neighbor-to-be came over to ask him if he would watch his construction site a bit better as trash kept blowing into her yard. He told her “Why don’t you just pick it up, you fat lazy bitch!” (She had a baby about 2 months prior…) The vendor he was talking to at the time was so offended that he refused to do business with the guy.

About 2 weeks later, he was surprised when they weren’t willing to let him run an extension cord over to their place for electricity when he was having some problem…

So eventually, he moved in.

The first thing he did was setup a corral for his mule. Except he set it 6 feet over the property line onto their property. The husband went over there and asked him to move it by Friday.

Friday came, and he hadn’t moved it, so the wife called him up and reminded him.

He came over to her house and screamed at her for 20 minutes. She happened to have both a handheld tape recorder and a tire iron…

So now they’re suing him.

After he got the lawsuit, he came over and screamed at her for another 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, some other dog in the neighborhood has been coming over and peeing in his jacuzzi. He’s convinced it must be my dog. I know its not my dogs, because I have a fenced yard so I really doubt one of them is flying over there, peeing in his jacuzzi, and flying back. Plus they’re brothers and practically inseperable, so the fact that its just one dog also indicates its not them. But there are about 5 dogs that look like my dogs in the neighborhood, and at least one that’s a spitting image. He’s videotaped it and everything according to the animal control guy who keeps coming over and leaving these annoying messages on my door because if my neighbor sees my dogs outside without a leash (like I’m getting the mail), he ends up calling animal control.

Now I haven’t told him he’s barking up the wrong tree (so to speak), because for one thing, I still don’t even know his name (me and the wife just call him Asshole). For another, I can’t stand the guy.

Anyone else have any similar experiences?

I got a kid in clinic yesterday who had been diagnosed with ADHD.

We get a fair number of those in the clinic, because while Eastern Medicine has its share of “voodoo”, so does Western Medicine. ADD/ADHD is one of those problems where Western medicine kind of throws up their hands, writes a prescription, and hopes the kid goes away. Any time a doctor writes you a prescription and then expects you to take it for the rest of your life, I’d be a bit suspicious they’re treating the symptom and not the problem.

From an Eastern perspective every “Attention Deficit/Hyperactive Disorder” kid we get has a different problem. When we fix the problem, usually the kid calms down.

In this case, while he had some minor issues with his liver and spleed, the real case was that the kid just had too much Yang energy. Its actually a good thing to have that much energy, he just has more energy then his system can actually manage. So mainly, he needs to be run ragged once/day in the park for a month. Once that happens, either his system will start to regulate itself, or we’ll be able to teach his system how to do that.

It always seems strange to me, the tendency of doctors to prescribe chemicals instead of physical exercise. In the clinic, we’ve now stopped prescribing herbs until the patients 2nd or 3rd visit…

When I was in my 20’s, I was a nice guy.

Which was terrible for my sex life, because all the women I met were into dangerous guys.

So I had to pretend to be dangerous.

It worked mind you, once I figured that out (and a couple of other things about women, like how to flirt), I was beating them off with a stick.

Now I’m in my late 30’s (38 on December 23rd).

Women are different now, they’re bored with dangerous. Now they like nice guys.

So I have to change my whole routine back to being a nice guy again. After lots of practice with my wife though, my flirting is pretty good though, so I’ve got that going for me.

Of course, I’m happily married, so this is all just to keep my wife on her toes. Plus women like it if other women are attracted to their guy. Some kind of “I’m the alpha female, you can’t have him” thing.

Now when my wife met me, she thought “Hmmm…he’s a nice guy, pretending to be dangerous. Wonder what that’s about.” She’s older then me, so she’d already gone through her “dangerous men are exciting” phase, and was now in the “dangerous men have boring, stupid problems” phase.

He one of the mainstream media in Iraq, and he gets something I’ve been saying for a while:

1. The war in Iraq sucks.
2. The alternatives suck worse.

Read it Here

I wish all the media understood that if they really want to inform us, they need to cover not just what is happening, but what our alternatives our.

