Many pseudo-liberals are very unhappy about lotteries. They believe the very poor, who are the principal buyers of lottery tickets, are squandering money they can’t afford. We are talking as much as $20-30 per play from people who are on welfare. The lottery, in their ill-considered view, is a drug that is sucking the blood out of the poor.

NONSENSE! The pseudo-liberals, most of whom have income above $90,000 regard playing the lottery as a sure-fire losing proposition. In fact, it is a sure-fire winning proposition. For the man with $90,000 buying a “losing” ticket” is buying a losing ticket. For him, nothing can justify spending $2 on a ticket except winning, and that, he likes to say, won’t happen. So this fine gentleman takes his $60 out to a nice dinner at least once each week.

In fact, for sensible people, the purchase of a lottery ticket is a very inexpensive way to buy a daydream. Hence, even if they lose, they win. The actual winning, should it happen, is only a bonus. It is the icing on a nice cake; it is the whipped cream on the icing; it is the cherry that sits atop the whole shebang. But whatever happens, the sensible lottery player wins. In fact, he can’t lose. What terrific daydream that last 3-6 days can yield so much pleasure as the imagined way one can use the $millions?

What would the $90,000+ pseudo-liberal have a poor person do with his money? Does he think it would be better to go out to an expensive restaurant and fritter away a few hard-earned bucks on a meal he can’t enjoy? Most people, including the poor, know best what pleases them. Poor people know that the more you spend the less value you get. Is anybody so stupid as to think a $100,000 car is twice as good as a $50,000 one? Or even that a $40 meal is twice as tasty as a $20 meal? Those who spend fortunes know that, too. They like conspicuous consumption. (about which Thorsten Veblen had much to say in his THEORY OF THE LEISURE CLASS). But conspicuous consumption may be good up to a point and, after that, is stupid, disgusting and foul.

I very much doubt that the $2, $10, or even $20 that a poor person spends on lottery tickets can be put to a purpose that would yield more pluck for the buck than he gets on lottery tickets.

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P.S. The value of certain lotteries is approaching $1 BILLION! When lottery values get that high, buying tickets is not only lots of fun but wise and sound economically because the number of combinations in a mega jackpocket is about 175 million. If you had a spare $350 million plus the time to buy many tickets, you ought to buy 175 million tickets. Even if you had to share the winnings, you’d probably come out ahead.

SO WHAT WOULD YOU DO WITH LOTS OF MONEY? LET THE GREAT ZERO MOSTEL TELL YOU.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahAOU1HZXlc

In the world of college presidents, nothing beats being forced out of your job under a cloud of suspicion that you are incompetent and probably a crook. When these suspicions are attached to your base salary you get a severance package that beats what you the readers will earn over the next 10 years.

In the 2011-12 fiscal year, the nation’s highest paid public university president was Graham B. Spanier, the president of Pennsylvania State University, who was forced out in November 2011 over his handling of a child sex abuse scandal involving a football coach.

Graham Spanier, the former president of Pennsylvania State University, was the nation’s highest paid public university president in the 2011-12 fiscal year.
According to the annual compensation report by The Chronicle of Higher Education, Mr. Spanier was paid $2.9 million in 2011-12, including $1.2 million in severance pay and $1.2 million in deferred compensation.

Don’t you wish someone would fire you? Other presidents hoping they will soon be disgraced and fired are: Jay Gogue of Auburn University, at $2,542,865; E. Gordon Gee of Ohio State University, at $1,899,420; and Alan G. Merten of George Mason University, at $1,869,369. Other worthies include: Jo Ann M. Gora of Ball State University ($984,647); Mary Sue Coleman of the University of Michigan system ($918,783); Charles W. Steger of Virginia Tech ($857,749); Mark G. Yudof of the University of California system ($847,149); Bernard J. Machen of the University of Florida ($834,562); and Francisco G. Cigarroa of the University of Texas system ($815,833).

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the median total compensation for the presidents of public research universities was $441,392, up 4.7 percent from the previous year’s $421,395. The median base salary, $373,800, was up 2 percent from $366,519 the previous year.

