That is probbaly the answer to this problem. Let this lady tell the kids individually about the no prize happy meals.
MSNBC's Monica Novotny Sympathetic to Anti-Happy Meal Campaign | NewsBusters.org
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
From the WTF? file...
I want this chick to come to my house and tell my son Ian there will be no toys in his happy meal. Let's see how much conviction she has then.
Monday, April 26, 2010
Wish I had written this...
What is money? It’s a medium of exchange – you use it to make purchases. To the average individual, money is also a means of cooperation. It transforms the value of your labor into a very efficient form of communication.
Suppose you’re a skilled chef who knows very little about carpentry. You could spend many hours struggling to make a bookshelf, producing a rickety and unlovely piece of furniture. It would be better to find a skilled carpenter and offer to trade your gourmet cooking for a well-constructed bookshelf.
Money makes this transaction vastly more efficient – you can choose from many different carpenters and compare their prices. Great companies have formed to produce mass quantities of bookshelves, which is much more effective than hiring out individual carpenters to construct shelves on demand, resulting in much lower prices to the consumer. You don’t have to spend time finding a carpenter you can trust, then waste more time haggling over the relative value of stuffed pheasant versus six feet of shelving. The value of your cooking skill is converted into money, and so is the value of the bookshelf. This is much better than bartering. Money is a swift, versatile, and precise vehicle for cooperative effort.
What is value? It’s more than just the number on a price tag. If you look around your home, you’ll find many objects with value that far exceeds their price: treasured heirlooms, gifts from your children, mass-produced artwork that you happen to like. Value is subjective… which means, in essence, it’s a function of choice. Would you risk your life to gather all those little knickknacks and crayon sketches pinned to your refrigerator, if your house were about to be destroyed in an earthquake, and you had only moments to evacuate? The situation would eliminate your choices in the matter, and the value of the items would diminish.
To put this in the context of current events, a comprehensive medical insurance plan with a high price tag would have great value to an older person, but much less value to a young person in the peak of health. Even if the young person is forced to pay the high price for this coverage, its value to him does not increase. Likewise, an insurance plan with extensive maternal benefits offers little value to a man. People assign less value to something they were given, or forced to purchase. Greater value is associated with goods and services they freely chose to acquire, and paid for with their own money. Everyday life is filled with many examples which illustrate this point.
What is power? It is the ability to impose your will upon others. Power requires compulsion, which can range from a mild set of incentives through absolute domination. Your best friends might be willing to honor almost any of your requests, but you don’t really have power over them. If you designed an elaborate plan for managing every aspect of their lives and finances, they would be unlikely to cooperate voluntarily. You would have to force them to participate.
In a constitutional republic, our elected government is meant to be the exclusive concentration of legitimate power. By definition, the amount of power exercised by the government increases as it grows larger. Power is compulsion – fines, subsidies, regulations, and imprisonment. More power means less freedom. Reduced freedom means less value. As money is drained away from free citizens, their ability to cooperate voluntarily is reduced… and only voluntary cooperation produces genuine value.
This is the dreadful equation of socialism. Money can be used to create value, or it can fuel the exercise of power, but not both. You can see this happening around you, right now. It has happened everywhere in the world, every time central planning has been tried. It would happen even if politicians were the selfless, compassionate, disciplined civil servants they claim to be. The fantastic corruption typical of socialist states, most definitely including our current Administration, serves to weaken the rate of exchange between value and power. The high-performance fiber optic communication lines of free-market capitalism have been torn out, and converted into feeding tubes for our bloated central government. Every dollar you pay the government in taxes and regulatory costs is another moment of your time that cannot be invested in willing cooperation with others.
It is possible to ration subsistence, but not prosperity. Americans are slowly, painfully beginning to appreciate the difference between those two levels of existence. We’ve been so prosperous, for so long, that we lost sight of how far our economy would collapse when value was traded for power. The arithmetic of poverty and unemployment is simple, and merciless. Free people multiply. The all-powerful State is only good at division.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
So I'm reading the paper...
Heck no, I didn't buy the paper. It was a freebie placed out to read while waitng for my haircut. But in this case I was waiting for a hamburger. I'm just trying to throw Kelly off my path....
