Pete and Repeat

Pete and Repeat are twins who spent forty years working for the same boss in the same button factory.

No, its not a joke.

Each brother has a wife and 2.4 kids. They both earned the same amount each year and saved away part of it. One year ago they each had $1 million in a 401(k) invested 70% in stocks, 30% in bonds. At that point, after 64 years of doing everything the same, Pete retired and Repeat did not.

Conventional economic wisdom says that when you retire, you should establish a withdrawal rate and maintain that rate, adjusted for inflation, for the duration of your retirement. There has been some debate about how much can be safely withdrawn, without depleting your savings before you die.

Peter Lynch suggested a seven percent withdrawal rate from a 100% stock portfolio. Many studies show that Lynch's advice is very dangerous. A withdrawal rate that high is very likely to deplete your savings too fast. If the market declines for several years, a 7% withdrawal rate turns into a much higher rate, which can eat up principal to the point where you can never recover. Dollar cost averaging, which in the accumulation phase works in your favor by causing a fixed dollar amount to buy more shares when prices are down, works against you in distribution by causing you to sell more shares when prices are down, exactly the opposite of what you would like to do. Applying Lynch's formula to historical stock market results shows than in 41% of the cases, the investor would go broke within 25 years. Lynch was great at running mutual funds. Seems he's not so good as a financial advisor.

Today most research suggests an initial withdrawal rate between four and five percent.

When Pete retired one year ago, he decided to use a 4.5% withdrawal rate from his savings, giving him an income of $45,000. Not lavish, but enough to live comfortably. Over the past year, his retirement account has declined due to the drop in the stock market and the withdrawal of $45,000. Today Pete has $645,000. Following the standard procedure, he will adjust his income for inflation. This year he will take $46,575, or 7.22% of his nest egg.

Repeat kept working for one more year. His 401(k) also took a major hit. Instead of taking money out, Repeat added $5,000 more. He now has $685,000, or $40,000 more than his brother. Repeat retires, and using the standard 4.5% formula, he computes his safe withdrawal rate as $30,825.

Now take a look at the situation. Repeat has more money than Pete, but conventional methods of financial planning tell Pete to take about 50% more income than Repeat. Pete followed the cautious advice of the Trinity Study, but is now worse off than the reckless and discredited 7% withdrawal rate of Peter Lynch.

I'm going to suggest that they both have the entirely wrong way of looking at the problem. Conventional financial wisdom is way off the mark. It forces you to plan for a worst-case scenario, and if we have learned anything in the past year, it is that the worst case is far worse than we thought. The simplistic, one-size-fits-all approach may sell books and help brokers sign up clients, but putting your finances on autopilot is never a good plan. It is very important to consider events as they happen and adjust your plan accordingly.

When you retire, you must plan based on what you know at the time. But five years from now there is no reason to stick with a plan based only on what you knew five years ago. The failure to respond to market movements works against you both ways: it can cause you to go broke when the market drops, and it prevents you from benefiting from increases in the market. Pete, faced with a loss of a third of his investment assets, needs to reduce his withdrawals to avoid going broke. When the market recovers, Repeat will be stuck with his low income even if he could afford to increase it.

Every investment plan has risks. It is possible to mitigate some of the risks, diversify the risk, or trade one risk for another, but you can't eliminate risk altogether. The conventional method exposes the investor to the risk of going broke, leaving him with no means of support for his last years of life. Even the safest possible retirement plan, building a TIPS ladder, carries the risk of missing better opportunities.

A few years back I invented a method to deal with these issues.

My proposal trades the risk of going broke prematurely for the risk of a declining purchasing power, but also eliminates opportunity risk. In other words, you may have less income this year than you did last year, but it is guaranteed that you won't run out of money before the time you planned to.

There are several important decisions to make. First, you have to select the date when you will run out of money. The idea is to pick the closest date that you are comfortably certain you will never reach. Your 100th birthday might be reasonable. Another school of thought is to plan until your 90th birthday and just assume that if you last that long, your finances are someone else's problem.

The key concept is that we are going to divide up the money into a parcel for every month from now until the date you picked. If that date is 35 years from now, there will be 420 parcels. Each month you only touch the parcel for that month. The performance of the investments determines the actual value of that parcel, but regardless of what the stock market does, you have one parcel for every month. Short of a total worldwide economic collapse reducing the value of all investments to zero, you are guaranteed to have some income every month. Given average market returns you can expect to do better than the conventional method. In the case of somewhat below average results, you'll do about the same. If there is a prolonged market downturn, your income will be less than those using the conventional method, but when they go broke, you won't. And if the market excels, so do you.

Using Modern Portfolio Theory, we can design an asset allocation which maximizes return at a given level of risk, and over the long term it should be possible to outpace inflation. Therefore, the parcels should not all start out equal. The earlier parcels should have more, and the later parcels start out with less, because they are expected to grow over time. I'm not going into the math here, but if you want to see it, ask me. Essentially it comes down to this: each month you take a percentage of the total value of your portfolio as income, and the percentage increases over time in a predetermined way.

Another decision you must make involves the tradeoff between initial income and expected income growth. If you start with too much income early on, it is very likely that over time your purchasing power will decline as the income fails to keep up with inflation. With careful consideration it is possible to find a reasonable balance between current income and inflation hedge. Typically you can start with an income a bit higher than the conventional method allows with a high probability of maintaining purchasing power.

I found that it works well to use the monthly withdrawal to help keep the portfolio balanced by taking the money from the fund which is most above its target allocation. This helps to further counteract the reverse dollar cost averaging I discussed earlier. Because you are selling a certain percentage of the assets, you don't sell more shares when prices are down, and by selling the fund which is most above the target allocation, you naturally sell high. Funds which are underperforming relative to the rest of the portfolio will not be sold as often, giving them time to recover.

If Pete and Repeat had used this method, their results would be much more sensible. Instead of the large and inexplicable gap in their incomes, with problems looming in Pete's future, both would have similar incomes proportional to their portfolio value, and they would have the security of knowing exactly how long that income would last.

Meet Al Franken

The man who is handing BO a veto-proof Senate.

Statist Indoctrination Centers

Last night a friend told me that his son came home from school and announced that the swine flu outbreak is caused by our lack of government-run health care. He knows because his 10th grade social studies teacher says so.

So let's get this straight:

Here is what you know if you go to a government-run school:

• Flu outbreaks are caused by not having government health care

And here is what you don't know if you go to a government-run school:

• The Constitution and Bill of Rights
  
• How to locate the United States on a map
• What we can learn from history
  
• How to think critically
• Why the Federalist Papers are important
  
• How to express an idea in a grammatically correct sentence
• The significance of America's Christian heritage
  
• Math

So what makes anyone believe that government would do better with health care than they do with education?

Best cities for jobs

Forbes Magazine recently published their 2009 ratings for job markets in different cities. The results were rather remarkable.

Texas cities held all 5 top spots on the ranking of large cities. Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin were the five best cities in the nation to find a good job.

On the list of mid-sized cities, Texas held two of the top ten spots.

Texas towns held half of the top ten slots for small cities.

The overall list which included cities of all sizes was not much different. Texas held seven of the top ten slots. With 8% of the nation's population, Texas grabbed 70% of the space in the ranking of the best job markets. It's just not fair.

To find any sign of the big liberal Meccas of New York or California, you have to search down to location fifty, where Bakersfield California makes the state's only showing in the top 100. New York doesn't make the list until position 90, where tiny Ithaca pops its head up. New York City is at at location 95 and Los Angeles is ranked an abysmal 279th.

