Youtube Video of winning essay speeches
(Note: All 6 winning speeches — 3 Middle School and 3 High School — are contained in the video.)
evenin’
Tucson shooting
We are hyper-legalized and hyper-sensitized. Every deviation from the norm, large and small, becomes the subject of the 24/7 cable news obsession. The unscrupulous politicians are the ones who build each new aberration into scripts that feature their political position tied into the aberration in a causal connection. Could be cause, could be effect, and the script either supports their position, or undercuts their opposition. Integration of the aberration into political scripts occurs after-the-fact of the aberration, when foresight is no longer necessary.
So let’s call the 24/7 coverage the first level of abstraction from the aberration, and let’s call building the aberration into a political context the second level. The third level happens when laws are created at the margins of our liberty, criminalizing the aberration and/or regulating the rest of society in a manner to inhibit conditions that permit the aberration to occur. The legal response tries to protect society, notwithstanding the feasibility of actually accomplishing societal protection. Whatever the outcomes, the political machinery uses the aberrant grist to feed its mill. As the gravity of the causal aberration fades in time, the legal response goes on forever, permanently limiting liberty for the remainder of the law abiding.
While the details can be argued about how terrible events filter through political and legal mechanisms to narrow our American liberties, the general model appears to be well-trod ground. If the exchanges between limiting liberties and public safety were effective, one could argue it’s all worthwhile. But they aren’t good trade offs. The reasonable and justifiable legal responses don’t leave us with an outcome of absolute public safety. They leave us with a myth of safety.
History has shown that there are aberrants in development, waiting in the wings to immortalize their name in the legal record books. Our legal system provides a mechanism to enable and encourage such fools with a path to immortality of a sort. We are a constitutional nation of law, but legalities can only do so much to protect us. Our political and legal system should quit seeking this holy grail. The answer does not appear to lie in the direction of further limits to liberty, especially since the system itself seems to have become a motive.
Look at the long view. Do we really want the parameters of our free life and society to be the sum of responses to an endless parade of psychos, zealots and assorted nutjobs?
Opportunities for Change
Opportunities For Change To Fix The Fiascoes of ‘10 – IBD
IBD – Opportunities For Change To Fix The Fiascoes of ’10
- Defund Obamacare
- Return federal spending to pre-2007 level
- End all stimulus spending and return balances to the treasury and to taxpayers
- Reform Medicare with market solutions
- De-politicize the Federal Reserve and stop “quantitative easing.”
- Privatize or shut down Fannie and Freddie
- Stop the Fairness Doctrine and similar proxies that threaten free political speech
- Replace the TSA with Isarali air security methods
- Stop Net Neutrality which is a canard for internet content control by government
- Fight the Islamofascist war to win it with finality wherever it is exposed.
- Fund missile defense systems
- Exit the new Start treaty
- Securely fence the southern U.S. border
- Pass the 3 pending free trade agreements with South Korea, Columbia and Panama.
- Require all federal regulation to be written by legislators through the legislative process.
Sunlight and Glenwood Springs
World weather
What a system! The earth spins from left to right. Relative to the earth’s surface, weather at the equator backslides while weather at the poles advances in opposite rotations, and the whole thing balances out. That’s so cool!
Ohioans
kids
Holmes County, Ohio
my 1st hdr photo
EC Conservative Breakfast Assoc
Commissioner Shipper presented and end-of-year report from the Elbert County Commissioners. See video of his presentation here.
Senior fellow at the Cato Institute Randal O’Toole gave a thorough presentation on transportation, public planning and government intervention issues. See complete video of his presentation here.
Life insurors pro estate tax
The Federal Estate Tax (aka, death tax) is currently repealed, due to a provision in the 2001 Economic Growth Tax Relief and Reconciliation Act (EGTRRA). However, on January 1, 2011, the tax comes back at the rate of 55 percent on all estates above $1 million.
