This article titled Eichmann begged for mercy before hanging was very, very interesting, but very, very sad, too. It speaks for itself. May we never forget.
Betty Blonde #473 – 05/24/2010
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Category: Politics Page 3 of 5
The arrogance of the main stream media is only matched by its ignorance. Pulitzer Prize winning main stream media (Washington Post) writer Kathleen Parker on CNN made the following statement:
One observation. I don’t know… this seems to have slipped through the cracks a little bit but Ted Cruz said something that I found rather astonishing. He said, you know, “It’s time for the body of Christ to rise up and support me.” I don’t know anyone who takes their religion seriously who would think that Jesus should rise from the grave and resurrect himself to serve Ted Cruz. I know so many people who were offended by that comment. And you know if you want to talk about grandiosity and messianic self-imagery I think he makes Ted Cruz makes Donald Trump look rather sort of like a gentle little lamb.
It is hard to imagine a college graduate in America today who does not understand why this is so profoundly obtuse. Nevertheless, if you do not understand why this is the dumbest thing you’ve ever heard from a CNN newser, then you need to pop on over to the Right Scoop and read the article titled The Dumbest Thing You’ve Ever Heard from a CNN Newser.
Betty Blonde #464 – 04/21/2010
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This is a US presidential election year that should be very interesting right at the time when I am actively working to curb my political appetite to concentrate more on the personal and spiritual. So when something of biblical proportions started happening (see this article) between Saudi Arabia and Iran (Isaiah 21?) I knew immediately it was going to be difficult not to spend at least a little bit of my time following these geopolitical realities that very well could have an impact on our lives, even in America. We DO live in interesting times.
Betty Blonde #460 – 04/15/2010
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It has been an interesting year. The veneer of good will between warring world views seems to have been ripped open. I ran into three interesting articles this morning when I opened up my browser to read the news. The first article, titled The end of “news” was about once trusted news sources that are no longer read by anyone but extreme partisans because they are no longer worthy of our trust. I found myself nodding my head to this article as I read. I no longer get my news from the AP, NBC, ABC, CBS, the Oregonian, The New York Times or even Fox News. I mourn that. I always loved to read the newspaper over coffee in the morning. The thing is, they no longer report the news. Other news sources break the important stories. I visited the old, reliable news source for a lot of years before I finally gave up. Now I just ignore them.
The second article titled Punch Leftists in the Mouth by Daniel Greenfield of the Sultan Knish blog about how to deal with those who want to tear society down. It is a rework of Mike Tyson, the heavyweight boxing champ’s famous quote, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Greenfield says it is not good to play nice with people who want to perpetrate evil. I found this interesting because James 4 was the chapter for my daily Bible read today.
Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God. –James 4:4
Therefore to him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin. –James 4:17
The last article is a hopeful one. The title of the article is The Sexual Revolution’s Coming Refugee Crisis. The subtitle is Many people are going to be disappointed, and even before they can admit it to others or to themselves, they are going to ask, “Is this all there is?” It basically says that a lot of the bad stuff that has gained approval in our society since the 1960’s cannot sustain itself. God’s rules are being broken and things do not end well when that happens. Many people will come to the end of themselves and start to look for answers outside of popular culture, politics and governments. There is a huge opportunity in that if we remain humble and point these people to something truly good. James 4 has some answers for that, too.
Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he shall lift you up. –James 4:10
Betty Blonde #368 – 12/14/2009
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I have long been of the opinion that the government should not be engaged (no pun intended) in the marriage business. The problem with government meddling in affairs outside of their domain did not begin with the recent Supreme Court overstepping of its constitutional bounds here in the United States. It happened long before that. A guy named Matt Appling in an aptly titled blog post, If You Think the Supreme Court Just “Redefined” Marriage, Take It Up With King Henry the Eighth, really nails the issue. It is ironic that so many people interested in redefining marriage to include something that is not marriage (same sex unions) are calling out the Christian community on the divorce issue. This is something over which the Christian world has fought wars, divided and argued for centuries.
It is right to argue that Christian’s need to get their house in order when it comes to the issue of divorce, but it seem very disingenuous when it is argued by people who treat the institution of marriage (in the true sense of the word) in such a cavalier manner. Christians really need to get this issue right. People both inside the Christian community and out who dishonor marriage through unrepentant fornication, adultery and attempts to redefine it should be viewed with incredulity when they try to argue that Christians are hypocrites with respect to divorce. Some of us are, but some of us, even in our weakness and failure, continue to repent, live repentant lives and fight the good fight.