Texas must be doing something right.

If high taxes and intrusive government was a winning proposition, California and New York ought to be dominating Texas.

A bit of perspective

How to save the housing market

The collapse of the housing bubble triggered the snowballing events which landed us into the current economic situation. Politicians have been trying all of the standard methods to prop up the market: tax incentives, artificially lowering mortgage rates, and throwing billions of tax dollars at the problem. These approaches have proven to be insufficient to put a floor under housing prices.

Current projections suggest that home values may fall another 10% before the end of 2010, so the pain is not over yet.

Economist Gary Shilling has an outside-the-box idea which might be far more effective, at no cost to the taxpayer.

Instead of stop-gap approaches, focus on the root of the problem: the current oversupply of houses. The housing bubble of 1996-2006 produced a surplus of 6.7 million homes. Shilling estimates that 3.9 million of those were making up for underbuilding during the S&L collapse in 1987-1991. Reduced building over the past two years has compensated for another half-million extra homes. That leaves a surplus of 2.4 million homes today.

In other situations when a glut of certain kinds of farm produce was driving prices down, the government has paid farmers to not produce certain crops. The analogous action for the current situation would be for the government to buy houses and demolish them. This would certainly alleviate the surplus of houses, but it would not be productive use of tax dollars.

Shilling has a much more sensible idea. If we open up our borders to legal immigrants who can buy homes, the housing surplus can be absorbed, resulting in the stabilization of housing prices. A million immigrants in 2009 and a million more in 2010 should go a long way to rebuilding the foundation of our housing market.

Buy a home. Save America. Become a citizen.

Sounds good to me.

But do you pay yours?

Some tax facts

The Declaration of Independence contains 1,337 words.

The Gettysburg Address was 269 words.

The King James translation of the Bible contains roughly 773,000 words.

Compare that to the Federal Tax Code, which last year exceeded 8 million words in length.

Every year the IRS sends out 8 billion pages of forms and instructions, killing more than 100,000 trees.

There are now more than 600 different tax forms.

Even the 1040 EZ "simple" form comes with 33 pages of instructions.

It is estimated that taxpayers spend $200 billion and 5.4 billion hours each year complying with Federal tax laws and completing their tax returns.

The IRS employees 114,000 people, four times as many as the FBI.

The average two-income family pays 39% of their earnings to the government in Federal, State, and local taxes.

The annual tax burden consumes every dime Americans earn from January 1 until April 13.

Gangbanger wannabe

Here is me as a gangbanger wannabe. You can find these guys all over myspace. They got the hat turned backwards and the stoopud gang signs. And they try to look all bad with their gun turned sideways like they saw it in some brainless action movie. And of course there is the dumb expression on the face that just begs you to go smack the little twit upside the head. So what I want to know is why someone would wanna be a gangbanger? What is the least bit appealing about any of that? Yo, wazzup wit dat, cuz?

In the dark

I'm not sure what the big deal about today's "Earth Hour" was. I mean, being in the dark is nothing new for a liberal.

Gratulations Conresswomun

I don't even know what to say.

Essential movies

Yesterday, Yahoo Movies released their list of 100 Movies to See Before You Die. They are careful to make the point that their criteria went beyond the entertainment value, commercial success, or awards earned by each movie to assess the cultural and historical importance of each movie.

They avoided the most common trap of focusing too much on recent movies. With 76 of the films made before 1980, they acknowledge what we already knew: they don't make them like they used to.

Naturally, no two people will ever agree on such a list. They were not far off on a lot of their picks, but some titles just don't belong there, and other very deserving films are omitted.

These are some of the titles from their list which I agree with completely:

Casablanca
Chinatown
Double Indemnity
Dr. Strangelove
Lawrence of Arabia
Schindler's List
Shawshank Redemption
Vertigo

But these films don't merit inclusion:

Alien
Blue Velvet
Breathless
Die Hard
Do the Right Thing
Enter the Dragon
The Exorcist
Goldfinger
The Graduate
Groundhog Day
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
National Lampoon's Animal House
Princess Mononoke
Terminator 2
Titanic
When Harry Met Sally
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

But where was "North by Northwest", Hitchcock's film which set the bar for the mystery adventure comedy?

And why was "A Witness for the Prosecution", one of the all-time great courtroom drama mysteries, not included.

"Laura" is a definitive film in the hardboiled detective genre.

Other films which deserve inclusion more than those listed above are:

The Adventures of Robin Hood
The Big Sleep
Notorious
Dial "M" for Murder
Taxi Driver
Rebecca
Pan's Labyrinth

In Memory

If I were the devil...

I would gain control of the most powerful nation in the world;

I would delude their minds into thinking that they had come from man's effort, instead of God's blessings;

I would promote an attitude of loving things and using people, instead of the other way around;

I would dupe entire states into relying on gambling for their state revenue;

I would convince people that character is not an issue when it comes to leadership;

I would make it legal to take the life of unborn babies;

I would make it socially acceptable to take one's own life, and invent machines to make it convenient;

I would cheapen human life as much as possible so that the life of animals are valued more than human beings;

I would take God out of the schools, where even the mention of His name was grounds for a lawsuit;

I would come up with drugs that sedate the mind and target the young, and I would get sports heroes to advertise them;

I would get control of the media, so that every night I could pollute the mind of every family member for my agenda;

I would attack the family, the backbone of any nation.

I would make divorce acceptable and easy, even fashionable. If the family crumbles, so does the nation;

I would compel people to express their most depraved fantasies on canvas and movie screens, and I would call it art;

I would convince the world that people are born homosexuals, and that their lifestyles should be accepted and marveled;

I would convince the people that right and wrong are determined by a few who call themselves authorities and refer to their agenda as politically correct;

I would persuade people that the church is irrelevant and out of date, and the Bible is for the naive;

I would dull the minds of Christians, and make them believe that prayer is not important, and that faithfulness and obedience are optional;

If I were the devil, I guess I would leave things pretty much the way they are.

By Paul Harvey
August 16, 1999

Introducing Obama Inc

Read news the way the mainstream media wouldn't dare to tell it: not factual but entirely true. Introducing Obama Inc.

More fractals

Several people asked about the fractal I posted last week, so I'll post a few more, even though this is somewhat off topic for this blog. These are images of the Mandelbrot Set, which is a generating function involving imaginary numbers. It just takes a few lines of code to generate the image, but the detail in the image is limitless. This means that you can zoom in on one portion of the image and find more detail. My program allows the user to select a rectangle with the mouse, and then zooms in on that rectangle. Here is the top level of the Mandelbrot Set.


Here are other views, zoomed in closely to different parts of the Mandelbrot Set. Remember that you can click on any image to see it in full resolution.























If anyone would like to try this program out, I'll give you a copy. It's kind of fun in a geeky sort of way.

Fiscal responsibilty?

BO's staged "Summit on Fiscal Responsibility" and his whining about the deficit he "inherited" from President Bush are losing more credibility every day. The irony of claiming to follow a "pay as you go" policy days after signing a $787 billion pork spending bill that will still be accruing interest when our grandkids are footing the bill was overshadowed when BO proposed a budget with a $1.75 trillion deficit.

For Democrats and other mathematically challenged in-duh-viduals, that is a quadrupling of the previous record deficit. In a single year the government will go $5,800 further into debt for every man, woman, and child in America, making BO the most reckless money waster in history. If he wants to waste his own money, I'm fine with that, but he is wasting our future and the futures of generations not even born yet.

