Via: Whomping Willow
Because heaven forbid that people in the TV talk the way people in the real world talk.
Was anyone really expecting deep insights from either convention? Both the DNC and the RNC are groups of politicians and celebrities talking up their beliefs to their true believers. It's not about insight; it's a pep rally. Democrats cheer, republicans and independents make fun of them.
♫That's what it's all about!♫
Now that example has backfired. A man in the Florida panhandle, Scott Teston, wanted to rezone his land from agriculture to business; his neighbors complained to the zoning board, and the change was rejected. So he decided to put 17 pigs in his yard, which the neighbors are, of course, complaining about. This time the county can't stop him, because he's in an agricultural zone. He's resubmitted his zoning request and has warned his neighbors that if it's rejected again, the number of pigs will go up to 500.
Good for him! The government doesn't need to be telling you what you can and can't do with your land.
My favorite point that Hugh and Tim Blair made: Moore is probably the biggest war profiteer of them all and he needs to be praying for Bush's reelection. If Kerry's elected, Moore disappears--"Quite a trick" according to Blair.
Moore's a liar, and that's been proven again and again by people paying much more attention than I do, so I won't bother going over that again. I do like hearing that a number of Polish people recognize Moore's film as propaganda--This from people who know propaganda.
Her speech is entitled "Standing Up To the 'Girls Gone Wild' Culture" and it calls for a return to modest dress and lifestyles. It's worth reading, if only for the story of Ella Gunderson, an 11-year-old girl who got Nordstrom's attention then organized a "Pure Fashion" modest clothing fashion show.
I think the pendulum is about to swing towards more modest fashions. Fashions can't keep getting more immodest forever, if only because the clothing industry would cease to exist as we'd all become nudists.
She's posted the transcript of her speech on her website; definitely worth your time.
Boileryard Clarke has a great post about the immorality of "wealth redistribution." Slam dunk.
I finally did it. I installed AOL on my laptop. I feel so... dirty.... I haven't had AOL for nearly a year now.
But it's OK! Really! I only installed it to get the high-quality video feeds. I can watch the national conventions--live--on my computer now, and it looks as good as TV. AOL is no longer an ISP; it's a content provider.
Seriously.
EDIT: Two other impressions: First off, they do seem to have taken care of one major problem I had with them before: They didn't try to claim all my file associations. That's good. They did have their other problems, like putting 8 new icons on my desktop and making me (by default) go through an extra step to have links and images enabled in my email, but these are minor issues and easily dealt with. The other major impression I had: Goodness this thing takes forever to install! I've had massive games that took less time to get off of the CD!
And the video works perfectly. Which was all I wanted in the first place. Now I can watch ABCNews "on demand." That's cool.
Anyways, to make up for it, in the extended entry is a series of fun-filled questions about me. Because I know you care. You can blame Bryan from Spare Change for the list.
Well folks, that's it. I hope you enjoyed it!
I do think that there's a good case for requiring prescriptions for drugs, because the doctor is should be better trained on the potentially dangerous side effects of drugs than the average consumer. (My libertarian/free market side says there's probably a better way to handle this than regulation, but the systems works pretty well for the most part.) But why should medical equipment, such as a defribrillator, require a prescription?
But that's not why I originally brought up this article. I'm more interested in how this issue is presented in the AP story.
Or, they could pick up the phone, call 911, and look for the defibrillator... at the same time! Besides the 911 operator is just going to send an ambulance carrying a team of a paramedics and--a difibrillator!
What really bugs me about this story is the quote from Dr. Thomas H. Lee: "People would be better off spending the money on a health club membership."
That's just stupid and irrelevant. There are people who will always, always be at risk for heart disease no matter what sort of health they're in. The former pastor at my church is an example; he stepped down to an assistant pastor position at another church because of his heart trouble. The doctors told him he was a victim of bad genetics. He could eat right and exercise, but he'd always be at risk for a heart attack. The at-home defribrillator would do him much more good than a health club membership.
The problem with both of the above statements is that it assumes that the average consumer is too stupid to know what's best for him. Individuals are generally the best at deciding what they need for themselves--if only the FDA would figure that out.
