Blog Jones

People oftentimes complain about how BJU was so slow to change its interracial dating policies. (I tend to agree with them; banning interracial dating is stupid and illogical.)

But, Georgia is worse off: They only just now got around to repealing the Jim Crow laws.

Oops….

I am going to kill you.

Slowly. Painfully.

Run.

Two things: How stupid does Jim Scancarelli think his readers are?

That’s what’s been happening for two weeks!!! You don’t have to explain it… unless your target reader is the senile old man who constantly babbles about the “good ol’ days” and how youngsters these days have no respect. He might have forgotten the previous two weeks of “storytelling.” Just like he forgot all the terrible jokes that were old back before the original author died in 1969.

By royal decree, I command that, for all comics, when the original author dies, the strip dies too. That means that Peanuts needs to come out of the comics now. So does Dennis the Menace. Please replace them with good comics, like Pearls Before Swine.

All right, second thing: Is this:

supposed to remind me of this:

?

‘Cuz it does. It’s not funny, and that’s what I come to the comics for. Hence the term, comics.

*sigh* Time for cleansing:

According to my site meter, I’ve passed the 10,000 hit mark. That’s cool.

Also, sorry for the infrequent posting lately. I’ve been having a fairly nightmarish couple of days at school. Projects coming due, presentations to assist with, and verse tests to take. (I got a B on this one. A very, very low B, but a B.) Finals start on Saturday; after Wednesday, blogging should return to normal levels.

Buddhist Monks in a Wal-Mart.

Why not?

I got an email from another BJU blogger and added a link to him on the sidebar.

There’s a Tech Central Station column up about how the numbers correllating obesity and early death have been very badly overstated.

But in a study released this week by the CDC and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (”Excess Deaths Associated with Underweight, Overweight, and Obesity”), the public health community has finally owned up to their massive fib by acknowledging that the number of deaths due to obesity in the US is closer to 26,000 not 400,000 as previously reported. This means that if these numbers are correct — which is questionable — then obesity goes from being the leading or second leading cause of death to perhaps the seventh leading source of premature mortality.

Apart from this huge downward revision in the numbers of people supposedly dying from fat, there are several things in this study which signal the end of any legitimate linkage between obesity and premature death. First, for the merely overweight with BMI’s from 25-30 there is no excess mortality. In fact, being overweight was “associated with a slight reduction in mortality relative to the normal weight category.” Being overweight not only does not lead to premature death, something that dozens of other studies from around the world have been saying for the last 30 years, but it also carries less risk from premature death than being “normal” weight. In other words the overweight=early death “fact” proclaimed by the public health community is simply not true.

Of course, being fat has other disadvantages, but they’re mostly social, not health related.

Now, what motivation might the public health community have for lying about how bad fat i$ for you? I’m $ure they had the pure$t of intention$.

See, you’re better off just following my philosophy, which is captured in this little comic strip:

Bryan over at Spare Change has a great post today about collectible Jesus figurines. It’s hilarious. An excerpt:

what’s the matter Billy, can’t reach it? Jump higher, jump! Jump!

Go read the whole thing.

Will Franklin at WILLisms has a great post up that puts Congress’ spending rate in perspective.

Washington will spend $22,039 per household in 2005….

Social Security/Medicare: $7,245.

Defense: $4,451.

Low-income programs: $3,559.

Interest on the federal debt: $1,582.

Federal employee retirement benefits: $838.

Education: $627.

Health research/regulation: $614.

Veterans’ benefits: $606.

Highways/mass transit: $388.

Justice administration: $361.

Unemployment benefits: $338.

International affairs: $284.

Natural resources/environment: $275.

Agriculture: $271.

The remaining $598 is allocated to all other federal programs, including social services, space exploration, air transportation, and community development.

Keep in mind that that’s federal taxes only. I don’t have any idea how much each state spends per household in addition to this amount. And even that would leave out local taxes and fees.

Living here is expensive.