BO proposes a myriad of tax increases to go along with his spending binge. He admits that these taxes will not pay for everything he wants to spend, which is not surprising. According to CBO figures, even if he taxed 100% of all income over $75,000 it would not pay for all of his spending proposals.

I'm sure you were relived to hear that only people earning more than $250,000 would be affected by BO's tax hike. If I doubled my income tomorrow I wouldn't be close to that, and unlike the President I cannot confiscate other people's earnings by fiat. But these 2% of the highest earners in America who BO loves to demonize are the people who make our economy work. They already pay more taxes than the remaining 98% of us put together. They own businesses and invest in wealth-creating enterprises which create jobs and generate prosperity that benefits everyone.

If you think that BO's massive tax grab will not affect you, think again. His budget includes a mammoth energy tax, which he estimates will generate $650 billion. Do you drive a car? Ride in a bus, train or airplane? Do you use electricity? Do you rely on natural gas to heat your home? Do you buy groceries? This tax will hit you hard. BO's $13 per week tax cut won't go far to offset the $1.30/gallon jump in gas prices or the doubling of your electric bill.

Another horrendous proposal is eliminating itemized deductions for those evil people who earn more than $250k. Those same people who create most of the jobs and prosperity in this country and pay most of the taxes also give more to charity than anyone else. Private charity groups who work in our communities and around the world to help people in need will be pounded mercilessly by this tax hike, and it won't be the rich who are punished, as BO suggests. The United Way, March of Dimes, Feed the Children, Salvation Army, American Cancer Society, World Vision, and hundreds of others will see contributions plummet. I believe that this is entirely intentional, as BO wants to be the sole benevolent benefactor with as many people as possible dependent on him for their subsistence.

The most insidious tax of all is being levied on us all right now, without any legislation passed by Congress or signed by the President. It is a tax on the value of our currency. In the past few months, the US Treasury has fired up the printing presses to a record rate and flooded the economy with money created out of thin air. The money supply, which had been growing at a fairly steady rate of six or seven percent a year for decades, was nearly tripled in just a few months, and even more is on the way to pay for more bailouts and the porkulus bill. With three times as much money chasing the same amount of available goods and services, rampant inflation is sure to set in as soon as people start spending money again. Right now, people are fearfully hoarding money, due in large part to BO's gloom and doom rhetoric and dire predictions of the catastrophe awaiting is we don't immediately rush his harebrained agenda through which is destroying what shreds of consumer confidence were left. This demagoguery ensures that the economy will not recover in the short term, which is fine with BO, who wants to take full advantage of the situation to seize as much power as possible and entrench countless new entitlements and government bureaucracies while people are gripped with the urgency of a crisis mentality. But when all of the newly created money starts to move again, inflation will hammer the purchasing power of your savings and income. This hidden tax will hit everyone, not just the evil rich people. In fact, those people who are having trouble affording the basic necessities right now will feel the effects the most, when the price for food, clothing, electricity, gas, and rent all skyrocket.

Is this the change people voted for? If BO had campaigned on a platform of quadrupling the deficit, taxing the life out of private charity, sending energy costs sky high, and decimating the value of the dollar, would he have been elected? BO is betting his Presidency, his re-election, and his legacy on big government socialism. History says that is a losing bet.

My rotary phone won't dial that site

I'm gonna dial up the VP's web site as soon as I get my modem hooked up to my TV.
Maybe we should get Al Gore, the inventor of the internet to help with this.

The Skeleton in my Closet

Everyone has their own skeleton in the closet. You know what I am talking about. It's that dark secret from your past that you hope to take to the grave with you. It is the horrific event from your past you would never tell even your closest friends, because you are sure they would recoil in disgust and never speak to you again. It is the thing that they dig up when you decide to run for public office to ruin your chances of being elected.

Everyone has one, and right here on this blog, I am going to share mine with you. I am not really sure why I chose to reveal myself in such a public way. Perhaps I hope that the catharsis will purge my soul of the burden of this awful truth. Maybe I just want to defuse the story so that when the media gets ahold of it, it will not ruin my presidential bid. Or could it be that I hope that you will learn from my tale of woe, and change your ways before it is too late for you.

Consider yourself warned. What follows is of a highly offensive and explicit nature. If you are squeamish, read no further. If you don't wish to have your opinion of me shaken, stop now. You have been warned.

And now, without further ado, the skeleton in my closet, the dark undisclosed secret from my past now brought out into the light, the most shameful episode from the hidden recesses of my memory: I went to high school with two members of the Dixie Chicks.

There. I said it. It is out in the open. I'm not sure which word I am more deeply ashamed of: "Dixie" or "Chicks". Or maybe it is their music. Or perhaps their tendency to insert their foot firmly in their mouth. In any case, if you no longer wish to associate with me, I completely understand. But I feel so much better. They say that confession is good for the soul.

A plan for our future

I was talking to my friend Jim Pannell yesterday, and he had a brilliant idea.

We should split the country in half and give half to the whiny bleeding heart commie pinkos who voted for BO, and give the other half to the real Americans who didn't. We've tried dividing the country north and south, and that didn't work too well, so I think that east and west would work better. We'll give the left half of the country to the lefties. That works out well, because most of them have already gone to California anyway, and they are welcome to it. There are quite a few in New England who will have to move west, but they can deal with it. New Jersey will be deserted, because conservatives sure don't want it.

The left coast can be ruled by BO and all of his czars. He's got a czar for everything, so there should be plenty of czars to go around. We will elect a President and restore the long-lost relic of Constitutional government. Both countries can govern themselves as they see fit. The left coast, which will most likely decide to call themselves "The People's Republic of BO" will soon be owned entirely by the government, and their citizens won't know how badly the government is botching everything because the kids graduating from government schools won't know how to add. They will have no military and no prisons because the government budget will go entirely to socialized medicine, funding abortion, government housing projects, poetry readings, condom distribution in preschool, replacing cars with mule carts, gay pride parades, carbon credits, and racial sensitivity training. Because all of the productive and educated citizens are on the east coast, within a year they will have reverted to a medieval existence.

Meanwhile, the east coast will be called "America" and will revive a lost form of government called a "Democratic Republic" based on a forgotten document, "The Constitution." We will have a low tax rate and a non-intrusive government whose primary purpose is to protect the fundamental rights of its citizens. When criminals notice that America has prisons and an effective legal system, they will all move west. America's citizens, unbridled and free from excessive taxation, over-regulation, and absurd union demands, will flourish with innovation and productivity, as the engine of capitalism creates an abundance of wealth that anyone with ambition and determination can share in. America will have a strong military and will trade freely with any nation that respects human freedom.

After three or four years, America will invade PRBO and take it back. They won' t have a military, electricity, internal combustion engines, the will to fight, or any freedom to defend, so it will require about a dozen guys with BB guns. We will be greeted as liberators.

The Fox and the Hen House

Today when I saw that BO is staging a "Summit" to come up with a plan to achieve fiscal responsibility, I spewed a mouthful of scalding coffee all over my computer terminal.

After all, this is the guy who, just last week, promoted and then signed Nancy Pelosi's massive pork bill spending money we don't have on things we don't need. And this week he is concerned about fiscal responsibility? His claim that we are going to "Pay as we go" was pretty much blown last week.

His game plan is to bring in 75 "experts", primarily Democrat special interest groups and left-wing think tanks, put them in a room, send them off in groups with the assignment of devising a plan to cut the deficit in half in four years. I'm not sure if the baseline for that halving was last year's $450 billion deficit or this year's trillion dollar deficit (and counting).

