The Spirit Lake Sioux Tribe has decided to weigh in on the University’s use of the “Fighting Sioux” mascot; they have retained legal counsel and sued. Sued the NCAA that is:
FORT TOTTEN, ND – Speaking at the tribal headquarters of the Spirit Lake Sioux Nation, attorney Reed Soderstrom announced a lawsuit against the NCAA alleging copyright infringement and civil rights violations. The Sioux tribe supports the University of North Dakota’s “Fighting Sioux” nickname and logo, but the NCAA has deemed them to be “hostile and abusive.”
“Today, the Spirit Lake Tribe of Indians, by and through its Committee of Understanding and Respect, and Archie Fool Bear, individually, and as Representative of more than 1004 Petitioners of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, filed a lawsuit against the National Collegiate Athletic Association in direct response to their attempt to take away and prevent the North Dakota Sioux Indians from giving their name forever to the University of North Dakota,” said Soderstrom in prepared remarks.
Soderstrom alleges that the NCAA has violated “the religious and first amendment rights of the Dakota Sioux tribes.” He also alleged a double standard in the application of the NCAA’s policy against the use of Native American names and imagery.
The Sioux Nation WANTS the mascot to remain. They find honor in being thus honored. The NCAA is insane.
Rumor has it that Clint Eastwood is a conservative. I am beginning to object to the term conservative because I feel that what we mean when we say we’re conservative is that we’re “Classic Liberals”.
This morning I posted on the flaw of using the popular measure of income disparity across nations. Many organizations use the GINI coefficient to measure this disparity. However, what these organizations fail to mention is that they are measuring household disparity, not individual disparity. And when they compare nation to nation, they don’t normalize those numbers so that we’re comparing apples to apples.
For example, in the United States, a massive amount of “households” is comprised of single parents. That is, the home will find a single eligible wage earner. And many of those parents opt not to work. Now, some will say that’s because there is no work to be had. Others, me included, will say that the incentives are all wrong. The entitlement programs offer enough aid that the prospect of going to work doesn’t make sense.
So, no income.
Is this sad? Most certainly.
Does this promote poverty generation to generation? With out a doubt.
Is this a serious problem that requires serious thought? Yes.
Does this implicate the job market, compensation structure or some inherent bias towards “the wealthy”? Under no circumstance.
This morning I showed the “horizontal” version of the data. Let’s look at the vertical:
Descriptor
Lowest Fifth
Second Fifth
Third Fifth
Fourth Fifth
Highest Fifth
No Earners
62.4%
29.6%
14.0%
6.3%
3.0%
One Earner
33.0%
52.6%
48.4%
33.1%
22.2%
Two Earners
4.3%
16.0%
32.4%
49.3%
55.9%
Three Earners
0.2%
1.6%
4.4%
8.9%
13.1%
Four Earners
0.0%
0.2%
0.8%
2.4%
5.8%
The data continues to reveal reality. The quintile that represents the poorest among us, the “Lowest Fifth” has 62.4% of it’s members with ZERO wage earners. That is, more than half, WAY more than half of the poorest quintile has no one in it making any amount of money. NONE. There is no way that this can be counted towards any measure of income disparity. For that to happen, there must be an income!
I have lived in North Carolina for 12 years [damn! 12 years] and I have never won the North Carolina lottery. Never mind that we have had a lottery for only 7 years and that I’ve never bought a ticket. Is it realistic that I be counted among lottery players that haven’t won?
No.
Back to the data. The “Lowest Fifth” has 62.4% of its members with no income. 62.4%. Compare this to the “Highest Fifth”. That quintile has 3% with no wage earners. Three. Further, the “Lowest Fifth” has only 4.5% of its membership with 2 or more earners. Compare that with the “Highest Fifth” who have 5.8% with FOUR wage earners.
It turns out that a predictor of income is, shockingly, the number of wage earners.
Thursday I posted my thoughts on the GINI rating and how it pertains to income here in America. In that post, my main thrust was the fact that GINI, as reported when comparing national income disparity rankings, was comparing household incomes. Not the incomes of individuals, but of households.
