Small c Conservative Educational Reform: Read to your kids

Altering the Department of Education, Teacher values and a body of Provincial law is the hard way to bring about change.  The easy way is to start at home as individuals.

Detecting woozles

Dad gave me Winnie the Pooh for my fourth birthday and that night started reading to his little Bozo.   For eleven years he read aloud every night he was home until his accidental death.  The books progressed from childish to adult and I learned what English should sound like, how it should be constructed and am to this day reading with enormous appetite anything worthwhile I can get my hands on.   Reading to your kids sets in motion a lifelong interest in finding out things and knowing how to use language.  It's more than all but the very best teachers can hope to accomplish.    This is more basic than "Home Schooling" as a movement:  One-on-one learning from the most important figures in your life.

ROBIN

Phonetics too.  Aged only four, I was floundering in Grade One, unable to figure how other kids could look at the marks under a picture of a Robin and know it was "robin". This same Dad spent an hour three nights in a row teaching me how to read phonetically.  That was it.  I went from the dummy to a top reader in one week.  There are many young people in high school who never get that far.  Three useful hours from someone who cares about you weigh more in the balance than a dozen years of school.

Morsi and Egyptian Brotherhood fingerprints all over Benghazi attack. Update: 400 missiles stolen

The Arabic media spell out Morsi's involvement while the US Admin downplays it and calls for Morsi's return.  The jihadists at Benghazi were led by Abu Ahmad whom Morsi had sprung from jail.   Libyan interrogation of cell members came up with Morsi's name too as well as a Saudi TV station owner.  A motive appears to be the release of the Blind Sheikh.
Read the complete story at PJ Media and grind your teeth.

Update:  Whistleblower claims 400 missiles were captured ("stolen") at the Benghazi site.  Think about it.  Another reason for the White House to suppress honest news about the attack.

Quail family values

Him and her

I admire quail.
Their plan for society is simple and friendly.
Couples in the spring.
Family goes everywhere together in early summer.
Dad does lookout duty.  Mom watches stragglers.
Late summer when the kids are about the same size as their parents, families of families form up.  You can still see the family grouping but they form a society  that hangs together and forages cooperatively through the winter.
One - two- three, repeat.

Out with the kids. Dad scouts ahead.
Mom brings up the rear, counting beaks.

Families of families
I never see them fighting.

Footnote:  Foraging in a flock is smart for winter feeding.  Together they chow down the seeds in an area all at once and then move to a new area.  If they were every bird for its own feather, they would race around to to gobble the best food in the fall but as winter wears on, they would find less and less food when they move to a new area.  Massive chow down in one place followed by the same in another, reserves lots of seeds to be found later where they haven't been yet.

"Read the Small Print" Wet Dream.

Dmitry

The use of small print veers close to corporate criminal behaviour. Courts in Russia sided with a ballsy lawyer who CHANGED THE SMALL PRINT because the credit company that issued the card didn't bother to read it. Corporations have been getting us to click and sign off in seconds to pages of boilerplate rules, rules that are just ducky for them and onerous for us.  When Tinkhoff Credit sent an unsolicited letter offering Dmitry Argarkov a credit card, Dmitry scanned the small print into his computer "changed the terms of the contract and returned it to the lender ... and they failed to notice".  He re-wrote it with  0% interest, an open line of credit and a huge penalty if Tinkhoff wanted out.  Tinkhoff Credit of course filed it away without a glance and issued the card.    The link above is to the story at The Independent.

"Agree somewhat"

When you download a new app, you commonly are asked to sign off on terms. You are invited to lie, saying you have read the entire document.  Not only that, you are asked to agree to the whole darn thing without a peep.  The people publishing the small print are expecting you to lie and they make money on it.   The size of the contract should reflect the size of the committment you are making.  If ten seconds is what you are investing in trying out some software, the company should offer you a handshake deal that you can review in about the same amount of time.  I quite often try to scan the key points of all the paragaphs but generally fail.

My favourite outrageous example:  The current iTunes Terms and Conditions.(August 1 2013)  It has 14,594 words in it.  Every time Apple updates iTunes or modifies how they want to deal with you, you are asked to lie that you have read and understood it all before downloading the latest Angry Birds app.  Apple knows you are lying.

Families shrink and houses "explode".

