iPandora

If they can, so can you:

Drew Carey has some ideas on how to improve transportation. One of them includes naming a freeway after himself. How? Just buy it.

Reason.tv host Drew Carey examines the costs and consequences of traffic jams and explores several solutions that can get our roads moving. How does a speedy trip on the “Drew Carey Freeway” sound? Plus, one lucky commuter gets a helicopter ride to work, courtesy of Drew.

So if we go. Click here to watch

Along a similar veign… 

While roads and the highway system will never be completely privatized, what will become of gas tax receipts? The taxes were levied to pay for road maintenance and construction. Today, they are increasingly used to supplement non-transportation projects such as health care, welfare, etc.

When the burden of road maintenance and construction on public entities are reduced, are drivers going to apathetically acquiesce to the diversion of transportation dollars to non-transportation causes simply because gas taxes have always been charged?

Of course, it could be a non-issue because we might all have electric vehicles by that time. Not likely though.

Stay up-to-date on the wildfires in Southern California here and here with interactive and constantly-updated maps.

**EDIT by Matthew**

I’m going to reset this to the top and ask this question:

We’re going to see calls for the government to pay for the reconstruction of these areas. Just as those who live in the southeast know they live in risk of damage from hurricanes those who live in these areas know that there is a significant risk of fire destroying their property.

What is the government’s responsibility, if any, to people displaced and financially damaged by these fires?

Tom McClintock, a great man from California, has spoken truth. Excerpts follow:

You have extended me a very dangerous invitation tonight – to speak to a gathering of political conservatives on the day that Al Gore has received the Nobel Peace Prize for discovering that the earth’s climate is changing.

(I)ndulgences will be used for such activities as planting more trees to absorb carbon dioxide. After all, young trees absorb an enormous amount of this “greenhouse gas” – far more than old trees. But isn’t replacing old-growth timber with young-growth timber what lumber companies used to do until the radical environmentalists shut them down?

(T)here are only two ways of generating vast amounts of clean electricity: hydroelectricity and nuclear power. But there’s no faster way to send one of these Luddites into hysterics than to mention that inconvenient truth.

(A)t Al Gore’s rally to save the planet in New York in July, no less an authority than Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that those of us who still have some questions over their theories of man-made global warming are “liars,” “crooks,” “corporate toadies,” “flat-earthers” and then he made this remarkable statement: “This is treason and we need to start treating them now as traitors.”

Ah, the dispassionate language of science and reason.

I got to high school in the 1970’s and learned from the Al Gores of the time that we foolish mortals were plunging ourselves into another ice age. All the scientists agreed.

I believe it was Ogden Nash who wrote:

“The ass was born in March
“The rains came in November
“Such a flood as this, he said,
“I scarcely can remember.”

(W)hen the global warming alarmists predict worldwide starvation, they’re right. They’re creating it.

(R)adical laws now in place in California are having a dramatic impact on energy production, agriculture, manufacturing, wine-making and construction, just to name a few sectors of our economy.

In normal times, citizens don’t pay a lot of attention to public policy, and that’s why democracies occasionally drift off course. But when a crisis approaches, that’s when you see democracy engage. One by one, citizens sense the approach of a common danger and they rise to the occasion. They focus – they look beyond the symbols and rhetoric – and they begin to make very good decisions. Political majorities can shift very quickly in such times. Polls can reverse themselves almost overnight in such times. And I believe that day is now rapidly approaching.

People ask me all the time: “What can I do?” And the only answer I can offer is the answer the great abolition leader Frederick Douglass offered to a young protégé. He said, “Agitate. Agitate. Agitate.”

The Good:

Justice Clarence Thomas has been in the news recently because of a book he has written, a memoir of his life heretofore. He’s making the rounds of radio and TV talk shows and Rush and Hannity, Miller and others are uniform in their approbation of his story. And it is not just conservatives enjoying the narrative of this amazing life. Deborah Douglas of the Chicago Sun-Times, a self-described liberal who believes Anita Hill’s story regarding sexual assault by Thomas, has a few wise words of support and agreement with the aims of Thomas’ life:

…my elders always said, “You may not respect the person, but you have to respect his position.”

Thomas strikes me as trying hard to envision the day when race doesn’t matter, and he offers a strict approach to the Constitution that backs that up. He’s a firm believer in a meritocracy, which becomes devalued when clout, patronage and nepotism persistently usurp it.