And I think that’s important. As I demonstrated in that post, taking these two families:
Family A making $60,000 a year
Family B making $70,000 a year
Looks to be fairly equitable. But now let’s consider that family A and family B get divorced, created 4 households out of two. Then the breakdown looks like this:
Family A making $0 a year
Family B making $28,000 a year
Family C making $32,000 a year
Family D making $70,000 a year
THIS looks to be dramatically different. However, the same four families in the second picture are the individual household represented in the first picture. Remarkable, yes?
The data is remarkable. Let’s go through it bit by bit.
First, the “Fifths” listed at the top is earnings by quintile. That is, the poorest 20% is the “Lowest Fifth” while the richest 20% is the “Highest Fifth”.
Now then, the data:
Households that are “families” is a massive indicator of income.As the percentage of families in each fifth increases, so does the wealth. The same goes for married couples. The top fifth has nearly 5x the number of married couples as the bottom fifth. Seems that family is important in wealth creation.
Family aside, the powerful statistic that I took away was the number of earners in a household. And what I found matches exactly with the phenomenon I described in my earlier post.
Of the households in the bottom fifth, more than HALF don’t have a single wage earner in the household. More than half. While the top 20% has only 2.6% of households that don’t qualify as a wage earner.
Further, if you look at the “Lowest Fifth” as a column and march down, you’ll see that fewer and fewer of those households have the described number of earners. Starting at the top, this segment of the population has 54% of households with 0 wage earners. While at the bottom, it has but .2% of the households with 4 wage earners. The exact opposite is true of the “Highest Fifth”.
In short, it would seem that as a household has more wage earners, that household moves from one of the fifths to another. And to the extent that this is true, look at the last line; aggregate earners.
The “Lowest Fifth” has 10,240 members. The fifth that earns twice as much money as the lowest fifth has twice as many wage earners. The fifth that makes three times as much as the lowest fifth has three times as many wage earners. The fourth has four times as many wage earners. And the highest has five times the number of wage earners.
This is true almost to the exact number.
The data presented above tells me that we don’t have an income disparity issue. We have a family structure issue. If you take a single wage earner in a household and compare that household to one with 4 wage earners, it should be no surprise which of the two households makes more money.
And lest there be any doubt. The “Highest Fifth”? They are some working sums -o- beetches. Fully 62.7% of those households have FOUR wage earners. This is not the lazy rich that the OWS and the ((% make them out to be.
I was having lunch with my daughter the other day; a special treat for me. She is 9 and her time is full. If not school, then dance or friends. The peaceful time of daughter and father is rare and precious.
I asked the waiter for the check. And then she said something that hit me like a truck. Gave me chills to the very core of my being:
Daddy, why do we have to pay for food? We need it to live! It should be free!
In my own HOME!
Suffice it to say that a copy of “The Law” will be given to her for her 10th birthday.
Ayn Rand is a lightning rod. A lightning rod for many many different reasons. But I wanna discuss a single one tonight. That is, that Ayn Rand promotes a certain degree of selfishness.
I’m not necessarily a Rand fan-boy. I do think that her book Atlas Shrugged, the only Rand book that I’ve read, is an epic tale of government encroachment. However, her views on virtually anything beyond what she spoke to in that novel is new to me. With the exception of one concept, that of her aforementioned concept of selfishness.
I’m a weird guy. I’m a weird adult who grew out of a weird kid.
I had weird hair growing up, and played weird games. My most favorite thing to do as a kid was to play D&D. I remember getting that very first blue Dungeons and Dragons rulebook. Remember? Back when an Elf was a class and the levels went ALL the way up to 3?
Crazy times.
I played that game until I was 4 years out of college. And even now am anxiously awaiting the day when my son understands how to play the PokieMon cards I’ve bought him.
I wasn’t very good at games with a ball; I can catch anything thrown within 10 yards of me and can hit the eye of a bird flying, but I SUCKED at those games. But, for a small farm town kid in farm country I could run forever. In track I won more races than I didn’t.
I went to church, Sunday school and sang in the choir until the day I graduated. I delivered Easter morning sermons at 5:00 AM. I marched in the band [though I did quit after two summers of marching in Minnesota heat in those hot as hell wool uniforms and those ugly black buffalo hats]. I loved debating in school, was in theater and ran the computer lab during study hall.