Franklin has several other interesting statistics that are worth taking a glance at. The good news is that, by some miracle, federal tax revenues have been increasing faster than Congress’ spending rates this year so far.

I wonder if there’s anything short of a violent second American revolution that can get Congress to actually *cut* spending.

(Via the Carnival of the Capitalists at Gongol.com)

Unlike some unfortunate souls, I appear to not be allergic to any of the varieties of trees, flowers, and grass that are spraying their reproductive material into the atmosphere right now.

It really is getting ridiculous. This nasty yellow dust covers everything outside. Sometimes, especially if it hasn’t rained in a while, you can actually see the dust being swirled around by the air.

Worse, the bugs are coming back. I hate bugs, especially ones that can hurt me. Bees we can keep, because they produce honey. Hornets and yellow-jackets serve no useful function besides causing pain, and they must die.

Then there are the bugs that carry diseases. Flies immediately come to mind, feasting on the filth of waste and death, then coming and landing on your sandwich. They must die.

Some are just annoying. Gnats are tiny and make irritating noises right next to your ears while you attempt to do some sort of strenous activity outside. Most varieties of ants are painless, but irritating.

But, by far, the worst insect of all is the mosquito. It falls into all three groups–it hurts you by causing painful, itchy bumps on your skin. It’s annoying, making a high-pitched noise right next to your ear. And it’s dangerous: Mosquitos are the number one disease vector in the world, carrying diseases like malaria to millions. (According to this guy, children are the number two disease vector.)

And you wonder why I prefer to stay indoors? No bugs, no pollen, and air conditioning, which is another one of the things I’m thankful for. Seriously, if it weren’t for air conditioning, I would have moved someplace more temperate a long time ago.

Wow, it must be getting late; I’m starting to ramble. I’ll see y’all later.

Hey, sorry that the posting has been so light recently. BJU is nearing the end of the semester, so all of the projects are coming due and I’ve been busy.

And, in my free time, I’ve been looking at a project to work on over the summer: I plan to build my own computer, which I think will be great fun. Provided that I don’t break anything.

While I was looking around, I saw some really cool computer projects that people have done, like this computer case built entirely out of case fans:

Or this classy humidor computer:

And even this teddy bear computer:

Now I keep seeing cool places to put computers, but I don’t have the funding to build them.

Oh well.

Anyways, I’ve got to go work on my Entrepreneurship project. Due tomorrow, after all.

I’ve got to go to work in a few minutes; here’s something I found amusing, from Frank J. at IMAO:

Violence is truly a universal language. Do you really think we are able to reason verbally with people in Iraq who don’t understand why their nation is poor when their leader uses all their money to build himself eighty palaces? But everyone… check that …everything understand the message behind saturation bombing. Violence truly allows every living thing to communicate between each other.

Can we expect there to be understanding between species when everything has its own form of communication: our thousands of languages, the dogs barks and stances, the bees complicated dance, the dolphins whistles and clicks (the dolphin’s language, incidentally, contains three hundred variations of the expression, “Duh…”, but has no word for, “Look out for that tuna net!”), etc. [Heck] no. That’s where violence comes in. Think of it less as aggression and more as an effective form of communication.

When the wolf viciously bites at an intruder on its territory, it’s simply saying, “Excuse me, sir, but this is my property, and I would like some privacy.” When the intruder savagely claws back as it tries to escape, it’s communicating, “I see. Sorry. I guess I’ll be leaving.” When you get too near a bee and it stings you, that’s but its way of saying, “Noli tangere!” When you crush the bee out of spite, that’s just your reflexive way of declaring, “Don’t do that. It upsets me.” Why spend millions trying to understand what dolphins are trying to say when a few boots to their heads will communicate all we ever need to tell them? There’s no reason. It’s just people’s ignorance that prevents us; that’s all.

I’ve been seeing a lot of news stories that have talked about how the Pope defeated, or at least helped defeat, communism. “How?” I wondered.

Here’s Anne Applebaum with the answer.

