Inside Tad's Mind

This afternoon, my wife and I took our three teenage children to see the Pioneer Theater Company's production of Hamlet. The highest praise that I think possible for this production is to report that my 12 year old son enjoyed the performance and understood the story. Many people are first exposed to Shakespeare though the mandatory 9th grade reading of Romeo and Juliet and are turned off by struggling to work through the early modern English prose and poetry. Other are told that Shakespeare's works are "the greatest literature in the English language," and are scared that they might have to think to understand the bard as "literary" work. More's the pity. While Shakespeare's work is wonderful literature, Shakespeare's work was meant to be performed and watched by an audience, not read. The plays weren't even published until after the playwright's death. While the themes are deep and thought provoking, the 16th Century audience also dema...

One of today's lead news stories reports that the NBER has determined that the "longest recession since the Great Depression" ended in June of 2009, after a "record" four consistent quarters of negative GDP growth. That news, besides being a year untimely, would be great if it were true. Well, okay, it is true if you use the NBER and government definitions of economic data. The problem is that the data is skewed and just a bit unreliable. First, the calculations of GDP are corrected for "inflation" by using the Consumer Price Index as the correction factor. The CPI was "tweaked" by Alan Greenspan back in the 1980's and doesn't measure the same fixed market basket of goods that was used previously, and makes allowances for people switching to alternatives if the price of one commodity increases. According to John William of Shadow Government Statistics (ShadowStats), who publishes comparisons between current practices and prior practi...

Reflecting on the "Baby Emma" case currently before the Utah Supreme Court, it strikes me that Mr. Wyatt, Emma's father is experiencing discrimination on two separate fronts: his gender, and his marital status. First, marital status: If Mr. Wyatt was married to Emma's mother, not even the Utah courts would require him to prove his paternity or his parenting skills. Even if the child were not genetically his offspring, the law would presume him the father, and would assume that he is a capable parent unless there was compelling evidence to the contrary. Without his express consent, Emma could not legally be freed for adoption in Utah or any other state. As an unmarried father, Mr. Wyatt is forced not only to assert his paternity and his parenting ability, but the Utah laws and courts are requiring him to meet a strict standard of dotting the i's and crossing the t's in a maze of legal paperwork designed to support the profits of the adoption industry at the exp...