I'll admit that I haven't read the whole article, but the fourth paragraph tells me all I need to know.
I guess I'll have to vote for Bush.
(Via The Boileryard
Also in the news: This is my 101st post using Movable Type. It is a day to celebrate my migration from Blogger! Yay!
What? You wanted valuable news? How about the discovery of a 182-carat diamond--bigger than a computer mouse and worth millions?
Oddly enough, I found about that via the radio before I found out about it via the internet. Usually the traditional media has more lag time than that.
Speaking of time, it's one o'clock in the morning. You know how most people have a 24 hour "sleep cycle"? I think God gave me a 24.5 hour one, because I stay up about half an hour later every night. That needs to stop, and not only because it means my posts get more meandering and less focused as I stay up into the wee hours of the morning. It makes things difficult Sunday mornings when I need to get up at 7:30 to get ready for church. I guess I ought to try to stay synchronized with the rest of the world.
So, in keeping with that goal, I'm going to bed. I'll try to talk about something important later.
For example, I might write about, "How do we decide what is important?" Well, obviously, stuff that impacts us personally ranks at the top. For example, if I wrote "Your hair is on fire," you might touch the top of your head just to make sure. Because you (if you're normal) like to keep your head as unburnt as possible. Or if I told you that the nation's food supply was about to be poisoned by terrorists, that would matter to you.
Further, if an event affects a group that you are a member of, then it stands a pretty good chance of mattering to you. Say, for example, a suitcase nuke goes off in NYC. That matters to me, even though it doesn't directly affect me in the same way that getting poisoned does, because it means that members of my group--the country--are being harmed. Or, say, Congress passes a Canada-style ban on "hate speech" that makes preaching against homosexuality illegal. That affects me because it affects another group that I'm a member of--Christianity.
Is there any other critera for something being important to us? As Machiavelli said, "When neither their property nor their honor is touched, the majority of men live content." I think we can safely add "nor that of their friends" to his statement. Do we care about things that don't affect us in the slightest degree?
Of course we do. Why else do we read Lileks or other personal blogs? Why is that? Other bloggers' personal lives don't affect me at all, but yet I'll read a select handful of bloggers' entries about their lives.
I'm thinking that there are three main reasons to read such personal, and frankly, unimportant (to most people) notes: A) Amusement, always a valuable commodity, opiate of the masses, etc.; B) inspiration, by which I mean both those things encourage us and those things that make us say "Aww....." in a "that's cute" manner; and C)enlightenment, for the occasional nugget of wisdom or the practice in the art of debate.
It's now 1:30. I think this thoughtline has run its course. Congratulations for finishing that; something tells me I'll wake up in the morning and read the above, and regret boring everyone with it.
But that's the great thing about the internet; you are under no obligation to read everything, or even to pretend to care. If this post bores you, you can skip to the next one, or go to some other blog for a while until I come up with something good again. I wish that it worked like that in say, classroom situations. I hate it, I hate it when a teacher wastes my time in endless review (for the slower members of the class), or follows some irrelevant, uninteresting rabbit trail, or even teaches something that's in the curriculum that's utterly irrelevant to life (such as post-modernist English literature). I'm paying you to teach me, so teach me something valuable for crying out loud.
"The worst thing a teacher can do is waste me time, for in so doing he commits a miniature murder." I wrote that down during an accounting lecture once. It's a bit melodramatic, but if Franklin's adage of "Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time; for that's the stuff life is made of," is true, then so my frustrated sentence from accounting.
Kind of ironic that I mention that when I'm wasting my sleep time writing this post. Does that mean I'm committing miniature suicide?
1:44. Bedtime. Seriously. Must put down laptop.
Goodnight everybody!
Wanna see? It's here. The links don't go anywhere, they're just placeholders. Enjoy!
