Some geniuses at my alma mater, Indiana University, have posited

Moving to western Africa (Ghana, identified elsewhere in the story), the professors say, could be just what’s needed for some children at risk of getting caught up in gangs or violence. They would see the world, get away from bad influences and be in a controlled setting focused on academics.

The classes would be taught by Indiana teachers using Indiana’s educational standards in a school overseen by the state of Indiana.

Just on a different continent.

OK, I’m confused here. Don’t libs always tell us we must spend more money on education? These guys have suggested shipping the state’s approximately $10k a kid it kicks in to the city of Indianapolis to Ghana so they can do the job that local teachers can’t do? (They think they can get $4M in donations to build a school.) Now as much as anyone I understand that the physical plant has nothing to do with what or how much you learn so let’s assume that’s not a factor here. However with a per capita income of slightly more than $700 I’m somehow guessing that even getting these kids a glass of clean water and a decent meal would end up being a daily adventure.

Leaving aside a host of obvious issues, like how we define “at risk” and then identify same, why Africa? What’s magic about Africa?

“The core idea is to pull kids out of an environment where they cannot thrive,” said Brown, an IU law professor, “and put them in one where they can.”

Really? Why can’t they “thrive”? What does it mean to “thrive”? Whatever happened to libs insisting we address “root causes”? Or does that force us to examine the responsibilities of parents and the teachers they seem to be anxious to run away from?

Is this why?

“It was often the case that an observer would say, ‘Why so far away, and why to Africa?’ ” he said. “That was not a question their parents would ask. They would say, ‘Wow, that’s exciting.’ “

Exciting? What’s exciting have to do with getting an education and learning life habits to carry you along? Any parent engaged in the real world, that should be their first question. Sending some kid from the inner city to Africa on the taxpayer’s dime is pointless. These parents would be much better served demanding accountability and results from that school down the block that’s apparently doing such a poor job that we have to ship the students to Africa to get it done.

BTW, does “jobs created or saved” include teaching gigs in Ghana?

… if the U.S. Army cannot even defend its own — against its own — then how can it defend the rest of us?

To inspire and nurture the human spirit— one person, one cup, and one neighborhood at a time.

Well, isn’t that just awesome I thought. I got a Chris Matthews tingle. So I get back to the vineyard and pull up the whole mission statement. It’s just full of pithy drivel …

We’re passionate about ethically sourcing the finest coffee beans, roasting them with great care, and improving the lives of people who grow them.

Q: do coffee beans scream when roasted? Object to rough handling? Lose sleep without a nightlight? Not a word about the taste of the product. The work environment?

Together, we embrace diversity to create a place where each of us can be ourselves.

Um, isn’t this basically what the chairman of the joints chiefs of staff said over the weekend when he excused mass murder saying diversity was more important?  I particularly liked the part about their stores:

When our customers feel this sense of belonging, our stores become a haven, a break from the worries outside, a place where you can meet with friends. It’s about enjoyment at the speed of life—sometimes slow and savored, sometimes faster. Always full of humanity.

I guess the bums at the public library don’t use the internet computers because surely if they read this, they’d be there in a flash. And this tripe just goes on and on …

In theory anyway, if they actually believed any of this, it would create tremendous problems for the store manager. “Jones, you’re fired.” “Why!?!” “For giving that bum, er, indigent, er … person two free cups of coffee.” “But I was nurturing his spirit and building a sense of neighborhood! It’s our mission!”

And that’s when I thought of Bob Stupak who, sadly, died about six weeks ago.

It’s coming up on about 13 years ago that my bride and I first went to Las Vegas. We had such a great time we acquired a time share there and we swing through there about once a year. Well, I do; she finds excuses to go with her sister and other cronies that I am (mercifully) excused from. I don’t think at the time we expected to find it all that compelling that we’d ever be back but we always have a good time. We’ve seen a lot of … strange and usual things, seen some fantastic shows and had some fabulous meals. And this last time the wife even won a few dollars. (Gamble? No. I’d rather sit there and tease her and watch the free floor show that is a LV casino.)

After that first trip we then watched a number of pieces about Vegas on Discovery and the Werhmact History Channel and so forth. This was also about the time that Vegas went through it’s brief “family destination” incarnation. We had been appalled at that time with seeing people pushing baby carriages down the Strip at midnite. As we said then and I’ll tell you again now — if you have a kid with you and it’s midnite, the Strip is not where you’re supposed to be. We also knew it wouldn’t last. Having once had kids in strollers we intuitively knew that those folks don’t always have the deepest pockets and Vegas is about trading money for fun, not making Mom happy shoving her baby down a crowded sidewalk at midnite, fending off the Mexican guys passing out the hooker business cards. But I digress.

