Corporate Crap and Other Dubious Wisdom

Finally!! Somebody actually posted a WTF that is Hi-Friggin-larious!

Here I am, innocently clickin my butt off to earn credits just like all you other innocent click-ho’s out there. Boom… out of the blue there’s some guy in a cowboy hat and… um… Oh hell… go check out Grins at Grinsnlaughter. Definately one of those "WTF moments".

The trials and tribulations of returning to school when even the teachers need teachers. Remain calm Bitchitude…and remember, you are NOT, repeat NOT allowed to take a teacher aside and kick her ass just because she’s a dim bulb!

What? You say there are NO volunteers yet to settle our debate? C’mon Marjo…here I’ve been waiting for days now for my email box to fill up without a single volunteer. How dissapointing.

Oh…. Now I see! That damned Martello has all the freaks visiting HIS site over at Andy Land!

DB

While scanning through my Economics book the other day for a class, I discovered a line that has stuck in my mind since.

"…almost all economists believe that rent control adversely affects the availability and quality of housing and is a very costly way of helping the most needy members of society. Nonetheless, many city governments choose to ignore the advice of economists and place ceilings on the rents that landlords may charge their tenants."[N. Gregory Mankiw, "Principles of Economics", 2004]

On a quickly scanned run-through you might be tempted to exclaim "Ah ha! Finally, someone to blame for the plight of the homeless and the high cost of housing — It’s those damned Economists!" No, unfortunately we haven’t found our scapegoat quite yet.

There are several factors at work here we might think about:

Economics is the study of how society manages its scarce resources.
The prime motivator or driver in an economy is the Marketplace.
For those of you just joining, that would be — Corporate America.

That said; let’s look back at my quote for a minute. If we look at the answer we can work back towards what the question must have been. That seems to have been clearly "What affect would rent control have on the economy?" The economists then after developing the appropriate model and extrapolating the results came up with the statement. Apparently a resounding thumbs down.

The interesting thing about economists, or for that matter any scientist, is that when presented with a problem they will look at every nuance, ramification, and permutation until they develop a reasonable solution. If we ask an atomic physicist how many grams of plutonium it would take to blow a half-mile crater in the moon, they might study gravity, composition of the moon, temperature, etc., and come up with the number of grams. Economists would have gone through the same thought process in answering the above economic question. They are focusing on a reasonable answer to your specific question.

It occurred to me that with all the brain and think tanks we have around the world, perhaps solving the plight of the homeless shouldn’t be such a heavy task. Maybe the problem is that we as a society just aren’t asking the right questions of our scientists.

If we presented our physicist with a half mile crater and ask him what it would have taken to put it there, he probably would have given us all the other factors in addition to the number of grams of plutonium.

What if we asked our economist what we would need to do economically to solve the homeless problem?

Just some food for thought.

DB

As unpopular as it may seem in a Blog site, I actually do try to stay out of politics as much as possible. It isn’t that I’m not informed, or that I don’t care, it’s that I prefer sending letters to my congressman and/or any other political figure rather than trying to stir up others into agreeing with me about political decisions.

In this case however, I’m gonna break my rule.

I wrote an article not too long ago called "Baby Killers" and guess what? The first person that posted in opposition was an idiot who didn’t even have the guts to post his name. I quote from my article "I won’t debate the right or wrong of us being envolved in military actions, but let me say that I have all the respect in the world for all the men and women who are risking their lives for the rest of us. Freedom has a price that many of us forget all too often."

Now tonight I’m reminded that there was good reason to me to write the article. On a friends Blog I find that idiocy and stupidity is still running rampant in our schools. (See Bitchitudes’ article) I urge you to read both articles if you haven’t already.

Have these damned people lost their minds?

The Constitution guarantees our citizens the rights to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. Just who the hell gives a bunch of still wet behind the ears college students and other agitators the right to harrass and threaten a US soldier? Do they actually think that HE doesn’t have any rights or is it that they think THEIR rights are more important than his? Just as our brave men and women are fighting in Iraq doing their jobs, this man was doing his job. Not only that, but with the full permission and likely at the request of the school!

The Constitution also guarantees our right to "Peaceful assembly". Oh yeah, demonstrations like this one are really peaceful. I’m sure that 50 or 60 agitators bullying a couple of soldiers because they wanted to protest Bush’s inauguration made a big impact on Mr. Bush… bunch of friggin morons.

I’m usually a pretty patient and soft spoken person, but folks this really pisses me off. As much as I just love to be right, I would just as soon not have been right about this.

Someone quoted Tony Blair, the British PM on their Blog the other day as having said that "the value of a country can be tested by the number of people who want to live there and the number of people who want to leave." As far as I’m concerned, if you can’t act like an American and stand up for what’s right by supporting our rights and our freedoms then you need to find another country where you can breathe THEIR air and take up space.

Use your damned minds for something better than holding your ears apart and your hair on. Use the education your parents are paying for to find ways to make America a better place to live. Here’s a clue from history… it wasn’t until Martin Luther King convinced people to have peaceful demonstrations and peaceful dialog that the American Civil Rights movement succeeded. The only affect that militant groups had was to muddy the waters and extend the length of time before the movement had a positive impact in America.

Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Spreading the seeds of discord in the end is doing Americas’ enemies work for them.

DB

Very Cool interview done by Roxanne K. Cottell (Aunty Mapuana) with Norma Vally on   and 

Also visit M. Rachael Moore at MBC Reading Room for new articles by M. Rachael Moore, and funny man Andy Martello.

The site is a hoot if I do say so

P.S. For those of you who haven’t been to the infamous Andy’s blog site:

and the wonderful and talented Ms. Moore:

DB