GOOD NEWS! Suicide has taken over from car crashes and other accidents as the third leading cause of the permanent ending of the vital processes in cells and tissues, what the squeamish call being dead as a doornail. Only those two bores, cancer and heart disease top it. In 1999, suicide was mired in 8th place but it has made a respectable surge among those in the 35-64 cohort thanks to the worst recession in decades that wiped out stock market wealth, home equity, college savings and retirement funds – the principal evil-doers.

I know about these wealth subsidies only 2nd hand since I manage quite well, thank you, on my fixed $72,000 per annum plus the largesse of the ex-clarinet player who wakes up in bed alongside me nearly every morning. [She made her fortune on a money-saving clarinet scholarship to college plus 51 years of servitude as a (pardon the expression) professor of history, dedicated to enhancing the well-being of our youth. In fact, just last month, the powers-that-be boosted her income by $7000 over and beyond her normal yearly adjustment, for no better reason than that she is very good at what she does.]

In 1999 about 29,181 people (more or less) checked themselves out of life’s rat race but that number has grown to 38,364. Good news, indeed.

Men have led the charge by a ratio of 4-to-1 according to a man (a survivor) at the Suicide Prevention Division of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, otherwise known simply as SPDSAMHSA54271LLK3. [Like Tevye's staircase, SPDSAMHSA54271LLK3 has letters and numerals going nowhere just for show.] According to SPDS -please, you know the rest – men kill themselves in lieu of seeking therapy. They tend to suffer bouts of bipolar disorder, concentrating on the mania part of the pole. In short, they kill themselves because they are having too much fun. I know this problem very well from the inside. Last week, my wife forcibly held me down as I reached for my supply of strychnine. This was occasioned by a side-splitting joke I had just heard that was unbearably funny. [Aside to The Grim: Four friends of mine with the Ph.D. degree in psychology told me I don't understand the nature of mania.] I also don’t understand what the 4-to-1 ratio is. Is that 4 male wolves to each female pussycat? OR WHAT? I have also been told that men kill themselves because they have wives and wives tend not to have wives. Certainly sounds right, doesn’t it?

An official over at NAASP [just forget it and don't ask what that means or I will tell you and then you'll be sorry] says that so far as middle-aged men are concerned “the safety net for working adults has a lot of big holes in it.” It’s “creeping erosion” according to an official over at IJCRCSP, which is a division of CDC. I suspect that one very good reason middle-aged men are killing themselves is that in order to get good jobs they have to be adept at learning acronyms. Obama is planning to increase the budget for mental health services by a couple million bucks. And you wonder why I can’t stand the guy?

Neither Charity Evaluator nor Charity Navigator considers salaries when evaluating the quality of a charity. There are many better ways to judge a charity, for example, the pct. of its revenues that goes directly to programs. Salaries should be considered only as tie-breakers. Many charities spend 60% or less on programs. From my perspective, whatever the explanation, these are not worth donating to. None of the charities listed belwo fail in that regard. Most spend at least 80% directly on programs. Very large ones have immense overhead, including advertising costs and cannot be expected to top 90%. None of the organizations below pays its CEO 5% of total revenue.

These are the highest paid CEOs in all the charities, regardless of their ratings. For their ratings, please consult both Charity Navigator and Charity Evaluator because there are some serious divergencies in their ratings. An A+ charity by the lights of CN may only be B+ according to CE. Greater divergencies than that do not exist.
Top Salary*

