Month: March 2012

Well yeah. I’m a fan of famous film titles. But there are some parallels. And just to put all those things in perspective. The people claiming in an act of solidarity that “Trayvon is my son too” might want to rethink their position. What am I on about? There seems to be Blowup in the…

The Jerusalem Post reports on a shortage of natural gas in Israel. Due to the country’s looming natural gas shortages, the Israel Electric Corporation is considering renovating its Reading power station in Tel Aviv so that it can also operate on mazut heavy fuel oil. Reading is Israel’s only power station that does not yet…

In a piece titled “Nature Has No ‘Balance’ for Us to Keep,” Matt Ridley touches on one of my pet peeves — the irrational human penchant for waging war against the “unnatural”: In her remarkable new book “The Rambunctious Garden,” Emma Marris explores a paradox that is increasingly vexing the science of ecology, namely that the…

Death sucks, and I know what it is like to lose people I love. However, I am getting a more than a little tired of angry grieving mothers who blame other people for the regrettable, stupid, and even fatal actions of their kids. The latest example is a mother whose son smoked synthetic marijuana, then…

Some drivers on the road are making it very difficult for other drivers, and an incident yesterday made me feel as if I was being turned against my will into a raging bigot. I don’t want to hate people, mind you. But there was this Prius driver who was in front of me on a…

I got nothing to say and no time to say it. However, a photo I saw on Facebook made me very happy, so I thought, why not share it? Dogs actually do smile. As most dog owners will cheerfully acknowledge. Ask Coco. She has a long history of smiling: That was when  she was still…

I voted for Ron Paul in the Illinois Primary. Election results are mostly in and it looks like Romney was the big winner at 47% with Santorum at 35%, Paul at 9% and Gingrich at 8%. (note – with counting still going on the numbers may change some.) Why did I vote for Ron? Well…

Culture wars are getting out of hand. Especially the rhetoric. It used to be that the phrase was “the culture war.” Lately it has been so expanded that there is no longer any “it” to it. I mean, it used to be that the “war” (itself an overused word meaning almost anything these days) involved…

I was over at Watts Up With That getting involved in a discussion of politics plus the demise of Scientific American when the subject of Maurice Strong and the UN came up. That got me to do a little searching and it is funny what I found. First the wind up. The World Summit on…

Watch the latest video at video.foxbusiness.com The really good stuff begins at about 4 minutes in. The net? Taxes on dividends could triple. Depending on who takes the Congress in 2012.

I hate to miss a chance to write a salacious headline (I blame it on my Navy training). Details Here.

This is an explanation of what happened yesterday in my writing blog, in case you think I lost it. While yesterday’s post was no more “political” than most of my posts are – I tend to analyze the psychological and psycho-social underpinnings of a situation, and I stay away from telling you who to vote…

I think the above is a true enough statement for those who are introverted. However, there is a dispute over who said it, and this blog has drawn angry misplaced comments — not for quoting it directly, but for quoting it within a quote from Jonathan Rauch’s 2003 article on introversion. Rauch attributed the quote…

Sarah’s recent post I’ve Completely Lost My Mind got me to thinking in a rambling sort of way (you can follow the thoughts in the comments at the link) and the above song came to mind. I have a question. Does any one recall the name of the book the song was based on? I…

Over at the Air Vent Jeff is discussing politics. In the comments a classic left/right confrontation is going on. To cap off my most recent spate of comments I had this to say: Let me explain in simple terms: 1. The Left – “the best way forward is…” 2. The Right – “the best way…

On my own blog. I’ve posted on the supposed war on women here before, from a slightly different perspective.  Today’s outbreak came because I-have-had-enough-of-this. I shared a Heinlein quote poster about how forcing a man to pay for anything he doesn’t want is the worst of tyrannies.  I meant it in general: say, pacifists paying…

Yesterday was Saint Patrick’s Day. And I wore orange. Not because orange is my color or I’m into the Orange Order or anything like that, but too many people were wearing green, and I’m not a greenie weenie type. Plus I don’t like the fact that Saint Patrick is said to have thrown the snakes…

I got so excited by Rick Santorum’s war on my erototoxins that I got all distracted from what I really ought to be thinking about. It’s not as bad as when I was a kid, though. In those days, my mind wandered terribly, and the teachers had to use discipline. Now they use drugs on…

While I don’t want to devote too much time to something that both Dave and M. Simon have already had fun with, what annoys me even more than Rick Santorum’s call for a crackdown on pornography is the crackpot thinking behind the idea. From the Santorum website: America is suffering a pandemic of harm from…

A tornado ripped through the Ann Arbor suburb of Dexter earlier tonight, doing substantial damage. In Ann Arbor, the floodwater was deep (my street was flooded), firefighters were injured, and apartments had to be evacuated. Here’s the video showing the twister: I was not at home when it happened, but I could hear the hail…