It all sounded pretty ludicrous until I stopped and pondered exactly what BO is trying to accomplish. You see, when I think about fiscal responsibility, it means that you control spending to live within your means. This is what fiscal responsibility means to conservatives, and it is how most real people must live their lives. We can't spend more than we bring in year after year, or eventually we end up in a lot of trouble. So if we have a deficit, the problem is that we are spending too much money, and the solution is to spend less.

But BO's spending frenzy proves that controlling spending is not what he has in mind here. Liberals have a whole different way of looking at things. If the government is running a deficit, it means that they are not taxing us enough, and the solution is to raise taxes. The idea of reducing spending to balance the budget is heresy to a liberal, whose personal empowerment comes from his ability to take our money and dole it out to those who will ensure that he remains in power.

So the purpose of this contrived political theater is to make an excuse for BO's plan to raise taxes much higher and more broadly than he told us in the campaign. The conclusion that this anti-capitalist crowd of union bosses, environmental wackos, community organizers, gay rights activists, ACORN nuts, left-wing professors, liberal politicians, and fringe think tanks reaches will surely not be that we need to reduce government spending. They will conclude that the only course of action is to raise taxes. And who is the President to disagree. He'll go along with their recommendations. After all, that's what the experts said to do.

Loose lips

Where I work we often have to deal with classified information, which is a big responsibility because the lives of many Americans depends on keeping that information secure. Our briefings instructing us on how to handle such sensitive information stress that we must never confirm or deny any statements from which classified data could be inferred. The fact that such data has been printed in the newspaper is not relevant.

It seems that Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, never got that briefing.

Feinstein answered a reporter's question about the location of our Predator drones by saying, “As I understand it, these are flown out of a Pakistani base.”

Her defense for offering this highly sensitive information was just repeating what she had read in the newspaper. I'm not buying it. First of all, she didn't say "The newspaper said they were flown out of Pakistan." She cited her own understanding, and she is in a position to know for sure. There is a huge difference between making an allegation in a local paper and having the chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence confirm it.

Feinstein's ill-considered blabbermouthing didn't go over well in Pakistan. “The Drones Are Here!” proclaimed the Pakistan Daily Times. This places Islamabad in an uncomfortable situation, though the government issued a swift and unequivocal denial. Who can blame them?

Fighting an intelligence-based war such as the one in Afghanistan requires a great deal of discretion, and a trusting relationship with friendly nations in the area is critical. In one thoughtless moment, Feinstein blew that trust. Not only will blowing the cover on this operation endanger the cooperation we have gotten from the Zardari government and make Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke's job that much harder, it will also endanger our drones, which are now sure to be a high-priority target for al Qaeda.

The Democrats are showing again that they are simply not ready for prime time in fighting the war on terror.

Fractal

Several years ago I wrote a program to generate Mandelbrot Set fractal images. You can zoom in on any area of the image, revealing infinite complexity. I hadn't looked at it for a long time, but today I was just messing around with it and found this interesting view. No real significance, just here for your viewing pleasure. Click on the picture to see it in full resolution.

In the news

• Police made an arrest in the January murder of Plano resident Sherlock Holmes. When asked what had helped to crack the case, police detective Lt. Watson responded that it was “elementary”.
  
• A bank robber who disguised himself as a woman to hold up a bank last week was arrested. He looks forward to his new notoriety in the prison yard, where he is known as “The Drag Queen Bandit”.
  
• Barack Obama said that “all sides had to compromise” to reconcile the House and Senate versions of his huge pork handout bill. The President cited the $500 per person tax cut which he promised in the campaign as something he had given up. Congress scaled it back to $400. Biting his lip in a fashion reminiscent of BJ Clinton, BO said, “It’s a sacrifice for me, but I’ll just have to live with the fact that for the foreseeable future you’ll all have to keep sending me that hundred dollars a year.”
  
• When two BO appointees were withdrawn for ethical reasons concerning their failure to pay more than a hundred thousand dollars in taxes, reporters asked if another tax cheat, Tim Geithner, would keep his job as head of the IRS. BO responded, “The American people are tired of hearing this same partisan bickering. We need to get back to the important business we came here to do: attacking rich people for failing to pay their fair share.”

Why the outrage?

I got an email from a co-worker about a certain actress who went on an anti-Jesus rant in her Emmy acceptance speech. She said that "A lot of people get up here and thank Jesus for this award. I want you to know that nothing had less to do with this award than Jesus." She went on to tell Jesus to "Suck it". The email encouraged Christians to boycott her show.

Now I had never heard of this particular actress or the show for which she won an Emmy, and I wouldn't watch the show even if she had gotten up there and recited the Lord's Prayer, so saying that I am boycotting the show would be pretty pointless. Even so, I don't see any reason to be outraged by what she said. Her statement is no different from what every person on earth, starting with Adam, has said to God.

Every person thinks that their own way is better than God's way. This belief is based on the lie that God's law is intended to deprive us of something good. God's law is based in His love for us and His way results in every blessing. Adam's sin was much deeper than the act of eating a piece of fruit. He was rejecting God's way, which leads to life, and asserting his independence to follow his own way, which leads to pain, destruction, and death. Each one of us has followed in that same pattern, telling God that we don't need Him, we can do better on our own, and He can "Suck it." That act of defiance to God is responsible for all the evil in the world. We can't say that we don't deserve it because we choose it. Blaming God for the consequences of our rebellion against Him makes no sence at all.

The fact is that God would have been completely justified in leaving us to self-destruct, and then say, "I told you so" as we enter eternity seperated from Him. But He didn't. Knowing full well that this actress would look Him in the face and tell him to "Suck it", Jesus, God in human flesh, loved her so much that He gave His life to save her. She has been offered the most precious gift imaginable that she could never deserve or earn, but she rejects His forgiveness and tells Him to "Suck it." Rather than outrage, that makes me incredibly sad for her.

While you're at it, buy me a kitchen

In last night's press conference did you see that woman who, back in October, was gushing about how BO was going to buy her gas and pay for her house? She showed up again, wondering where her freebies are, and asking him to throw in a new car and a kitchen as well. After all, he's been in office for three weeks, so what's the holdup? Ok, maybe it was not the same woman. BO drones all share the pathetic stupidity of expecting the government to take care of all of their problems.

Now any reasonable person would have taken the opportunity to clear up some common misperceptions. In America if you want to improve your situation you go get educated, develop some marketable skills, work your tail off, and earn your own way. But BO didn't tell her that. He told her to talk to his staff and they'll see what they can do.

BO's vision of America is of a place where all good things come from government. The financial crisis is a result of government, and the solution is a massive expansion of government. Health care can only be accomplished by another massive expansion of government. And if you want to remodel your kitchen, talk to the President's staff.

Going against the flow

In the past four months there has been a record movement of funds inside 401(k) and IRA retirement accounts out of stock funds into "safe" bonds or money market funds. This move didn't happen before the plunge in stock prices of September, when it would have avoided the huge losses. Instead people sold their stock at the low price, essentially locking in the loss and missing the chance to take part in the recovery. The Hewitt Associates 401(k) Index indicates that in each of the last four months of 2008, 401(k) participants transferred nearly a billion dollars out of equities and into fixed income investments.

If you had moved your money out of stocks last summer, I would congratulate you on your unusual foresight. I've given up on trying to predict short-term stock market fluctuations years ago. Most people who try that game end up losing. In the ten years from 1998 to 2007, the S&P 500 returned 11.81% annually. "Safe" Treasury Bills returned 4.53%. The average 401(k) account returned 4.48%. People who try to "beat the market" or avoid down markets consistently do worse than they could do with a simple "buy and hold" discipline.