In the meantime government should get out of the marriage business.
Betty Blonde #365 – 12/09/2009
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The saying, “Don’t sweat the small stuff and it is all small stuff,” is one that resonates with me. There are big, important things for which all men are responsible, but we often get caught up in little stuff that really does not matter. Still, the steps taken by the judiciary in this country to facilitate evil requires a response from people of conscience.
A couple of days ago, Daniel Greenfield at the Sultan Knish blog wrote a post titled Be the Best Saboteur You Can Be about how, sometimes it is important to sweat the small stuff. When evil is perpetrated and no one in authority cares to do anything about it, the only thing poor schlubs like you and I can do is become saboteurs. Good saboteurs sweat the small stuff. In the article, Greenfield lists five things we can do. Here is part of point number two from his list which is my favorite:
2. Fight the small stuff
You don’t have to think in terms of a national movement. You don’t even have to think in terms of an organization. Those are things that we need, but you can fight the left in small ways at home.
I’m not talking about Sign X or donate to Y.
Just obstruct any liberal initiative, policy or program in your community. It doesn’t matter what. It doesn’t matter if it’s innocuous. It doesn’t matter if you agree with it.
Undermine it on principle. If you can, vote it down. Encourage others to vote it down. If you can’t, look for ways to tie it in red tape by attaching other agendas to it.
The left wins its biggest victories at the planning stage. Its activists come early and stay late. They propose their plans, rig meetings, use kids and the elderly as human shields, and get their way. They are not used to any real opposition. Particularly the kind that doesn’t bluster, but finds ways to tie their proposals in knots, to make them expensive and drag them out as long as possible.
Oppose them when you can. Concern troll them when you can’t.
If you don’t have that kind of position, think of the origins of the term ‘sabotage’. Workers threw their shoes into machines and stopped the machine. Don’t do anything illegal. Don’t do anything that will get you fired.
But if you have the opportunity to make a liberal program work badly, if you have a legal way to put more stress on it, to tie up the energy and time of the people running it, to make it worse… do it.
We’re the underdogs. We’re the political guerrillas. This is not our system. It’s their system.
Our job is to make it run as badly as possible.
I love that. “This is not our system. It’s their system. Our job is to make it run as badly as possible.” Evil is afoot. We have the high ground if we take it. Truth and history are on our side. There is neither a moral nor intellectual case for setting the course that has been set. Our job is to reject what has been forced on us. There is a great, even eternal cost for not resisting evil and quite probably a huge temporal cost if we do resist evil. It is worth it to resist evil. We already know the outcome of this story, that we win in the end.
Betty Blonde #357 – 11/27/2009
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The New York Times, as the old saying goes, is like a broken clock. Even a broken clock is right two times per day. NPR and Time Magazine do not seem to be right quite that often. In fact, I had kind of relegated them both to the same category as purely naturalistic evolution–their chance of getting anything right is about equal to the mythical chance of a tornado assembling a Boeing 747 as it passes through a junk yard or a million monkeys typing at a million typewriters for a million years to duplicate a work of Shakespeare.
I still think NPR is in that category, but imagine my surprise when an article appeared in Time Magazine that perfectly articulated my thoughts on where we stand here in America now that the Constitution has no fixed meaning and can be modified on any whim of the masses. I am not one of those who believes the court’s latest indignity was done on the whim of five out of nine justices. If society was against them, the Supreme Court could in no way make these kinds of changes.
Society at large now defines “marriage” differently than those who hold to orthodox Christian beliefs. Christian, my son, made the statement that this is nothing new, society has been like this for as long as he can remember. Thankfully, his living memory is not that long–less than twenty years. Still, this did not all start with attempts to change the definition of marriage to accommodate homosexuality, but with some equally pernicious evils: the libertine sexual morays of the 1960’s and the acceptance of divorce with neither societal nor legal sanction and diminishing sanction by much of the church. Rod Dreher, the author of the article expresses my feelings about this very well:
…social and religious conservatives must recognize that the Obergefell decision did not come from nowhere. It is the logical result of the Sexual Revolution, which valorized erotic liberty. It has been widely and correctly observed that heterosexuals began to devalue marriage long before same-sex marriage became an issue. The individualism at the heart of contemporary American culture is at the core of Obergefell — and at the core of modern American life.
