Toyah

It was good to see some old Highlanders this last weekend, as Dallas and O'Toole were in town for a graduation party. Unfortunately, I didn't have much time to hobnob.

As of Saturday, we are finally done with the scraping and sanding after three weeks of work (interrupted by a straight week of non-stop rain). Sunday we taped the windows and Monday we finally started painting for real. The west side is done and a bit on the north side, too.

Haven't linked to The Onion in a while. Sad.

Now, here's a speech from a Congressman that I like!

Barney Frank (D-MA) had this to say about the Agricultural Appropriations Bill that was debated Tuesday:

...I have been forced to conclude that in all of those great free market texts by Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and all the others that there is a footnote that says, by the way, none of this applies to agriculture. Now, it may be written in high German, and that may be why I have not been able to discern it, but there is no greater contrast in America today than between the free enterprise rhetoric of so many conservatives and the statist, subsidized, inflationary, protectionist, anti-consumer agricultural policies, and this is one of them.

No word on the final result of the bill...

will hill graduates this year. he represents the last student at hillsdale that i would recognize on the street. his graduation party is this weekend. this gives me an excuse to go up to the 'dale. i will get up there friday evening. the last time i talked to jim he said that he would make an appearance. i hope to see a few other people from out of town, and of course, the highlands lasting link to the town...a-train.

blog as plan maker: i was thinking that maybe whatever guys are in town could do a breakfast-ish activity saturday. what do y'all think? anthony, jim, matt? any chance of a lightning strike (jeremy sighting)? and pardon my assumption that phil won't be up here until there is a wedding or some equally big event.

monday i will be going to paramount's kings island with a group from church. the weather report for that is sunny and hot, which means big, BIG crowds.

I knew, even as it happened, that the news reporting of New Orleans post-Katrina was likely as much rumors as real news, but even so, this is pretty eye-opening:

Remember the dozens, maybe hundreds, of rapes, murders, stabbings and deaths resulting from official neglect at the Superdome after Hurricane Katrina? The ones that never happened, as even the national media later admitted?

Sure, we all remember the original reporting, if not the back-pedaling.

Here's another one: Do you remember the dramatic TV footage of National Guard helicopters landing at the Superdome as soon as Katrina passed, dropping off tens of thousands saved from certain death? The corpsmen running with stretchers, in an echo of M*A*S*H, carrying the survivors to ambulances and the medical center? About how the operation, which also included the Coast Guard, regular military units, and local first responders, continued for more than a week?

Me neither. Except that it did happen, and got at best an occasional, parenthetical mention in the national media. The National Guard had its headquarters for Katrina, not just a few peacekeeping troops, in what the media portrayed as the pit of Hell. Hell was one of the safest places to be in New Orleans, smelly as it was. The situation was always under control, not surprisingly because the people in control were always there.

Full story here (it's pretty long).

This is pretty cool...the U.S. Navy is building a new ship out of scrap metal from the Twin Towers. The USS New York will be an amphibious assault ship and will be launched in 2007. Part of the bow is made from 24 tons of scrap metal from the World Trade Center.

Two sister ships are also planned, the USS Arlington (named after that part of the Pentagon that was hit on September 11th) and the USS Somerset, named after the county in Pennslyvania where United Flight 93 crashed.

This hasn't been an issue that I have followed very closely, perhaps because immigration problems don't directly impact me, living as I do in a very northern state. My opinion on immigration is that a) it should be encouraged where ever and however possible and that b) illegal immigration should be, you know, illegal. Which means we should be making it much easier than it is to legally immigrate, while making it much harder than it is to immigrate illegally. If that means fences and soldiers, then so be it.

I can't say I'm extremely enthusiastic about Bush's plan, but I do concede that it's probably as good a plan as we can get. I greatly dislike any kind of amnesty, but on the other hand he's probably right that it's not practical or realistic to round up the millions of illegal immigrants and mass-deport them.

I wish that President Bush had addressed the current state of legal immigration more strongly, but other than that his plan is probably the best we can do, all things considered. Now, what his plan will look like when it gets out of Congress is an entirely different question, but for now I can sigh and endorse his plan.

Why Rental Car Insurance is a rip-off: Tim Hartford. I'm proud to say I've never been sucked into buying it, but not really because I thought of it as a rip-off. Rather, I thought (hoped?) my credit card had some form of rental insurance that would pick up the slack. I mean, that's what "Platinum" means, right? At the very least I know I can charge the $900 deductible to my credit card. Now paying 18% interest so that you don't have to buy the rental insurance: that's dumb.

Related: How to torch a car (for adolescent Frogs).

In one of the greatest movies of all time, the evil King Edward of England says "the problem with Scotland is that it is full of Scotts." Naturally I was thinking that the problem with Europe is that it is full of Europeans, which leads to the question of what is wrong with Europeans?