Amidst all these TV shows there was a few brief moments of an interview with this character Stupak, a guy who’d been up and down, was rough around the edges but at heart was a gambler. He spoke a great truism amongst all the pastel pablum of ‘Vegas is for families!’ happy talk. He uncorked a statement along the lines of: “Vegas isn’t for families. If you want to go somewhere that caters to families, go to Disneyworld. You want to gamble, come to Vegas.’

So as I thought of Bob I realized Bob would have snorted at Starbucks mission statement: ‘If you want a sense of belonging, join the Marine Corps– if you want a cup of world-class java, come to Starbucks.’ Further, it would say something like, ‘Our mission is to sell the most coffee at the highest price possible and maximize profit and return to shareholders.’ Period. If Starbucks and other companies want to save the planet, then, don’t take people’s investment money.

Bob’s investment advice would be– if you can’t decipher the business plan without running it through the leftie translator, take your money and run the other way.

While private lenders learned a lesson from the mortgage crisis and are shying away from easy-money loans, the FHA has stepped into the breach. The agency has provided backing for 37 percent of all mortgages used to buy homes this year.

After the collapse of much of the private mortgage market last year, Congress and the George W. Bush administration greatly expanded the FHA’s original Depression-era program aimed at assisting sales of modestly priced homes by more than doubling the ceiling on loans that the agency can insure to $625,500 while maintaining its loose lending terms - ensuring that nearly any home sale could be covered by the agency.

The FHA’s predominance was enhanced further this year when Congress lifted the ceiling to more than $729,000 for major urban areas and passed an $8,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers that can be accelerated for borrowers to use as a down payment on FHA loans and avoid any cash commitment to their home purchases.

Back in the spring when The One first started wrecking the economy and throwing away our hard earned money the jackass move that Congress pulled that made me the angriest, at a personal level, was this business of sticking me with someone else’s mortgage.

Like most newlyweds my bride of 32 years and I hadn’t the proverbial pot when we were first married. I had a lousy job and she couldn’t find one. Living in a rural area of IL with few housing options, the first winter we were married we partially spent living in an unheated trailer. Things like this tend to trigger Scarlett O’Hara reactions in me (you know, “As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again”) and of course, better days came. But we were always highly sensitized to the roof over our heads, so through scrimping and saving we managed finally to acquire the house we live in now and paid it off in 11 years.

Boy, were we stupid. We busted our humps and did without and now we’re going to have to pay some fool’s mortgage because Barney’s and Chris’ collective IQ and knowledge of the marketplace and economics, their moral sense of right and wrong, would rattle around in a thimble.

So this morning I read this pithy editorial in the IBD about the nuclear option on “health care” that’s about to be rammed down our throats–

In the age of the Internet, Congress refuses to post for computer access the most consequential legislation in history, as far as its effect on human lives (and deaths) is concerned, before voting on it.

The people will have to wait until it’s all signed, sealed and delivered before finding out exactly how this government-imposed monster will devour health care as Americans have known it for all their lives.

–and I realize I’ve been punked again, only much worse. Punked is the wrong word for this betrayal of 300,000,000 people, but I don’t know what the right word is.

I’m 56 years old. The other thing that my beloved and I have scrimped and saved for is the freedom of our older age together. I thank the Lord that I have smart friends who got me out of the market before it tanked last year. I thank the Lord I had enough sense to get out of the market before the internet bubble burst. I thank Him for having given me a love of reading such that I read, and understood, Einstein’s aphorism that compound interest is the strongest force in the universe– and took it to heart. Consequently, I actually still have our nest egg. We should be looking forward to kicking our shoes off and having some fun. But I can see that that’s not in the cards.

Having been punked again, I’m an even bigger chump than I thought I was. What we want to do won’t matter. Being an ant and not a grasshopper? Stupid. I also realize that our feelings about our home weren’t about keeping a roof over our heads– it was about our freedom. And now I realize, all our freedom is truly about to be destroyed, forever. Not only that, my personal nightmare is quite possibly going to come true. As my pals bs and bk, contributors here, would tell you, my worst fear is dying on a gurney for no damn reason or worse. I’ll die of something treatable because being too old, too white and too conservative, I’m a useless mouth. In fact, I’m an enemy of the people. Check that– enemy of the planet. That’s exactly what these fascist scum have in mind for me and millions like me.

I have actually been eligbile for early retirement from my job for a couple of years now. Continuing to work just incrementally adds a few bucks a month to my pension check; it won’t top out until I’m 65 and I never intended working that long anyway. I’ve always been a big believer in the idea that if you’re going to retire you need to have something to do that first Monday morning after the party and I’ve never had that, so, I’m still working. But, I think I know what to do on that proverbial ‘next Monday’ now.

Monday morning I’m going to call Evan Bayh’s office and tell the gopher that answers the phone that if he votes to pass this grotesquerie that I am going to go ahead and take my early retirement and invest my remaining days in seeing that he is run out of public office at the first available moment. In a perfect world, he’d be strapped to a satellite and launched into low earth orbit… sorry, I’m getting carried away. I’ll call Lugar’s office too, but it’s probably pointless because the man is borderline senile and he’s all done in elective office next go ’round anyway.

Obiviously, I’m a chump. But I’m going to be a chump with a purpose.

Airline staff will be present at boarding gates in terminals to ask passengers waiting to fly to relieve themselves before boarding, The Independent reported.

ANA hopes the weight saved will lead to a five-tonne reduction in carbon emissions over the course of 30 days.

Leaving aside the hoax of global warming, if you read the rest of the story and do the math yourself, you find the ‘idiot with a calculator’ in there without too much trouble.

Let’s take their contention that the average bladder carries 15 ounces of liquid at face value as well as the unspoken assumption that everyone showing up at the gate really has to go! Now if you accept my assumption that the weight of urine’s about the same as water that means, on a 150 passenger airplane, if everyone gets on empty … and their kidneys don’t function for the duration of the flight… then you didn’t haul about 141 pounds of urine on that flight. (OK, you realize that if you asked everyone to dispense with 10 pounds of carry on luggage you’d be 10x more green, but that’s not what I’m carping about here.)

They say they’re going to do this on a whopping 42 flights over the course of a month. Well, if you continue with their math, that’s 150 people times 15 ounces of urine times 42 flights or 94,500 ounces of urine, equating to 5,906.25 pounds or 2.95 tons.

Hold the phone. According to the story, not hauling 2.95 tons of urine through Japanese skies “will lead to a five-tonne reduction in carbon emissions”? A “tonne” is a metric ton, that is, 1,000 kilos. At 2.2 pounds per kilo what the contention is here is that not hauling around 2.95 tons of urine keeps 11 tons of carbon out of the atmosphere?

We have one of two things here– either we should just give up on all this green baloney because the planet and the human race is doomed or, we have an idiot with a calculator in charge at ANA.

But the reality is, it probably doesn’t matter because the impact of cash for clunkers is now evident. I think everyone– except the legacy media of course– realized that auto sales would crash back to earth when cash for clunkers expired. In the case of Chrysler and Government Motors, it’s more of a case of crash for clunkers.

Edmunds.com predicts GM will sell 152,000 units in September 2009, down 46.1 percent compared to September 2008 and down 37.8 percent from August 2009. GM’s market share is expected to be 20.6 percent of new vehicle sales in September 2009, down from 29.4 percent in September 2008 and up from 19.5 percent in August 2009.

Edmunds.com predicts Chrysler will sell 55,000 units in September 2009, down 48.7 percent compared to September 2008 and down 40.7 percent from August 2009. This would result in a new car market share of 7.4 percent for Chrysler in September 2009, down from 11.1 percent in September 2008 and flat compared with August 2009.

The chart that accompanies the story tells the year-to-year total sales story — Chrysler down nearly 51% from 9/08, GM down a shade over 48%. I think it’s fair to ask, with Fiat’s sales in Europe down more than a quarter and its parent company eyeball deep in debt, will Chrysler survive another year? The AP says it’s an 18 month slog to get to something the public wants to buy. Having heard this sort of happy talk from the used-to-be Big Three for years, I don’t see the next K car over the horizon. Neither do Chrysler partisans; at the Mopart news blog, as one guy put it,

It probably does not have the capital to wait through another year of low US car sales with a market share that is almost certainly to stay below 8%. It does not have models tailored to the current market tastes. Chrysler is going out of business. The company just hasn’t made it official.

The AP says the Treasury won’t pump any more money into this thing. Still it’s an open question in my mind whether The One will try to stampede everyone into sinking more money into this corpse of a company. I’d say it’s a toss up.

You are a political leader whose domestic programme is bogged down in messy controversy: what do you do? You go global. You walk the world stage with an air of supercilious moral righteousness…

I am not just talking about Gordon Brown. He is part of a great tradition of failing prime ministers and presidents at the fag end of their tenures going walkabout on the international circuit, in the hope that this larger arena will provide some sort of dignified final chapter to their historical story. But Barack Obama is at it too…

OK, admit it– when you read the phrase “… going walkabout on the international circuit..” a lot of you immediately were reminded of the Huckster from Hype’s interminable farewell tour, but I digress. Daley posits

There is a new discourse in the air which goes beyond the established understanding of the relationship between national and international politics: a language of “global governance” and an apparent consensus that all the interests of responsible countries are now “shared interests”.

She makes the point that that kind of talk is ignored outside the US because “older nations are sufficiently cynical” to realize it’s happy talk but is incendiary here because our poltical arena is defined by specific words found in our “sacred documents”. What makes “shared interests” governing dangerous isn’t the obvious downsides pointed out.

The idea of global governance is meaningless without mechanisms to enforce it, so what are we talking about here? World government? A system of laws and policing which would be beyond the reach of the electorates of individual countries, and therefore have no direct democratic accountability to the peoples of those nations?

Although Daley explores the implications of an unaccountable bureaucracy (EU, anyone?) in my opinion the real danger is summed up in her last paragraph:

But perhaps you find yourself convinced, in the present economic circumstances, that there are no national crises any more, only global ones – and that the governing of all nations must now be subsumed under some overarching international framework of law and supervision, to be monitored and policed by suitably empowered agencies. Maybe you think that is an acceptable price to be paid for stability at home and security abroad. But consider this: what if the new dispensation, once installed, fails to produce that stability and security, or delivers it only to certain nations (not yours), or does so only by limiting freedoms that you consider precious? What recourse will you have then to remove it peaceably from power, as you do your national government?

It seems clear to me– as much as anything The One says or does can be considered to be clear– that  mushy one-world government is what he loves. Well, assuming he’s in charge of it of course. Tragically, if it happened, it would inevitably become a massive despotism; with humans running it, it could be nothing else. Today, the UN is a toothless despotism, but it’s the model to be built from. Most dangerous for us, despotism is what most attracts the left. It’s why The One and his ‘bots will never stop. Otherwise, how do they achieve the New Soviet Man?

I had my thinking about the ‘pitiful underfunded urban schools’ issue totally changed by a first-hand volunteer experience. For a number of years starting in the late 80s I’d been involved with Junior Achievement. In 1994 they started a thing called Exchange City. When it was initially begun in the Indianapolis area, some co-workers and I, using equipment loaned by our employer, had set up its computer network and then worked with a few schools the day the program ran. The aim of the program at that time had been to teach kids about capitalism and its benefits. Over time I got a little bored with it and ultimately volunteered for another of JA’s programs at a “poor inner city school” that my employer was frequently pleading with us to get involved in.

What an eye opener that was. First– the physical plant was at least as good if not better than my lily-white kid’s suburban paradise school. Second — they had more computers per kid than in my kid’s grade school, even 15 years ago. The more I observed this “urban wasteland” school, the more obvious it became that at least in the case of this town, it’s a load of fertilizer.

Allow me to veer off topic here for a second … The fact that this urban hellhole school was decidedly not an urban hellhole, although it’s in a bad neighborhood, begs an interesting question. Undoubtedly there are some truly dangerous, decrepit urban schools in this country. But, where do we perceive they are? Big cities run by Democryte mayors. Where was this one? In the ‘hood of a city run almost exclusively by Republicant mayors going back at least a generation. Draw your own conclusion and please pardon my digression…

With this experience in mind, at the time that all this idiotic bleating about the so-called digital divide started, I told my buddies bs and bk, both contributors here, that the only result would be that we’d fritter away a few billion on some over-priced computers and no one would ever be able to pick out any discernible positive effect. So it was certainly no huge surprise to me this morning to read

I In 2003, Mr. Goolsbee and his University of Chicago colleague Jonathan Guryan examined just what the annual $2.25 billion subsidy to schools was achieving. It had, they estimated, advanced the adoption of computers in schools by as much as four years. Or possibly not. “Even without subsidies,” the report acknowledged, “many school districts chose to make Internet investments. It is therefore difficult to distinguish between the effects of the E-rate program alone versus the already strong upward trend in the fraction of schools with Internet access.”

Nevertheless, Mr. Goolsbee declared E-rate “a tremendous success” in wiring up the nation’s schools. What he and Mr. Guryan did not find, however, was any evidence that Internet connections improved student performance. The study admitted: “The authors looked at test scores for math, reading, and science. Their results showed no evidence that investments in Internet technology had any measurable effect on student achievement.”

Former President Jimmy Carter said Tuesday that U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson’s outburst to President Barack Obama during a speech to Congress last week was an act “based on racism” and rooted in fears of a black president.

I mean, Democrytes are all about name calling when they have nothing else to talk about. Being able to channel someone’s “fears” is typical pablum too.

But I had a second thought. J. Carter has almost made a career of careening about the world offering his support and whatever fading, reflective glow a failed presidency confers upon someone to whatever tinhorn dictator du jour is slapping the US around or is deep into stealing a sham vote to shore up their despotism. As long as they hated America, or Jews, or better yet, both, Jimmy was on it. Thinking this, I asked myself– so, how is calling Joe Wilson a racist any different than Jimmy’s usual tour de farce? He’s doing his best to prop up a would be tinhorn dictator who comes complete with a high profile vote fraud organization, who apparently hates America; Jews I don’t know about. Same dirge. Different audience. Same non-effect.