Ruminations - 7/15/08
I'm tired. Too much going on. Just random thought from surfing...
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Nice word - Nestapo! Nanny State Police! Love the word - it brings forth just the right amount of snark towards these busybodies that have nothing better to do (especially elected politicians) that haven't grown up enough to leave the rest of us alone.
Somebody ought to inform the EPA of the word "Nestapo". Going after lawnmowers? And may start regulating speed on the highways - more speed, more CO2? ("...vehicle speed is the single largest operational factor affecting CO2 emissions from large trucks,” and that “every mph increase above 55 mph increases CO2 emissions by more than 1%.” The ANPR puts speed limiters on large trucks on the table as a means of reducing carbon dioxide..."). So much for the Dept. of Transportation...
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Comedians don't find Obama funny. Our pal John at RWN solves the problem:
What makes this so delicious is that most of his supporters are too young to understand the joke.
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Change I can believe in (Erick at RedState):
Barack Obama Purges His Website. No Longer Critical of the Surge.
When the situation in Iraq was going badly, Barack Obama wanted us to retreat. When the surge took hold and the situation in Iraq improved, Barack Obama wanted us to retreat. No turn in Iraq went unstoned in Obama's commitment to retreat and surrender.
Not any more. Obama has thrown his old positions under the bus. And, for a guy whose campaign claims to get the net, he's done an extremely dumb thing -- he purged his website of his former positions. Apparently he's never heard of a cache.
Just like with Kerry, I can hear those summer time shoes a-movin': flip-flop, flip-flop
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Until recently, the impact of Title IX, the law forbidding sexual discrimination in education, has been limited mostly to sports. But now, under pressure from Congress, some federal agencies have quietly picked a new target: science
As in quotas in college. Title IX, while helping women in a positive way, has also wrecked havoc on men's sports. Might this be the feminists ultimate revenge? Or just pour our nation down the toilet? After all, in sports, there are only so many slots that can be filled with scholarships. Now, they want to turn away men with money who want to pay to study subjects?
So far, these Title IX compliance reviews haven’t had much visible impact on campuses beyond inspiring a few complaints from faculty members. (The journal Science quoted Amber Miller, a physicist at Columbia, as calling her interview “a complete waste of time.”) But some critics fear that the process could lead to a quota system that could seriously hurt scientific research and do more harm than good for women.
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We've all heard humorless America-haters promote themselves by announcing, As Thomas Jefferson said, "Dissent is the highest form of patriotism."
[snip]
Yes, hope can work to positive effect, sustaining us in the face of grave misfortunes. But there's nothing audacious about it. "The audacity of hope" is blubbering gobbledy-gook.
Audacity is for innovators, risk-takers and crusaders - for those willing to stand in the fire of public opinion and tell a million people they're wrong and here's why. Audacity's not for the passive mob hoping government will fix everything (while blaming government for everything).
Hope is the opposite of audacity. It's passive, an excuse for inaction.
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Since 1962, national defense spending has shrunk from 9.3% of GDP to 4%. Entitlement spending grew from 5.8% of GDP in 1962 to 11.2% in 2007. It's going to continue to grow rapidly for several decades, too.
As a percentage of the total federal budget, national defense spending went from 49.6% in 1962 to 20.1 in 2007. Entitlement programs went from 31% in 1962 to 56.2% in 2007.
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A reason why college is unaffordable (and it ain't the lack of loans):
There are two main culprits here. Traditional colleges and universities, protected from competition by regulatory barriers and buoyed by public subsidies and rising demand, have managed to avoid most of the difficult choices inherent to becoming more efficient and restraining price...
Governors and state legislatures, meanwhile, often treat universities and students as revenue source during economic downturns, shifting the funding burden to tuition as a means of softening the impact of fiscal crises brought about by their incompetent stewardship of the public treasury
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So what HAVE the secularists done with the OWN money?
…It is welcome that the Pope has said sorry for the sexual abuse perpetuated by some Catholic priests and brothers. But it is appropriate for others to say a warm thank you for what the Catholic religious have done in educating the young, looking after the sick and caring for the dying here and overseas. You will not hear such praise from the sneering secularists. Nor will you find a school or hospice in a foreign land that is run by the Green Left Weekly or the New Left Review.
Er, not much it seems...they seem to require other peoples money, in the form of taxes, in order to do what they think is "good works". I'd hold them in much higher esteem if they used their own money and persuade others to contribute instead of forcing them through taxes.
