In This Dimension

Shutdown Congress to Avoid a Vote?

Below are links to a conservative petition. (I am not posting this for you to sign it; that’s your call.)

http://www.grassfire.org/108/petition.asp?Ref_ID=1628&PID=17794089

Watch the second video of the two on the page.

The first is so much rah-rah from the GOP Congressmen staying in Friday when Pelosi shut down Congress to go on vacation in the midst of a Republican speech from the floor. She ordered the lights turned out, CSPAN’s cameras turned off and the sound system shut down. A Congressman re-started the sound system for a bit until she heard and shut it down again.

Why did she shut down Congress? As reported[…]

Iowa Flooding Responsibility

A couple questions from The National Review: 
 
Where are all of the  Hollywood celebrities holding telethons asking for help in restoring Iowa  and helping the folks affected by the floods? 
 
Where is all the media  asking the tough questions about why the federal government hasn’t solved the problem? Asking where the FEMA trucks (and trailers) are?
 
Why isn’t the Federal Government relocating Iowa people to free hotels in Chicago?
 
When will Spike Lee say that the Federal Government blew up the levees that failed in Des  Moines?
 
Where are Sean Penn and the Dixie Chicks?
 
Where are all  the looters stealing high-end tennis shoes and big screen television sets?
 
When will we hear[…]

Obama Walk vs Talk: Pay Women Less

The below is from this article.  

Hillary fans take note: Obama is NOT on your side in the pay-discrimination wars. McCain IS on your side.

“On average, women working in Obama’s Senate office were paid at least $6,000 below the average man working for the Illinois senator. That’s according to data calculated from the Report of the Secretary of the Senate, which covered the six-month period ending Sept. 30, 2007. Of the five people in Obama’s Senate office who were paid $100,000 or more on an annual basis, only one — Obama’s administrative manager — was a woman.

“The average pay for the 33 men[…]

What Are we Reading?

What we read does indeed matter. What future leaders read matters quite a bit - it forms their ideas of the world, their grasp (or lack thereof) of history, and their consciousness of how to move the culture and civilization forward.

The mother of a friend of one of our children recently walked into our family room and, upon seeing the filled bookcases lining one wall, asked, “Who reads?”

This is not a future leader, nor a parent raising one.

Here is an excellent article on the subject of kids posting you’ll-be-sorry-later content on FaceBook, and on what Harvard grads are reading. Fascinating.

As the[…]

Intelligentsia?

Defined here as, “intellectuals considered as a group or class, esp. as a cultural, social, or political elite,” these “intelligentsia” have taught us that cut-n-run means “victory,” and that teachers’ unions can improve education (regardless of the fact that education has declined for decades everywhere unions hold sway).

Hardly a day goes by that we aren’t told by the “intelligentsia” that the Left is correct, the Right is wrong, and that we the people must do yet some other thing at odds with history, education and common sense.

However well-intentioned these people are, the facts and history stand against them.

Getting rid of[…]

Words Matter

As long as columnists and pundits refer to the proposed drilling location in ANWR as a “wilderness,” these same columnists will contribute to a lack of domestic energy.

We use particular words for particular reasons, and “wilderness” connotes trees and shrubbery and mountains, lakes and streams unspoiled by civilization.

All well and good, but the picture forming in the mind from “wilderness” bears absolutely no relation to the ANWR drilling site. As long as the mind’s eye of the reader is “wilderness,” the writer will have done a disservice to his/her cause of communicating reality.

The site in question is well under 500[…]

Social Security Demographics

That a modern advanced society should not have its elderly destitute is a given. But how is that best handled?

One way is government welfare. Social Security, however, has proven too costly to maintain, provides an extraordinarily low return on the investment of the tens of millions of workers who pay into it (which doesn’t include government workers – surprise!), and is in the process of going broke.

The arguments for changing Social Security are many, but they all have a common thread: They rely on an intelligent and informed population.

Which brings us to the second way to deal with the elderly:[…]

Baby Boomers, VA Tech and Responsibility

It is truly amazing how much pure nonsense is in the statements below by “adults” who ought to know better. I have inserted comments where appropriate. The article was on AP this morning.

Report: Va. Tech Could Have Saved Lives
By KRISTEN GELINEAU (Associated Press Writer)
From Associated Press
August 30, 2007 9:50 AM EDT

RICHMOND, Va. - Virginia Tech officials could have saved lives if they had quickly warned the campus that two students had been shot to death and their killer was on the loose, a panel that investigated the attacks said.

Instead, it took administrators more than two hours to get out an e-mail[…]

Scientific American

Not to pick too much on Scientific American, but the magazine is such an easy target for people who think rather than feel about the world.

Arabian Brainpower, a nice fuzzy little article on the opening of a university in Arabia – and the prediction that it really will be a university. This is nonsense, of course, but nice fuzzy stuff for a left-of-center mag. For context, a friend joined the Peace Corps in 1977 and taught Physics in Kabul, Afghanistan. Or tried to. The moon was landed on by man? Don’t be absurd – Mohammed said it’s only as large as the[…]