In general, I like it. Lot's of good information on the progress we've made as a society (reductions in poverty, pollution, increasing morality in general, etc.), especially in the first couple of chapters. After that, Easterbrook gets into why, despite all the progress we've made, that we don't feel happier. (Among the factors: "anticipation induced anxiety," or worrying about the future; the inability to buy the things that produce happiness, e.g. "love, friendship, respect, family, standing, [and] fun," which ties into what he calls the "nice-hotel-room factor:" "For an increasing number of Americans and Europeans, life is like being in a really nice hotel room, but not having a good time because no one else came along on the trip"; and several more factors which I will not summarize here. Get your own book. :-)). Then he instructs us how to become happier (here's a hint, from one of the chapter titles: "Selfish Reasons to Become a Better Person"). One of the big issues with American society, he believes, is that we (in general) have a lack of purpose. We work, and work, and work, attain a pile o' possessions, then lay our heads on our pillows and ask ourselves, "Isn't there more to life than this?"
Then he attempts to give us a purpose, by describing what he believes to be three "deep structural faults" in our society: The lack of universal health insurance, a minimum wage that is too low for someone to live off of, and the greed of those at the top (specifically, CEO's and other corporate execs). Of course, he appeals to his audience's sense of morality: "Higher wages for the struggling, in return for a clear conscience for the successful, represents an attractive bargain: both a moral necessity and in the self-interest of anyone who is not coldhearted." It was nice of him to couch his argument in language that backhandedly calls anyone who disagrees with him immoral. Leaving that aside, let's address his issues, shall we?
Issue #1: Universal health insurance: Great idea, except for one tiny detail: Who's going to pay for it? Should companies be forced to give all their employees, full and part time, from the burger flipper to the CEO, health insurance? What about the small start-up business that can barely make ends meet at the end of the month? Should they be forced to pay? Pretend that your small business faces this legislation, and that you can find health insurance for $100 a month per person, and that you have 5 employees. Can you afford a new $6,000 expense? Is that going to cost the employees their next raise?
Or will the government provide health insurance itself, in it's typically wasteful and corrupt fashion? Will we start a brand-new, incredibly expensive entitlement program to give the poor free health insurance? And will it stop at universal health care? After all, the poor need transportation too! Let's give the poor free cars while we're giving things away!
But if you can find a way to pay for universal health insurance without robbing American individuals through tax dollars and without robbing American companies through federal requirements, be my guest, it's a great idea. Otherwise, let the poor find jobs that offer health insurance. (You know, even Wendy's provides health insurance to its workers)
Issue #2: Raise the minimum wage: This really bugs me, because Easterbrook even mentions the problem with this idea, but doesn't recognize it. Allow me to quote the book for a moment: "Suppose the minimum wage went to $10 and health insurance became universal. Pizzas, sandwiches, house-cleaning, and everything at the Gap and Target would cost slightly more." This matters very little to the more affluent american, but to the poor person, that "slightly more" makes a huge difference. Essentially you run in a circle: The poorest get paid more, but it raises the prices of what the poor need to buy, so they need to be paid more. You achieve little to no real increase in income.
The other major problem with raising minimum wage is outsourcing. Business are already outsourcing a number of jobs to India and other foreign countries because American employees are too expensive. How much more then, if you doubled minimum wage? Is a $10/hour minimum wage going to be of any value if there are no jobs to put the workers in?
The minimum wage is a price floor like any other, and basic economics teaches us that a price floor will always cause a surplus--in this case, unemployment. Bad, bad idea.
Issue #3: The "greed at the top." We're dealing with this one right now, as Ken Lay, mentioned as an example in the book, is under trial for his actions.
The last main chapter describes how we as a country can help the people who are starving in foreign countries who live on a dollar a day. While noting that things are getting significantly better, Easterbrook calls the West to take it upon itself the goal of ending global poverty once and for all. This I'm all in favor of. Easterbrook says, "But as regards to resources at least, it seems possible that eventually everyone will live like Americans and Europeans, with the world containing billions of passenger cars and detached homes, huge numbers of big-box retails stores, and truly, utterly frightening numbers of fast-food restaurants." Let it be so!
He also credits the (largely unexpected) improvements in poor countries to three factors: "The actions of developing-world citizens themselves," free-market economies, and aid from the West. I cringe at the last one; I approve of aiding those countries less developed than ours, but must this aid be through the government? Let private citizens give to these countries, and let companies start businesses in them and raise them out of poverty! As Easterbrook recommends elsewhere, drop the trade barriers to our country from these poorer nations, and let the free-market really start off for them. Companies are always looking for causes to help (it's both good PR and good stewardship, especially with the tax advantages they get), let them donate food, medicine, housing, fertilizer, clean water systems, etc, etc, to countries in need. Foreign aid doesn't have to be a massive, wasteful government program.
...
All in all though, it's a pretty good book, especially the first couple of chapters, which are a breath of fresh air in the age of panic. There's still work to be done to improve both our and global society, but it's nice to know that we are making progress.
Does anyone even care about the "food pyramid" or maintaining a doubleplusgood, government approved diet? I'll eat whatever I jolly well please, thank you.
Sounds to me like they're already making individual choices.
There are two problems here. First off, it's none of the government's business what I eat. If I eat nothing but quarter pounders w/ cheese for the rest of my life, and I die of a heart attack at 35, then it's my problem. Problem two: Even if I thought that the government should dictate guidelines on what I should eat, people are overpublicizing healthy eating. Shelf after shelf of health food, dieting books, exercise equipment, constant drumming from the media about the "obesity crisis," etc, etc, etc. When a message of any kind is preached over and over and over again to a person who does not care in the first place, that person will probably rebell against that message. Case in point: Now we have Hungry Man dinners with 1 and a half pounds of food (the chicken and mashed potatoes dinner has 1010 calories) and cookbooks like Eat What You Want and Die Like A Man.
So, seriously, to the government, health food critics, and doctors who want us to eat healthy: You've made your point, now shut up. Thanks!
As a general rule of thumb, monopolies are bad for the consumer, who in the case of government is the citizen. This is because the monopoly--the government--has no profit motive, no incentive, to improve services or reduce costs. Even worse, in the case of government, you are required to purchase the service they offer, or you will be tracked down and thrown in prison, or forced to pay at gunpoint. Wilde puts it this way in the comments:
His alternative offers the economist's solution to the problem of monopoly: Competition. This would prevent many of the problems listed above. If a private defense agency, which he abbreviates PDA, tried to charge 50% of a customer's income, the customer would switch to another agency. If the PDA told the customer that his toilets could only use 1.6 gallons of water, then the customer could cancel his "subscription" and go to another provider. And so on.
Note, however, that this does not apply to territorial defense (i.e. armies), only to "law enforcement," which in the case of an anarchy would mean defense of life and property from criminals--which is all I wanted from my government in the first place.
Bonus!: Read the article for details on how this system would improve gun rights!
Then Dean Esmay linked to several of his other tracts. One of them, entitled "The Curse of Baphomet" features the story of Alex Scott, whose son attempts suicide. Their friend, Ed, links the suicide attempt to Alex's membership in the Masonic lodge. Ed then proves himself to be some kind of expert on Masonry, and claims that the "highest degrees" of Masons learn that the "Great Architect of the Universe" is this guy Baphomet.
Ed later claims that the "symbol of Baphomet" is worn by "the century's most notorious Satanist." Here's another fun claim:
The Washington Monument is of the devil. And, the ancient Egyptians worshiped Sauron.
OK, enough of this one. Next, we have Chick's claim that "the Catholic Church invented Islam." (The previous statement quotes Dean Esmay, not Chick).
Ironically, the title of this tract is "The Storyteller."
Oh, by the way: The Catholic Church is plotting world domination, and keeping a database of every protestant's name (see the final panel of this page). They're murdering (last panel) the illegitimate children of nuns and burying them under their convents. They're bullying churches into the ecumenical movement by breaking up churches, which they do by accusing innocent pastors of having affairs with young women, or by whisper campaigns, or by outright assasination of protestant church leaders. The Catholic church also being run by the Masons (See the 14th panel).
I wish Chick had stopped at "This Was Your Life."
OK, so... what's the alternative? Israel bombs Palestinian terrorist leaders (as they have been doing), at the cost of inevitable civilian casualties, to the outrage of those who are safe from the bulk of Palestinian aggression.
