Pork neck bones were only item on the old meat rack, so I'm using the meat in a lentil soup

    I did a quick swing by Kroger this morning in hopes of finding some deals on the old meat rack. The only thing they had was pork neck bones marked down to 50 percent off, so $3.56 for 3.5 pounds.
    I've never cooked a pork neck bone before. They look a little like some of the ribs I've seen, so I thought maybe I could barbecue them. I got on my phone and did a quick Internet search and found where someone suggested I could simmer them for several hours and the meat would fall off the bones. The meat could then be used to make a lentil soup.
    So I came home, chopped an onion fine, sauteed it and some mushrooms in a quarter-stick of butter, added 12 cups of water and a couple of big teaspoons of beef base along with rosemary and other spices, and then added the pork neck bones to simmer. They are simmering at fairly low heat even as I type.
    I've never cooked lentils before, but the package says they only need about 20 minutes. So late this afternoon I'll fish out the pork neck bones, remove any remaining meat and continue to simmer the broth until suppertime. I'll throw in the lentils 20 or 30 minutes before it's time to eat. Some recipes call for a can of diced tomatoes. I'll let Lucy decide on whether or not to add any.
    Check back late tonight and I'll report on how it was!
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    UPDATE: I promised an update on how dinner turned out. It was good, and the neckbones had a lot of meat on them. However, I had to dip out the bones and sort through the meat and mushrooms by hand. Even then some little bones got through.
    Next time I will use smoked pork rather than fresh and strain it. I'll lose the meat doing this but still get all the flavor. While straining I'll saute the onion and mushrooms, pour the liquid back in and let it simmer for an hour. The mushrooms do add a lot of flavor, but have to be simmered.

College friend, housemate, and fraternity brother shares letter signed by both of our fathers.

Click to enlarge

    At some point I seem to recollect coming across a quote that said "Mississippi is not so much a state as it is a private club." I thought Faulkner said it, but numerous Google searches for the author have proven fruitless. If I can't find anyone to attribute it to I guess I'll claim it.
    The point of the quote is that Mississippi is a relatively low-population state in which people from all over seem to share friendships and a common history.
    Joe Guyton, a fraternity brother and former housemate recently emailed me a copy of a letter to the national Democratic Committee that was signed by both of our fathers back in 1948. It urged the committee to name a slate of electors to support the re-election of Harry Truman as all of the state's leaders were supporting Strom Thurmond and Fielding Wright.
    A Google search found reference to this (unsuccessful) effort in a biography of Mississippi Congressman Frank Smith. It was apparently encouraged by Ole Miss professor Jim Silver, who was my father's favorite professor.
    My father was unable to attend a ceremony honoring Silver three years ago, so I went in his stead. I was disappointed when Chancellor Dan Jones and others used the event to suggest that those who wanted a new athletic director for Ole Miss were like those who drove Silver from the Ole Miss campus. It was a disgraceful act of incivility outside the bounds of the Ole Miss creed, yet Jones has still not apologized.
    In any event, what are the odds that two of 24 people who signed a letter back in 1948 would have sons who would later become friends, fraternity brothers, and housemates? My guess is that in Mississippi such things are more likely than in most states.

USAir's Choice Seats offer little more than a chance to give airline more money

    Delta Airlines offers a few rows of "Economy Comfort" seating on most of its planes. It's a coach seat with extra padding and about four extra inches of extra legroom. Sometimes it's only a few dollars more, and I've bought it before and found it well worth the money. On International flights Delta throws in free hard liquor.
    United Airlines has "Economy Plus" seating, which is the same thing as Delta's Economy Comfort, with a few inches of extra legroom.
    And then there's USAir, which offers "Choice Seats." The airline's website describes these seats as follows:

Be among the first to board (with Zone 2) and among the first to leave when you land. ChoiceSeats are mostly window and aisle seats toward the front of Coach and may include exit row seats. You'll find the same leg room as other seats, but you'll be closer to the front of the plane.