Today people are still doing the wrong thing. Two years ago there was a general agreement that stocks were a good buy, when stocks were priced at about $15 per dollar of earnings. Today stocks are "on sale" in search of buyers, with the price discounted to $9 per dollar of earnings. If stocks were a good buy at $15, shouldn't they be an even better buy at $9? I think so.

It is a mathematical certainty that $100 invested in stocks today will return more in the future than $100 invested two years ago. Historical data also supports my claim that today is a prime buying opportunity. Steven Leuthold studied the returns of stock bought at different valuation levels. He divided the initial price per earnings into deciles. Stocks bought in the top 10% of P/E lost 1.3% on average over the next five years, while stocks bought in the lowest 10% of valuations returned 19.3% annually, on average.

This should not come as a surprise to anyone who has heard the motto: Buy low, sell high.

Right now stocks are well below the average price per dollar of earnings. According to Leuthold, stocks bought at our current level of valuation have historically returned 14.1% over the next five years. Admittedly, it will take a majority of that upswing to recover the loss from the last year, but if you flee to safety now, you won't ever recover those losses.

"Buy low, sell high" is easy to understand but very hard to do, mainly because it requires that we not join in with the mania of the day. When everyone is abuzz about the killing they made in the latest craze, be it internet stocks, real estate, or tulip bulbs, remember that someone is going to be stuck with those when the bubble bursts, and you don't want to be that person. On the other end of the spectrum, when things look grim and the outlook for the future is doom and gloom as far as the eye can see, the emotional response is to get out. When you go with the flow you will always buy high and sell low.

Nathan Rothschild once said to "buy when the blood is running in the streets." But to actually do that requires a really strong stomach. In the late 1990's, people were buying up internet stocks, tech stocks, and telecom stocks with no regard for the fundamental value of the companies they were buying. The price per earnings of companies like Lucent Technologies soared as high as $300. Other companies were snatched up at even higher prices, and their P/E could not be calculated because they had no earnings. At the same time, the Asian stock market was in the tank, making today's S&P 500 look rosy by comparison. The Japanese index was down 80% in one year. Today Lucent no longer exists and most of the "internet" stocks are worthless, but investors who bought Japanese stock that year were rewarded with an average return of 21% annually for the next ten years.

So I am resolutely doing nothing. My retirement savings, what is left of them, are staying right where they are, and each week I continue to contribute eight percent of my paycheck to my 401(k), invested primarily in the same diversified assortment of stocks I have used for years. I am counting on a principle which has held true in the past: I don't know if today's stock price is high or low compared to tomorrow or next month, but it is certainly low compared to 2036, when I plan to start selling.

Porkulus

I've been saying for a couple of weeks that BO's "stimulus" bill is little more than a huge barrel of pork handed out to his key Democrat special interest groups. Here is a rundown of all the stuff in the bill, very little of which creates real jobs or boosts the economy. A quarter of a billion dollars for film for Hollywood? $850 million for Amtrak? The bill is filled with wealth transfer programs, funding for various departments of the government, and loads of money to unviable "green energy" research which is likely to never amount to anything. In addition, the bill will transfer $79 billion from states who worked to balance their budget to states that didn't. In other words, from states run responsibly by Republicans to those run into the ground by Democrats.

Dead middle

The Brady Campaign just released their "State Scorecard Ranking" which rates each state's gun control laws based on which "sensible gun control laws" they implement. States can curry favor with Sarah Brady by restricting the sale of ugly or cheap weapons, by requiring various ridiculous gadgets be sold along with guns, by allowing cities to hold gun makers liable for shooting deaths, and by limiting, delaying, licensing, registering, and recording gun sales.

It is no surprise that The People's Republic of Kalifornia ranks first, with the most oppressive laws restricting your Second Amendment right to bear arms. Those liberal utopias of New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland, New York, Rhode Island, Hawaii, Illinois, and Pennsylvania round out the top ten.

I was surprised to find where Texas, with it's wild west image, ranks on the list: Dead middle. We are tied with Vermont, Wyoming, and South Carolina for 27th. Indiana, Georgia, Kansas, Arizona, Missouri, Florida, and 15 other states all have more freedom than Texas.

Come on Texas, we can do better. Texas law does not permit licensed citizens who have undergone training and background checks to carry a concealled weapon on a college campus, even though they can carry it in most other public places. Employers are also allowed to ban the transport of a legally-owned firearm in the employee's car in the parking lot, which effectively forces the employee to travel to and from work without the protection of a firearm. The employer does not assume the liability for the safety of their disarmed employees. Why, in Texas of all places, is the government ensuring that criminals have access to large groups of disarmed targets?

Let your state lawmakers know that we can do better in these areas. Even better, exercise your rights by owning a handgun, knowing how to use it, getting a CHL, and joining GOA.

Love America, not the tumor

The left is in a tizzy about Rush Limbaugh daring to say something that I said a few days earlier: I hope that President Obama fails. They are out in full force, smelling blood in the water, DNC talking points telling them to attack conservative's patriotism. Frank Schaeffer starts out with a particularly absurd statement: both Limbaugh and Al-Qaeda want BO to fail. So Al-Qaeda hopes we stay in Iraq and keep killing their suicide bombers in droves. Obama bin Biden (oops, Freudian slip, I meant Osama bin Laden) is crossing his fingers and praying to Allah that BO fails to weaken America? Al-Qaeda operatives are lining up for waterboarding at Gitmo? It would just make the terrorist's day if we learned of their plans for mass carnage by listening in on their phone calls to terror cells operating in America, captured them and threw away the key? They are just begging for more bombs and less talk? If anyone is cheering for BO to succeed, it is Al-Qaeda.

I want BO to fail for the same reason that I want Al-Qaeda to fail: they are both seeking to do harm to America.

The liberal mantra that it is unpatriotic to oppose their messiah is based on the basic liberal fallacy that America's government is America and therefore love of country requires love of the government and everything that it does. I love America because it is the world's protector of freedom and liberty and a land of endless opportunity for every person. I respect the Constitution which protects those principles by limiting government's power to prevent it from becoming tyrannical, and I owe a huge debt of gratitude to our military which fights to establish and defend freedom and liberty, both for America and for others.

To illustrate this dichotomy, let me tell you about a family I know at my Church. Their little daughter, Tory, has neuroblastoma, a form of cancer which attacks the brain and central nervous system. Her father, a pastor from Ukraine, brought her to Fort Worth for treatment. Having talked with Tory's mother and father I can tell you that they deeply love their daughter. They also hate the cancer that is choking the life out of her. They have gone through many rounds of chemotherapy and surgery to remove the cancer. It is a painful process and sometimes it takes Tory right to the edge of death.

You could say that they hope the cancer fails.

So does that mean that they hate their daughter? Of course not! They love their daughter and therefore they hate the cancer that is killing her.

In the same way I hate the tumors of liberalism, of runaway government spending, of egalitarianism and collectivism, of socialism which chokes the life out of economies and kills freedom, of the soft tyranny which looks to government as the solution to every problem and justifies crippling taxation as necessary to achieve equality of outcome. I hate the cancer of all BO stands for because I love my country and I can't stand by and let the cancer run its disastrous course. BO is not America and their fates are not synonymous. I want BO's Presidency to fail because that is the only way that America can succeed.

Media in the Tank

We all have known for a long time that the media is way off the liberal deep end. The New York Times, Newsweek Magazine, CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC, etc. are completely, one hundred percent in the tank for BO. So the recent news coverage is nothing surprising, but it does provide further confirmation, as if we needed any.