I ask this question in the context of Europe's absolute inability to confront the rising face of terror in the world - namely Islam. I am just unable to understand. I used to basically think that it revolved around Europe simply not caring because they weren't the ones that had to stare the results of terror in the face. After all, no planes fell out of the sky and onto the French Palace d'Republic. But, now Europe has endured trains in Spain and the subway in London. Granted, these were smaller scale attacks, but they were still horrific. On top of that, the actual response to these attacks has been backwards. In Spain, the elections following the attacks resulted in the socialists once again rising to prominence and an absolute retreat from doing anything in response to the bombings. As a quick aside, the example of Spain is very reinforcing for Islamic propaganda - a weak, fat, corrupt society that will be incapable of responding to its attacks.

In fact, as time goes on the only real thing that Europeans want to stand against is the United States. This is baffling - Europeans rail and wail against the society that protected it from its last great threat, the evil empire of communism. I don't know how to break it to Europe, but "hey guys, the islamo-terrorists don't like you either, for some reason you can't understand this, but it's true anyway." On top of that, Europe has the problem of what I dub "the creeping jihad." This is the jihad of immigration, namely in the form of Turks, but also other Muslims pouring into Europe, but not becoming European. While Muslims pour in, Europeans, having abandoned the traditional family model of propagation, are not having kids. Europe is becoming "re-balkanized" by a new society springing up inside of it; this new society has the potential to quickly outpace it in terms of growth. This is something that I have noticed more and more in my travels in Europe throughout the past decade.

I would now like to direct my readers' attentions to a nice piece on windsofchange.net. http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/008539.php In this piece the author sort of looks at this same question. One big point that he makes is that "Europe is on a vaction from history." I tend to agree with this. I might say that Europe needs to remember itself. What I mean is that Europe needs to tear itself away from the self-defeating ,pinko-communist idealism that blames the west(more recently known as the US) for all of the worlds problems. It seems as though Europe believes that it has "enlightened" itself into a postmodernism that is quite incapable of dealing with the threats of a new pre-modern threat (radical Islam). Of course much of what I say here also applies very strongly to the United States as well, but at least we are 10-20 years "behind" Europe on that front.

Anyway, please read the piece on windsofchange and feel free to leave any additional thoughts and ideas.

In progress...

My castle is in need of paint, so Debbie and I have taken this week off from work to get that done. Two days in, I can tell you it's going slower and taking a lot more work than I expected (however, I did expect that!).

Here's a couple of Before pictures:

http://www.hillsdale.edu/roche/

Woodrow is dying a slow, painful (and expensive) death. Any recommendations on the next horse? I'm looking for one with a few miles' experience.












"I hate rude behavior in a man. I won't tolerate it."
--Woodrow Call

The Federalist Society is sponsoring an interesting back and forth (pdf) on the topic of immigration. The persons involved in the discussion are Professor John Eastman of Chapman University School of Law and Professor Margaret Stock of the United States Military Academy at West Point. I am not taking a public position in this debate, I'm just drawing your attention to an available resource.

Nothing has irked me more in recent months than the public hysteria over rising gas prices. It is now the public consensus that Big Oil Co. and Big Oil execs are to blame and that the solution is to outlaw or over tax said Co. and execs. But with increased consumption of oil in India and China, decreased production at home (ANWR, RITA, &c.), mid-east unrest, and foolish congressional decisions in relation to nuclear energy, domestic production, and gasoline additives, among other things, what we are seeing in the gas market is a classic supply/demand interaction.

Does this mean nothing can be done to lower prices? No, it doesn't. But there are constructive ways to approach the problem, like attacking artificial and self-imposed barriers to increased supply. It is quite popular to say that Americans should try to break their "addiction to oil" by promoting alternative fuels. There is much promise in the future of alternative fuels, and indeed much necessity. But the task of developing alternative fuel sources is something best left to the market, not government control and interference. There are a variety of alternative fuel technologies available or in development, and certainly more will be discovered. But it should be the market mechanism and the profit motive that higher energy prices will induce that should dictate which alternative fuel sources are the best and most efficient for American consumers and when it is appropriate to start making the switch.

In the mean time, however, we have to deal with the reality of rising gas prices, and rather than descend into meaningless diatribes about the evils of "profiteering," our task should be to promote a more informed public understanding of why gas prices are climbing higher and how Congress is to some degree complicit in the problem. One thing is for sure: we are in the midst of a failure by leaders at all levels to take the initiative and lead on an important issue that requires level-headed leadership. Right now we seem to be spinning our wheels and going nowhere.

Further reading: Charles Krauthammer has a good column on this in today's Washington Post; Mark Davis has some useful comments; and Ann Coulter's column is less useful than amusing.

my car was acting naughty a couple of months ago. someone who had owned the same kind of car said that they had similar problems and that it turned out to be the crank position sensor. they suggested that i go to auto zone and buy a new sensor and try it out. if it wasn't the problem i was only out the amount of the part. that is what i did. i went to autozone. they gave me a position sensor, and we changed the part out in my car. last week the car's issues reappeared, but this time i couldn't get the car home/started. the problem: the crank position sensor! auto zone had given me the cam position sensor. why my car trouble didn't reoccur sooner, i don't know, but the problem that i thought had been taken care of with a minimum of expense is now hundreds of dollars. i'm not bitter though...i will merely never go to auto zone ever again.