    So on USAir you pay a big premium for a Choice Seat with the only reward being getting on and off early. That's a pretty weak reward. Extra legroom and free whiskey I'll pay for, but I'm not paying a big premium just to get off the plane two minutes before everyone else.

Oxford students all atwitter after discovery of new anonymous social media app

    The newest social media app, Yik Yak, has arrived in Oxford, or more precisely at Oxford High School. It was apparently unknown to most students before the school bell rang Tuesday morning, but by 3 p.m. virtually every student with a phone had downloaded it.
    The Twitter-like app, designed for college students, allows anonymous posts which are only visible to those in roughly a five-mile radius. Then high school students found out about it. What works okay for college students doesn't work so well for high schoolers trapped in the same building together all day. The app has been a nightmare for school administrators around the nation, who say that it has been used for bullying.
    Yik Yak's developers disabled the app at all Chicago schools earlier this month, and went on to apply a GPS block at all U.S. middle and high schools. Of course, Oxford High has only been in its current location a few months and it apparently isn't in the database. So Oxford students spent Tuesday anonymously spouting off about things or students they didn't like.
    Yik Yak is essentially a digital version of the "burn book" from the movie "Mean Girls." Hopefully school officials will contact the app's developers and request to be included in the school-exclusion database.
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    Below is the clip from the movie that shows the aftermath of a burn book gone viral.

When patients fail to pay their Obamacare premiums health care providers are left holding the bag

    The important thing to understand about Obamacare is that virtually everything is broken. It's a bad, poorly thought out law.
    It had to be, by the very nature of it. The Democrats rammed it through Congress as part of a reconciliation bill. Even the people supporting it had little idea what they were voting for. Nancy Pelosi made headlines when she explained that the bill would have to be passed before people would really understand what was in it.
    The American people are starting to understand and many simply do not like it.
    One little feature of Obamacare is that anyone purchasing subsidized insurance is automatically covered for four months after making a single payment. In other words, there is a 90-day grace period before policies are cancelled.
    I suppose that is something that can be priced into insurance. But what happens next is the shocker.
    During the first 30 days of the 90-day grace period insurance claims will be paid and processed. Any claims during the next 60 days simply will not be paid unless the premiums are paid.
    So doctors and hospitals will be told that a patient is insured, only to find out later that they aren't going to be paid.
    Obamacare already has really low reimbursement rates for doctors. In California, for example, a majority of doctors are simply refusing to see those insured through exchanges. They can't afford to. Refusing to pay doctors and hospitals for services provided is going to make them even more loathe to accept exchange insurance.
    Failure to pay premiums is a big problem with Obamacare. The administration has been trying to hide the numbers, but roughly 20 percent of those who signed up never paid their first premium, and that may be a low number. So instead of 4.2 million being enrolled through the exchanges the number is more like 3.3 million or fewer. If 20 percent of this number eventually defaults on their insurance payments, then roughly 600,000 people will be able to run up doctor and hospital bills under the guise of being insured. Providers will be falsely told that their patients are insured only to find out later that they are being stiffed.
    No doubt many people are going to be upset over the fact that they've paid for insurance and can't find a doctor to accept it. How bad is the problem? Well, it depends on the state. Forbes did an analysis of the availability of specialists and found substantially fewer participate in Obamacare.

    The chart at right shows specialist availability offered by Athen in its PPO plans versus its Obamacare Bronze plans. In some cases the differences are extreme. For example, Anthem PPO customers in Indiana have a choice of 1055 cardiologists to choose from in their plan. Obamacare customers have 74. In other words, only one in about 14 doctors in its regular PPO plans are willing to accept Obamacare patients.
    Anthem was chosen for the comparison because the data was readily available, and its exchange plans tend to be as good or better than most.
    Understand that President Obama has declared policies which don't cover things like maternity care for senior citizens junk. But most Americans would prefer to pay less for their insurance, forego the free birth control they don't need, maternity benefits they don't want, and so forth, and instead have a wide choice of doctors who would be glad to see them.
    Roughly half of American doctors aren't going to accept Obamacare, and that number is likely to rise after they don't get paid.
    Even worse, because of all the money being spent on Obamacare there is no money to pay for the annual Medicare/Medicaid "doc fix," which increases reimburse levels for these programs. Doctors are about to take a 24 percent pay cut and many will respond by refusing to see Medicaid patients.
    So the problem isn't limited to just purchasers of junk Obamacare policies. Soon Granny won't be able to find a doctor, either.
    Thanks Obama!