These t-shirts being hocked on CNN, presumably to make up for sagging revenues from their plunging audience numbers, are a prime example. The one pictured above features the headline from their gushing video of inauguration day, filled with people overcome with emotion by the wonderfulness of having another big-government liberal president.

If this one isn't enough to make you puke, there are plenty more:

• This is America happening
• Obama's era of change arrives
• Obama fever goes global as hopes rise
• 44th president is a 1st for the nation
• Obama's moment arrives
• Obama: It's time to remake America
• Change comes to Washington
• Obama: 'We have chosen hope'
• 'This is my moment too,' witness says
• Obama makes history
• Cheers great Obama on parade route
• One dad sees MLK's dream in Obama
• Lovey-dovey first couple melts hearts
• A long way since Jim Crow, Powell says
• Inaugural tickets hot, hot, hot
• Obama inspires historic victory
• Obama fever spreads around the world

You know, there is medicine for that fever.

Noticeably absent are:

"Obama shreads the Constitution"

"Obama weakens America"

"Obama capitulates to terrorists"

"Obama funds infanticide"

"Media reveals bias"

But do not fear, I am here to take up the slack. Right now on Zazzle.com you can find the missing headline tshirts. Don't miss your chance to buy a piece of history!

Cutting poor babies stimulates economy

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told ABC News’ George Stephanapolous Sunday that the Democrat’s economic stimulus bill, containing hundreds of millions of dollars for “family planning” services for the poor, will make real cuts in the number of low-income people, thereby saving taxpayer dollars, and increasing average income for everyone.

“Poor people are a luxury we just can’t afford,’ said Rep. Pelosi, “They cost us a lot of money to maintain; what with food stamps, housing and health care. So if we can rapidly reduce the number of poor people through contraception and abortion, that’s a net gain for federal and state budgets, and a fast track to economic recovery. Every poor baby prevented is like money in the bank.”

A spokesman for Planned Parenthood, the world’s leading abortion sales chain, confirmed Mrs. Pelosi’s assertion, noting that “even if the stimulus bill helps harvest only the low-hanging fruit by reducing live births among blacks and hispanics, that would be a major boost, since minorities comprise nearly 50 percent of those on Medicaid.”

Planned Parenthood continues to lobby Congressional Democrats and the Obama administration to include even more funding in the stimulus bill for better marketing efforts to attract minority women who have not yet considered abortion as “a viable lifestyle choice.”

“Despite our best efforts to date,” the source said, “only 1-in-5 pregnancies ends in abortion. We need the marketing money to spur growth in what we call our frequent-flier segment. Blacks make up only about 13 percent of the population, yet they have 40 percent of the abortions. We still think there’s real upside potential there.”

The spokesman added that, “Planned Parenthood, since its inception, has been the Sam’s Club of abortions for minority communities. We keep the product cheap so our customers can buy in large quantities. What we lose in profit per procedure we more than make up for in volume. Of course, our work also helps reduce racial tensions by adhering to time-tested Darwinian principles.”

So sorry to win

Yesterday The Covenant School of Dallas fired its girls basketball coach, Micah Grimes, because he would not apologize to Dallas Academy for his team's 100-0 victory.

On the coach's web site he posted a statement saying, "I respectfully disagree with the apology, especially the notion that the Covenant School girls basketball team should feel 'embarrassed' or 'ashamed,' " part of the post says. "We played the game as it was meant to be played and would not intentionally run up the score on any opponent. Although a wide-margin victory is never evidence of compassion, my girls played with honor and integrity and showed respect to Dallas Academy."

When the score was 25-0 three minutes into the game, the coach instructed the players to not play a full-court press. In the second quarter he put in his bench players. The winning team made only four 3-point shots, three of them in the first quarter. The coach noted the quarter-by-quarter score: 35, 24, 29, 12.

Covenant School headmaster Kyle Queal announced the firing, saying "It is always good to spread the points around." He suggested a new "athletic justice" rule to take points from winning teams and award them to losing teams.

No word yet on when we can expect an apology from the Dallas Academy coach for stinking so bad.

Money wiz can't figure taxes

Today BO's financial wiz-kid blamed his failure to pay $33,500 in payroll taxes on Turbo Tax, a software package used successfully by 18 million average citizens every year.

Tim Geithner, BO's nominee for Treasury Secretary, said that Turbo Tax didn't tell him that he needed to pay social security and medicare taxes on his self-employment income, and the man slated to run the IRS said that he had no clue that he was supposed to pay those taxes.

Earlier he stated that failing to pay these taxes was "a common mistake". BO echoed this claim, saying, “It is an innocent mistake. It is a mistake that’s commonly made for people who are working internationally or for international institutions. It has been corrected. He’s paid the penalties.” However, the ethics department at the International Monetary Fund, the source of his untaxed income, found that only one of the 1,800 other IMF employees failed to report their income and pay the required taxes.

BO is unshaken in his conviction that Geithner is the man for the job, “My expectation is that Tim Geithner will be confirmed. And my expectation is that he is going to do an outstanding job on behalf of the American people.”

Senator Lindsey Graham said, "We need a new secretary of treasury who understands where this country is at financially and has a game plan to move forward. I think he’s the right guy.”

I am very relieved to hear that solving our nation's financial crisis is easier than filing your taxes.

BO is pro-life!

BO angered his pro-abortion base on Tuesday when he revealed his pro-life views which he had cleverly concealed throughout the campaign. BO used strong language in his inauguration speech to emphasize his support for all human life:

The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.

An outraged spokesman for Planned Parenthood, America's largest abortion provider, said, "We can see through President Obama's thinly veiled rhetoric. You can't pass anything forward from generation to generation unless you are allowed to live, and to pursue their full measure of happiness, one must first successfully escape the womb. We are appalled that President Obama would wish this for anyone."

BO went on to promise swift justice to those who attempt to carry out abortions:

We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.

All that remains is to see how BO intends to implement his pro-life views and overturn Roe-vs-Wade through legislation, by packing the Supreme Court with like-minded judges, or simply by using his rhetorical powers to get a majority of Americans to "hope" for "change".

I'm embarassed for her

I finally got around to watching the rest of the Inauguration last night.

You know, BO has a lot of gall to object to torture and then subject the nation to this poetry reading. I thought the Bill of Rights protected against cruel and unusual punishment.

Getting right to business

BO wasted no time getting right to work for the American people.

After listening to what most concerned average Americans and carefully considering all of the important tasks that lay ahead, he hit the ground running. BO tackled the most important and pressing issues facing every American. Using his new powers as leader of the Free World, BO acted decisively and swiftly to address the tough problems we face as a nation.

What did he do?

On his first day as President, he ordered the trials of the terrorists responsible for killing 3000 Americans on 9/11 to be stopped.

It is good to know that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has an advocate in the White House.

Is this the "new tone"

Joseph Lowery, considered by some to be the "dean" of the civil rights movement, gave the benediction at yesterday's inauguration. He closed with this little ditty:

"We ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around... When yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right."

Can anyone tell me how this is not a blatantly racist portrayal of minorities as helpless victims of evil white oppressors? You'd think he is stuck in 1958 Mississippi. The fact that BO was elected president proves that his depiction of America is way out of date.

Flubbing the oath

"And I will execute..." (Hey! Where is the teleprompter???)

What is success?

I got an email from a BO drone who had some questions for me:

Don't you know that Obama is our President? His election is a historic event. Don't you want his Presidency to succeed?

Let's take these one at a time.

The drone was a bit premature to declare Obama "our President", but at noon today that will be the case. BO will be the President of America. Unlike the Democrats, we are not going to question the legitimacy of his Presidency. He will have all of the powers the Constitution gives to the President. But that does not mean that we have to agree with everything he wants to do to America, and just step aside and let it happen. In fact, that is exactly what our Constitution was designed to avoid through its system of checks and balances. The Bill of Rights explicitly protects the God-given right of American citizens to raise grievances against the government, and you can count on me to take full advantage of that right.

Yes, Obama’s election is a historic event. BO is the first black man to be elected President. Well, not really. He is the first half black, half white man to be elected President. One must wonder why he chooses to identify himself with the bigamous, drunken, corrupt man who abandoned him and his mother rather than with the mother and grandparents who raised him and gave him all of the opportunities that allowed him to be where he is today. He proves that you can overcome the oppression of slavery and become President. Well, not really. His father was Kenyan, not the descendant of slaves. He proves that you can come from poverty and do anything. Except that he was raised in an affluent family and went to an elite private school in Hawaii before going off to Harvard. But it is a historic event. No one from Delaware has ever been elected Vice President. (While it is true that Biden lived in Pennsylvania for 11 years, he is 83% Delawarian, which gives him much more solid claim to the title than BO’s 50% blackness.)

Finally we come to the real question: “Don’t you want his Presidency to succeed?” The question suggests that if I answer “No” then I am wishing for harm on America. However, that all depends on how you define success.

Do I want BO to succeed in implementing his radical agenda to surrender to the terrorists, raise taxes sky high, nationalize huge portions of the private sector, and “spread the wealth around” through massive socialist redistribution programs? Of course not! I intend to see to it that those goals go down in smoke just like BJ Clinton’s medical takeover scheme crashed and burned when the American people rejected the huge government power grab.

If, as the drone suggests, success means doing what is good for America, then for BO to succeed he would have to come to some kind of epiphany. But I really don’t expect that some fine morning BO will wake up and realize that prosperity does not come from the Government, that free markets private sector innovation and productivity is the only way to create wealth and spread it around effectively, that corporations create jobs and government creates nothing, that terrorists won’t just leave us alone if we try to make nice with them, and that in most cases the best thing the government can do is get out of the way.

So I do hope that BO will succeed, but I’m not counting on it. America can prosper either way. We prospered in spite of BJ Clinton. Every economic cycle has a downturn and a recovery. BO will try to claim credit for it, but the industriousness of the American people is the engine driving American prosperity.

Thanks, Son

Dear Son,

I wish to thank you for a great gift you probably didn't even know you were giving me.

In 2008, the Federal Government committed a total of $8.5 trillion to the most massive bailout in history. Thank you, son.

You might wonder why I am thanking you?

Well, the government doesn't have a spare $8.5 trillion laying around. In fact, the Federal Government was already running a sizable deficit. So we will have to borrow that money and add it to the national debt. There is no way that we will ever pay off the debt, so you can count on paying interest on the money spent bailing out failed businesses for the rest of your life.

At a typical interest rate of six percent, this will cost $510 billion a year, forever. Your share of this cost will be $1,700 per year every year for the rest of your life, or $4.65 every day for the rest of your life. Odds are, you will be forced to pay more than your share, in the name of "fairness".

Like I said, Thanks.

It is good to know that we learned something as a nation from this fiasco. For instance, we learned that overextended debtors with a history of irresponsibility with money should not be taking out big 30-year ARM loans with no money down and no idea of how they are going to make the payments. Which is why our government, a model of financial irresponsibility, already saddled with more debt than they can ever pay off, is borrowing $8.5 trillion more. But if the government ever gets into real financial trouble, they can always just print more money to pay their way out of the problem. If you did that they would throw you in jail. When the government does that, it drives up prices and devalues your money, your life savings, and your income.

It's also good to know that government has learned their lesson about meddling with the free market. Their policies, starting with Jimmy Carter, strengthened under Bill Clinton, and continued under George Bush encouraged mortgage companies to loan money to uncreditworthy borrowers. Government chartered organizations, Fannie and Freddie, guaranteed hundreds of billions of dollars of risky loans, packaged them up and sold them as highly rated mortgage securities. So now the solution is for the government to nationalize vast additional portions of the financial industry, buying up failed insurance companies, mortgage companies, and banks which are in such bad shape that no one else would touch them. But it's all ok because we will just pass the bill on to you. By privatizing the profit and socializing the risk, we are sure to encourage companies to make prudent decisions in the future, certain that if things go badly the government will be there to bail them out.

I have taught you how to budget your money and account for what you spend. At any time you can tell me how much money you have and account for every penny of your allowance money. You carefully set aside saving money for long-term purchases. It is good to know that the politicians who have made a career out of using our money to buy votes, favors, and influence, are sure to be at least as careful with your money as you would be. As a matter of fact, they can't say exactly what happened to the first $350 billion that they passed out.

So when Harry Reid, George Bush, and Nancy Pelosi lecture the auto makers on how the Government will demand financial responsibility and accountability as a condition of the auto industry bailout, maybe they ought to start by getting some for themselves. After all, it is not their own money that they are dishing out like candy on Halloween. It's your money and your future.

Love,

Your Dad

New mugshot fashion statement

Why Jesus is better than Santa

Some Christians seem to be staunchly anti-Santa. They think that any mention of Santa Claus in any situation is an attack on "The True Meaning of Christmas." These morons take the anti-Santa theme to a new low. Seriously guys, get help. Do you really believe that your vitriol points anyone to Jesus?

Personally, I don't mind Santa. After all, he is based on the real-life Christian, Saint Nicholas. Not a lot is known about him, but during the fierce persecution of Christians under Roman emperor Diocletian, his acts of generosity demonstrated Christian love and the spirit of Christmas, epitomized by God giving His only Son for us.

So I am not anti-Santa. I just recognize that Jesus is better than Santa. Here are a few reasons.

Santa may represent what Christmas is about, in his original form, but that meaning has mostly been lost in the current incarnation of Santa Claus, the fat jolly elf who drives a sleigh pulled by reindeer. Jesus, on the other hand, is what Christmas is all about. If Santa points to Jesus, than surely Jesus is greater than Santa. Nicholas' inspiration and motivation was all from Jesus, and any good Nicholas had was not from himself, but from Christ dwelling in him.

Christmas is named for Jesus Christ, not for Santa. Santa acts in honor of Christ's birth, not the other way around.

Santa's gift-giving is conditional. If you don't make the "Nice List" you get a lump of coal. Jesus gift of salvation is bought and paid for with no conditions. It is freely given to anyone who will take it. In I Timothy 1:15 Paul wrote: "Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst." You don't have to be on the "Nice List" to be saved. Paul was not exagerating when he called himself the worst of sinners. Before he met Jesus, he arrested, imprisioned, and beat Christians and even oversaw their murder. It is very good news that we don't have to earn God's approval because none of us stand a chance of meeting His standard.

Santa hangs around at the North Pole most of the time, and travels around by sleigh propelled by flying caribou. Jesus is all-present and dwells in the hearts of those who allow him to enter. You don't have to go to the mall in December to talk to Jesus or make your requests known to Him. You can talk to Him any time, anywhere, about anything, and He promises to hear and answer.

Santa brings stuff which will ultimately wear out, break, or get lost. When we die, none of it will do us any good. But Jesus gave us an eternal gift which will never decay or wear out: everlasting life in a restored relationship with God. Anything Santa could give we could buy for ourselves with money, but money could never pay the penalty for my sins. God's Word is very clear that only blood can atone for sins. Santa didn't give his blood to redeem me. Only Jesus could do that, and only Jesus loved me enough to do it.

Saint Nicholas died 1700 years ago. What is left of his body is buried in Bari, Italy. Jesus, on the other hand, is alive and seated at the right hand of God where He intercedes on our behalf. After Jesus resurrection, the Jews or the Romans could have put to rest the testimony of the disciples who saw Jesus simply by producing his body. But they could not do it because He is alive. Neither the historical Nicholas or the mythical Santa has anything on that.

Finally, Jesus is superior to Santa because Jesus is God and Santa is not. Nicholas himself made that point when the father of the three girls whose dowry Nicholas secretly paid for discovered the source of the gifts, Nicholas asked for him to keep his identity secret because, Nicholas explained, "It is not I you should thank, but Christ alone."

Some people should not procreate

Heath and Deborah Campbell of Easton Pennsylvania are upset that the local "ShopRite" grocery store refuses to make a birthday cake for their three-year-old son with the boy's full name on it.

I feel sorry for this kid.

He didn't pick his name. It was his parents who decided to name their son "Adolph Hitler Campbell." Now the boy has to deal with that name, at least until he reaches the age where he can legally change his name. His siblings have a similar problem. JoyceLynn Aryan Nation Campbell, his sister turns two in a few months, and his baby sister Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie Campbell is six months old.

We named our firstborn son after a man who is noted several times in the Bible for loving God wholeheartedly. A name carries great significance. It embodies the hopes, aspirations, and heritage passed from the parents to the next generation of their family. Unfortunately, hatred and evil can be passed along instead of a positive legacy of faith, honor, love, and respect.

My main reason to have sympathy for this boy is not that he can't get a birthday cake. It is that his parents are raving idiots who have no business reproducing.

The Day the Earth Stood Still

Finally we have proof that Al Gore really IS from another planet.

Universe designed for us

The most recent issue of Discovery Magazine, a secular scientific publication, has a fascinating article which concludes that the universe is adapted for us, not the other way around.

Physicists don’t like coincidences. They like even less the notion that life is somehow central to the universe, and yet recent discoveries are forcing them to confront that very idea. Life, it seems, is not an incidental component of the universe, burped up out of a random chemical brew on a lonely planet to endure for a few fleeting ticks of the cosmic clock. In some strange sense, it appears that we are not adapted to the universe; the universe is adapted to us.

This causes a real problem for scientists who want to explain the inescapable fact that the laws of the universe are "fine tuned" to support life. In the past, this observation was explained by the "anthropic principle" which was first set forth by Brandon Carter in 1973. It says that we should not be surprised that conditions where we live are suitable for life: if they were not, we would not be here to observe them. Based on this principle, life will only exist in those regions of the universe where conditions are right for life.

However, scientists are now coming to the conclusion that the very laws of physics and the particular properties of the fabric of space and time are "custom tailored" to allow life to exist.

According to physicist Andrei Linde of Palo Alto, California, if the laws of physics were tweaked in just about any way, life could not exist.

For instance, if protons were 0.2 percent more massive than they are, they would be unstable and would decay into simpler particles. Atoms would not exist, and neither would we.

If gravity were slightly stronger, the results would be nearly as grave -- stars would compress more tightly, causing them to burn hotter and faster, exhausting their fuel supply much too fast to support life.

Stars produce energy by fusing two hydrogen atoms into a single helium atom, converting 0.007% of the hydrogen's mass into energy. But if that percentage were 0.006 or 0.008, the Universe would not support life. The lower number would result in a universe filled only with hydrogen, and the higher number would lead to a universe with no hydrogen, no water, and no stars like our sun.

The universe is delicately balanced between runaway expansion and terminal collapse. If the universe contained much more matter, additional gravity would have caused it to implode. If it contained less matter, the universe would have expanded too quickly for galaxies to form.

Had the matter in the universe been more evenly distributed, it would not have clumped together to form galaxies. Had matter been clumpier, it would have condensed into black holes.

If the strong nuclear force which bonds atomic nuclei together were slightly more powerful, all the protons in the universe would have paired off and there would be no hydrogen, which fuels stars. There would be no water, and life would not exist.

A universe with four-dimensional space would not support stable planetary orbits which allow for solar systems. Two-dimensional space would not permit life. Only three-dimensional space allows for planets with life.

Physicists believe that some kind of unseen "dark energy" is driving the continued expansion of the universe. But Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind says "If dark energy had been any bigger, there would have been enough repulsion from it to overwhelm the gravity that drew the galaxies together, drew the stars together, and drew Earth together. It’s one of the greatest mysteries in physics. All we know is that if it were much bigger we wouldn’t be here to ask about it.” Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, a physicist at the University of Texas, agrees: “This is the one fine-tuning that seems to be extreme, far beyond what you could imagine just having to accept as a mere accident.”

The scientific evidence points clearly to one conclusion: the universe was created by God according to His design for the purpose of containing life.

However, scientists, dedicated to the pursuit of truth through the scientific method of creating postulates and theories and then proving, disproving or refining them using observation and empirical data, immediately reject one possible explanation which can not be proven or disproven in favor of another explanation which also can not be proven or disproven.

As the article explains, Linde has developed a theory to explain the observations that our universe is ideally designed for life. He suggests that there are many "universes" each with different properties and laws of physics. He uses 11-dimensional super-string theory to suggest how different universes could have completely different characteristics. He even has a pretty picture of a "multiverse" produced by a computer simulation, with a caption explaining that "each colored ray is another expanding cosmos". If a computer simulated it, it must be real!

Scientists Poe Polchinski at the University of California at Santa Barbara and Raphael Bousso at the University of California at Berkley calculated that the basic string theory equations have an astronomical number of possible solutions, each representing a unique way to describe the universe. This meant that almost any experimental result would be consistent with string theory. Hence the theory can never be proved right or wrong.

Linde's multiverse intends to solve the problem by suggesting that there are boundless numbers of "universes" and then applying the anthropic principle to say that we exist in this universe because it has conditions suitable for life to develop. Of course we can't see these other universes or detect them or demonstrate their existence in any way. That leaves only one option: to predict how our universe would behave if this theory was true and then compare those predictions with experimental results.

John Polkinghorne, a theoretical particle physicist from Cambridge University pointed out the flaw in this thinking. “If you allow yourself to hypothesize an almost unlimited portfolio of different worlds, you can explain anything. If a theory allows anything to be possible, it explains nothing; a theory of anything is not the same as a theory of everything."

When Linde was asked whether physicists will ever be able to prove that the multiverse is real, he answered, “Nothing else fits the data. We don’t have any alternative explanation for the dark energy; we don’t have any alternative explanation for the smallness of the mass of the electron; we don’t have any alternative explanation for many properties of particles. What I am saying is, look at it with open eyes. These are experimental facts, and these facts fit one theory: the multiverse theory. They do not fit any other theory so far. I’m not saying these properties necessarily imply the multiverse theory is right, but you asked me if there is any experimental evidence, and the answer is yes. It was Arthur Conan Doyle who said, ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’”

Linde admits that only evidence for his multiverse theory is that he can't find any other explanation for his observation that the universe shows evidence of design for the purpose of supporting life. The fact is that there is a very good explanation: God made it that way. But Linde discounted that explanation without giving it any examination or consideration, not based on data or evidence, but because he refuses to allow for the possibility that there is a God who made us and has the moral authority to define absolute standards for right and wrong according to His own character. But tell me how it is scientific to reject one possibility just because they don't like it and then claim that another possibility, equally unprovable by science, is supported not by empirical evidence, but because they have arbitrarily ignored every other option?