A lot of existing housing stock is not going to fetch a good price in the future.  Canadian demographics and taste have changed.   Seven kids in seven hundred square feet was common in the forties. Now it's often two childless seniors in two thousand and more.  I see these plans every day in my shop in the Okanagan.   Your grandparents' house will often fit in the Master Bedroom of todays well-off golden agers.   Two en suites,  a jet tub and private patio, a lounge area, tray ceilings, and enough room to chase each other around the bed in flagrante can run to 1200 square feet. Some places of course are much smaller but they are built to an expensive standard.  Where is this heading?

Notice this floor plan has one bedroom only.

As family size stays small, the Canadian housing stock will start to shrink.  People who can afford to buy a home are less likely to pick an existing one, more likely to tear something down and build closer to their heart's desire.













Added:  This reflects the Okanagan Valley which is a retirement haven and has a small industrial base.  New tracts near Markham Ontario and such places may be less obvious.

Last Refuge of Scoundrels

Playing it up with flags.

Kudos to scoundrels for hiding behind the flag.  They recognize what's important.

Samuel Johnson famously said patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels.  This is an indictment of scoundrels, not patriotism. Love of your corner of the homeland is so basic it doesn't need to be taught any more than I need a reminder in the morning to look at my wife with tender regard.  The strength of our natural love for parents and the places where we grew to adulthood is what makes it a refuge for scoundrels, something that will last after their own stratagems for power have failed.


The flag extends the gifts of kinship to people otherwise strangers.  The acerbic line is true: "He may be a bastard but he's our bastard".    Patriotism goes beyond the people to include a kinship with the land.  We each treasure some landscapes of Canada as a part of our life.  No wonder that people in Saskatchewan wanted to include Prairie Skies as one of the seven wonders of Canada.   For me I am moved by the fragrance of greasewood bloom in the Okanagan, by peeking from Saturna towards Vancouver and more.

Little booboos have bigger booboos upon their back to bite 'em.

Something going wrong is embedded in an ecosystem of other bigger things going wrong.   Two Toronto guys shooting at each other happens in a neighbourhood where welfare rules reduce the motivation to get a job, and is linked in turn to drug laws that raise the payoffs for selling contraband and is amplified by an otherwise reasonable immigration policy that is a bit loosey goosey about weighting family ties. Meanwhile the press goes off about gun control. And no one is speaking up about personal responsibility.

Today's news has an example from bankrupt Detroit.
A million dollar cheque lay in a drawer for a month, un-cashed.

Chain reaction of little things
until the kaboom

How could someone forget?
How could there be no oversight in place to get a handle on this?
A bigger booboo is that a cheque was needed in the first place.
As of February, electronic funds transfer wasn't available at City Hall.

Anybody who services equipment knows how it goes.  A ten cent bearing is a little damaged from dirt. The dust cover on the hub was lost a month ago but no one had replaced it.  The owner had skipped a service check.   He tends to be casual like that in everything.  The driver heard a funny noise but didn't think it worth mentioning.  The hub seized.  An important delivery was late.  The tow truck couldn't come until the next day.  An angry customer cancels a big order.  The month shows a loss.  And so it goes, ad infinitum.  

The liberty I have taken with the title can be remedied by reading the back story on "Little fleas have smaller fleas...."   Johnathan Swift drafted the ditty and mathematician De Morgan gave it a lilt and made it funnier.  There's a second part, too:  "And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on.,,,,"

Did I do that?

The Maple Leaf Forever: It blew down July 20th.

In the fifties we were taught "The Maple Leaf Forever" as an alternate anthem.  There was an actual tree that inspired the poem and it blew down three weeks ago in Toronto. (Picture)

How bad is the song?  Canadians are Brits is the first message.  They beat the Yanks at Queenston Heights and Lundy's Lane in 1812.  (Both solitudes can cheer for that one.)  But then "Wolfe the Dauntless Hero Came" and captured Quebec in 1759.  One of Wolfe's nicknames was "The Conqueror of Quebec" and another, curiously, was "The Conqueror of Canada".  (This is hard slop for true laine Québecois to swallow).

Not suitable for bilingual consumption but you know what?  The tune is great unlike the stodgy meter of "O Canada".   In fact some words for "O Canada" are a little stodgy too.  But it's what we've got and I'll stand up for it.

Lundy's Lane was no walk in the park and although the Americans withdrew, the British had a rough time of it.

A conservative Canada would be a light to the nations.

Pass the torch from the Liberty Statue to the Beaver.  You'll be waiting till the cows come home for someone else to stand up and be your hero.

"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."

What does free mean?

