Buckeyes lead Spartans by 9 with 8 minutes to go ..... here's my top picks again

1.  Florida.  Still

2.  Indiana.  Finally for real.

3.  Louisville.  Solid and rounding into shape at the right time

4.  Gonzaga.  Don't look now ...

5.  Duke.  Of course.

6.  Kansas.  Keep the throwback unis.

7.  Wisconsin.  Surviving the #2 schedule in the country

8.  Syracuse

Best of the rest:  tOSU, the school up north,  Pitt, Sparty,M-F U, Georgetown, Okie State, Arizona.

Tourney "surprises"?  How 'bout the Billikins - do they count?  And VCU is still hanging in there.  A good seed could mean alot for them.

At least that's what much of the media is telling us. Let's review, shall we?

For starters, during the last election one side made a subtle point that many Americans might be too reliant on the gubmint.  POTUS insisted that we are NOT.  They also predict dire consequences if the automatic budget “cuts” known as sequestration take place March 1.  These can't BOTH be true.   If modest across-the-board “cuts”—mainly cuts in the rate of growth—in military and domestic spending pose a threat to the American people and the U.S. economy, then the country is alarmingly dependent on government, which the Elph candidate was skewered for pointing out pre-election.

Candy Crowley may be taking to heart her snub from the debate club.  On Sunday on CNN she pressured Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood about whether or not the administration has "ginned up" the impact of the sequester in order to pressure Congress telling him at one point, "Your post-sequester total at FAA ops and facilities and equipment is going to be about $500 million more than 2008 and the planes were running just fine"

Meanwhile Secretary of Education Arne Duncan appeared on CBS’ Face the Nation to explain that our kiddies will be left to fend without those glorious unionized teachers: “There are literally teachers now who are getting pink slips, who are getting notices that they can’t come back this fall … We don’t have any ability with dumb cuts like this to figure out what the right thing to do is. It just means a lot more children will not get the kinds of services and opportunities they need, and as many as 40,000 teachers could lose their jobs,” said Duncan. Then, channeling his boss’ faux outrage, Duncan stated, “The fact that this is so easily avoidable is why I’m so angry.”

So why did Obama design the sequester in the first place? Duncan explained that it was all just a political tool to raise taxes: "Sequester was set up to be painful to everybody, recognizing the dysfunction of Congress, to be so painful it would force people to come to the table."

Which brings us to the POTUS.  He has warned that, among other dire consequences, the FBI will have to let criminals go free. Tens of thousands of teachers, funded primarily by state and local funds, will be lose their jobs. National parks everywhere will close. First-responders will be laid off. The government will have to cut back on food and safety inspections. Thousands of people will close benefits, student loans, health coverage and food stamps. Flights will be cut and airport delays will increase considerably.  Democrat HI Governor Neil Abercrombie has warned that the sequester will make Pearl Harbor vulnerable to another attack. Seriously.

Really?  No reason given as to why the FBI will be doing that.  No reason why teachers, payed by state and local gov'ts, will be laying off teachers due to Fed cutbacks.  Same for First responders.  We could go on, but why??  It's just ....SILLY

I'm seeing this one alot right now.  Many of my homework assignments in my "regular" classes are pretty straightforward.  An hour or two of work every 2-3 days will get it done.  But in Legal Research and Writing it is MUCH more intensive and MUCH more time consuming.  Toughest class we teach.  I TELL my students this day one.  And three and again most every day after that, so they don't think they've suddenly fallen off a cliff, but rather are undertaking to achieve great things.

Invariably one or two of them will try to get by on the "one or two hours every 2-3 days" instead of the  2-4 hours EVERY day.  And they wonder why their works is so... poor ... compared to classmates.  

And so it was that Jim Gereghty hit the nail on the head earlier this week with his "morning jolt".

Young people go through their childhood and teen years, believing that they are uniquely gifted and talented and wonderful and believing that their adult life will be one fabulous victory and success after another. And then at some point they depart the protected simulation of life that is childhood/high school/college . . . and the real world just kicks them in the crotch again and again. (This is a bit of what Adam Carolla talked about in his rant about Occupy Wall Street.) And so instead of concluding, “Oh, achieving my dream is going to be a lot harder than I thought, I had better redouble my efforts,” they deflect the hard truth of responsibility and conclude that somebody else, somebody out there — society — is to blame. They can take no joy in anyone else’s success, because that just reminds them of their own failure to achieve what they had envisioned all of their lives. And their attitudes quickly become one more obstacle — short-tempered, incapable of taking responsibility, quick to blame others, perhaps paranoid, concluding others are out to sabotage them.

