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  • CPS Pays Parents for Good Behavior

    Blatantly stolen from Second City Cop:

    Is the lure of a $25 gift card enough to persuade a parent who’s not involved in their child’s education to get involved?

    Seventy Chicago Public Schools that have struggled to engage parents are about to find out.

    At Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s request, Walgreen Co. has agreed to provide $25 gift cards to parents who pick up their students’ report cards and participate in parent-teacher conferences during report card pickup days.

    “This is a way, in my view, of incentivizing responsible parenting,” Emanuel told a news conference at Field Elementary School, 7019 N. Ashland.

    Is he serious? “incentivizing responsible parenting?” In what parallel universe is this unmitigated ass living in? If you “incentivize” (which isn’t even a real word) bad behavior, what do you get? More bad behavior.

    Every study in existence proves this. Example A is the entire welfare system – you pay someone not to work, you get a shitload of people not working. You give someone a check for pushing out babies, pretty soon the birthrate skyrockets and you have 15, 14 even 13-year-olds having babies. You know what reduced the teen birthrate back in the 1990’s? Stopping the checks.

    Emanuel said he got the gift card idea during one of his morning workouts.

    “That’s what happens when I start swimming. I start coming up with ideas,” the mayor said.

    The mayor then approached Walgreen CEO Greg Wasson, who jumped at the opportunity to “give back” to the city where the company has operated for 112 years and now has 150 stores.

    This explains part of where he keeps getting these fucked up ideas – chlorine poisoning.

    via Second City Cop.

    So that’s kinda entertaining.  But I fail to see how giving away gift cards to parents who come pick-up report cards and sit for parent-teacher conferences is exactly creating an incentive for bad behavior.  Seems like good behavior to me.

    The bigger problem with this is like Chris Rock (and Barack Obama) have pointed out that we keep setting the bar so low.

    Another comparison, though, is illustrated by an old Chris Rock joke: “People say Colin Powell speaks so well. What’d they expect him to say? ‘Ahmma drop me a bomb’?” There’s something incredibly condescending to think of saying that a man who has risen to the ranks of 4-star general or United States Senator is “articulate,” but it’s always meant as a compliment. In reality, though, it’s a backhanded one.

    Obama is more than “articulate,” of course; he’s a truly gifted orator. And he was editor of the Harvard Law Review and otherwise has some mighty impressive credentials. It does seem, though, that the bar is set much lower for Obama than most men who would be president.

    via Outside the Beltway.

    Isn’t there a soft bigotry in saying that these parents need this incentive to do things that other parents do [without the incentive]?

    I actually believe — from what I’m seen with my own eyes living on the West Side for 9 years — that the vast majority of parents want to help their kids get a good education.  They want to be a positive influence in their children’s lives.  They just simply do not know how because they were never taught by their parents.

    What we need to do is help train parents to be better parents.  Not throw $25 in gift cards at them and expect them to suddenly become Ma and Pa Cleaver.

  • Intellectual Flight from China

    Like hundreds of thousands of Chinese who leave each year, she was driven by an overriding sense that she could do better outside China. Despite China’s tremendous economic successes in recent years, she was lured by Australia’s healthier environment, robust social services and the freedom to start a family in a country that guarantees religious freedoms.

    “It’s very stressful in China — sometimes I was working 128 hours a week for my auditing company,” Ms. Chen said in her Beijing apartment a few hours before leaving. “And it will be easier raising my children as Christians abroad. It is more free in Australia.”

    via NYTimes.com.

    No story in the NYT about the intellectual flight from the U.S.

    Funny how that works.  Guess that’s not news worthy.

     

     

  • Dem Governors Force Ins. Premiums Higher

    Tens of thousands of homeowners who suffered wind and storm damage this week will get financial relief from rulings by several governors that insurers must treat Sandy as a tropical storm and not a hurricane.  …

    “Whether they call it a hurricane or something else, that translates into the percentage I have to pay to get my apartment redone,” she said before Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Wednesday that homeowners would not have to pay hurricane deductibles. “I had no idea. It’s crazy, and it’s going to cost so much money.”Homeowners’ insurance policies in coastal areas almost always include a provision that the deductible will be higher when damage is caused by a hurricane than a lesser windstorm. The difference can be steep — in the thousands of dollars — because the regular deductible is a flat dollar amount, while the hurricane deductible is connected to the replacement value of the house.

    via NYTimes.com.

    Right about now dozens of actuaries at all the big insurance companies tossed a huge pile of paper in the air and started to bang their head against the wall.

    The title of this story at the NYT is “Governors Promote Lower Deductibles for Homeowners” which is one way of looking at it.  The other way is to say, “Governors pander for votes, interfere with the insurance system, annual premiums going to go up up up.”

    You don’t get to negotiate your insurance policy terms after the fact.  If you wanted a lower deductible then you could have purchased insurance with a lower deductible.  If you wanted hurricane replacement value insurance then you could have bought that as well.  But if you went cheap and bought the typical policy… then you got the typical policy.

    So when the insurance companies start running the numbers they will figure out how much more they’re going to pay out as a result of Gov. Cuomo’s unilateral action.  Then they divide that amount over all the policies in the area over 5 or 10 years.

    So take your joy now.  Because when you get your insurance bill next year something tells me the NYT will not be writing a story about how you can’t afford to pay it.