"If you care about improving peoples' lives, then you ... care about economic freedom.
You will care about secure property rights, impartial rule of law, freedom to trade, a currency that keeps its value and government that stays small relative to the size of your economy."

We do a little bit of all of it now and stand better than many in the world.  Why settle for a small cheap vision?   Make the Loony a sounder currency than the Swiss Franc.    Replace red tape that stifles initiatives with blue tape that corrects course.   The right of two people to shake hands to make a deal would be considered the norm and defended vigorously.  Close the Human Rights Tribunal and the CRTC and allow law and the power of contract to do its job.  CBC would exist but funded by its subscribers and advertisers.

Footnote: The quoted poem by Lazarus is on a bronze plaque near the base of the Statue of Liberty.

Texas Biggied it in Oil and Gas.

Texas doubled its oil production in just the last two years.   A quarter of all the land-based drilling rigs on earth are in Texas right now (852).  If you call Texas a country, it will be the 9th greatest oil producer on earth by the end of the year and it is the 3rd greatest gas producer after Russia and after all the rest of the United States.   (Excerpted from article at Forbes).

Page source

And more to come in the US and Canada.

China has magnificent balls: Planning not one but two highways to Taiwan

Bridge or tunnel, they are part of the National Highway Network Plan (2013-2030)  recently approved by the State Council, China's cabinet.  Remember when America was great and forged a network of highways in the fifties?  Now it's China stepping up to the plate.  Does this mean in twenty years we will be asking for a defence treaty with China?

Taiwan hasn't negotiated an agreement but it would be advantageous for trade and tourism. China will see this helping their wayward province return to the Motherland.  China has to weather some financial corrections first but 2030 may be do-able.

Link to China Daily News.
Putting out the buzz may be more important than planning the project for now.

Undersea topography.  The Taiwan Shoal is "an undersea desert"
of shallow sand.

Cheap amber gadget would save lives on Canadian highways

Back up lights, raised brake light.
Cars in the fifties didn't have them.

Brake lights and turn signals have been around forever.  Then came backup lights followed by a bonus brake light mounted in the back window. Now add an amber light that comes on when you lift your foot off the gas.  On a hill it may mean you're coasting but in heavy traffic it means you are on high alert making decisions.   Give a heads-up to the driver behind so they can be alert and prepared to take action too.  It's like the stress-free flashing amber lights at BC intersections warning you the green light is about to change to amber.   Ontario doesn't go for them and it's a lot dicier knowing when to stop safely.

It's easy to add a bit of amber.
Just do the same to the rear window brake light.

This is a cheap upgrade to improve communication among drivers and save lives.
While you're at it, how about Ontario beefing up those flashing amber warning signs?

Sir Thomas Beecham's best gaffe: "Still King".

Princess Mary

"In the foyer of a Manchester hotel, Beecham saw a distinguished-looking woman whom he believed he knew, though he could not remember the name.  He paused to talk to her and as he did so vaguely recollected that she had a brother.  Hoping for a clue, he asked how her brother was and whether he was still in the same line of work.  "Oh he's very well", she answered, "and still king".

Sir Thomas

Although I first read this in a biography of Sir Thomas, it is a slippery quote. In one version he is on a train. Almost identical tales ending in "Still King" or "Still Queen" abound with different actors.  Snopes gives a few samples.

Hometown disappears. Why you can't go back.

Ghosts of  their parents

I loved my home town. That's where the first girls to catch my eye lived.  I got the concepts of schooling and neighbourhood, shopping and cultural happenings there.  And I can never go back because that town left home when I left home, carried in my head.   With us went the culture of those days.  Maybe buildings are still there but the people are not the same.  The closest you will ever come to going home again is a high school reunion. Love them and hate them, they are your peers and the life of the sixties lives on inside them but not in your hometown today.

No way back

I've a poignant memory from a visit to Deep River 20 years after I first left home.  Looking from my mother's front window onto the road to school, I recognized some of the kids... a couple kindergarten kids skipping hand-in-hand and some serious high school loners with their homework.  What I saw were traces of their parents.  They seemed like ghosts compared to the young men and women and their homes which I carry in my head from the sixties.

Notional money crash.

World GDP has changed little while World Notional Money has soared trillions.  You've read articles about the US and the EU, the IMF and the Fed and the rest “kicking the can down the road”, putting patches on debt-riddled instruments and all of them incestuously interlocked trying to make each other look good.