This is profoundly incompatible with orthodox Christianity. But it is also the world we live in today. Dreher goes on to describe the ramifications of all this for professing Christians and how times could get even uglier, but that it has happened before. It is scriptural that evil will ascend before the end. One of these times, when evil is ascending Christ will return. Whether this is that time, only time will tell.
In the meantime, I will consider reading Time Magazine again in a million years or so.
Betty Blonde #356 – 11/26/2009
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This article in the Christian Post tells the story of a homosexual teacher of third graders who chose to resign after he colluded with the school’s Assistant Principal to read a book that promoted homosexual marriage to his students behind the backs of the student’s parents. The headline of the article outrageously lays the responsibility for the resignation of the teacher and the Assistant Principal on the parents. A paragraph in the middle of the article explains the real reason they resigned.
Due to the outrage among the parents, Currie and Goodhand felt compelled to issue their resignations last week. And Currie said he felt he could no longer teach at a school located in the socially conservative church community of Efland.
“I’m resigning because when me and my partner sat down and talked about it we felt I wasn’t going to have the support I needed to move forward at Efland,” Currie added. “It’s very disappointing.”
Bad grammar and all, this statement is at complete odds with the title of the article. It was the self-serving feelings of the teacher and the Assistant Principal that caused them to resign, not the justifiable outrage of the parents. The egregious act of indoctrination of young children to accept one side of an extremely controversial topic without first checking with the parents is bad. The arrogance of this government school teacher’s justification for perpetrating this outrage is even more staggering. He said:
I think that anyone who knows me as a teacher would understand that that is an absurd claim,” Currie said. “Every single decision is based on what is best for my kids, not what is best for Omar Currie. I am a champion for my kids. I fight tooth and nail for every single thing that my kids need.
He is so wrong on so many counts. They are not his kids. What is best for the kids in his class, especially when it comes to controversial moral and sexual issues, is not his decision. I am not sure about this government school teacher, but government schools in general have a horrible record relative to the teaching of reading, writing and arithmetic. They should get their house in order on those subjects and leave the moral and sexual instruction to the parents.
This guy is a product of the horrible education provided to education majors by the teacher education establishment within the university system in this country. Until we clean that house by recruiting higher quality students, getting rid of the rampant political correctness there and dramatically increasing the academic rigor of teacher education programs, we are going to have to deal with this kind of thing. The better option is to just not participate with the government schools by opting for homeschool or private school or, better yet, get the government completely out of the delivery of education. Milton Friedman had the right idea on all this.
Betty Blonde #355 – 11/25/2009
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I traded a couple of emails the other day with a buddy who had some insider information about some events in the news. The news was reported in a very skewed way by the main stream media which made people in the middle and toward the right of the political spectrum howl. The insider information, and I trust the guy who gave it to me, led me to believe both sides had some points right and some points wrong, but mostly they missed the bigger point altogether. All this made me think about a blog post I wrote a few days ago titled Sometimes it seems like things are getting really bad. That post referenced an article that explains that, even though morality is in decline, there are literally two billion people who hold to what is right.
The backdrop for this was some discussions with the kids about how important it is to figure out what is true for one’s self. If someone makes a statement about the way another person thinks, acts or their very nature, it is best to take it with a grain of salt until it can be known first hand. No one has all the information and people change. I am still embarrassed (and ashamed, if the truth were known) about stuff in my past. There are a few people who know some of that stuff about me, but are willing to be my friends anyway. And the reality is that I have changed. I am different both in terms of values, priorities and discipline than when I was seventeen. I am glad for those who give me credit for that. It is good to give other people credit for the positive changes in their lives, too, and not base judgments on imperfect, incomplete and false second hand reports. We are probably missing the bigger point altogether anyway.
Betty Blonde #353 – 11/23/2009
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I received an instant message from Christian yesterday about an article posted on Yahoo News. The headline in big bold letters said:
Israel army kills West Bank Palestinian: Palestinian security
In his instant message Christian said, “Pay special attention to the 3rd paragraph.” The third paragraph says the following:
An army spokesman told AFP that a Palestinian had died after he threw an incendiary device at a jeep and the vehicle overturned on him.