Funny how now I have the same philosophy with regards to the paper as my dad did to Playboy and the like when I was younger. Let me explain. When we, my older brothers and I, were teenagers, my dad found a Playboy or somesuch in the attic. It was Mikes or mine. Paul didn't do that stuff. Good thing he didn't find the can of Skoal and the bottle of Boones farm too. I kid. So he took us aside and gave us the lecture about how this filth is not how we need to see women. It objectifies them and that is not being a man. Of course he knew boys would be boys and we would probably see this kind of magazine again so he said whatever you do don't pay for the stuff. Don't give your money to this industry.
I thought I was doing a very god job of this until I watched Cinemax at night. Holy Moley! Needless to say I canceled those channels. I canceled all the movie channels actually. HBO!?! What's up with that?
Where was I?...reading the paper...yes. I saw where Obama is repealing a Title IX loophole. It has been there a while. Title IX is the law which requires equity for sexes in college sports. You may remember years ago where universities were cutting mens programs to pay for new womens programs. That is Title IX. The part they changed was the colleges being able to use a survey to determine whether or not they would be subject to Title IX. Basically, asking the students their interst in the sports programs to gauge whether or not new womens programs are warranted. If the survey was not turned in, that would be determined as no interest.
Well, they took the survey away. Now, regardless of student interest, Title IX will be applied across the board. Biden in his infinite wisdom said this of the decision,"Making Title IX as strong as possible is a no-brainer...What we're doing here today will better ensure equal opportunity in athletics, and allowing women to realize their potential — so this nation can realize its potential."
So when does the Title IX for white guys go into effect? I've been told ad nauseum that African American children don't feel they can succeed because they have no role models to look up to...Oh yea? What about Clarence Thomas, Condoleeza Rice, JC Watts? Oh you mean liberal role models? I guess looking up to Charles Rengel, Jesse Jackson and The One would depress me too...Don't white youth have the "right" to feel lost too? I mean if you want to be a white professional athlete...good luck. Hockey yes. Baseball maybe. Basketball and football. Fugedaboutit.. If you have your little white heart set on being a cornerback in the NFL, you pretty much better apply for unemployment right now.
Artificially bolstering one aspect of society while breaking down another is not the way for this nation to realize its potential. How can you realize potential when the entire premise of said potential is skewed?
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Saturday, April 17, 2010
iTunes...
Didn't realize how much I missed my iTouch until I was on the flight to Chicago. No tunes to pass the time.
Sitting now listening to Edie Brickell..."shove me into shallow water." Great song. Only one they had.
Perusing my play list and the one played the most is Vanessa Carlton "A Thousand Miles". Huh? Well, Madison had a bit to do with this. She loves this song and comes into my office and plays it over and over...and over. Like father like daughter.
I used to make my friends angry with the amount of times I would replay a song. One time we were partying at Darryl Huffman,s house, RIP. I played Duran Duran's "Save a Prayer" quite a bit that night and woowee they got sick of it. On my play list today it has been played a paltry 12 times. I still love the song though.
Surprisingly enough a Jellyfish song ranks as the most skipped. It was the last song on "Spilt Milk". Right after my favorite song on that album, "Too Much Too Little Too Late". Now there's a song I would rewind. There's a place where they go into 6 part harmony and I rewind it 6 times to sing every part. That is definitely a Mutley moment.
Pass the Dutchie on the left hand side...Hans plays with Dottie, Dottie plays with Jane...Sprawling on the fringes of the city in geometric order...Name those 3 songs if you dare? No googling.
Quite an ecclectic group of stuff I have in my list. From the mid 16th century to today. The mid 16th century stuff is Thomas Tallis. When the church of England broke form the Catholic church, King Henry commissioned this guy, among a few others, to write new music for the church.
And then there's DEVO. "Freedom of Choice" is an album that shaped my childhhod in more ways than one. Mark Mothersbaugh is still writing today. Most notably for the Rugrats. And imagine my surprise when the kids and I were watching Yo Gabba Gabba and lo and behold there was Mark doing a drawing segment on the show. Another cool band Squeeze has a connection to my kids. In one of the early shows they sing Fruit Salad (yummy yummy) and the chef in the skit is one of the founding members of Squeeze.
So, what songs shaped your teen years?
Friday, April 16, 2010
Strike three...and four actually...
Is there anybody to whom this guy won't bow?
I mean, who is this lady?
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