It was great. All of it. And I wouldn’t trade it for all the world.
But I paid a price; a massive price.
Beginning in the 5th grade I started getting picked on. While fast, I was small; until I was 33 I weighed 137 pounds. Marching in the school band with your head in the Monster Manuel while the cool guys played on the varsity basketball team didn’t make a lot of friends [though it made the BEST of friends]. Not until years later did the torture really stop, and even then it didn’t really stop. It just slowed down. I still remember opening my locker and reacting with horror that the entire contents had been doused with water; my Honor Cords [you know what honor cords are?] were in there. Thankfully the perpetrator had displayed some form of human sympathy and took ’em out before the dousing.
I was hit, kicked, pushed and taunted. Heck, I even had my hair set on fire once coming back from a class trip. The things you see in the movies…..they’re real.
I still remember walking down the empty second floor hall in the middle school when I realized one kid in front of me. One in back. I fought as hard as I could, but I couldn’t stop ’em from pinning me to the locker and feeding me dog food.
Good times.
Oh, and to ensure that I would continue to participate in this mandatory fun, my dad was the 8th grade math teacher. The deck was stacked against me. In science class it got bad one day. 2-3 guys [it was never just one now that I think of it. cowards] were kinda taking turns, like crows on road kill. It went too far that morning and I actually retaliated; I hit the kid in front of me. That kinda calmed things down. After class, the teacher pulled me aside and mentioned that he saw what had happened. I was relieved, ’cause it didn’t FEEL like the bastard saw it while it was going on. He then looked at me dead in the eye and expressed his disappointment that I had hit that kid; he expected better. I bit my tongue–that made TWO of us. Ass.
But at least I didn’t have to worry about a girlfriend 😉
I knew back then that this wasn’t “fair”. That I really didn’t do anything that deserved this. Heck, I didn’t DO anything. I read The Trilogy, all four of ’em*, during class and just stayed out of the way. I went to class, went to Greyhawk, went to church, went to track and went to bed.
I suspected then, I continue to believe even now, that those kids didn’t know what they were doing. I bet if you were to ask those boys, now men, they wouldn’t remember the stories. In fact, if I were to see ’em in town, we’d have beers and talk about the GOOD times. As if.
And so it is, as I read stories of kids in school today being bullied, that I wonder how I’m gonna teach my own kids. What I’m gonna say, what I’m gonna do. What lessons will I make them endure. My own father let me experience every one of ’em. He didn’t intervene even once that I knew of. In fact, only one time did I see an exchange that let me know he knew what was going on.
Down the street were some brothers. And one day they were picking on my sister. We told dad and he went over and tried to talk those boy’s dad. The man refused to believe that his kids could’ve done that, “Not my boys” was what he told my dad.
The next night my brother and I took it out on those brothers at the ice rink. Looking back I suppose it was us that was the brute then. Anyway, it wasn’t long before that man came knocking on OUR door and asked my dad to explain why his sons would have done what we did to his boys. I still remember dad saying, “That wasn’t my boys. My kids wouldn’t do that.” He closed the door and simply went back to his paper. Not even one word, for or against, was said.
I think that I’ll try, somehow, to explain to my kids that growing up is a lot like life. It isn’t not getting knocked down that’s the goal, THAT is gonna happen. It’s all about the getting back up.
My heart breaks for those kids getting picked on today. I just read a story of another girl who has been bullied and the hell her parents are going through. For those kids that don’t know where to turn and who to talk too, [God knows they most likely don’t even KNOW about Styx] I just wish they could see their 26 year old self. Still weird, still geeky. But okay with the world and their place in it. But if I could talk to ’em, I know what I’d say; “Get up! Get back on your feet! You’re the one they can’t beat and you know it.”
Anyway. I don’t remember what the point was except maybe that life teaches how to prepare for life. Yesterday’s wimpy kid is going to be tomorrows Libertarian champion maybe? The geek makes good maybe? The ugly duckling gets the hot wife perhaps? I dunno know.
Maybe it’s just to remind us that mean people suck.
* Rings, Lord of the; Unbeliever, Thomas Covenant the; Lance, Dragon and Foundation, Just
