Talking with someone recently, he started telling me about a blog post to check out. Turned out to be one of mine. It was my income tax analogy post, which is by far the most popular item among all the many posts I've generated over the past several years.
Sort of cool to be referred by someone to your own blog post. I didn't tell him it was mine - not sure why.
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Retirement
I've reached the age where retirement has to become more of a focus. To the extent I ever had a plan, it was always to retire gradually. For a long time, I imagined taking a part-time teaching job at a local community college as I neared retirement age, and use it to keep busy and pay for groceries for a few years as I transitioned into retirement.
As I've been working as an independent consultant, it dawned on me that I could simply begin scaling back on the projects I accept a little at a time. It seems reasonable that I may be able to gradually reduce those consulting assignments until I don't feel like continuing.
Retirement communities and senior trailer parks in Florida have never held a lot of appeal for me. But that doesn't necessarily mean I won't end up on one eventually.
Like everybody else, except for those who have company-provided pensions, the retirement issue for me has to be based on financial status. Pay off the mortgage, do some remodeling or upgrading on the house, buy a decent car that might see me through most of the post-retirement years, and hopefully have enough cash left to live above the poverty line through the golden years.
Some folks have retirement forced on them, either when their company dumps them in favor of a younger and cheaper employee, or when their health fails. I'm unlikely to fire myself, but there's a risk that the consulting work could dry up. And of course nobody knows when the health issues might crop up; I suspect I'm nearly due for my 60,000 mile engine overhaul.
Met a retiree several years back who told me about his retirement goal held for his latter working years. He wanted to play golf every day when he entered retirement, and when the day came, he immediately hit the links. Problem was, within the first month he grew bored with playing golf every day. He suddenly found himself adrift, with no idea how he was going to spend his time.
I don't have specific ideas for how I want to spend my retirement years. But I hope to have some fun and do some liesure travel. And maybe finish the work I started on my family tree research. If grandchildren arrive on the scene, I hope to have the opportunity to catch many of their activities, whether their talents lie in sports, music, or other things.
Now after writing all this stuff about retirement, it's making me feel old. So I think I'll wrap here.
As I've been working as an independent consultant, it dawned on me that I could simply begin scaling back on the projects I accept a little at a time. It seems reasonable that I may be able to gradually reduce those consulting assignments until I don't feel like continuing.
Retirement communities and senior trailer parks in Florida have never held a lot of appeal for me. But that doesn't necessarily mean I won't end up on one eventually.
Like everybody else, except for those who have company-provided pensions, the retirement issue for me has to be based on financial status. Pay off the mortgage, do some remodeling or upgrading on the house, buy a decent car that might see me through most of the post-retirement years, and hopefully have enough cash left to live above the poverty line through the golden years.
Some folks have retirement forced on them, either when their company dumps them in favor of a younger and cheaper employee, or when their health fails. I'm unlikely to fire myself, but there's a risk that the consulting work could dry up. And of course nobody knows when the health issues might crop up; I suspect I'm nearly due for my 60,000 mile engine overhaul.
Met a retiree several years back who told me about his retirement goal held for his latter working years. He wanted to play golf every day when he entered retirement, and when the day came, he immediately hit the links. Problem was, within the first month he grew bored with playing golf every day. He suddenly found himself adrift, with no idea how he was going to spend his time.
I don't have specific ideas for how I want to spend my retirement years. But I hope to have some fun and do some liesure travel. And maybe finish the work I started on my family tree research. If grandchildren arrive on the scene, I hope to have the opportunity to catch many of their activities, whether their talents lie in sports, music, or other things.
Now after writing all this stuff about retirement, it's making me feel old. So I think I'll wrap here.
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Lies and Manufactured Issues
The time has come to get real on the fake contraception debate.
The Left is accusing the Church of creating this as a bogus issue for political reasons. That's demonstrably false, because Catholics were initially supportive of Obamacare. The issue is about religious liberty and the clear first amendment violation. A particularly apt comparison has been made that this Obamacare regulation makes about as much sense as the government mandating that Kosher Delicatessens sell pork, using the absurd defense of the policy that most Jews don't keep kosher anyway.
Besides the obvious unconstitutional and anti-religion, anti-freedom outrages embodied in this rule, I am particularly offended by the spin being attempted by Obama's left-wing echo chamber. His sycophants at MSNBC have been touting a false narrative suggesting Social Conservatives in general, and Rick Santorum in particular, would pursue a goal of outlawing contraception altogether. They're quite coordinated in this horrible mischaracterization of their opposition, and are demonstrating that the truth matters not at all when it comes to election season.
I'm not interested in banning contraception either, although I would like to see abortifacients pulled off the pharmacy shelves. The other lies I've heard from the President and his HHS Secretary are that these drugs are beneficial and crucial medications in support of women's health.
Wrong on all counts.
How about some actual facts for a change:
The CDC established a clear link between availability of contraception and the incident of STD's.
Easily available contraception increases pregnancy rates because of high failure rates and the simple fact that it increases the frequency of sexual intercourse. Studies in Europe proved that with increased availability of contraception came vast increases in abortion rates.
The Pill is a class 1 carcinogen. This is sort of ironic given the recent flap over the relationship between Planned Parenthood and Susan G Komen's breast cancer organization.