  • Rise of Titan the World’s Fastest Supercomputer

    After falling behind Asia and Europe in the great race, where success is measured in FLOPS floating-point operations per second, the US has struck back at the new high-tech Olympians with Titan: quite possibly the fastest supercomputer in the world.  …

    All of that might now change, as a new supercomputing giant hailing from the Smokey Mountains was unveiled by the US Department of Energy’s DOE on Monday.  More than 10 times faster and five times more energy efficient than its predecessor Jaguar, Titan is the brainchild of the DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory ORNL, nestled in the Tennessee highlands.  Titan’s theoretical peak is 20 petaflops – 20 quadrillion calculations per second – with 299,008 CPUs central processing units and 18,688 graphics processing units GPUs spinning at breakneck speeds to make to make scientific breakthroughs in record times.

    Titan’s blistering computation speed will be the equivalent of “the world’s 7 billion people being able to carry out 3 million calculations per second,” ORNL says.

    via RT.

    Hell Yeah!!

    You all realize this is the Super Bowl of computers right?

  • Watch The Hope & The Change for Free

    Simply click here: http://www.hulu.com/watch/409925

    Common people use common sense to come to their own conclusion.

  • Dem Voter Fraud Already Begining in Ohio

    Two volunteer poll workers at an Ohio voting station told Human Events that they observed van loads of Ohio residents born in Somalia — the state is home to the second-largest Somali population in the United States — being driven to the voting station and guided by Democratic interpreters on the voting process. No Republican interpreters were present, according to these volunteers.  …

    A source, who wishes to remain anonymous, is a volunteer outside the Morse Road polling center. She has witnessed Somalis who cannot speak English come to the polling center. They are brought in groups, by van or bus. The Democrats hand them a slate card and say, “vote Brown all the way down.” Given that Sherrod Brown is the incumbent Democrat Senator in Ohio, one can assume that this is the reference.Non-English speaking voters may use an interpreter. The interpreters are permitted by law to interpret for the individual voting; however, they are forbidden from influencing their vote in any way. Another source who also wishes to remain anonymous has seen Democrat interpreters show the non-English speaking Somalis how to vote the Democrat slate that they were handed outside. According to this second source, there are not any Republican Somali interpreters available.  …

    According to the Somali Community Association of Ohio’s web site, over 45,000 Somalis live in Ohio. Only 40 percent have become citizens of the United States, and only 25 percent speak English well enough to get a job.The second source mentioned has seen voter intimidation at this same voting place. A Mitt Romney bus stopped near the voting center, approximately 30 Democrats who were outside handing out the slate cards rushed over to the bus. They yelled at the bus, and swarmed around its door when anyone attempted to exit the bus. This, from the “tolerant left.”

    via Human Events.

    No reason to wait until actual election day.  After all, Obama comes from Chicago where we’re all told to vote early and often.  No reason not to being stuffing the ballot box with illegal votes as soon as possible.

    Crazy… just crazy.

  • New Star Wars Film Coming In 2015

    Uh, Star Wars geeks enthusiasts? Brace yourselves for a double whammy.

    One: Disney has purchased Lucasfilm for a whopping $4.05 billion (yes, with a “b”). Which brings us to two: Stars Wars Episode VII is not only happening, but it has a release date for sometime in 2015.

    via E! Online.

    Excellent news.

     

  • Map of Chicago’s Shootings

    Over at the Chicago Sun-Times there is a very cool map of all the shootings and other mayhem in the city of Chicago.

    Go see for yourself.

  • More Dem on GOP Violence

    ALTA LOMA, CA — Someone keyed the word “Obama” into two cars and slashed seats in another outside a residence that had Mitt Romney campaign signs.

    via CBS Los Angeles.

    But wait, that’s not all you get:

    Racine, WI — Before the event could get under way, though, organizers say a truck affixed with “Obama” stickers drove through the parking lot and dumped quantities of nails.

    “We went outside and picked up what we could,” said Lou D’Abbraccio, holding a cup filled with nails. “But this was just wrong.”

    via Mount Pleasant.

     

     

  • British Terror Cell Wanted to Violate Sharia Law for AK-47s

    A British terror cell allegedly planned to buy five AK47 assault rifles by borrowing £100,000 in loans, a court heard.  …

    In one conversation recorded by the police the group are discussing how to obtain weapons.

    Naseer said that “out there in the market: “You can buy M16 you can buy AK.”

    He added: “You can get grenades, you know grenades? Fifteen hundred pounds for one grenade.”

    He said: “I’m trying to do that…take out loan.

    “Get about 100 grand then you get four five AK’s ready.”  …

    Naseer justified attacking non-believers because they have “sex like donkeys”, orgies and took drugs. He said: “They wanna you know have sex like donkeys on the street, they wanna club, act like animals and why shouldn’t we terrorise them, tell me that?”

    via Business Insider.

    Oh where to begin?

    For the record, I don’t believe anything about this story.  It’s just too over the top.  I’m a big believer that truth is stranger than fiction but rarely does it play out so perfectly; impossibly perfectly.  Anyway…

    It’s common knowledge that Sharia prohibits the fixed or floating payment or acceptance of specific interest or fees (known as riba, or usury) for loans of money.  So it makes me wonder how these Islamists were going to take a loan for the weapons.  Unless of course they are hypocrites.

    Next, what are they talking about buying these military grade weapons that are illegal in the UK, and in the US, and well just about everywhere?  How is this possible?  How can someone acquire something that is illegal?

    As for the donkeys, I’ll let you draw you’re own conclusions.