There service sucks and now people can legally jailbreak the iPhone. I expect hundreds of thousands of people will opt for this once their contract runs out. The monopoly power for AT&T is eroding, thank goodness.

A primary goal of parenting or teaching is to awaken the man within the child. It is to allow the child to grow in his independence. A parent or teacher is to come along the child as a helper, not a server. One who is served does not learn independence but impotence. The mother who feeds her child with a spoon but never allows the child use the spoon himself becomes a hindrance to the child’s natural desires to learn. She hinders the joy the child receives upon learning to do this simple task for himself. But a mother who helps her child creates opportunities for a child to do basic tasks for himself, praising him when done well. In this way the child also partakes in the joy of accomplishment and completes the task with joy.

Traditional discipline is “done well” when the child is rendered mute and motionless as a paralytic, obeying the will of the parent or teacher. The child obeys out of fear. A well disciplined child, on the other hand, though free to do as he likes, chooses actions agreeable to himself and to the community. Obedience comes from a deep respect for his parents, teacher, and for the other children. Discipline, for Maria, is not a fact but a way. There is only one rule to obey, be respectful of everyone and everything. The parent and teacher are to help the child by giving examples of proper social relations. They are to show how to properly interrupt someone who is busy or how to tell someone to move out of their way. To tell a child “no” without instructing how to properly accomplish their goals is to frustrate the child. A child does not inherently know what it means to be kind or respectful, he must be shown.

Damien Jurado has a new (promising) album.

http://www.saintbartlett.com/

1) Today is a great day to buy BP. I call bottom on this stock.
2) The DOW will drop to 8500 in the next month. I won’t be suprised if it goes even lower.

Something we can all agree with, I think.

The New Food Pessimism

Full Article:
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Well, it’s done. I just submitted my final exam for “Repair of Concrete Structures” and recently sat for my Structural Engineering 1 exam. Part 2 comes in October assuming I pass part 1 and the bureaucrat labyrinth named The State of Kansas approves of me in time.

It is time for a much needed break. And maybe I can get back to all the other things I used to love in life. Like cooking, tinkering, reading, and writing. As for the later, let me wet your appetite by saying that I’ve been thinking a lot about debt and risk on the bus in the mornings. There’s this book called “Black Swan” I hope to pick up soon. It is very much in the “Small is Beautiful” thread but with a twist. It’s written by a Statistician. Also, I need to say a few words about parenting, though I think I can learn a lot from those here.

Peace be with you.

There’s a petition going around to phase out the earnings tax in St. Louis and replace it, presumably, with a land tax. There was a debate on the issue on a local KC show, Up to Date. See the March 10th episode here: http://www.kcur.org/uptodate.html

“I must confess up front that I am not smart enough to reach any informed conclusion about the subject; the scientific debates exceed my poor knowledge by several orders of magnitude. But I would be very much surprised to learn that you could dump unnatural chemicals into the environment, or natural chemicals in unnatural amounts, and not have any effect. To expect nature to handle a chemical it has never seen, or to rebalance chemicals it has already balanced, is to expect too much of the natural order. Of this I am sure: The burden of proof must rest on the polluters. Those who wish to use the air, the rivers, the ocean, and the land as public dumps should be forced to demonstrate, on sound evidence, that it will do no harm. Those who would limit such dumping do not have to prove a thing, other than that such dumping is not natural; it is up to the dumpers to prove that nature can take it. ” – John Médaille

http://distributism.blogspot.com/2009/12/distributism-and-global-warming.html

Interesting post on Health Care Reform…

Honest Statism Beats a Fake “Free Market” Every Time – by Kevin Carson

“The point…is not that a socialized system is better than a private system. The point is that their honestly socialized system is better than our socialized corporate system masquerading as a “private” one.”

“Consider this [the public option] in light of the principles of dialectical libertarianism. A particular government measure is not to be evaluated on an atomistic basis, but in light of its contribution to the level of statism in the system of the whole. As Brad Spangler pointed out, when you’re held up at gunpoint the bagman who collects your money is just as much a robber as the guy holding your gun. The corporate bagmen who lobby for government intervention and profit from it are, therefore, part of the government. And when government intervenes to grant special privileges for nominally “private” actors, that is a net increase in statism. On the other hand, when a second government intervention qualifies or limits the exercise of this grant of privilege for the sake of ameliorating the worst effects of privilege, it is a net decrease in statism.”

Bravo to Elinor Ostrom, the first women to win the Nobel Prize in economics. Paul Romer offers these thoughts on her ideas – ideas that are very fitting to our discussions here.

Most economists think that they are building cranes that suspend important theoretical structures from a base that is firmly grounded in first principles. In fact, they almost always invoke a skyhook, some unexplained result without which the entire structure collapses. Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economics because she works from the ground up, building a crane that can support the full range of economic behavior. [...]

This man wrote classical music that moves me. I have always found classical music to be, well, old and not relevant to anything I cared much about. Either it smacks me as being overtly “pretty”, like a pottery barn catalog or a chick flick movie, or simply dated, like last year’s bestseller. Albeit, I’ve not listened to a lot of classical music. I’ve mostly just listened to “the classics”.

But this is different. Give him a try, if you’ve got the time.