Discuss a book with the kids.

After they read a book (or see a movie or a stage play) you can discuss the book with them. Good leading questions about a work of fiction might be

1.  Who is the hero/heroine (protagonist is a unisex word that covers both sexes).  What motivates the protagonist?  What does the protagonist do?  Is it successful?

2. Who is the view point character?  (Dr. Watson is the classic fictional view point character).  Often the protagonist is the view point character.

3.  Who is the villain?  What makes him/her evil? 

4.  Does this story follow the classic story outline?  

   Protagonist is faced with a challenge of some sort.  He/she attempts to deal with the challenge.  The first (and perhaps some later challenges) overwhelm the protagonist.  At the climax of the story the protagonist makes one last do of die effort to deal with his challenge.  He/She either wins or looses, winning is customary but not necessary.  All after the climax is anti-climax.  Is the anti-climax (if present) necessary?  When do we readers learn what the challenge is?  And what might the challenge be?  How much does the outcome depend upon the protagonist's skill and cunning?  And how much upon pure good luck?  What is the anti-climax (if there is one) and is it necessary to the story.  

5.  Is it one of those modern stories where the protagonist merely serves as a punching bag thru out the story?  Like Catcher in the Rye.

6.  Is the protagonist believable and realistic?

7.  What shelf in the bookstore does this book belong on?  Romances?  Mysteries? Science fiction and fantasy?  Historical novels?  The everything else shelf? 

Let's Reform the Federal Income Tax Code

I thought I had finished up my taxes.  I fed all the returns into TurboTax, ran the return checker, printed out the return, found envelopes and addressed them, wrote the checks.  Whew.  So I go and get the mail.  Damn, another K1 form in today’s mail.  I will have to punch that in and then reprint to whole return.

We could make the whole tax scene better with a go thorough tax reform. 

1. Repeal the entire tax code.  And get rid of the huge stack of court rulings supporting the existing code.
2. New tax code must be less than 100 pages.
3. The tax code exists to raise the money the Feds need to operate.  It is not to encourage electric cars, windmills, solar roofs, home ownership, teaching school, or greenie plans to throw us back to the Stone Age.
4. Income is money you made.  Doesn’t matter how you made it, or where you made it.  Income is income.  We scrap capital gains which exists to give stock holders a break.  You make some money trading stocks, that’s income.
5. Foreign companies get treated the same as domestic companies.  Get rid of the K1 schedule and have them file a 1099 just like domestic companies.
6. No deductions for anything except charitable giving.  Contributions to the Republican Party, the Democratic Party and the NRA are deductible. 
7. We have three tax brackets, one for the truly poor, one for the really rich, and one for average working stiffs.  Tax rate for the truly poor is 5%; they have to pay something to teach them how much taxes hurt.  Tax rate for the average working stiff is 17%.  I have been doing taxes for 60 years, and every year when the 1040 is ready to file I wind up paying 17%.  And tax rate for the really rich ought to be double that, 34%.  Congress must reset the breakpoints (how much income puts you in which class) every 4 years.
8. No more “foundations” which allow the really rich to dodge a lot of taxes.

Feel free to post your favorite tax reforms.

Have your kids change a tire.

This is for kids old enough to drive.  That's 16 in most places.  Have them find the spare tire in the family car.  (Is it in the trunk? is it slung underneath the minivan? Is it on the rear hatchback? Where could a Detroit yo-yo hide the spare this year?)  And find the jack and the lug wrench.  Note to parents, if your car doesn't have a jack and a lug wrench you ought to go out and get them.  Town dump and auto junk yards ought to have old ones.  Get the kid[s] to set the parking brake before jacking up the car.  Pop the hub cap off.  Have them loosen the lug nuts while the weight of the car is on the flat wheel.  After the car is up on the jack, the necessary heave-ho needed to break the lug nuts loose may throw the car off the jack.  Loosen means less than one quarter turn.  A small can of penetrating oil will help with rusty and stuck lug nuts.  With the car jacked up, back off  all the lug nuts, put them in the hubcap, and pull the flat wheel off.  Put the spare on.  Put the lug nuts back on, tighten lightly, don't knock the car off the jack.  Lower the jack and then tighten all the lug nuts.  Put the hubcap back on.  Check the air pressure in the spare.  It has been aging in the trunk for years and it might have a slow leak and be close to flat itself.  If the spare isn't too flat, drive down to the nearest gas station that has air and pump it up.  This part is easier if you have a tire pressure gauge in the car.  They are only a few dollars at the auto parts store.  For extra credit get the kid[s] to stow the flat wheel, the jack, and the lug wrench so that they won't rattle when you hit a bump. 

British Labor Party gets new leadership

The US TV has not had a word about it, but an email reached me from the American Jewish Congress.  It congratulates the new leader of the Labor party, Ken Starmer opon his election.  The old Labor party leader, leftie Jeremy Corbyn, was outspokenly anti-Semitic,  anti-American, and an all around PITA for the Brits and for us.  Good riddance to Corbyn.  Ken Starmer is a new name to me, I never heard of him before, and I have no idea where he is coming from. 
   Surprising that the MSM has said nothing about this fairly serious change in British leadership.

Google is going wild. 1318 page views today.

Used to be blogger would show a few pageviews a day, if that.  Then I had an 800 page view day, a lull abd 1318 pageviews today.  Looks like the Google software weenies messed something up.

There are a lot of brain dead manufacturers out there

Those are the ones who fail to put their company name on their product.  If they had two brain cells firing they would always put their name and Made in USA on everything they make.  It's good for sales.  It's the best advertising they can get.
   We consumers ought to understand that products that are not marked Made in USA are probably made in China.

Why I don’t trust computer models.

A computer model is nothing more than a computer program that computes how something will change over time, Global warming, Corona virus, you name it, is going to work out.  I have written and tested plenty of computer models over a long career in R&D and programming.  When you start programming a computer model, you already have a clear idea of what you want the model to say.  If the model doesn’t say what you want it to say, you start fixing the code.  Work hard enough and the model will say what you want it to say if especially if you are willing to cheat.  One greenie climate change program had a line of code that read “If date younger than 1945 add a few degrees.  If date younger than 1955 add a few more.”  This bit of code came from the Hadley Climate Research Unit (CRU) and created Mann’s “hockey stick” plot of world temperature. 

   Any how a model (or two or other models) predicted massive infection rates of Corona virus world wide.  It is beginning to look like that model’s frightening predictions of infection, need for hospital beds, ventilators, and what ever, are not true, and the Corona virus epidemic is not as bad as the model predicted.  It is still pretty bad, but not as bad as the model predicted.