How is that for unbiased reporting? Bury the lead and pump the politically correct version in the headline. That’s the way to do it. About a week and a half ago a great article came out in The Alegmeiner titled Israel’s Supports Must Stop Using These 13 Phrases. Among other things, it explains why it is wrong to refer to Samaria and Judea as the “West Bank” and how the use of the terms “East Jerusalem” or “traditional Arab East Jerusalem” is just wrong, too–“The 19 years between when invading Jordan captured part of the city in 1948 and was ousted by Israel in 1967 was the only time in history, except between 638 and 1099, when Arabs ruled any part of Jerusalem.”
The article is a succinct primer on how much of the media tries to force the narrative a certain politically correct direction when it comes to reporting on Israel.
Betty Blonde #349 – 11/17/2009
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I LOVE Sarah Palin. The following is from her Facebook post about Rachel Dolezal, the white chick who claimed to be black so she could get a good job in the NAACP and the other white chick who claimed she was “native American,” so she could get a good job as a professor at a politically correct university. This is almost a perfect storm. It is old now, but the meme going around the internet right now that goes “An Indian and an African walk into a bar… Just joking, it’s just two liberal white women” really IS funny. Here is part of what Palin said:
Ok, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t laugh… this hard. I know this isn’t a victimless crime, what this white chick perpetrated. But it’s a most crystal clear picture of so many screwed up things we’ve let society adopt as the norm. Namely, the practice nowadays of judging someone not based on character, but on skin color. Our original civil rights freedom fighters are rolling in their graves over the backward steps we’ve taken lately. It’s politically incorrect to call out Elizabeth Warren for falsely claiming she’s American Indian, or dinging Obama for just making up his former multi-ethnic girlfriend, and I guarantee I’ll be branded a racist for laughing at this Rachel Dolezal story. Whatever. Dolezal is an unsatisfied lily white leftist who believes the only thing less politically correct than being a white girl is to be a white guy today.
Kelly is the blue-eyed Mexican girl in our family. The funny deal is that the Mexican side of the family has as many or more blue-eyed, light-skinned people as my lily-white, Anglo-Finnish side of the family. Her first language is Spanish and her mother’s family has been in Mexico for centuries. She has actually gotten called out on here racial insensitivity toward Mexicans by white women at school on a semi-regular basis. One of my favorites was when a girl got offended and told Kelly off because she was not offended by some cafeteria workers wearing sombreros and fake mustaches on Cinco de Mayo. Kelly embraces the affirmative celebration of all things Mexican. How can you not love sombreros and fake mustaches on Cinco de Mayo.
The jokes about these posers are a ton of fun. The subjects of derision could not be more worthy.
Update: Lorena just sent another hilarious one: Click here.
Update II: Found this link to the sombrero and mustache incident (described above). Great fun was had by all!
Update III: This just in from our favorite government school teacher, (lily white) Trisha via text message:
I am thinking about going back to college… I think I can afford it if I claim trans-race. I don’t look it, but I feel Mexican! Affirmative Action and all that. I thought I might claim some imaginery children as dependents…because, although I don’t have children, I fell like I do! I am working on making some salsa and getting a tan! Thoughts?
Trisha, this is a slam-dunk! You are blood related to Mexicans! You EAT salsa and some people you know have kids! You are in with the win!
Betty Blonde #346 – 11/12/2009
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Dennis Prager wrote a great little series of articles (here, here and here–so far) on the differences between the political left and the political right. His third article really nails it. It starts with the following:
A fundamental difference between the left and right concerns how each assesses public policies. The right asks, “Does it do good?” The left asks a different question.
He then goes on to give great examples of this exact phenomena describing the different ways liberals think about the minimum wage, affirmative action and the “peace” movement. His final example is the granddaddy of them all:
Perhaps the best example is the self-esteem movement. It has had an almost wholly negative effect on a generation of Americans raised to have high self-esteem without having earned it. They then suffer from narcissism and an incapacity to deal with life’s inevitable setbacks. But self-esteem feels good.
Betty Blonde #342 – 11/06/2009
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Our car got towed this morning because we did not have a sticker from our apartment complex to park there. Unfortunately, we had never gotten one even though we had asked repeatedly. Fortunately, if you do not count all the notarizations, hassle, faxing emailing, use of public transport and associated costs, we were not charged for the towing and storage because the apartment complex acknowledged they were the ones who caused the problem. Of course, they will not do anything about the crazy hassle they caused us, but as I tell my kids, “don’t whine!”
