iPandora

From CNN and Campbell Brown:

…we are again asking the President to explain why, exactly, that he announced, with great fanfare, new ethics rules if he had no intention of abiding by them.

Democrat leaders are often the first and loudest claiming the ethical and moral high ground.

I guess this is what happens when the high ground is defined by and populated with moral relativists.

The picture I get in my mind is all the righteous leaders of the Democrat party, Pelosi and Reid and Obama and all their entourage and Blagojevich, standing in a sea of muck and waste, drawing a circle around themselves with sidewalk chalk and claiming the land they stand on is high ground.

I should have spent more time in art class and turned that into a comic… Alas, I have not the skill. Just the dream

Political Power, unlike money, is a zero sum game.

In order for one to gain and consolidate more of it, another must lose it through neglect and carelessness or bitter struggle.

At the same time, power is not necessarily directly correlated with size. A large organization can run fluidly and freely given good leadership and skilled and involved members. A power-grabbing entity does tend to bloat with those drawn to power and the ease of corruption.

It is not size that corrupts, but immoral people.

The presidential race should give us each an opportunity to see honestly and completely the morals, ethics, and skills of those who would lead us but which instead tends to show us carefully scripted appearances controlled by any number of variously corrupt entities.

The candidates themselves try to control their images. None of them have nothing to hide, and therefore, they dodge and obfuscate.

The media, with it’s control over what is shown in living rooms across the world, has a powerful ability to shape the discourse. If it doesn’t show up on the nightly news, it didn’t happen.

Charles Kessler, in a speech before Hillsdale College summarized in In Primis, speaks to the difference between size and power, and how size and corruption are not necessarily related.

Juan Gonzalez, in the New York Daily News, tells the sordid tale of pork and corruption which has birthed an amazingly idiotic tax hike in downtown New York:

No one could recall such a naked combination of arm-twisting and pork-barrel handouts to pressure City Council members to approve the huge tax increase known as congestion pricing.

The real problem is always complex and deep, but a significant part of the root is that we, the people, don’t really care.

Like Charlie Brown’s baseball team, we don’t want to be held accountable for our government. We pass the buck to the elected officials, who pass the buck on and on.

If we and a larger percentage of the population of America took responsibility for our government, there would not be a problem of usurpation of power and conglomeration of authority.

An aware and concerned citizenry is a powerful citizenry and the bane of corrupt politics everywhere.

Wise words.

Non Sequitur, March 4th 2008

Two stories about numbers that aren’t lying. Unfortunately, numbers often don’t have voices capable of counteracting lies made by their misuse.

First, from The People’s Voice blog comes a bit of misinformed and communist rhetoric in support of HR 676 by our old friend Congressman Conyers.

Beginning with with the classic assumption that everybody worthwhile agrees with him, the author, Stephen Crockett, claims that:

It is obvious that none of the major Presidential candidates of either the Democratic or Republican Parties are supporting the right approach to providing universal healthcare. Frankly, all the Republican candidates are going to be major obstacles to achieving this national goal. While the top Democratic candidates (Clinton, Edwards and Obama) do support the concept, they are all offering Band-Aid approaches for a life-threatening economic and health crisis in America.

I’m not sure, Mr. Crockett, but I don’t find it obvious. While I agree that there are several challengers on each side whose policy proposals are so bloated and impossible as to be laughable, the fact that you apparently don’t think they go far enough is proof positive that it is not obvious.

Just a warning: it goes downhill from there.

From Thinking Out Loud: Visions of Universal Healthcare Dance In Their Heads.

Second, in what is becoming an unpleasant task considering the number of good friends who support this guy because he is a Christian while ignoring the obviously un-christian nature of his policies, Mike Huckabee is listed as one of the top ten “most wanted”corrupt politicians of 2007.

Judicial Watch placed Mike as number 6, surrounded by such other luminous paragons of anti-virtue and un-justice as Hillary Clinton (#1), Rudy Guiliani (#5), and Barak Obama (#8):

Governor Huckabee enjoyed a meteoric rise in the polls in December 2007, which prompted a more thorough review of his ethics record. According to The Associated Press: “[Huckabee’s] career has also been colored by 14 ethics complaints and a volley of questions about his integrity, ranging from his management of campaign cash to his use of a nonprofit organization to subsidize his income to his destruction of state computer files on his way out of the governor’s office.” And what was Governor Huckabee’s response to these ethics allegations? Rather than cooperating with investigators, Huckabee sued the state ethics commission twice and attempted to shut the ethics process down.

Aforementioned Congressman John Conyers is#2 on the list. And California’s Senator Feinstein and Representative Pelosi are numbers 4 and 9, respectively.

Perusing my spam lists today I found one link from a Splog (spam blog) which kinda tickled my funny bone. This particular splog gives a “personal touch” by estimating or parsing the name of the original author, giving a few chosen adjectives of description and following with an excerpt from the scraped article (usually found by automated searching of RSS feeds) and a link to the original article.

To make it more personal, the splog tries to find a first name AND last name for the author, and while I have posted my last name down in the copyright bits in the page footer, the splog didn’t find that and had to guess.

I must say I’m honored to be considered a relation of Lynne and Dick:

Matthew Cheney wrote an interesting post today on
Here’s a quick excerpt
Copyright © 2007 matthew. Visit the original article at http://www.ipandora.net/2007/12/17/frank-ernest-me-blog/. Me Blog. Frank and Ernest, December 17th, 2007. ShareThis. Tags: blog, comic, Frank & Ernest, Humor.

Further humor (to me) comes from the new plugin I installed which inserts a copyright warning at the beginning of the feed version of the article. Because of this the feed scraper only got copyright boilerplate, tag, and plugin information.