Keep reading this post . . .

and just like that I go from the caring instructor trying to help them get a better life to one more old white guy trying to keep them down.  It seems to be almost reflexive.

Sad, really.

From a New York Post column yesterday:

The entire premise of the blue-state anti-gun proposals is based on an absurd fallacy: that honest citizens who own guns are potential criminals, and that real criminals will dutifully conform to the new laws, even though they’ve defied all the earlier ones.

As POTUS drags us kicking and screaming towards his envisioned European perfection .... here's something some of us warned about MONTHS ago ... from France.

We can see this effect at work in France, which regulates companies with 50 or more workers far more heavily than those with 49 or less. A December 2012 paper by Boston University economist Francois Gourio and University of Wisconsin economist Nicolas A. Roys for the National Bureau of Economic Research notes that, as a result of the regulatory cliff, the size distribution of firms in France “is visibly distorted: there are many firms with exactly 49 employees.” And they’ve got the graphs to prove it.

Here’s their graph showing the distribution of firms with between 1 and 100 employees:

here, in yet another nutshell, is why imho Keynsian is wrong, from M. Rothbard

 Hayek subjected J.M. Keynes’s early Treatise on Money (now relatively forgotten amid the glow of his later General Theory) to a sound and searching critique, much of which applies to the later volume. Thus, Hayek pointed out that Keynes simply assumed that zero aggregate profit was just sufficient to maintain capital, whereas profits in the lower stages combined with equal losses in the higher stages would reduce the capital structure; Keynes ignored the various stages of production; ignored changes in capital value and neglected the identity between entrepreneurs and capitalists; took replacement of the capital structure for granted; neglected price differentials in the stages of production as the source of interest; and did not realize that, ultimately, the question faced by businessmen is not whether to invest in consumer goods or capital goods, but whether to invest in capital goods that will yield consumer goods at a nearer or later date. In general, Hayek found Keynes ignorant of capital theory and real-interest theory, particularly that of Böhm-Bawerk, a criticism borne out in Keynes’s remarks on Mises’s theory of interest. See John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936), pp. 192–93; F.A. Hayek, “Reflections on the Pure Theory of Money of Mr. J.M. Keynes,” Economica (August, 1931): 270–95; and idem, “A Rejoinder to Mr. Keynes,” Economica (November, 1931): 400–02.

 

I used to start my day by clicking on the TVIO/idiot box and watching/listening to a movie or show I'd pre-recorded.  The intellectual equvalent of Sugar Frosted Choco-Bombs (or is it Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs?).  Lately my focus has shifted.  I stumbled up a cache of archived podcasts that are a tad more nurishing and have been starting my day with a series of them.

1.  Econtalk with Russ Roberts.  Not really archived.  I'm up to date on these but I use the newest to start my day when I can.

2.  Law Talk.  Richard Epstein and John Yoo.  Almost caught up here as well (8/02).  Fascinating discussion of law, history and current events.  Mainly the first two, which is why pulling the archives and listening from E1 is so much fun.

3.  The Beeb 4 puts out a series called "In Our Time" that I discovered a couple years ago and I started following.  Melvyn Bragg hosts and brings in 3-4 experts on the topic for 30-45 minutes.  The most recent topics:  War of 1812 (from the Brit perspective), Epicurianism, Ice Ages.

4.  IOT also did four topic specific series and they round out my daily listening.  a) Culture (Proust, Youth, Robin Hood).  b) History (Enlightenment is Scotland, The Aztecs, Bohemia)  c) Science (The Calendar, Physics of Reality, Oceanography)  d) Religion (Buddha, Muslim Spain, The Landisfarne Gospels) and e) Philosophy (Good and Evil, Just War, Nihilism).  Those are just a sampling of topics.  These things started back in 98 and ended up in 2011 so there are a LOT of them!  

Not a bad little college lecture series, every morning!

Of course, I could just listen to NPR and read the NYT.