The Most Important Phone Number of All (for Americans)

See if you can remember this phone number 10-4-3-4-1-1-1. (yes I know 10 isn't a typical phone number).

I was having a conversation with a high school kid and was appalled that she barely knew the US Constitution, even though she was taking a "Constitution" course. She knew about robber barons and Jim Crow but close to nothing about the Constitution. I explained how easy it was to grasp. It's in 7 parts: the first deals with the power of the legislature (that's the Congress), the second with the executive (the President), third the judicial branch (the Courts). What else would the framers need to consider? The States and their relation with the Federal Government; the fifth Article deals with how to make changes to the Constitution (the Amendments); the sixth Article is about pre-existing debts and obligations owed by the states and clearly states that the US Constitution is supreme over all state laws. Finally the seventh and last Article deals with how the existing states were to ratify this constitution.

Do you remember the phone number?

It's a mnemonic to help remember the US Constitution. There are seven Articles in the US Constitution and each Article in the Constitution is made up of Sections. Ten in the first and so on.

What's the phone number again?

If you want to challenge Socialists, and their gentler breathrens Progressives and Liberals you need to know the Constitution.

Wall Street Bonuses Up 17%

Don't you love the media trumpeting the 17% increase in bonuses? Greedy Wall Street, while Main Street suffers Wall Street lives high on the hog. Of course our media commentators conveniently forget that the previous year Wall Street took a 40% hit.

Deepening financial crisis has hit hard the employees of Wall Street, whose yearly bonuses were down 44 per cent in 2008, and that in turn hit the New York state, which would lose USD one billion in tax revenues.

A report issued by State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli on Wednesday showed that New York City employees' bonuses last year were USD 18.4 billion, down from USD 33 billion in 2007.

The decline will cost New York City USD 275 million, he said.
Wall Street employees’ bonus dips 40%

A 17% increase from 18.4 billion means that Wall Street bonuses for this past year was roughly 21.5 billion. This means that over a two year period Wall Street bonuses are down roughly 35%. And of course NYC tax revenues are still down over 200 million.

Franz Klammer, He was gonna win or die trying.

Love skiing, love the Winter Olympics (except for figure skating and curling). Here's what I think is one of the best downhills ever.

Science-Media Complex

I just googled Science-Media Complex, and in the back of my mind I was thinking "of course I'm the only one who ever thought of this phrase." Lo and behold, not only have other people come up with it but they also based it on the same idea: that Anthrogenic Global Warming is a hoax.

How to Speak Arabic

I'm reading The Arab Mind by Raphael Patia. There are numerous wonderful quotes. Here's one:

[A] simple assent [saying yes] from an Arab can be, for him, nothing more than a polite form of evasion, while the same word may mean for his English interlocutor a definite, positive commitment....

A simple "Yes" or "No" is, for the English speaker, a definitive statement. His Arabic interlocutor, however, conditioned as he is by the exaggeration and overassertion that are the rule in his own mother tongue, is simply incapable or understanding such brief and simple statements in the same sense. For him, "Yes" only means "Perhaps." ("No" has for the Arab a similarly indefinite meaning.)

Only if the English speaker had said: "Yes, I am telling you definately, yes; I assure you positively and emphatically, yes; my answer is irrevocably and permanently yes!" would the Arab have got the point that what the English speaker really meant was "Yes."

Tea Party Movement, Cato and Publius

I’ve had discussions with several left-leaning historians who are appalled with the Tea Party Movement. A pet peeve is the very name “Tea-Party.”  The original Tea Party, they say, was opposed to “Taxation without Representation” and today’s Tea Party people, as we all know, are ignorant crazies led by demagogues. Today’s taxes were voted in by elected representatives: therefore how could these people (the modern Tea Party) possibly be compared to the 18th Century version?

My first response is why were there pen names in the 18th Century movement? After all how close to the Classical originals were the 18th Century Cato and Publius?

They weren’t. Nor was the point to be exactly the same. It was to identify with an agreed upon heroic past and emulate these heroic figures. Today’s Tea Party may not be arguing against Taxation without Representation but they are combating a political establishment that has deviated greatly from the original intent of the Constitution (as they see it). They also see today’s United States to have fallen into one of the great traps warned of by de Tocqueville and others. For instance:

“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.
Alexis de Tocqueville”

The Tea Party is an apt name as it brings discussion back to the US Constitution and what it means. Do we look at rights the way it was thought of during the 18th Enlightenment or the way it was perverted in the early 19th C by the anti-enlightenment Romantics or later by the Socialists?

If you’re unfamiliar with this look up Positive versus Negative Rights.

Global Warming, Scientific Hoaxes

Here's some more BS about Global Warming data which I wasn't aware before this article, World May Not Be Warming, Say Scientists :

The doubts of Christy [ professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and a former lead author on the IPCC ] and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.

These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.

For instance:

Some [data collection stations] are next to air-conditioning units or are on waste treatment plants. One of the most infamous shows a weather station next to a waste incinerator. ...

[There are other examples such as a] weather station at Rome airport, which catches the hot exhaust fumes emitted by taxiing jets.

In Britain, a weather station at Manchester airport was built when the surrounding land was mainly fields but is now surrounded by heat-generating buildings.

If anthropogenic global warming was true there wouldn't be all this bullshit. The scientists who included this data, knowing it was compromised, make a mockery of themselves and taint the reputations of scientists everywhere.

One of the posters replying to the article wrote this hilarious spoof:

I have a theory. This could possibly happen sometime in the future. A large majority, sat 3/4's of all automobiles on earth, are pointed in the same direction, say east for example, when they simultaneously accelerate! This could cause the earth's rotation to increase suddenly and offset the natural timing of earths clocks causing chaos among the animal kingdom thereby turning night into day and summer into winter! This must not be allowed to happen! I will be accepting grants and donations and maybe even a Nobel Prize so I may quit my job and dedicate myself fulltime to do more research into this earth destroying disaster that may or may not be happen. No applause , please just cash or checks thank you.

Thank you Gregory Levitzki. That was an excellent comment.

How about this scenario? Some status hungry, multi-billionaire decides to build the biggest building in the world. In doing so he puts so much weight in one small area of the planet that he knocks the earth out of its orbit causing the Earth to plummet into the sun.