Peter G. Cordeiro, M.D., Chief Attending Surgery, Plastic & Reconstructive Service Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center $2,050,872
Michael Friedman, M.D., President/CEO City of Hope $1,434,148
Edward J. Benz, Jr., M.D., President/CEO Dana-Farber Cancer Institute/Jimmy Fund $1,245,790
Edwin J. Feulner, Jr., President Heritage Foundation $1,172,321
Robert J. Mazzuca, Past Chief Scout Executive Boy Scouts of America – N.O. $1,136,942
Wayne LaPierre, Executive VP/Ex-Officio National Rifle Association & Foundation, respectively $970,300
Harry Johns, President/CEO Alzheimer’s Association – N.O. $966,342 Includes $392,718 retirement and other deferred compensation.
Greg Bontrager, COO American Cancer Society $913,126
Scott A. Blackmun, CEO United States Olympic Committee $902,977
Steven E. Sanderson, President/CEO Wildlife Conservation Society $870,642
William E. Evans, Director/CEO St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital/ALSAC $863,770
Jonathan W. Simons, M.D., President/CEO Prostate Cancer Foundation $845,079
David Harris, Executive Director American Jewish Committee $842,419
Douglas Barnes, Chief of Staff Shriners Hospitals for Children $827,961
Includes $385,081 retirement and other deferred compensation. Brian Gallagher, President/CEO United Way Worldwide $813,338
James E. Williams, Jr., President/CEO Easter Seals $796,501
Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, President International Fellowship of Christians and Jews $784,193
Michael L. Lomax, President/CEO UNCF/The College Fund $773,693
Robert J. Beall, President/CEO Cystic Fibrosis Foundation $760,446
Rabbi Marvin Hier, President/CEO Simon Wiesenthal Center $742,218
Marc H. Morial, President/CEO National Urban League $732,800
Abraham H. Foxman, National Director/Trustee Anti-Defamation League & Foundation, respectively $719,738
Howard P. Meitiner, President Phoenix House Foundation $715,869
Myra Biblowit, President Breast Cancer Research Foundation $715,226
Larry Hausner, CEO American Diabetes Association $707,729

* Includes “Compensation,” “Contributions to employee benefit plans,” “Expense accounts and other allowances,” and deferred compensation earned in reporting year, as reported to the IRS. Compensation of medical professionals may include fees for patient care in addition to salary.

When you read, as I just did, that the University of Louisville’s basketball team has a net WORTH of $291 million, it makes you wonder about the difference between value and worth. And if that $291 figure sounds high to you, consider, too, the money brought in recently by the sale of Francis Bacon paintings: $86.2 million, $44.8, $37, and most recently of all, $40 million. Poor Francis. Think how rich he would be if he were alive and was selling those paintings himself and for himself.

All these figures address net worth in terms of bucks but there is something called INTRINSIC VALUE, and commercial prices have nothing to do with that. In fact, commercial or otherwise, money has no bearing on intrinsic value. But it is very hard to figure the latter out. If you don’t put a price on a thing, just how valuable is it? All of us hear about the intrinsic value of human life and, not being able to get a good grip on that, we incline to say human life is infinitely precious, beyond any nonsense of financial calculation. Just how much does it take for you to be willing to kill your children?

Looked at from the perspective of “your children or your money,” – a Jack Benny-like dilemma – we see how preposterous the worth of a “thing” is. It is precisely that nonsense that made Benny’s hilarity so witty and valuable. What is a Benny-like joke worth? Yet the torturing fact is that we can put a tag on Benny’s jokes. Someone says, “In exchange for my giving you $5 million, do you agree never to hear or let anyone else ever hear, another Benny joke?” You betcha I do. Much as I appreciated the great man, $50 would buy me off and I’d settle for $500 to buy off the pleasures of the rest of the world. No one would ever be allowed to hear a Benny joke again. Mean-spirited? Grubby? I just don’t know but I think I wouldn’t be alone feeling that way. What would Rochester say?
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And once again, I raise the question of what Liza and Joey think.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkRIbUT6u7Q

Last night in the great state of Georgia, the NCAA held its championship. The average price for Monday tickets started between $300 and $400 last week and surged above $600 yesterday, according to SeatGeek data. Over the last 24 hours, the average price paid was $783. For most fans in the Georgia Dome it was only a healthy bar tab. Oh, yes, between drinks, a basketball game was played. As often happens, one team won, one team lost.

Tuition at public colleges jumped last year by a record amount as state governments slashed school funding, the latest sign of strain in the U.S. higher-education sector.