There was some educational benefit to this exercise. We learned that it is pretty easy to take the wildly expensive (to the tax payer–not so much for the ridership) train to Beaverton from Wilsonville. If we ever really needed to go to Beaverton, that would be a good thing. From the image Lorena took inside the train, it does not look like the train is going to make up that huge tax deficit with fares anytime soon. If the freeway system around Portland wasn’t broken so badly, they might have not ridership at all.
The one GOOD thing that came out of this was that I learned it is quite enjoyable and even convenient to walk to work. It is even a semi-safe walk. I am going to try to start making the walk to and from work as frequently as possible. That is one great way to lose weight, not only with the exercise, but with the more limited amount of time available for eating because it took you so long to walk.
Betty Blonde #339 – 11/03/2009
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It seemed kind of crazy to me that the following two posts appeared on Lorena’s Facebook one right after the other. The first is of our buddy, Karl at a Colosseum somewhere in or near the Middle East. The other is a from the Drudge Report. Is it a coincidence? Maybe not.
Betty Blonde #333 – 10/26/2009
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We used A Patriot’s History of the United States as our principle text for the study of U.S. History during homeschool. We had not planned to do that, but needed something after we were sorely disappointed by our experience with Joy Hakim’s politically correct and simplistic A History of the US provided by the Sonlight program. This was the one glaring weakness in what we feel is a stellar homeschool offering. Hakim’s screeds were just a bridge too far in terms of both focus and dumbed down content. Hakim’s highest earned degree is a Masters degree. Her undergraduate degree was in Government and I could not find the area of her Masters degree so who knows whether she has any formal training in History.
Two profoundly more knowledgeable, professional historians wrote the New York Times #1 best selling A Patriot’s History of the United States. Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen are both college History professors with long lists of refereed journal articles in their curriculum vitae. The book was more readable, less agenda-driven and covered U.S. History more deeply and broadly than the Hakim books. I found an article on a talk given by Larry Schweikart about the book. The article featured a photograph of four homeschoolers who used his book as a text for their homeschool study of U.S. History and were impressed enough with the book they wanted to come hear the author speak. It is nice to know we are not the only homeschoolers that used this book. We have hope Sonlight will eventually see the light on this and make the switch, but it has been several years since we raised the issue.
Betty Blonde #332 – 10/23/2009
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I have never really had a desire to be a political blogger. I write about some political stuff sometimes, but that is more a function of my worldview than any allegiance to a political ideology. That being said, it is hard to get to the news of the day without passing through the political filters of the reporters and commentators. Television news is the worst. The knee-jerk, brain dead, hard left orientation of the “mainstream media” is the worst and the country club republicanism of what postures as a more balanced choice is only marginally better. It makes me thankful we do not have a television. Radio is just as grating. I ride silently in my car these days. I probably should have been doing that all along.
So, I am relegated to getting my news from the Internet. There are actually quite a few places now from which I feel comfortable getting my news. The news aggregation sites are good because one can preview the source before they consume the product and there are often links to commentary that are worthy of a read. I found the Sultan Knish blog at one of the news aggregation sites I frequent and now I try to read everything written there. The blog author, David Greenfield, makes me kind of sad because he is not only way smarter than me, I am very confident I will never come within a country mile of being able to write as well as him. He is kind of like Mark Steyn in that regard.
I wrote this post specifically so I would have a pointer to the blog on my website and because he captured my exact thoughts on David Letterman. The following quote gives you a flavor for the whole article, but I hope you read the whole thing.
He was not a liberal by conviction, but out of laziness. When challenged by guests like Bill O’Reilly, he quickly folded. His politics were not thought out, they were unthinking. For all his pretense of eccentricity, he was a conformist who understood that if he played the game, he would get paid. His comic personality, the folksy skepticism and detached disdain served up in measured doses to viewers, was calculated to cover up this essential attribute that defined his enormously lucrative career.
Letterman is a professional sycophant who limos off into the sunset to the strains of the sycophantic braying of a dying industry. As audiences dwindle, the media has become its own audience, mourning the passing of its glorious past by taking hits of nostalgia from its heady days of power and privilege.
