Politics, statistics and Brittney's ex husband

People think that the corporations pick the presidents. No, fourteen people in Iowa and a dozen in New Hampshire will winnow the herd of 18 hopeful presidential candidates down to two. The corporations only get to choose between candidate Coke & candidate Pepsi.
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I heard an interesting speaker on statistics – yeah, you read that right. “Interesting” and “statistics” in the same sentence. He says that Kentucky officials have been fretting about the decreased number of younger workers in this state, and many have called it the “brain-drain”, because anyone educated leaves. Turns out that they’re not leaving. They haven’t been born in the first place. Most parents aren’t having a lot of kids, so the population of youngsters decreases. So it’s not that Eastern KY is losing future scholars, they’re just incapable of producing them.

This statistician had a lot of charts, graphs and projections and all that. I don’t know how he makes his 50 year estimates with any reliability. He’s essentially counting the offspring of offspring that have yet to be born.

One result of this demographic shift is that you will have to work longer. I’m already planning that I’ll have to work to 75. Of course, you can’t raise the retirement age 10 years all at once. I’d suggest that you scale it maybe .25 years every 2 years or something like that. If you’re 6 years from retiring, you’d have to work an extra 9 months. Not gonna kill ya. It’s an unpleasant thought to have to work longer, but you can’t make the argument that they couldn’t be prepared.

An area of concern for the future is that the wealthy families don’t have many kids, Blighted areas have population growth. An educated parent, black, white, Latino or Asian is likely to have children who value education. Uneducated parents tend to have uneducated kids. Poor kids aren’t suddenly going to raise their academic ambitions if you remove all the middle and upper-class. Evidence suggests the opposite. Urban school districts have seen the exodus of the affluent for a generation now, and that hasn’t inspired higher achievement on the part of those who can’t afford private education.
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I got Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” from the library. “Saturday Night’s for Fighting” is a good enough song, but I can’t imagine a bunch of tough guys heading out on the town saying “Yeah, crank that! Elton tells it like it is!” And, sadly, any bar fight that little Elton would start, could only end badly. In seconds, he’d have his ass handed to him in a highball glass with a slice of lime and a little umbrella, and that’s just if he were battling your average John Denver fan.

While on the music industry, Madonna is the richest woman musician. This came as absolutely no shock to anyone but maybe Ashlee Simpson thought she was in the running. Brittney’s recent meltdown reminds me that many noted geniuses have had mild to severe bouts of depression and mania in their twenties, such as Einstein, John Stewart Mill, Hayden, and I’ll throw myself in with these luminaries and say that I had a few days in my twenties when I wasn’t manically depressed per se, but maybe a little irritable. So, that makes me a genius as much as Brittney proved her brilliance merely because of a well-timed bout of insanity.

I don’t know of any natural force that could possibly explain how you lose your kids to a guy like Kevin Federline. And, I feel bad for the kids, of course. Having K-Fed as your role model isn’t the easy ticket into the Ivy League. Yeah, they’re pretty screwed.