Splogs foiled again!

Frank and Ernest, December 14th, 2007

Blogging turns 10 years old today. An article in Wired magazine describes what Jorn Barger considered to be the true or original purpose of blogging and includes ten tips he has for new bloggers. He coined the term “blog” to describe

I think #2 is especially good (except the “posted elsewhere” bit, blogging has evolved and become better and worse for it):

You can certainly include links to your original thoughts, posted elsewhere … but if you have more original posts than links, you probably need to learn some humility.

The idea with blogging now is that the web is personal. A blog brings a collection of links to content along with commentary based on a particular person’s worldview and/or perspective.

The real goal of blogging is to provide a window to your own web.

The web has gotten to a point where it’s size is so far beyond any one person’s or even any single-purposed group’s ability to digest.

By blogging, we bring our perspective as well as our own circle of sites into a predigested with added commentary list for others to peruse both to get to know you and to foment and encourage further exploration, discovery and learning.

I have little sympathy for fat people, and even less when they’re sitting next to me in an airplane. Apparently at least one fat person thinks he ought to be allowed to try and squeeze his bulk into a single seat with no thought for the poor person(s) forced to share 2/3rds of (their) seat(s) with him. This is selfishness, and I support Southwest Airlines in their decision to require people to purchase two seats if they cannot lower the armrests past their gluttonous bodies.

Thankfully, the gentleman who was compelled to buy a second seat to store himself has taken the terrible “shame” he experienced and used it to drive himself to lose weight. Good for him. Give it a bit more time and he’ll be thanking Southwest for shaming him into actually doing something good.

The sad part of this story is the fact that shame is seen as something which ought to be assuaged, the guilt is bad because it is guilt, not because it indicates how the person is in the wrong. Mr. Hill ought to have been ashamed of his weight long before he got to the airline ticket counter. Shame is a good thing, it tells us when we’re wrong and ought to change.

There is a significant difference between merciless taunting and true shame. I do not need to act any less loving or caring to cause shame in another. To taunt one for their difference or deformity is wrong at all times and in all cases. It is when the over-reaction to taunting causes all commentary and truth telling to be considered taboo that the whole culture loses its ability to self-regulate and now we have ugly fat people, and ugly fat kids, and walking medical bills, and public stupidity, and so many other visible scars walking the streets and sleeping on park benches.

I do not discount that these are humans who need love more than most. But Jesus came for those who knew and admitted they were sick.

Found this courtesy of The Point:

I still don’t enjoy the comic, but you gotta hand it to them: this is a very classy recognition of the strength and beauty and downright worthwhile nature of motherhood.

For all those doubters and phobics out there, we have Stein.

I’m not sure if he’s doing this tongue in cheek to get attention or if he’s really serious, but comic Ben Stein is producing a movie on the close-mindedness of the scientific community who without reason or resort forbid even the consideration of alternatives to their own closely held ideologies.

Ben Stein is Expelled.

While I make no claims that Scott Adams, author of the (in)famous Dilbert comic strip, is a Christian, he certainly explains clearly some fallacies of Atheism. In a series of posts initially begun in the spirit of what he terms “philosotainment” and driven on by comments to his articles and the responsive ravings of Austin Cline, Adams shows some rare jewels of the logical arguments for the likelihood of the existence of God. By no means does he come to correct conclusions all the time, and he makes no bones about the fact that he does this primarily as entertainment and only secondarily as serious philosophy.

Adams begins with “The Atheist Who Thought He Was God“:

In order to be certain that God doesn’t exist, you have to possess a godlike mental capacity – the ability to be 100% certain. A human can’t be 100% certain about anything. Our brains aren’t that reliable. Therefore, to be a true atheist, you have to believe you are the very thing that you argue doesn’t exist: God.

In the comments Pascal’s Wager is brought up. This argument is boiled down into the statement that it is a better ‘bet’ to believe in God than not to. Adams responds with “Pascal’s Wager” and includes a particularly brilliant jewel of wisdom:

…if you assume our perceptions are often flawed, you have to allow the possibility that some apparent absurdities are due to our limited powers of perception. So, for example, while the notion of a loving God who allows eternal damnation seems absurd, it is less absurd than assuming the world is run by invisible unicorns, or that God discriminates against those who believe in him.

He then goes on to say that given his own observation of current world religions he’d put his money on Islam as being the religion most likely to be correct based on several criteria, mostly stemming from a human view of current events and the goals and desires of God.

Austin Cline then chimes in with what he considers a withering response but which is in effect a series of adjective-laden phrases claiming that Scott Adams is an adjective-laden phrasologist, not a serious thinker. Austin does ignore the fact that Adams considers himself an adjective-laden phrasologist and makes no claims to serious mental inquiry here. Ironically it is the admitted adjective-laden phrasologist who submits the substantive arguments and it is the claimed substantive-intellectual who succeeds only in creating a storyline with no character or plot. Maybe he should take lessons from Adams, it could only help.

Adams, happy with the increased traffic to his blog, no doubt, responds gaily and with great relish in “The Poster Child For Cognitive Dissonance” in which he recognizes the ridiculous nature of the argument and ends with an admonition to Austin to “dance, monkey, dance!”

I’ve read a few bits and pieces of Adams philosophical explorations and I maintain a healthy level of respect for this man. Novelists and those who have to entertain with story and narrative are a special breed who usually command a greater than normal level of understanding regarding the human condition. Otherwise they would not be able to command an audience, as people would recognize the unreal nature of their characters and plot. Adams is by no means right about many things, but he is thoughtful and I would bet his keen wit and sharp mind against many people without fear.

Maybe I just like to laugh.

Thanks to Vox Populi for this story.