A single chart shows how doomed Obamacare relies on the victimization of young males to succeed

This chart shows what a really bad deal Obamacare is for males of almost any age. Roughly 50 percent of the premiums paid by young males go to women and wealthy older insurance customers. Note the bottom portion of the chart, which shows that older customers receiving giant subsidies are signing up at roughly twice the expected rate while young people have signed up at about half of what was expected and needed.

    It should be apparent by now that the government's attempt to take over and micromanage one-sixth of the American economy is a complete and total flop. Obamacare will fail, and it should fail. The chart above, from the ACA Death Spiral website, shows why.
    One of the myriad faults with Obamacare is that it limits or outlaws all insurance ratings, save for those based on geography. Age ratings are permitted in part. Older patients cost as much as five times as much to insure as younger ones, but Obamacare imposes a 3:1 maximum premium differential. In other words, young people just starting out in life are forced to subsidize their wealthier elders.
    Oddly enough, liberals don't seem to care about premium differentials when it comes to auto insurance. The differential is often huge: young males pay premiums several times those of older females. If we are going to limit age differentials in insurance, shouldn't we do so for all types of insurance? Shouldn't we require all citizens to purchase auto insurance, whether they own a car or not?
    The chart above shows that roughly 50 percent of premiums paid by younger males will go to provide free insurance coverage to other groups, a subsidy being a form of free care. Consider the fact that 20 percent of insurance benefits are actually overhead costs and young males as a group will receive only 40 cents of medical care for every dollar in premiums paid.
    But wait there's more! I'm operating on guesstimate here, but we've all observed that in any group the bulk of medical costs are incurred by a relatively small number of individuals. Using a proper rating system I dare say that out of a group of 100 men I could identify 10 up front who would be likely to consume 50 percent of the group's medical services over the next year.
    Technically insurers are allowed to charge a smoker's premium under Obamacare. But those who lie won't have their policies cancelled or coverage denied. With Obamacare, those who engage in risky health behaviors now have their costs passed over to the healthy. So the Type 2 diabetic who weighs 300 pounds, drinks like a fish, and chomps on pork chops and pies all day won't have to pay a dime in extra insurance costs. His costs are covered by gouging vegetable-eating joggers.
    I suspect that when you factor out the costs of the intentionally or unfortunately ill, you'll find that young, healthy males will receive less than 20 cents in health-care benefits for every dollar paid in premiums. For young males -- and males of most ages really -- Obamacare is a sucker deal.
    The Obama administration has been in an all-out effort to get young people to sign up for Obamacare. And many administration officials have been up front about why these younger signees are needed: to subsidize health care for those being sold discounted health plans. The president is actually making (bad) comedy videos in an effort to woo the young.
    But these Obamacare shills have a terrible sales pitch. It's essentially, "Hey young people, come sign up for insurance so we can charge you four times as much as we should and use the money to give free coverage to people who are older and wealthier than you!" Many young people will qualify for health-care subsidies when purchasing low-quality policies through the exchanges, but unless these subsidies equal 75 percent of their premiums it's a bad deal.
    Suppose you were to go to a restaurant and be told that your $25 meal would cost $125 in order to provide everyone with unlimited fine wine with dinner. This might be a good deal, except for those who are satisfied with a $5 glass of wine, or no wine at all. Soon such a restaurant would find that teetotalers and cheap-wine drinkers would stay away, and it would quickly go broke as its changing customer base slurped down vast quantities of Cristal, Château Petrus, Opus One, etc., for the low price of $125 per meal. Would you go to such restaurant? I wouldn't.
    Of course, with the Obamacare mindset such a restaurant needn't go broke. The government would just agree to cover the tab of any patron who drank too much expensive wine and pass on the costs to the taxpayers. But is this a rational government policy?
    Should young males buy health insurance? Perhaps. They should base their decision on their own best interests and not on some stupid comedy skit by the president. If they are dreadfully ill, of course they should buy the now-partially-free insurance. If they have a substantial estate, yes. But for the average male with a modest estate a better choice is probably to buy plenty of accident coverage on one's auto policy and hope for the best.
    Yes, bad things can happen, but uninsured young people can get emergency health care. If a chronic condition should surface they can wait a few months and enroll in Obamacare. And if their bills are just impossible to pay off they can declare bankruptcy and get a new start. This is the best choice young males have under Obamacare, and it's the one most are taking.
    Maybe more young people could be persuaded to sign up, if only they could be shown videos like the one made by Richard Simmons, as part of the "Tell A Friend -- Get Covered" campaign (shown below). Please watch this video, young males of America! Doesn't it make you want to pay four times as much as you should to "Get Covered"?