Every time a patch is added, the capacity of the old system goes up a bit.  Inevitably, a few more leaks will pop.  When these are patched, the fabric of the old system is stretched to a new level, whereupon quite a few more new leaks pop up.   Those too have been patched and the old fabric is stretched now into new territory never tested before.

What you can predict is that it will fail.

You can predict a failure in the near future will be a fabric failure requiring a system rebuild, not just a patch on a seam.  That it will start with something tiny is also predictable but where it will happen is not.

Fun when regularly grounded

Kind of scary when  charge
builds and builds

High school science class gives an analogy.  A Van de Graaff generator builds high static charges which regularly zero out.  If you polish the globe used to store the charge to higher and higher degree, the charge builds higher and higher before finding an imperfection to channel the discharge off the ball.

Politically incorrect kids

As kids we played "Cowboys and Itchybums" in the bush behind our street.  I don't think we'd seen a cowboy or an Indian in our life but we knew about itchybums thanks to pin worms and kiddy hygiene. Nothing to do with race and everything to do with child's play.

Language police, please do not hyperventilate.

Cowboy or Indian was equally attractive and we all ended up as one or the other, a lesson in good race relations you might say. No one ever hesitated to be an Indian but we felt there was a little indignity if "Itchybum" cropped up.  A kid is entitled to some privacy.


Added photo:

Drudge humor: Putin survives Summit cold snub by Obama

Got to love the juxtaposition at Drudge:
Drudge shows Putin licking a cold one scoop ice cream cone.  Should Obama strike even harder, make that a two scoop cone with sprinkles.
Putin is busy touring the middle east, gaining status. (h/t small dead animals )

Supersized snub

Small town webpapers bumping small town newspapers..

Two Okanagan towns have good little weeklies, The Oliver Chronicle  (1937) and The Osoyoos Times.(1947)  Now they also have two good little daily web competitors,  Oliverdailynews.com and Osoyoosdailynews.com.  The upstarts take classifieds and obits for free and have some paid advertising to boot.  The business model of the dotcoms is low capital and a little more responsive.  Both weekly papers have a web presence nowadays with daily updates (as does every little paper in Canada apparently).  You have to ask how long heritage papers will endure before it's just competitive websites duking it out.

I like both weeklies and over the years have sent a couple club stories to them, placed a few ads, followed the politics and accidents and news of marriages, looked for shopping deals in their pages.  Now, for breaking news, I check the internet first (Forest fire on edge of Osoyoos, Fatal accident south of Oliver).  The upstart competitors let local people put in their own stories and photographs with a little adult supervision. It's fun to be part of the story.  The content is less disciplined in the webpapers but that's how most news is dished up in real life as you talk to people across a counter or beside you on a bus.  With no paid reporters, you don't get the local baseball scores unless someone feels like writing it up.

Though no national or regional stories make the cut, local politics does.  Ultimately, all politics is local.  If I was running for political office, I'd have these little daily websites on my radar and would try to influence their content.

Speculation grows that Central Banks have less gold than they claim. "What's in the Vault?"- Peter Schiff

Gold prices fell but there seems to be an increase of supply not a drop in demand.  Peter Schiff looks at Central Banks and asks, "What's in the vault?"  This won't end well and will affect our financial health.

He lays out the case that a lot of gold supposedly in storage has been lent out or sold.   When Germany asked for some of its gold back this spring, the NY Federal Reserve Bank wouldn't let them view it and will take seven years to return it.  The COMEX inventory has dropped sharply. A Dutch state-owned bank said April 1st that it would not give back physical gold, forcing depositors to take "money" instead.  Morgan Stanley is rumored to have had serious runs on gold it holds for clients.    All this makes sense if the political actors behind the central banks have been secretly misusing gold. Lower gold makes it look like the national currency hasn't been diluted and devalued.  This won't end well.

Who has gold reserves?
More gold in jewellery than in vaults.
Where does the US have its gold?

h/t Zero Hedge for the Peter Schiff story.

Backyard geniuses make float plane tugs.

These crazy contraptions deserve a handle like "Hallelujah jacks" but make do with bland names like "Float Plane Mover" or "Tug". You'll do a double take seeing chopped cars floating on their front wheels, steering a hydraulic jack-cum-cart from behind.  They should have a shine and show with everything from Hillbilly Traditional to Detroit drag.  It's all do it yourself!  There's no factory to order from.

Pictures from the Pat Bay Float Plane base near Victoria BC.

Hard at work.

A second

This gem has a COPA sticker
on the window.

A fourth.

There's not much on line but here's an open top one: