Saturday, August 31, 2013

Sumlin's Double Standard

Regarding "Sumlin working overtime trying to keep Manziel, Aggies in check" (Sunday Sports), I'm curious about one thing: why is it that A&M coach Kevin Sumlin is willing to talk at any and every length about Johnny Manziel's infractions, but goes radio silent when it comes to the five other starters suspended for two games before the contest with Rice on Saturday?
 
More to the point, why is it that Steve Harvey and every other sportswriter has not a lick of curiosity about why Sumlin imposed such serious penalties?  When infractions are this widespread and serious, they have a duty as reporters to dig out and report the details.

Pete Smith, Cypress

Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Wall Street Milks The Little Guy

Regarding "The conspiracy for failure in 401(k) plans" (Wed Business Pg. D2), kudos once again to Scott Burns for his advocacy on behalf of Savers for full disclosure by the companies that deceive the public about the real costs of 401k and IRA programs.  Burns has been a lone voice amongst financial experts in his relentless coverage and the wealth of detail he provides about the shenanigans of these companies. 
 
What is distressing, though, is the extent to which state and federal regulators as well as academia have participated in preventing full disclosure on retirement fund fees.  Case in point: Burns cites the threat by Yale Law School professor Ian Ayres to reveal the names of companies with high-cost plans.  The backlash from the industry was so intense that he backpedaled, promising that no "company-specific" data would be released, lest he "overstep...the boundaries of polite behavior."
 
For heavens sake, why not?  On what planet is this information that the public is not entitled to have?  Ayres was clearly pressured to back off by the Establishment politicians who protect the interests of powerful lobbies, and there's none more powerful than Wall Street.  The end result is that small investors will continue to be milked like dairy cows, at least until Scott Burns and folks like him can provoke a long overdue public outcry.  In the meantime, shame on our politicians for their failure to protect the public from this fraud.

Pete Smith
Cypress, TX
 
 
 
 

Monday, August 26, 2013

Teachers To Parents: Do Our Job and Shut Up

So, I was reading the Sunday newspaper the other day, and came across an interesting article.  Sorry, some explanation is probably in order.  For those of you reading this on your iPad, Nexus or Notebook, a newspaper is what Blank Reg referred to as "a non-volatile storage medium", which is to say, text and pictures on paper, no doubt a quaint concept for the virtual generation.  Blank Reg was - as middling aged Fanboys know - the Alpha Dropout of the "Blanks" from my favorite all-time late 80s TV series "Max Headroom, 20 Minutes Into The Future".  As the leader of the Blank movement, he cherished the non-electronic printed word almost as much as he did the opportunity to eradicate his profile from the dozens of databases maintained by the sundry governmental agencies, public organizations, insurance companies and ISPs (Internet Service Providers) devoted to - nay, obsessed with - the notion that they deserve to know everything about you and to monitor your activities, if not 24 by 7, then at least to the extent practicable based on available technology.
 
Anyway, the "USA Weekend" supplement featured a front page article titled "What teachers want you to know",
by "award winning" principal Eric Sheninger.  The Teaser on the front page told of  "6 important tips" for "parents........to help children succeed".  Well now, if you know OffHisMeds, you know that nothing blows up his bullshit detector faster than tips for Parents by Educators.  You might as well just publish six tips by pickpockets for the people about to get their pockets picked.

This explains why I go to such lengths explaining mundane things, such as the fact that the print version had six tips, but the online version had seven.  This little dichotomy allowed what was up until that time a pretty funny and prescient Riff to be damn funny and prescient.  The premise is simple: what is it that Eric Sheninger would say to us, if he had no filter?  I let OffHisMeds off his leash to find out:
 
"Well parents, another school year is upon us, and I thought I'd take just a moment to share with you a few tips that I know every teacher in America would like you to know.  So, without further ado, here we go:
 
1) Learn to accept that if your child fails to learn, it is your fault.  Yes, three hours of homework each night may sound onerous, but it's not if you consider that you and your child are a Team, and darn it, Teams work together!
 
2) Advocating that Education Professionals be held to any standards is hurtful, demoralizing and will lead to a "brain drain" in our schools when disillusioned Teachers leave teaching to become astronauts, rock stars, Nobel prize winning physicists or Wall Street tycoons - all the professions we gave up so that we could serve the Public.
 
3) Very little of what your children tell you about school life is true.  Remember, studies have shown that the human brain is not fully formed until age 21, so nothing they tell you can be trusted until they are no longer under our supervision.
 
4) Promoting self-esteem in schools is Job One, and Teachers don't just teach it, we live it.  We and your children are in kind of a fragile place right now, what with all the scrutiny and tests and whatnot, so tread carefully and try not to criticize us or our unions, or your children will suffer the consequences.
 
5) We're always going to need more money.  Always.  And if you don't give it to us, then you don't care about the children.
 
6) We Education Professionals are relentless in our efforts to change and update the curriculum.  And while we believe that these changes are built on scientific principles, it is certain that their implementation will take at least five years before you can judge the results - much less us - by which time we will have come up with an entirely new, different and exciting curriculum just in case the current five year reform doesn't work out.
 
7) We are underpaid, and we never tire of telling you this, nor of the infinite ways in which we sacrifice ourselves for your children.  So, in lieu of good pay, we require you to bow down before us.  Bow down before us as if we were gods.
 
OK, my bad.  The front of the magazine said there were six important tips, but I threw in a bonus tip because darn it, we care about your kids nearly as much as we care about the salary, retention bonuses, transfer bonuses, incentive bonuses, per diem, stipends, forgivable loans, COLA adjustments, merit increases, pay raises, expense reimbursement, accumulated sick days, cash-redeemable vacation days, retirement pay, fraudulently earned Social Security benefits, health care benefits and tenure that comprise the compensation package bestowed upon us for the 181 days per year that we toil on behalf of the community until we all retire at age 53.
 
It may seem like the Education profession is hostile to its customers.  But that's only true if we are judged by the same mundane standards as, say, your neighborhood tire store. 
 
We deserve better, and are very disappointed in you."
 
 

Thursday, August 22, 2013

Dumping On NASA

In his Chronicle article "With NASA's incompetence, China is set to lead in space" (Thursday Outlook), former NASA engineer Don Nelson expresses as much disdain for NASA's space program as he does regard for China's.  His curious loyalties notwithstanding, much of what he then writes in defining America's space program does little to justify his conclusions, much less his prescriptions. 

First, one must take exception to his astonishing claim that the focus of our space program should be the mining of natural resources from deep space.  The notion that this can be productively done and then returned to Earth is ludicrous.  Anybody with a rudimentary understanding of the energy and resources necessary to attempt such a thing knows that there is no material we could bring back - not even gold - that would justify the trip, ever.  For example, let's assume some Chinese space shuttle had the same  return payload as our STS - 15 tons - and that 15 tons of pure gold was just floating in, say, the asteroid belt waiting to be picked up.  With a spot price of $1,370.00, that gold would be worth $650 million, or roughly the interest the Chinese earn on their US bond portfolio in one week.

The fact that mining of any kind requires industrial-scale equipment makes the proposition even more mind-boggling.  The fact that the success of any mining operation is predicated on actually finding recoverable quantities of a mineral in the vast expanse of our solar system makes it even more so.

Besides the simple economics that don't work and never will, Nelson's second claim that mining the solar system is necessary in order to save the Earth defies common sense.  Our planet has only one resource at risk of being in short supply - energy; and more of that is not retrievable from deep space via space ships.  So why exactly is Nelson advocating for it in the first place?

Next is his contention that NASA's STS (Shuttle) program should have been retained.  How can any right-thinking person fail to understand that it was the Shuttle program that wrecked NASA?  The 165,000 pound Shuttle was 90% dead weight compared to the alternatives, including the admittedly retro Orion capsule that will replace it.  From a cost or safety standpoint, launching the Shuttle into space even one time made as much sense as launching my two story Colonial, yet NASA still did it 135 times, stuck their heads in the sand for 30 years and expected us to do the same.  Ironically, Nelson makes this point when he refers to NASA's "culture of optimism", but fails to appreciate that it applied in spades to the Shuttle.
 
Nelson's assertion that China's nascent space program will have a functional shuttle by 2020 is implausible in the extreme.  For one thing, such a program doesn't even exist in the public record, if it exists all.  Second, Chinese success in space has proceeded at a snail's pace compared to what America achieved in the 60s and 70s, when the Shuttle program took a dozen years from conception to implementation, and this at a time when America's space industry and expertise was inconceivably larger than China's present day program.  And not to put too fine a point on it, but despite their manufacturing prowess, China has not demonstrated the ability to design their way out of a paper bag.  Their entire program in this regard is accomplished through acquisition, theft and appropriation, and last I heard, NASA wasn't handing over the blueprints to the STS.

Finally, there is no version of a shuttle capable of hauling oar from the asteroids that could contend with our planet's gravity well, either on departure or return.  I could go on like this for days: Nelson claims - falsely and even cruelly - that the loss of life in the two Shuttle disasters might have been avoided had an escape pod been built into the Shuttle.  Nelson scorns NASA's claim that an old-style capsule is ten times safer than shuttle technology, but this is easily provable based on the totality of manned space missions since 1959.  He speaks glowingly of the Air Force's efforts to privatize space, but gives NASA no credit for doing the same.  These are all things you'd expect a former NASA engineer to know, and yet, he doesn't.
 
It is also worth noting that most of the technology necessary to make a deep space trip has not only been developed by NASA, but has been a big part of NASA's unparalleled success with unmanned missions throughout the solar system.  While Nelson is happy to wax poetic about a China with virtually no track record at all, he's not only content to dwell on NASA's failures, but apparently doesn't feel that their successes warrant even a mention. 

That's just not constructive.  Like Mr. Nelson, I believe we ought to travel to deep space, most likely the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter; but once we get there, it would be much more practical to colonize and develop it, rather than attempt to haul pieces of it back to Earth.  In the meantime, perhaps he can reserve his ire for the politicians primarily responsible for much of NASA's current disarray.  For example, he could examine the affect of President Obama changing the direction of NASA's efforts as set out six years prior by his predecessor, George W. Bush.  Six years of work flushed down the toilet, not because Obama necessarily disagreed with Bush's vision, but because he, Obama, did not have one then and does not have one now.

Simply put, Obama doesn't believe in a space program at all.  He has used NASA as a stalking horse, a scapegoat and a political football.  His "program" is an incoherent jumble of half steps that will lead to nothing.  It's curious that somebody who actually worked for NASA would fail to comment on that, not to mention that, left to the current administration, NASA will soon be nothing but a subsidiary of the Environmental Protection Agency. 
 
Pete Smith
Cypress, TX

Monday, August 19, 2013

McCain And Media Get Jiggy With Jihadists

Regarding "Egypt lashes out at foreign press over coverage" (Monday World, Pg. A5), it's not every day that a military dictator can lecture Western media with any kind of moral authority, but in the case of recent coverage of the military's coup against President Morsi, it is justified.  General Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi and others in the provisional government correctly point out that the Muslim Brotherhood under Morsi has acted like a terrorist organization, and rightfully complain of "an excessive focus on the......Morsi supporters killed by police......and insufficient attention to the acts of violence by Morsi supporters."
 
Their complaint is an understatement.  In the U.S., if armed gangs launched dozens of coordinated attacks on policemen and churches, and the police responded by shooting the attackers, no reporter would dare to portray the gangs as simply "angry citizens", much less demonize the police for defending themselves and innocent civilians.  And yet, that is exactly the way most media outlets have covered the Egyptian conflict.
 
That said, this narrative didn't just spring out of thin air.  When prominent politicians like John McCain and Lindsay Graham both sound like mouthpieces for the Muslim Brotherhood in their demonization of the military, they give that narrative a legitimacy it doesn't deserve.  Politicians, pundits and reporters alike that share this skewed storyline should be forced to explain the dozens of Coptic Christian churches burned to the ground and decades of Islamist oppression before they next venture an opinion on the matter.
 
Pete Smith, Cypress

Thursday, August 8, 2013

Death Train 2000 Revisited

Regarding "It's time to revisit plans for light rail in Houston" (Thursday Outlook), Bill King does a major service with his recap of the many deficiencies of Houston's glorified trolley, otherwise known as Metro's light rail system, but perhaps because of space constraints, he failed to mention three others:
 
First is its terrible public safety record.  A few weeks ago a cyclist was run over and killed by a train, and in its short history, there has been hundreds of injuries involving pedestrians and other vehicles.  Fatalities have included not just citizens but Metro employees as well, and arguably, very few of these accidents would have occurred had Metro never been built.  
 
Second, Metro Rail is an urban environmental disaster.  A short walk or bike ride along Main Street is nothing less than shattering to the nerves, as the rushing trains clatter down the tracks, the operators repeatedly blasting their horns to warn of their approach.  The whole of the system, including trains, stations, traffic lights, barricades, overhead wiring - even the fountains - is an assault on the senses, obstructing and interfering with the businesses, restaurants and other amenities along its route, as well as the pedestrian who desires nothing more than to sit on a bench and perhaps read a book in peace for a few minutes.
 
Finally, while King did an admirable job recounting the construction costs to expand Metro Rail, he failed to mention the monstrous operating deficits that will plague taxpayers for as long as the trains run.  An April 15 Chronicle article revealed that Metro fares recover only 32% of the cost of running them, creating a deficit of over $115 million since 2004 for the 7.5 miles of the Main Street line.  Clearly, if you expand the rail system, you will expand the operating deficits as well.
 
It is well past time to reconsider any further expansion of "at grade" rail.  It is a failure by any and every sensible measure, and when Houston's leaders sacrifice public safety in order to line their own pockets, they deserve nothing less than to be tarred, feathered, and run out on a rail.  Pun intended.
 
Pete Smith, Cypress

Monday, August 5, 2013

LTE: Tainted NCAA

Regarding "NCAA investigating Manziel" (Monday front page), Heisman trophy winner Johnny Manziel becomes the latest student athlete to fall victim to one of the more disreputable public organizations in American society: the National Collegiate Athletic Association. 
 
Started back in 1906 by Teddy Roosevelt to promote safety in college athletic programs, it has since metamorphosed into an agency with but two apparent goals: 1) Divvying up the billions in profits generated by our college student athletes every year; and 2) Investigating and punishing student athletes who try to get even a tiny slice of the action.
 
Even as they destroy the academic and professional careers of student athletes for "offenses" like signing a jersey for cash, the NCAA laughably continues to call itself a "non-profit organization".  NCAA president Mark Emmert made $1.7 million in 2011, a 50% increase from his predecessor in in 2009.  Some non-profit.  Is this is the man who will stand in judgment of Johnny Manziel?
 
The NCAA's expectation that student athletes not only work for free but be exposed to injury and death while the NCAA profits is not just unethical, it is downright disgraceful.  If the NCAA was judged by the same laws which regulate wages, hours and workplace safety that govern all American businesses, there is little doubt their practices would be illegal. 
 
It is high time for the NCAA itself to be investigated, and reformed.