In essence, the pope made two contributions to the defeat of totalitarian communism, a system in which the state claimed ownership of all or most physical property — factories, farms, houses — and also held a monopoly on intellectual life. No one was allowed to own a private business, in other words, and no one was allowed to express belief in any philosophy besides Marxism. The church, first in Poland and then elsewhere, broke these two monopolies, offering people a safe place to meet and intellectually offering them an alternative way of thinking about the world.

Read the whole thing.

(Thanks to Virginia Postrel for the link)

Kevin Drum links to a column by “Conservative economist Bruce Bartlett” with the following quote:

In the 1980’s and 1990’s, I thought it was possible to restrain the growth of government by cutting taxes. This would “starve the beast,” as Ronald Reagan used to say, and force government to live on its allowance. And after Republicans got control of Congress in 1994, I thought the means had finally come to make a frontal assault on the welfare state.

I have been sadly disappointed….Deficits are no longer a barrier to greater government spending. And with the baby-boom generation aging, spending is set to explode in coming years even if no new government programs are enacted.

As a result, he’s come out in favor of a “Value-Added Tax,” wherein a product is taxed at every stage of production. To quote Bartlett, “It is costly to put into effect, and it hits the poor and the elderly hardest because they spend a higher percentage of their income.”

So, let’s see… Our politicians won’t manage our money properly, and so the answer is… give them more money?

Right.

On the other hand, how do we get them to stop wasting our money? Virtually all of our elected officials–Republican and Democrat–are more interested in spending our money than in conserving it. You can replace them at the elections, but the new politicians are as bad–or worse–than the old ones.

You know, I think that a better system might be to have an independent body responsible for taxation, and another body responsible for spending. Following that change, pass an ammendment requiring a balanced budget every year. Now you can “starve the beast.”

Ideally, of course, Congress would listen to reason and just stop spending so much of my money. Here’s where Bush is being so incredibly stupid; I’ll spell it out in simple, one- and two- syllable words: You can’t take in less money and then spend more money without losing money.

It just won’t work. The positive effect on the economy of lower tax rates helps a little bit, but then when you push $1.2 trillion drug bills through Congress, you absorb that effect and then need to raise taxes again.

In a slogan: Cutting taxes is good; cutting spending is better.

And, you know, Mr. President, you haven’t used your veto power once. Ever. In your five years of being in office. The only time I’ve ever heard you threaten to use your veto power is to stop any bill that would help fix the $1.2 trillion dollar mess you helped make.

Shame on you.

Mark Sanford for President.

Personally, I’ve just always called it soda. Coke is a brand name; pop is just silly sounding. But, since not everyone thinks as I do, here’s a county by county breakdown of the entire United States and their preferences on the matter.

Someone out there has way too much time on their hands.

(via Marginal Revolution)

It’s time to move somewhere else.

Pretty soon, if you’re tossing a paper napkin on the ground, making an illegal U-turn or even letting Fido relieve himself on the streets of Bellwood, be forewarned: Somebody could be watching.

In the hopes of eliminating crime, village officials say they’ll have all the public ways in the 3.5-square mile town under camera surveillance within two years.

Though other cities like Chicago have set up cameras in high-crime neighborhoods, Bellwood will be the first town in Illinois, and possibly the first in the country, to have every public thoroughfare, sidewalk and alley under the watchful digitized eye of the Bellwood Police Department.

Civil libertarians question Bellwood’s approach and wonder how much surveillance is too much.

“Where is the conversation about what kind of society we want and whether we think it’s appropriate to do this?” asked Ed Yohnka, spokesman for the Illinois ACLU.

Bellwood’s mayor said he welcomed the suggestion that his town might be considered something akin to a Big Brother-land.

“I wish we could create that image. I would love that,” Mayor Frank Pasquale said with a chuckle.

Mayor Pasquale needs to read more. Idiot. Almost as bad as the British ad agency behind this monstrosity.

(Via CrimProf Blog via InstaPundit)

De mortuis nil nisi bonum.