Marty wants to know how I feel about the draft. Well, Marty, unfortunately, I don't know. Or perhaps that is fortunately, because the draft has not been active in my lifetime, at least not to that point where I was able to talk. So I don't really have an opinion on the matter. But I'm sure I can come up with one.
Sharing the wealth. Popular phrase. It's all the rage. Of course, these days it means that those who have somewhat more than others, relatively speaking, are going to be required to give up some of that so that the others can get some.
Walter Williams talks about the concept, where he points out that someone who holds to the liberties as envisioned by the framers of our society will be soundly defeated if they try and stick to such a concept.
As an aside, the local paper printed this Williams column in today's paper, while his site shows it was published on the 5th. Talk about being behind.
Did anyone else receive one of these? According to their web site, US Code Title 13, sections Section 141 and Section 193 your response is required by law.
Everyone knows the government spends a ridiculous amount of money on fighting "terrorism" and it doesn't really do much. Do you feel safer knowing the government is on the job? I sure don't. I'm ticked that they introduce delays, close down access and generally make life more difficult, all while putting our country deeper in debt and accomplishing absolutely nothing.
Wheeler, that is. The former City Council member, voted out in the last election after her stance on the arena, is back. Or trying to be back, at any rate. So what has changed? Why should you vote for her now, if you didn't last time?
I can't answer that. But I can tell you about her platform. She's focusing on crime (more badges = less crime reads one billboard not far from my house), taxes and roads.
Politics and money shouldn't go together. I think that a large part of the problem is that the politicians spend money like it isn't theirs. And a huge percentage of it isn't. But the even larger problem is that people don't seem to get that. They want the government to do this or build that and all the while, they are the ones who have to fund those payments.
I don't understand that disconnect, or how to get that message across to those who don't understand that the government is not a money-printing machine. It's a money-recyclying machine, and the money being recycled is ours. Sure, we are "paid" a certain amount of money, but a large part of that paycheck will never be seen by us.
In another strange occurence, when the big oil companies rake in large profits, they have somehow done something wrong. When companies are referred to as "business", there is a reason for doing so. No one is in the business of going broke (except perhaps the US government).
Yet when GM loses $1.5 billion, no one is crying out for them, and demanding that they be paid money so they don't go broke. You figure it out.
Apparently a draft version (via Jenn) of a law in Indiana will require you to file a petition for parentage if you can't become a parent, uh, the old-fashioned way and if the person helping you (we'll call them the donor) is not your spouse.
Interesting. Even though they may be well-intentioned by trying to make sure that only your standard husband-and-wife arrangements may have kids, I have to think that the government in Indiana has finally found that point where they just don't have anything else to do.
Come on. Maybe if you can't think of any other laws to create, you should just go home and not make any more. Or maybe you should clear some off the books. It's obvious that the government spends far too much time now trying to intrude on our lives. Let's head the other direction.
So it seems that speed cameras in Charlotte have nabbed 30,000 violators. Not a shabby number, but apparently a huge number - 20,000 - extra citations could have been issued. Why were they missed? Because either the speeders were only speeding slightly or the license plates were blurred.
First, this is an estimate, so the actual number may be 200. It could also be 50,000. Second, there is no breakdown - so perhaps 99% of those were one case, and 1% the other. Maybe a 50-50 split. It doesn't really matter all that much.
So it would appear that Lynn Wheeler is once again ready to run for City Council. Has she learned her lesson? I don't know. The message she posted would indicate that she has done so, but there's only one way to find out.
I'm not sure I'm ready to take that route. While Lynn promises to fix the problems of crime, taxes and potholes (that's an odd combination for her focus), I just don't know if she can do the job or not. Her prior loss and two years off might help, but is it really in the city's best interest to bring her back?
Now that's just wrong. Charlotte-Mecklenburg, in their infinite wisdom, keeps "evidence" - in other words, fighting dogs - at animal control. Now I'm the first to say that those dogs deserve as much a chance at life as the next one, so before you get going, let me finish.
These dogs must be kept until the end of the trial. The city gets the bill. And perfectly adoptable animals get put to death because these can't be euthanized because they are evidence. What's even worse is that, at the end of the trial, these fighting dogs are typically euthanized because they are considered unfit for adoption.
The chief justice of the Supreme Court, William Rehnquist, has been in and out of the hospital. Recently. I'm all for the right of older people to work. I think it's good. But when you can't go to work because you're back being treated for cancer again, perhaps you ought to forget about the public being interested in your personal business (as Rehnquist refers to his health) and spend a little time getting healthy, and allowing someone else to take over.
Sandra Day O'Connor recently retired and apparently she wasn't even sick - her husband was! So she decides to retire, to help her husband. Meanwhile, someone who may very well be even worse off than her husband continues not only to sit on the court - but to be the ultimate authority of the same.
Maybe lifetime terms were a good idea when a lifetime was much shorter, and once you got sick you couldn't expect to live long. But when someone can struggle for weeks, months, even years, maybe they ought to take the time to concentrate not on their authority, but on their life.
I hate it when people change their links and don't provide any way to get from the old one to the new one. It's even worse when organizations do it. And the absolute worst culprit of all is the government. They have all sorts of data, and loads of it is at least marginally interesting to someone. Take the Mecklenburg Board of Elections. I had a number of links to past results and informational pages, and they all just died. Actually, they may have been dead for a while. But I just noticed it.
I understand some elections are two years old. So what? Keep 'em out there. That way people can look them up later. Informational pages shouldn't change that much - provide redirects to the new locations, or at the very least to the home page. Come on people.
Update: Have this problem? Try the free Alexa Amazon Associate Site Report. It's limited to 50 broken links per report, and 1 report per day, but hopefully it won't take you long to get through it. I had to run three days straight at first, now I barely break double-digits, and that's mostly when someone removes their archives. Cut it out!
