Obama wants to talk

Random blog entry about this.

How Did Things Get So Screwed Up?

Gerafallo Therapy

Gay Lunch

Che Twit

UK riots are spawning from social networking on the internet. So far twitter has refused to shut down accounts of these rioters. The company deems the freedom of expression of rioters more important than the safety of the people they target. After all, this is the poor against the rich, or middle class and rich kids having fun; or was this about the cops shooting Mark Duggan? So far the riots has cost the lives of five citizens and no cops.

The rioting is also about looting. Ebay and Gumtree though are doing their part and will not sell the looted goods. Just as the internet has been used to coordinate the riots, so it has been used to identify the guilty.

How poor is the poor if they have phones and internet connectivity to coordinate the riots? It is going to get them caught. Phones have GPS systems; they are carrying around a location device. How smart are these rioters? Can they read past a 140 character twitter message? Loot any good books lately? No.

Math Money

Do you hate Math? Why? It is easy money.

A woman in Texas has won four multi-million dollar lotteries.

Luck? Perhaps, but she is a Mathematician with a PhD in statistics. Coincidence? Or maybe it is time to hit the Math books a bit harder.

Feminists Make Poor Economists

Susan Feiner has got to be trolling for Ms. Magazine. Her blog entry "A Feminist Economist Speaks Out: Deficits are a Grrrl’s Best Friend" is designed to attract criticism.

She believes:

• The mantra that “the budget must be balanced” is a throwback to the 19th century, originating from the same outmoded economic thinking that justifies women’s lower wages.
• ...families and businesses have to earn income or sell assets to get dollars to pay off debts. The federal government does not face any such constraint. It can spend as much as it likes and borrow as much as it likes. 
• There is absolutely no bookkeeping, accounting or arithmetic possibility that the U.S. could “run out of money.” ... And that means our government can, during a crisis of unemployment, spend what it wants to spend.
• The real problem is that our government, held hostage by right-wing extremists, won’t spend enough.

Those are just a few things I picked out. This is truly breathtakingly idiotic, and your daughter might be reading this!

Schoolhouse Rock : Tyrannosaurus Debt

Will the Government ban brown bag lunches?

Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people. -Henry Kissinger

Will the government cut parents out of the loop when it comes to lunch at school? What if they ban students bringing lunch in from home? Will your child be forced to buy lunch at school?

To justify banning something it needs to be deemed unsafe. Today, bag lunches that we have eaten for generations have been reported as reaching temperatures that facilitate food borne illnesses. The study was conducted with preschools, but a bag lunch is a bag lunch and could apply to any student of any age.

The federal government has proposed some "voluntary" guidelines for businesses to follow in advertising food that qualify as healthy targeted towards children. The National Restaurant Association is pushing back because:

"The proposed standards are unworkable for the industry and for consumers. They impose impractical nutritional standards that will significantly compromise the taste and palatability that consumers demand and underestimate the technical limitations of the industry."

Would the government really make such regulations? The government didn't ban the incandescent light bulb; it made regulations for light bulbs that physics cannot meet with the incandescent model. Will this force restaurants to only serve a low calorie nutritious gruel to children?

San Francisco and Santa Clara County have banned McDonalds from putting a toy in the "Happy Meal" because it targets kids to order an unhealthy meal. Is there a healthy choice at McDonalds? Yes. But shouldn't parents decide what their children eat and not the government?

Will the government really tell us what we can eat? California, Baltimore, and New York City have banned trans fats; other cities and States are proposing to do the same. New York is even proposing a ban on restaurants using salt. The FDA has a ten year plan to limit how much salt is in the food we buy. Across the pond in Stockport, England, they will no longer have salt shakers on the table. If you want salt you will have to ask for it.

What else will the government say we cannot eat? How else will it dictate marketing? Are we close to a ban on bag lunches?

Control the food ...

400 points

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44000197/ns/business-stocks_and_economy/#.Tjr0pxwmimQ

http://www.cnbc.com/id/44017828