Abortion creates a very high risk and is indisputably most closely tied to incidents of breast cancer in women.
Prolonged use of synthetic hormones often lead to cervical and breast cancer, and often render women infertile at whatever point in time they finally decide they're ready to have children. We all know women who focused on establishing their careers, then sadly discovered they were unable to conceive when they finally became ready for children.
The fundamental question boils down to this: Why is Obama and his Democratic party so hostile to children? Obama has a history of not only supporting the barbaric practice called "Partial Birth Abortion", but also has openly supported killing babies born alive when the attempted abortion failed. Kathleen Sebelius has demonstrated the same hostility toward infants.
Why do they hate babies so? Why do they force such harmful drugs on women, knowing that those drugs will most likely cause infertility and cancer? Why do they refer to contraception as "preventative medicine", as if a baby is a disease to be prevented? Why does a black president support and promote abortions which are disproportionally performed on black women, just as intended by Planned Parent's founder and chief eugenicist Margarat Sanger?
Why are liberal women who won't eat meat and demand only "organic" fruits and vegetables so willing to pop synthetic hormones that are much more likely to kill them than a cheeseburger?
The Catholics have it right, not just because they believe that God's will is more important than ours when it comes to the family and that sex is reserved for married couples for the primary purpose of producing offspring, but that monogamy without artificial contraception is truly the healthiest option for everyone.
Is it now too much to expect that our partisan discourse at least argue their positions without lying to us?
The Left is accusing the Church of creating this as a bogus issue for political reasons. That's demonstrably false, because Catholics were initially supportive of Obamacare. The issue is about religious liberty and the clear first amendment violation. A particularly apt comparison has been made that this Obamacare regulation makes about as much sense as the government mandating that Kosher Delicatessens sell pork, using the absurd defense of the policy that most Jews don't keep kosher anyway.
Besides the obvious unconstitutional and anti-religion, anti-freedom outrages embodied in this rule, I am particularly offended by the spin being attempted by Obama's left-wing echo chamber. His sycophants at MSNBC have been touting a false narrative suggesting Social Conservatives in general, and Rick Santorum in particular, would pursue a goal of outlawing contraception altogether. They're quite coordinated in this horrible mischaracterization of their opposition, and are demonstrating that the truth matters not at all when it comes to election season.
I'm not interested in banning contraception either, although I would like to see abortifacients pulled off the pharmacy shelves. The other lies I've heard from the President and his HHS Secretary are that these drugs are beneficial and crucial medications in support of women's health.
Wrong on all counts.
How about some actual facts for a change:
The CDC established a clear link between availability of contraception and the incident of STD's.
Easily available contraception increases pregnancy rates because of high failure rates and the simple fact that it increases the frequency of sexual intercourse. Studies in Europe proved that with increased availability of contraception came vast increases in abortion rates.
The Pill is a class 1 carcinogen. This is sort of ironic given the recent flap over the relationship between Planned Parenthood and Susan G Komen's breast cancer organization.
Abortion creates a very high risk and is indisputably most closely tied to incidents of breast cancer in women.
Prolonged use of synthetic hormones often lead to cervical and breast cancer, and often render women infertile at whatever point in time they finally decide they're ready to have children. We all know women who focused on establishing their careers, then sadly discovered they were unable to conceive when they finally became ready for children.
The fundamental question boils down to this: Why is Obama and his Democratic party so hostile to children? Obama has a history of not only supporting the barbaric practice called "Partial Birth Abortion", but also has openly supported killing babies born alive when the attempted abortion failed. Kathleen Sebelius has demonstrated the same hostility toward infants.
Why do they hate babies so? Why do they force such harmful drugs on women, knowing that those drugs will most likely cause infertility and cancer? Why do they refer to contraception as "preventative medicine", as if a baby is a disease to be prevented? Why does a black president support and promote abortions which are disproportionally performed on black women, just as intended by Planned Parent's founder and chief eugenicist Margarat Sanger?
Why are liberal women who won't eat meat and demand only "organic" fruits and vegetables so willing to pop synthetic hormones that are much more likely to kill them than a cheeseburger?
The Catholics have it right, not just because they believe that God's will is more important than ours when it comes to the family and that sex is reserved for married couples for the primary purpose of producing offspring, but that monogamy without artificial contraception is truly the healthiest option for everyone.
Is it now too much to expect that our partisan discourse at least argue their positions without lying to us?
Friday, February 03, 2012
Is This the Generation?
The prophetic words of Ronald Reagan were, "Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction". Now the question is, has that generation arrived?
History shows that socialists and communists have used mostly the same tactics in the past to gain power. Demonizing the rich, and telling the poor that the rich are responsible for their misery.
Now we have more than half the citizenry dependent on the government for all or part of their livelihood. And those folks are unlikely to vote against maintaining those government benefits. Soon the government will go bankrupt, and when they can no longer cover their social welfare obligations with debt, they will confiscate the assets of all producers (not just rich ones) and begin making large spending cuts that will bring the dependent class to the streets in violent protest, as we've seen in Europe.
Hopefully it won't degenerate into a repeat of the purges of Stalin and Mao. But it easily could. I'm not as concerned for myself, but for the next generation. It's the next generation that will decide whether they want freedom or a dictatorship. I hope they have the courage and strength to choose freedom.
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