Jeb Bush and Ben Stein

THE ZEN OF COOKING LIKE A GUY™

You never have to clean a banana. Think about it.

BRCI

Fred C.: “Is anything going on with BRCI? You suggested it at 2 cents and it’s since gone to 4 cents. Seems to be a pretty big jump for a penny stock.”

☞ Nah. The trading is very thin. The jumping up and down simply depends on whether someone wanted to buy (in which case he likely paid the dealer 4 cents) or sell (in which case the dealer likely paid him only 2 cents). You just need to wait a year or two to see whether this company gets some traction (in which case our shares would likely be worth a good deal more); or goes the way of most start-ups (in which case it will just fade away).

What I can tell you is that it is a serious effort by serious people to fill a serious need.

EDUCATION

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush on “Morning Joe” last Thursday: “I think Secretary Duncan and President Obama deserve credit for (a) challenging a really core constituency in their own party, but (b) putting students first rather than the adults in the system. . . . New York City is an awesome example . . . very exciting.”

Two minutes worth watching?

GOVERNMENT

Mike Hanlon sends us this Chicago Tribune op-ed that makes the case for government. In part:

. . . Let me advance a suggestion that some people will find reprehensible, socialist, liberal, whatever. In the United States, the government is not your enemy. Not local, not county, not state, not federal.

It’s time to find a way to pour cold water on that thought before it fuels any more violence or unleashes any more nut cases. Where the idea came from that you could have a society without services and taxes to pay for them confounds me. I love my sanitary waste system. I love my garbage collection. I love the fact that a cop will come if something goes wrong. Taxes do indeed suck, but it’s not like we don’t get anything in return.

The reputation of government has already been damaged deeply by a couple of decades of “government is the problem” thought. It worked as a campaign stunt for that hero of the far right, Ronald Reagan, but look at what it unleashed. We are now so bound up that we can’t move legislation through the U.S. Senate. That is a clear consequence of many years of demonizing what the government does.

That people push this agenda when sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, are in harm’s way in Iraq and Afghanistan is unconscionable. That critics push this agenda when the ranks of government are full of people who believe in what they are doing — exhausting themselves in some cases just to help people who are forgotten, abandoned, ignored — is despicable.

Hang out with some street-level workers for the Veterans Affairs and then come and argue that their work isn’t crucial, valuable, fully human and admirable. You would be wrong about that. . . .

GOVERNMENT – II

Ben Stein – the conservative – made the same point in two minutes on CBS Sunday Morning a couple of days ago, complete with pictures. (“There is a basic assumption among many of us conservatives that bothers me. Basically, the assumption is that if a person is a government employee, then he or she is lazy and shiftless, a parasite just eating up tax dollars without doing anything. ‘Bureaucrats’ is what the sneering expression usually is. To put it mildly, this is unfair and not even in the ballpark of what’s true.”)