Estate tax advocates often portray their fight as a struggle for fairness against greedy billionaires and spoiled heiresses, but as this American Family Business Foundation Issue Brief documents, it’s the multi-billion-dollar life-insurance industry who profits handsomely from the tax at the expense of family business owners and farmers, to whom they sell estate tax-related products. [Read more…]
Sharia law unconstitutional
Oklahoma citizens had it right when they voted to prevent Oklahoma judges from using Sharia law to decide Oklahoma cases. Sharia law contradicts rights granted to Americans in the Declaration of Independence and rights protected from government encroachment in the Constitution. When Judge Vicki Miles-LaGrange grants CAIR’s claim that the practice of Sharia law is a constitutional right, she demonstrates ignorance of either the Constitution or Sharia law or both.
The Closing of the Muslim Mind (Robert Reilly) [Read more…]
Republicans being part of the problem
Republican Jon Kyl of Arizona and Democrat Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas are pushing a compromise that would lower the top rate to 35% with a $5 million deduction.
Current death tax rate is ZERO. In what universe is a “top rate to 35% with a $5 million deduction” LOWER THAN ZERO?
Senate Republicans who vote to close debate on, or who vote in favor of reinstating the Estate Tax must be shown the door in 2012. The message of last November was to stand up to Democrat taxers, not cave in to them.
Dehellenization of Islam
The Closing of the Muslim Mind (Robert Reilly)
– Highlight Loc. 2001-83
Dehellenization of Islam
The “intruding sciences” would intrude in Islam no more. They were expelled. As a result, notes Professor Joel Kraemer of the University of Chicago, “the assimilation of the Greek heritage in the Orient may be termed a ‘tragic sterility.’”10 professor of Arabic and Near Eastern studies G. E. von Grunebaum stated, “The far-reaching importance of the Greek contribution to Islamic cultures should not lead one to suppose that it effected a fundamental change in its vitality or its concept of man. There are few traces of the Greek spirit in the human ideal within even those sects which, like the [Shiite] Isma’iliyya, were most open to the influence of the Greek element in the interest of its own theologico-philosophic system.” Thus, he concluded, “The fundamental structure of Islamic thinking has been left untouched by Hellenistic influence.”11 [Read more…]
The Fragile Community
WikiLeaks and a fragile community – David Brooks NYT Opinion
Consider the effect computers have had on the insurance industry, and consequentially, on all of the risks (health, life, fire, accident, loss) funded by the insurance industry. Prior to computers, the historical price for an insurance provider to cover a beneficiary was the product of static market conditions. Insurance is a financial service product based on knowledge of risk, and the knowledge of various risks to beneficiaries had been stable for many years. With the advent of computerization, beneficiaries and risk could be correlated in the machine so that insurers could now choose which beneficiaries were least likely to cost them benefits. Computer correlation of beneficiary data fundamentally shifted the bargaining power between insurers and beneficiaries, and as we can see with health insurance, the consequences to this radical shift are still playing out in a myriad of market and government reactions. [Read more…]
WikiLeaks and Cablegate
It is passing strange, to use one of George Will’s expressions, that so many voices trumpet the rule of law with espionage charges against WikiLeaks, while remaining silent on the constitutional 1st Am. protection of the free press to publish in America. Their silence on the fundamental constitutional question speaks more loudly than their proposed enforcement of the rule of law over the very narrow espionage charge.
The taboo lies in the unsubstantiated conclusion that America’s interests have been harmed by these leaks. This is not a proven conclusion. It is unsubstantiated fear mongering. Sure, diplomats feelings have been hurt. America’s true interest lies with informed citizens who now have an opportunity to see the world their unfettered executive branch diplomats have been screwing around with overseas. Diplomats are embarrassed by this disclosure and they should be. The solution is not to censor the internet, as the executive branch has now begun doing. It is not to fortify and further enable a secret domain where unelected functionaries pursue their personal prescriptions for America’s interests, as this Post article calls for. The solution is to raise the bar – the standard against which diplomacy is measured, and hold the executive branch to that higher standard in all diplomatic matters.
photo method
These pictures from Dusseldorf and Cologne, except for one, were taken with a Sigma DP1 camera on a small tripod that I carry in my pocket. [Read more…]