If you read my blog, go over there and comment on Chris’ article. The current batch of commenters from both the right and left are idiots. The lefties I find most amusing, because Chris tends to be a bit lefty, and its always funny when the lefties turn on their own…

Here’s some tips:

1. First, you need the name/address of an actual soldier to send stuff to, because the DOD is a little bit cautious about “any soldier” packages. There’s a website that can help with that. In my case, I had a soldier who was on the way back to the states talk to someone at a unit that had just entered. Being me, they did that in July, and I didn’t send the stuff until Monday…

2. Use the USPS. Go to their website and get a flat rate Priority Mail box sent to you (they’re free). Its the best deal at $7.70 for up to 80 pounds, and they know how to ship to APO/NPO/MPO post offices. Its kind of pointless to use FexEx or UPS, because it ends up going to a DOD post office for redistribution anyways.

3. You might want to have them send you some priority mail stamps too while you’re at it. You can’t send anything thick in those boxes, so keep that in mind (I had to send a water bottle and some baby wipes separately, which ended up costing me $19 to send $15 worth of stuff…)

4. Put the stuff in those boxes. They aren’t that big, and that’s a good thing. They move through the system faster that way, and whoever you send stuff to will have to deal with the box. Its a lot easier to carry 5 twenty pound boxes then 1 hundred pound box. So lots of small boxes get there faster, and its easier on the troops.

5. Think about getting some of the even cheaper flat rate boxes from the USPS while you’re at it, and send something small once/week. Most soldiers I’ve talked too just like getting the mail. I like to send mix CDs.

6. Sending letters is important too, and only $.37.

Is stories like these

I find it very hard to believe that a man who takes the time to visit with each family of a fallen soldier would have entered into Iraq if he had any other alternative.

One of my healing clinics patients was diagnosed with both ADHD and depression, so he was on both Prozac and Ritalin.

After a lot of work, he’s off the Prozac now. Next stop Ritalin.

Why is Chinese medicine “voodoo” again?

Subtitle: Yet another reason to be glad Arafat is dead.

It sort of sums up the whole Israel/Palestine thing:

The Palestinian security forces have killed more Palestinians then the Israelis.

(That would be as if the NAACP had killed more black people then the KKK, except that the PLO was more like the KKK then the NAACP, so the analogy is flawed, but you get the idea. )

You’ve seen her on mudflaps. Lots, and lots of mudflaps.

Feminists have ranted about her as an objectification of women. Thelma and Louise made fun of her, and the truck drivers who displayed her.

But do you know her story?

It seems that when mudflaps first came out, they had a problem.

The mudflaps would fray at the end, because as truck tires picked up rocks, the rocks would fly at the mud flaps, tearing them. Gradually, the mudflap would fray away at the end, until it wasn’t offering very much protection to other drivers.

This meant that you had to replace the mudflaps fairly often. Even worse, if a mudflap wore excessively, you could get an expensive ticket for having an inadequate mudflap.

Then, Frank Bosworth hit on the idea of placing a little piece of metal on the back of the mudflap to reinforce it.

His mudflaps lasted 10 times longer then anyone else’s. Pretty soon, if you were going to buy a mudflap, you were going to buy one from Frank.

The shape of that piece of metal? He designed it off a picture he had of his wife from their first date. They went to the beach together, and he snapped that picture. It had been on his desk ever since. She’d died of cancer that year, and he wanted to remember her as she was.

Because of his patent, for years, the only long lasting mudflaps you could get were Frank’s, and he refused to change the design. His patent has expired now, so you can get mudflaps in other designs now.

Which is too bad really. By the way, her name was Lisa.

So the next time you see a Mud Flap Madonna, you’re really seeing a sign that says “Frank Loves Lisa”.

They have almost no understanding of how the economy actually works. Here’s an argument against any sort of incremental privatization of Social Security from Mike Kinsley, who according to Blog Maverick runs the editorial pages at the LA Times!

I’m going to fisk it, and I won’t be kind…however, as a bit of a disclaimer, I work on Wall Street for a mutual fund company so its possible that privatizing Social Security might help me professionally.

Mike Kinsley says:

My contention: Social Security privatization is not just unlikely to succeed, for various reasons that are subject to discussion. It is mathematically certain to fail. Discussion is pointless.

Discussion is never pointless, when the person is as wrong as you are.

The usual case against privatization is that (1) millions of inexperienced investors may end up worse off, and (2) stocks don’t necessarily do better than bonds over the long-run, as proponents assume.But privatization won’t work for a better reason: it can’t possibly work, even in theory. The logic is not very complicated.

