Bunny inspectors, health and education, and a laser like focus.

View 787 Thursday, August 22, 2013

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barrack Obama, January 31, 2009

More Bunny Inspectors. I seem to recall the President promising a laser like focus on expenditures and budget items, but that was back in campaign days.

Thomas Stemberg: A New Law to Liberate American Businesses

If Congress could close military bases, it can reduce job-killing regulations.

Nearly 30 years ago, I started a company called Staples Inc. SPLS -1.37% that went on to do pretty well. Launching a business like Staples in 2013 would be a much harder proposition, with success by no means certain. There are so many government impediments to business today that the next Staples—and its 50,000 jobs—might never get off the ground.

Chief among those roadblocks: the blizzard of bureaucratic red tape that buries businesses and stifles job creation. These include the additional 16 million hours that vending-machine and chain-restaurant business owners must spend complying with new food regulations each year. But there is also the license that magicians require to do a rabbit disappearing act, which mandates an annual fee, surprise inspections and a rabbit disaster plan. All told, American business faces 46,758 pages of rules to live by in the Federal Register.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324653004578651852012786828.html

Stemberg proposes a commission like the base closing commission – the Defense Realignment and Base Closing Commission to be precise – that would take a laser like focus on regulations and propose lists of those to be abolished; the Congress would be required to take each list and do an up or down vote on the package, no amendments or sneaky readjustments. Whether it would work or not can be debated. Certainly something has to be. We have had for more than four years a President who promised, along with Hope and Change, a laser focus on budget expenditures.

I do get discouraged.

To give you some idea of just how bad things are in both the schools and the courts – that latter probably because the schools have been awful for decades – you might read these:

The 3rd Circuit Court’s ‘boobies’ boo-boo

The justices who decided the case of the breast cancer bracelets need to take a refresher course in adolescence.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/commentary/la-oe-weaver-boobies-tinker-third-circuit-court-20130821,0,3570673.story

I am blessed that this never happened to me

School is no Place for a Reader

Jennifer A. Franssen

A perplexing fate awaits a reader in an elementary school. There is no place for this strange child in classroom, library or playground. Watching my daughter caught in this predicament I find myself troubled by the paradox of an institution charged with teaching children to read that seems unable to offer either welcome or nourishment to the ardent reader within its walls.

http://notesandqueries.ca/school-is-no-place-for-a-reader/

—

73s/Best regards de John Bartley K7AAY

If you want your children to be able to read, you must teach them yourself, preferably before they get to first grade. Just about all children from dull normal up can learn to read at age 5, and it was traditional for a hundred years for the English Upper and Upper Middle class children to learn to read at home taught in the nursery by nannies. There is no reason to assume that English gentry have better protoplasm than your children.

If you want to know more on that, see http://www.readingtlc.com/. My wife’s reading program is old, it’s clunky, it looks like DOS or early Windows because that’s what it was written for, but it works: seventy half hour lessons, and just about everyone from age 4 to 44 can learn to read nearly all English words of any length. By read I mean see the word and pronounce it even if this is the first encounter with the word, or even if it’s a nonsense word like porkmine or elfsocks or muckasimfor.

Many of us have always known this, but now it’s out:

Area 51: The real cover-up

The secret base didn’t house UFOs, but that doesn’t mean the government had nothing to hide.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/commentary/la-oe-turley-area-51-20130821,0,943923.story

I didn’t know anything about the air pollution, but many of us understood that U-2 and SR-71 and other surveillance and high performance projects operated out of there. In 1964 I was editor of Project 75 which surveyed everything known about ballistic missile technology and had explicit need to know access to everything relevant to the present and future technologies in any way relevant to the Strategic Offensive Forces of the United States. That included flying saucers. If there were any extra-terrestrial technologies known in 1964 I never heard of them, and since the purpose of Project 75 was to structure the SOF to assure the survival of the United States, I can’t imagine why if we knew of any new technologies they didn’t get into the design survey. I certainly looked into everything known at Wright Patterson, and although I never visited Groom Lake I did go to the command hq. that oversaw the place. Nothing. (Nothing about Roswell, either, needless to say.)

But there was a cover-up, and the story is out now.

And a bit of encouraging news:

Jeffrey Singer: The Man Who Was Treated for $17,000 Less

Bypassing his third-party payer, my patient avoided a high hospital ‘list price.’

Every so often I have an extraordinary and surprising experience with a patient—the kind that makes us both say, "Wow, we’ve learned something from this." One such moment occurred recently.

A gentleman in his early 60s came in with a rather routine hernia in his lower abdomen, one that is easily repaired with a simple outpatient surgical procedure. We scheduled the surgery at a nearby hospital.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324139404579017113415486176.html

The story tells how hospitals have different price schedules for insured and uninsured patients. You have heard the stories before, but this is explicit.

Perhaps there is a substitute for Obamacare?

Of course the whole notion of housing and food and medical care for those who can’t afford it has the problem that there is no agreed moral obligation to provide any of those to anyone unless you make certain assumptions that can be called ‘religious’.

Tocqueville noted that in Europe many matters of general welfare were traditionally considered a problem for government, and dealt with by government agents and bureaus. To his surprise nearly all those in America were dealt with by “the associations”: private associations some religious, some secular and civic. That American tradition was diluted over the years, but it still survives, although since Johnson’s Great Society days the tradition in America is like Europe. Housing and health and welfare are problems for government and taxpayers. As a result the associations have been weakened.

It may be time to reconsider just what are the responsibilities for being one’s brother’s keeper. Or sister’s. Or partner’s. The associations worked very well until times of great economic stress.  And the associations were better able to deal with the problems of ‘entitlement’, justice, fraud, and the whole question of the deserving and undeserving poor.