Either that, or Israel rolls over, surrenders to the the terrorists and are driven out of their homes (again) or killed. OOooohhhhhhh. Now I get it.... The World Court, the "principal judicial organ of the United Nations", which is widely known as an anti-semitic organization, couldn't possibly have any conflict of interest, could they?
Personally, I think it's time that the Israelis cut themselves loose from world opinion and just unilaterally took care of their terrorism problems, just as we are doing. How much longer are the Israelis going to tolerate this, I wonder?
I like it. It appeals to my tendency towards the pragmatic. I found it here, on an Irish language webpage.
Or: Why can't more Christians be original? Yesterday, my mom walked into my room and invited me to join her on a trip to Christian Supply, a local Christian bookstore. She had a coupon that expired today, and I had nothing better to do, so I went. Luckily, I brought my Clie with me, so I could shoot some photos. Unluckily, the Clie's camera isn't a very good one, so please bear with the low-quality images. Click the extended entry link below for my photo-essay.
The first thing you see as you come in the right-hand entrance is this:
You know, I'm not sure how this thing fits in with "Thou shalt not make any graven image," but, hey! What do I know? Here's some more selections from the Christian Supply Wall o' Idols:
That's a very specific demographic.
I mentioned one of these before, but now they've come out with two more magazine-esque versions of the Bible(!) I'd be embarrassed to take one of these to church, myself. (I just use my Clie. It's a very useful tool.)
Notice one of the headlines on the Refuel edition: Today's hottest songs. I wonder if they're planning to put out a new issue every month. The top headline is: Girls, cash, and cars. Yep... Appealing to preteenage boys' greed and libido is definitely the best way to sell the Bible.
Next!
As we skim the back cover (link to image) we see this quote: "Revolt against the cheap substitutes the world calls the 'good life' and become a part of the CrossCulture." Ah, so we'll also appeal to the teenage drive for rebellion to sell our books. OK. Oh, and let's also change some of the "lingo"--Christianity just has such a dull ring to it. Let's have our marketing guru's come up with the best new name for the Christian life they can.
Seriously though, despite the marketing spin, I think this book might actually be worth reading. Another line reads "It's about daily sacrificing your selfish ambitions" and another says "What you will find is a call to total commitment and surrender to the one person who is able and willing to transform you into the person you were truly meant to be." It's at least somewhat creative, which is more than I can say for a lot of products in the store, such as this:
"In a horrifying vision, Chelsea Adam has relived the victim's last moments." Mmm-hmm. Wasn't this also the premise of an NBC drama called The Profiler? Cross out "psychic" and refer to her "new-found Christian faith" instead, and you've got the makings of a great book!
Then you've got the people who profit off of other people's work by attacking it, such as these two:
Key quote from the second book (images here and here): "According to information compiled from a number of web-sites, Pokemon, short for pocket monsters is an RPG/simulation Game Boy game released in 1995 by Nintendo of Japan."
I'm sorry, but it takes just a little bit of credibility away from you when you cite "a number of websites" as your primary source. Reading through the pages I glanced through, it became evident that the author's primary sources were sites like this one which insist that the Pokemon franchise has occult ties and that its authors are probably agents of Satan. As one who played the original GameBoy game, I can tell you that their claims are way, way off-base. But it's not my purpose here to refute this book's premise or its poor arguments, nor to question whether poorly-reasoned attacks on harmless children's games are tantamount to the boy who cried wolf, nor even to point out the obvious pun between the book's title and it's subtitle. My purpose is instead to point out how too many Christian authors are trying to sell books on the coattails of other people's hard work instead of creating their own original ideas.
On that theme, we have this:
Compare this
to this: 
My mom believes that the book with headphones came first; I'm not too sure.
On the other hand, there's no questioning what inspired this T-shirt:
The middle line reads "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death." Due to a bit of a hand shake, the rest is illegible. But you can definitely see which movie series they're trying to cash in on. If I had done this photo-essay a few years ago, I could have shown you many more marketing style T-Shirts, like the infamous "Godweiser" shirt. But, fortunately, the time of that particular fad is over.
I'll end with one other, much more original idea, what I've chosen to term the Tub o' Religion:
Here's to more original ideas like this one! Good night!