Your logic is not complicated, that much is true, its just wrong.

\1. To “work,” privatization must generate more money for retirees than current arrangements. This bonus is supposed to be extra money in retirees’ pockets and/or it is supposed to make up for a reduction in promised benefits, thus helping to close the looming revenue gap.

Actually, it can “work” in a number of ways. It can provide people with more easy access to their SS-related retirement funds for instance. LA Times is a big company, so presumably, you have a 401K plan. I work for a small company, so I don’t, instead, I’m limited to this lame-ass IRA thing. Ever change jobs? Its a pain to move all that stuff. If President Bush just made 401K plans that were attached to the person instead the company, that would be a big win for millions of Americans, even if they never made a single dime more money.

An investment can also “work” if it provides other benefits. Some 401K plans let you borrow money against the plan, essentially paying yourself interest.

Imagine you want to finance $10,000 worth of car payment. If you get a bank loan, that $10K will cost you $15K. If you borrow against your 401K, that $10K will still cost you $15K, but you get the extra $5K for retirement.

“Working” could even mean as little as making Americans feel involved in the whole process and getting them to keep track of what is happening with Social Security.

So immediately, I challenge your assertion that it has to generate more money for it to work. But it doesn’t matter, because SS always invests in T-Bills by law (funding our National Debt), which is the least risky, but also least-returning form of investment. So its not hard to be.

\2. Where does this bonus come from? There are only two possibilities: from greater economic growth, or from other people.

No, it can come from more efficient use of the same money. There’s something I call “conservation of money” in that in general, money is neither created or destroyed.

When you spend $100 on a good or service, you now have that good or service, but the vendor now has $100, which they presumably spend on some other good or service. So that $100 is still there, moving around the economy.

The Federal Government, when they take $100 away from you, spends it on $40 worth of goods or services, sucking $60 out of the economy, because they are do mind-numbingly inefficient.

So its far better to have $100 free in the economy then $100 in taxes. Its important to understand that there’s not just money, there’s whether that money produces anything. If your employer pays you $100, then you probably produced $110 worth in goods and services. If the government pays a welfare recipient $100, whether that welfare recipient is on AFDC, a corporation getting subsidies, or foreign aid going to a corrupt leader, that $100 produced nothing, terminating the economic cycle.

The government, merely by existing is a drag on the economy.

\3. Greater economic growth requires either more capital to invest, or smarter investment of the same amount of capital. Privatization will not lead to either of these.

Or more efficient use of capital. The 1990’s saw a large amount of economic growth due to computerization leading to large efficiencies. Efficiencies that produced more profits, producing growth.

Its very important to realize that the economy is NOT a zero sum game, its a cycle. In private industry, $100 of capital is expected to produce $110 worth of good/services. All economic growth is based on that cycle…

So if the money can stay productive as long as it possibly can, it will lead to greater growth.

a) If nothing else in the federal budget changes, every dollar deflected from the federal treasury into private social security accounts must be replaced by a dollar that the government raises in private markets. So the total pool of capital available for private investment remains the same.

Well, at least you’re admitting that SS is basically a hidden tax of 15% on top of the existing income tax. In theory, ALL of the money in SS taxes was supposed to belong to the payee, that just never happened.

Anyways, its more complicated then that. If the government says: 1% of the 15% is yours to invest in something other then T-bills that’s not money the government is “losing”. Presumably the government would no longer have to pay out benefits attributable to that 1%, instead that would be a separate account that paid separate benefits.

b) The only change in decision-making about capital investment is that the decisions about some fraction of the capital stock will be made by people with little or no financial experience. Maybe this will not be the disaster that some critics predict. But there is no reason to think that it will actually increase the overall return on capital.

If you see the economy as a zero-sum game, no it wouldn’t. But the economy is NOT a zero-sum game, so it easily can. The key point you’re missing is that money in the government’s hands is nearly wasted, so by taking it (temporarily) out of the governments hands we increase the amount of productive money in circulation, increasing growth.

\4. If the economy doesn’t produce more than it otherwise would, the Social Security privatization bonus must come from other investors, in the form of a lower return.

Well, we have no way of telling what “it otherwise would”, but investing and the economy is NOT a zero sum game.