The average amount that students at public colleges paid in tuition climbed 8.3% last year, the biggest jump on record, according to a report based on data from all public institutions in all 50 states. There are reasons for this but not mentioned in the report is greed. Salaries of college administrators rose for the 11th consecutive year. Someone’s got to pay for this. College administrators are like bankers and CEOs of major corporations: Hey, we don’t care; we want MORE. Meanwhile, as in nearly all years, tuition rises far exceeded the cost of living. Only Harvard can say, “Who? Not me” because it has so much filthy lucre obtained from other sources, it has stopped bothering the poor. Families with incomes under $40,000 have been excused from the “Pay now, die next week” syndrome. In fact, they no longer pay any tuition. The theoretical costs at Harvard are Tuition $33,696 and Room & Board $11,856. That applies only to the preppies from Exeter and other such money-grows on trees factories. Is Harvard big-hearted? Maybe. In part. But by sparing itself the bother of charging the poor schnook, it reduces its accounting burden.

On average, female nurses earned $51,100 in 2011 while male nurses collected $60,700. But the females are lazy louts. They prefer working part-time. By “part time” I mean they stay home to have the easy life: wash their husbands’ clothing, clean the house, make the beds, do the cooking and shopping and attend to the crying babies. In short, they don’t deserve big bucks.

Men are concentrated in the exotic corners of the profession. They make up 41% of the nurse anesthetists and bring home $148,000 whereas the gals are 92% of licensed practical nurses and they make just $35,000. Good! Down on your knees, ladies and scrub the floors. To further enhance their natural superiority, male nurses are likely to have doctoral degrees and the female of the species doesn’t even know what that is. The bean counters tell us female registered nurses who work full-time still earn 7% less than their male counterparts.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Doz5w2W-jAY

Eva Longoria is calling for a hefty increase in taxes on the rich which, she doesn’t mind admitting, includes her. Why does she want that? You don’t have to be as brainy as she is to see why. It is all gain and no loss i.e. a so-called win-win situation: In a world where income and burdens are more equitable WE ALL end up winners. Eva knows that; Pul Ryan doesn’t.

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Eva won no prizes at last night’s Awards In Celebration Of Themselves and for that she should be grateful. Naturally, I did not watch but I expected that the son of C. Day-Lewis would win “Best Actor” because, after all, what else and who else? He’s the best since Boris Thomashefsky, who, if you don’t know, is the grandfather of Michael Tilson Thomas.

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Here’s Mike conducting the final movement of a Pete Tchaikovsky symphony. Hey, don’t get me wrong. Just because I memorized the music of this symphony in only 200 listenings in the interval from 1951 to 1956, you shouldn’t think it means much to me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mctpTyIBt_I
Note, please, Mike has inherited a lot of histrionic skills from Grandpa. Indeed, he performed in a TV special about THE GREAT MAN. Sorry, you must come up with $2.99 if you want to view it.

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At long last, after a reign of only 2000 years, Neville Marriner is stepping down from his post at that symphony orchestra whose name cannot be remembered. He is being replaced by the King of Subway music, Joshua Bell. Here is Josh, picking up a dollar an hour for his troubles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0KdAXLSO0Y

The majority of Americans believe that however awful federal agencies may be, we must not exaggerate. While corruption may be widespread, it must surely be true that, on the whole, government agencies like the CIA, FBI, DEA, CBF, and ATF do more good than harm. This we may take as an article of faith because these agencies were created for the explicit purpose of doing good. That being the case, it would be incredible for each of them to fail, and fail alarmingly.

I have done a poor job over the many years I have been interested in corruption to persuade people how naive they are. First, it is unlikely that any of these agencies were created with noble intent. I admit that proving this is a bigger job than I have heart to take on. However, it is not a great task to argue that, as they are constituted, these agencies exist for ignoble purposes. Dozens of books and hundreds of articles are out there for perusal by those of you who have the strength (and indignation) to find out for yourselves.

One small but well documented and highly readable essay that should prove very disheartening to you (if you believe America is the greatest country on Earth) is Michael Levine’s account of his life as an officer for decades in the DEA, directly and closely involved in many of the biggest drug busts in history. The amazingly depressing story of the DEA is American corruption writ small and it would be a blunder to suppose that it is only an exception to the largely good work other agencies do.

Please read http://www.expertwitnessradio.org/site/mainstream-media-the-drug-war-shills/