Saturday, September 17, 2011

Sometimes I hate being a BYU fan.

Their football team won at Ole Miss by 1 point. Then it lost to Texas by 1 point.

Tonight they're down 47 to 10 to their arch-rival, the University of Utah, with 8 minutes left. They've had more turnovers that I could keep track of. All on their home field. Utah is pouring it on. I can't stand to watch.

If they were always bad, it wouldn't bother me so much. Maybe it's the Norm Chow curse. When LaVell Edwards retired, it seemed the natural pick to replace him with Norm Chow, the offensive coordinator who had been behind so much of their great offenses of the past, but instead they hired Gary Croton who allowed standards of behavior to decline, ending in a scandal when several players were charged with rape at a beer party. BYU requires all students to sign and agreement to abide by its Honor Code, which stipulates that they uphold LDS standards, no alcohol, no pre-marital sex or adultery, among other things. The current coach Bronco Mendenhall has done a good job, but now Norm Chow is working for Utah as its offensive coordinator. The curse is playing out in its full fury.

I know. I don't believe in superstitions like this, nor in Karma, but this is certainly a great payback for Coach Chow. I wish him well. He also coached for USC and UCLA as well as the Tennessee titans. Now he'll coach against those two PAC 12 schools who let him go. BYU should honor him for his legacy and plead with him to forgive them.

Friday, September 16, 2011

Krauthammer: "Of course it's a Ponzi schem. Now let's fix it."

I've compared Social Security to a Ponzi scheme in the past, but it wasn't set up as one. That only developed because the population growth fell off. It was sold as a Ponzi scheme would be sold, and the government could keep it afloat as long as it were willing to keep increasing payroll taxes. The problem is that people have been promised retirement benefits that are often beyond the amount of their "investment" plus reasonable earnings. What we should all acknowledge is that SS is and always has been a welfare program for old people, but as life spans go up, it gets to be more and more expensive. There are ways to fix this. Like cutting benefits based on actuarial data. But the best way is for Government to cut spending, and get the economy booming by providing more certainty to investors and businesses.

Heh! Democrats are spinning their loss of NY-9 by calling the district "too Jewish." It's been held by a Democrat since 1923, usually by a Jewish Democrat.