Commenting on this article, Glenn Reynolds (a.k.a., Instapundit) wrote, “All America is West Virginia Now…”

Not to say I told you so, but…

Back in 2007, I created a fact sheet to “encourage” people to vote for Democrats in the 2008 elections.

This fact sheet listed a bunch of statistics on West Virginia, starting with the fact that we’ve been mostly Democrat controlled for 75 years^[a], and continuing with a number of bad statistics about the state as a whole. I concluded with “Vote Democrat in ’08! – Because it’s easier to drag everyone else down to our level than to climb up to theirs.”

For those who might want to argue that, technically, this recession actually started during Bush’s term, remember that the President’s powers are limited by a series of checks and balances; whatever damage was done late in Bush’s Presidency was, at the very least, aided and abetted by a Democratic Congress. (Not that he was free of blame, of course – I didn’t care for a lot of his policies, either.)

1. It was 75 years in 2008. This was, admittedly, in the future at the time I created the flyer, but, using my amazing deductive skills, I figured the makeup of our government wouldn’t change drastically sans election. [↩]

I don’t know if he’s responding to Jason Keeling’s West Virginia Day challenge or not, but Oncee has a post up about the need for West Virginia children to have laptops.

I like to tell my wife that a good friend of mine (now my step-brother) had all the fun toys when we were kids, and that I had to make do with sticks and rocks that I pretended were toys. This is, of course, a bit of hyperbole. I also had a Commodore 64 that I got to pretend was a real computer.

I kid, I kid. The C64 may not look like much in comparison to today’s computers, but it really was a decent home computer at the time. It gave me some experience with using a computer (and even some experience with BASIC (pun intended) computer programming), and the PC we had much later gave me even more. The thing is, though, I mostly used these computers as toys or sophisticated word processors. I’m not saying those things aren’t worthwhile – they gave me a love of computers that lasts to this day – but I wonder if there isn’t something more we can do.

Maybe we need to be aiming a little higher than just putting computers in children’s hands. Maybe we need to be looking at the possibility of actually showing these children that these computers are more than just fun toys that they can use to play on the internet. At least a few of the local Charleston-Area Bloggers are IT professionals of one sort or another, I think. I’d be willing to volunteer my time to help students become more familiar with their computers, if someone wanted to set something like that up.

In an attempt to be competitive against banks that charge a ton of overdraft fees (and that’re likely to charge more in the near future), a Texas Bank named Probity is offering an alternative, which the CEO calls “Netflix for your checking account.”

In April, a tiny startup launched with a crazy idea: to offer checking accounts that aren’t free — they cost $19.95 a month. Yet Probity already has several hundred customers.

Tim Smith, a former bank consultant turned CEO of Austin, Texas-based Probity Financial Services, which offers the online checking accounts in partnership with a Missouri-based bank, started the company after getting fed up with the fees and penalties associated with most banks’ “free” checking accounts — such as overdraft fees of $35 a pop. (In March, we wrote about how consumers are fed up with these fees, which the Federal Reserve is trying to regulate more strictly.)

I’m kind of torn on this one. On the one hand, those fees provide a pretty good incentive^[a] to get people to strive to have more control over themselves (and their wallets). Doing away with those fees is likely to just make people less responsible with their money, which is more painful in the long run. (“The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.” – Herbert Spencer)

On the other hand, I admire the fact that Mr. Smith and his colleagues have seen an opportunity and are now providing a service that people may want and/or need. It’s not like the government’s swooping in to “save” people from their own stupidity “predatory” bank practices. I like the fact that this plan has sprung up, quite naturally, from the market itself.

Besides, as Harlan Ellison once said, “The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen…and stupidity.” This new offering by Probity (and, come to think of it, the fees that they’re striving to replace) are simply a method of making money from stupidity^[b]. I’d certainly do the same thing if I came up with a way to do it.

Both the article above and the source from which I found it (see the hat tip, below) seem to imply that this is the end of free checking, but I kind of doubt that. I think it’s just an alternative for those who might see value in paying an advance fee to avoid later ones. That the later fees could be avoided simply by exercising a little self control isn’t really a problem, as no one is expected to exercise self control anymore anyway^[c]

( þ The Atlantic Business Blog )

1. Admittedly, it’s not always a particularly effective incentive – most of the time, it’s the same people getting hit with these fees over and over again. [↩]
2. In the interest of full disclosure, I was one of the people whose stupidity was being “mined” by the banks as recently as a few years ago. It wasn’t until I realized that I wanted to marry the woman who is now my wife that I really got serious about doing better with my money. I really started paying close attention to my bank account and tracking every single dollar I spent, and until I started doing that, I was constantly being hit by these “stupid tax” fees. [↩]
3. Update: I had a footnote here that involved a bit of snark over abortion. After giving it some more thought, I realized that this was counterproductive, as it split the focus of the post and, besides, muddied the waters about my own stance on abortion (which, actually, is usually in flux) anyhow. So, I’ve removed the snark and will refer anyone who wants to read my thoughts on abortion here. [↩]

Rachel Lucas explains very nicely why I will never go to England^[a]:

Oh god, I understand nachos. Melted cheese all over jaunty, salty chips with refried beans and seasoned ground beef and oh criminy hell on earth, what I would do for a simple CRISPY BEEF TACO right now…

Oh and to really take this tangent off the tracks, you can all stop telling me I can make this stuff myself. I cannot. You don’t understand. The “foundation” ingredients are not available. Spices, I have; veggies for salsa, I have. But their version of ground beef is called “mince meat”, and it is not the same. And there is no sign of anything remotely resembling what a Texas would call “refried beans.” Tortillas are not the same. Yes they have them, in the “exotic” section of the Tesco, but they’re not! the same!

I went more than the first two decades of my life without eating Mexican food, because I am picky and don’t like to try new things. Once I realized I loved Mexican food, I also realized that I have a limited amount of time on Earth in which to enjoy said food, and that I must eat it as often as possible. Unless God Himself tells me, in absolutely no uncertain terms, that I have to do so, I have no intention of going without Mexican food for more than a few days ever again. I couldn’t even visit England, because the amount of time I would spend flying over and back would put me way too close to my going-without-Mexican-food limit.

I want to thank Rachel for getting the warning out to us “hillbilly ‘Murricans.” Otherwise, I might have actually visited England, and I don’t know how I would have survived.

1. That’s not what the post itself is about. The main topic of the post is Rachel’s adventures in clothes shopping while in England. [↩]

As much as I dislike the President’s policies in general, I really can understand his silence on the Iranian election and its aftermath. We didn’t have anyone there to observe the elections, so I can see why he might be reluctant to speak up about the validity (or lack of) with regards to the election results themselves.

However, despite the President’s neutrality on the issue of the results themselves, I can’t fathom a reasonable excuse for his silence on the brutality and oppression that Iranians have faced during the aftermath of the election. I realize that “no preconditions” was a major issue during his campaign, but President Obama needs to, in no uncertain terms, condemn the way that Iran has treated these protesters.