The College Board trumpets SAT changes, but final outcomes will remain almost unchanged

    The College Board has announced that they are revamping the SAT. Once called the Scholastic Aptitude Test, SAT now stands for nothing.
    The SAT used to be an almost-perfect IQ test, and until 1995 it did the job so well that a high score was accepted by Mensa, the high-IQ society. It measured aptitude, not the ability to work hard, nor kindness, nor collegiality, nor a host of other factors that go into making one a success in life or in college.
    But the fact remains that all other things being equal someone with a high IQ is going to outperform someone with a low IQ. All other things being equal, a student with a high SAT score will outperform a student with a low SAT score. The best predictor of college success isn't high school grades alone, nor entrance examinations alone, but grades and exam scores used in tandem. Work ethic matters. A good work ethic combined with an above-average IQ matters even more.
    Americans hate the notion of IQ, particularly when expressed in its two-letter formulation. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman recently gushed all over the pages of his newspaper with praise for comments made by a Google executive, who said his company no longer used IQ in the hiring process and now hired primarily based on cognitive ability. Friedman saw this as a wonderful change.
    Is Friedman, who is supposed to be an American opinion-shaper, too dull to understand that IQ and "cognitive ability" are exact synonyms? If this executive had declared that "Our employees no longer drive trucks to work; they now use pick-ups," would Friedman have the sense to understand that the man was speaking complete gibberish?
    Back to the SAT. The idea of changes made back in 1994 and 2005 were designed to muffle the test as a measure of mere IQ and to reward those students who work hard mastering certain skills. The thought was that this would reward hard-working students with lower IQs at the expense of high-IQ slackers. It hasn't worked out that way.
    A test which rewards hard work is going to help high-IQ students who work the hardest. Thus Asians, whose propensity for academic work is no secret, have tended to do quite well on the SAT. Highly intelligent students from a non-competitive academic environment have fared poorly. By attempting to measure hard work rather than merely IQ the makers of the SAT actually skewed it further in favor of the brightest students from the best high schools.
    The College Board claims that the changes to the SAT are designed to more closely align the test with current schoolwork. In reality the changes will likely increase the importance of IQ as a determining factor of SAT success.
    That's essentially the only two choices these test-makers have. They can test achievement and hard work and the winners will be those bright students who prepare the most. Or they can just test IQ and include some kids without a great work ethic or without access to a quality school.
    In the end, achievement is the handmaiden of intelligence. Changing the SAT will alter scores a bit, but the final message is going to be one that society simply does not want to hear:
    Some students are smarter than others, some students will work harder than others, students who prepare for any type of test will outperform those who don't, and some students will do well on virtually any test designed to measure intelligence or achievement.
    The College Board can change the SAT, but insofar as outcomes are concerned, little will change.