For heaven’s sakes, one of the main controls the Federal Reserve has is the M1, the money supply. How can you think its a zero sum game when the Government can adjust how much money exists in the economy at any point in time?

a) This is in fact the implicit assumption behind the notion of putting Social Security money into stocks, instead of government bonds, because stocks have a better long-term return. The bonus will come from those saps who sell the stocks and buy the bonds.

Actually, you could get a much larger return then SS just by buying something other then T-bills. There are other bonds besides T-Bills, but that’s all that SS invests in. SS privatization doesn’t have to be a big win, it can be a small win. If it just did a little bit better then inflation (which it doesn’t do now), that would help everyone.

b) In other words, privatization means betting the nation’s most important social program on a theory that cannot be true unless many people are convinced that it’s false.

c) Even if the theory is true, initially, privatization will make it false. The money newly available for private investment will bid up the price of (and thus lower the return on) stocks, while the government will need to raise the interest on bonds in order to attract replacement money.

Nope. More money in the stock market can also mean more new businesses, which means more new jobs, which means higher wages, which means a strong economy, which means more money in the stock market, which…

And which means more tax revenues. Were you asleep during the ’90s? Strong Stock market, Strong economy, strong tax base…

Plus there’s nothing that says the money would have to go into the stock market. It could go into bonds, thereby lowering interest rates, which would help relieve government debt…

d) In short, there is no way other investors can be tricked or induced into financing a higher return on Social Security.

If you were correct, which you’re not. You seem to think that we live on that mythical South Sea island that used large stones for money, so that the money supply was finite. Money is a lot more complicated in the modern world then that South Sea island. It moves in cycles, and the faster those cycles go, the more the economy grows.

Even on that South Sea Island, you had economic growth, because people could make new stones…

\5. If the privatization bonus cannot come from the existing economy, and cannot come from growth, it cannot exist. And therefore, privatization cannot work.

Q.E.D.

You seem to know very little about economics, and it stuns me that you are in any way affiliated with the editorial pages of the LA Times. The mind boggles.

Update: Original posting of Kinsleys email was here

Another update: This guy said it better Pie growing is more important then pie slicing.

It always comes back and bites you in the butt.

I finally started doing Qi Gong every day.

Previously, I always had a hard time getting started in the morning. I didn’t really wake up until 10 am. Now, I find if I do 20 minutes of Qi Gong, I’m ready to go, and alert. So for a 20 minute investment, its like I have an extra 2 hours in the day.

Sounds good right? Except I’ve turned into one of those people that I used to make fun of. You know, those people who get up early and do calisthenics and stuff.

I have a plan though. From now on, I’m going to be judgemental about rich people.

Yeah, that’ll do it.

As if doing Qi Gong once/day wasn’t bad enough, I got my wife to get me this biofeedback doohickey for my birthday.

The horror! When will it end!

I draw the line at Birkenstocks though. Its COLD in Flagstaff in winter, plus you get those little cinders inside them…

Maybe it would be more macho if I called it “Jedi training”?

Nah, just more geeky…

The biofeedback dohickey thing is pretty cool though. The exercises have been pretty easy though given how much Qi Gong I do.

Every year, my wife and I have a huge fight over Christmas.

13 years, 12 fights. (We weren’t living together that first year, so we missed the fight. Thank god.)

Basically, she grew up in a household where Xmas started in October. They didn’t have a lot of money for gifts for each other, so the gift part was way reduced.

Instead, they spend months decorating the house, giving neighbors and friends tiny presents, wrapping presents. All kinds of stuff.

That’s not what we did at my house. At my house, we started Xmas in December after my Dad’s birthday December 1st. We didn’t do that much decorating in the house or outside other then putting up a Christmas tree.

Pretty much the fight is because I spend most of the holiday season thinking my wife is this insane Martha Stewart clone, while she spends most of the holiday thinking I’m an evil Scrooge.

At some point, it boils to a head, and she starts screaming at me about how it ruins Christmas for her to have to drag me through the entire process.

Which is, more or less, true.

On my side, I don’t mind doing more during the Holidays, I just never knew until this year how insane she was about the whole thing. October? Jeesh!

Anyways, we had it again this year. We’ll have to see what happens next year. After the fight we had me come up with a list of what Christmas stuff I thought was appropriate to do on my end. Maybe that will help.