Betty Blonde #331 – 10/22/2009
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I am on the same page as Dennis Foley in his article at the Intellectual Takeout website titled Render Unto Caesar? He starts off by saying, “I’ve seen it coming for many years.” He believes oppression is coming for Christians. I have seen it, too. My college age daughter and I discussed this very thing last night. A group of “friends” who purport to be Christian ridiculed her for a position she took that is fundamental to Christian belief. This is all part of the reason we decided to homeschool our children eleven years ago. Foley describes an event where the governor of a state blames Christianity for the ills of our society and suggests that religion (Christianity really) and the religious should be suppressed. Foley describes it so well, I am just going to post a starting quote and recommend a read of the whole article.
The threat appears regularly in the comments on our social media pages. The first time you learn that passing your faith on to your children is considered a form of child abuse, you’re taken aback. But then the allegation is repeated over and over and over again. The first time you see talk of “stamping out the virus of religion,” you wonder what that means. But then you learn what it means for some when another commenter nonchalantly recommends going into the churches, slitting the priests’ throats, and finally getting on with the evolution of society.
Such anti-religious (typically, anti-Christian) attitudes as are now spreading like wildfire through social media. Similar sentiments played out horrifically in the French Revolution, the Marxist purges in Eastern Europe and China, the Cristero War in Mexico, the killing fields of Cambodia, and the ongoing slaughter of Christians in the Middle East and Africa. Is it unreasonable to wonder if and how the virulent, anti-Christian attitudes of today will be unleashed in America?
Betty Blonde #324 – 10/13/2009
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A book by a guy named Jonathan Haidt just came out that describes what a lot of data says about the difference between conservatives and liberals. I tend to be pretty skeptical about liberal social research, but the conclusions of this work resonated with me. The premise is summed up in a quote from this article:
According to Haidt’s research, there are five things people care about:
- avoidance of harm
- fairness
- loyalty
- authority
- sanctity
Conservatives care about all five in equal measure and liberals care about only the first two. Here is a quote from the book, as transcribed by The American Conservative:
“It’s as though conservatives can hear five octaves of music, but liberals respond to just two, within which they have become particularly discerning.”
There is a sixth thing which the book claims people care about, but for which liberals have a fundamentally different definition than conservatives. That is liberty. That was particularly enlightening. Here is another quote from this first article I saw on the new book (I read three. The other two are here and here.).
Conservatives tend to view liberty as the notion of being left alone to pursue happiness in whatever way they choose. Liberals tend to view it as the act of creating a level playing field for society’s most vulnerable individuals.
This very much rings true. I need to think about whether this gives me any additional insight about why liberals act they way they act. At first blush, I think it is something that thoughtful people, maybe even some liberals, have intuitively known all along.
Betty Blonde #302 – 09/14/2009
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I was stunned and quite pleased yesterday on my visit to get a new card for my work at the Social Security Administration office in Oregon City yesterday. I had to wait about a half an hour, but it was really quite pleasant. When I first got there a very helpful, chatty security guard pointed out how to use the machine to log my visit. Then the guy who worked with me to get my card was seemed so contented, I asked him if he liked his job.
He said, “I love my job. I have been here eleven years.”
He want on to explain briefly why he loved his job–meeting and helping people, working with other good people, etc. I LOVE to hear that kind of thing. It really caught me by surprise. I am super happy to know their are people really going for it a one or two places in government. I wish there was a way to get that going throughout.
Betty Blonde #284 – 08/19/2009
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Cheap desalinization has been one of the holy grails of engineering for a long time. There are others like cheap, lightweight and (truly) efficient batteries, safe and efficient cold fusion, etc., etc. This article about how Israel does amazing things to desalinate water at a huge scale and a low price. Here is a quote from the article about where they are with their efforts:
The new plant in Israel, called Sorek, was finished in late 2013 but is just now ramping up to its full capacity; it will produce 627,000 cubic meters of water daily, providing evidence that such large desalination facilities are practical. Indeed, desalinated seawater is now a mainstay of the Israeli water supply. Whereas in 2004 the country relied entirely on groundwater and rain, it now has four seawater desalination plants running; Sorek is the largest. Those plants account for 40 percent of Israel’s water supply. By 2016, when additional plants will be running, some 50 percent of the country’s water is expected to come from desalination.
This could have huge ramifications for the whole world. Imagine if the African and Australian continents could get cheap, fresh water to areas where it was never before available. What about desalination and pumping of water to the arid parts of Mexico and even to Arizona from the Gulf of California. It is a big deal.
Betty Blonde #270 – 07/31/2009
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