The problem is that so many people feel that day is so far away, they can’t take a chance on a guy whose misplaced colorblindness could undo years of racial progress. A man who has tried so hard to flee the burden of race has found, perhaps, that burden is inescapable.

Compare this with the New York Times’ printing of a article by Prof. Anita Hill, one-time subordinate of then Mr. Thomas, in which she continues to maintain the veracity of her story against the oft-reviled Justice. For further enjoyment read the Letters to the Editor regarding Hill’s editorial.

The Bad:

Close to home, in Oak Park, IL a school thinks it can prevent walkway roadblocks and last-minute dashes to class by outlawing “group hugs” at the school. Umm… does this even need commentary?

What about punishing lateness to class. Not allowing ‘lip’ to teachers. Teaching academics instead of the worthless garbage required by so much state and federal oversight and union hand-tying. Creating an environment where learning is the method and creating intelligent, functioning humans is the goal.

Good friends of mine teach at a private school where there are few, if any, field trips, and the students learn classical Greek and Latin as regular parts of their curriculum. When asked when they get to have fun the students themselves respond that learning IS the fun.

Reading the article it seems as though assault and molestation seem to be part of the problem. There is not a right to education, if the person decides they would rather be bringing bombs or molesting others or anything which prevents others from getting the education they are trying to get, kick them out, and send their parents to school instead where they might learn how they need to challenge, lead, and discipline their children before sending them to school.

There are plenty of remedial education options for those who find they really need to learn what they thought they didn’t need to know earlier.

The Ugly:

Dad’s abdicating their responsibility in the home. Living a life of half-way fatherhood, being “men” when others are around and being craven power-whores when they don’t think others see. Yelling at wives and children, psychologically abusing those they’ve sworn to honor, cherish, serve and protect. Psychological abuse is as harmful, if not more so, than physical abuse. Scars on the skin fade with time, scars in the heart only heal with mercy, grace, and forgiveness.

Yes, that’s all I have to say.

The Relative:

Dawn Eden, author of “The Thrill Of The Chaste”, a book on the better way of chastity in today’s unchaste world, debated Virginia Vitzthum, author of “I Love You, Lets Meet”, a book on hooking up through personals ads. In response to a question from the audience regarding why Dawn feels as though she needs to “evangelize” Dawn answers that she is speaking from the position of one hurt by the lifestyle and now speaking against it to protect others. Virginia begins her response calling Dawn “sincere” as though she were some little child, but worse than the haughty snub is the relativist thought that what is right for Dawn isn’t right for everybody else.

One of the most pernicious lies of out time is that of relativism. Humans are relative in that we perceive things relative to other things. Darkness is the absence of light, cold feels more pervasive and “cold” when we’ve just come out of a warm shower, listening to loud noises and we have trouble hearing a whisper we could’ve heard without problem prior. Standards are not relative. Humans invent some standards, such as for gaging temperature, noise, and light, in order to empirically relate different things. But just as the pot has no control over the wheel which spins it and has no say with the potter in its construction, there are standards which govern humans and which brook no relativist comparison. One is either right or wrong (we as humans, being inside the system, often do not have the faculty for judging right and wrong accurately, we cannot measure motive, and therefore must rightfully leave such judgment to the one who created both the human and the standard), good or evil, pure or impure.

Abortion mill parent company Planned Parenthood, progeny of the racist white supremacist Margaret Sanger, has encountered an unexpected roadblock in the construction of a new abortion mill (aka. Planned Parenthood Clinic, or reproductive health clinic) in a suburb of my own beautiful Chicago.

The planned clinic in Aurora was being constructed by Weitz Construction when pro-life activists found they’d lied in their permit requests to the city. The structure was bought and paid for by Planned Parenthood, and was to be used exclusively for that purpose. But on the permit filings Gemini Office Development listed the tenants as “unknown”.

In this city, opinion is never very far away, and there are a few telling opinions on this issue.

First, from the pro-abortion side. Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn (the Tribune ran the original article revealing the true nature of the building project) begins his piece on the conflagration this way:

Well of course Planned Parenthood representatives didn’t tell the truth to Aurora city officials while they were building a new clinic in the western suburb.

Why is it such a matter-of-fact thing, Mr. Zorn?

Their goal was straightforward: To open a reproductive-health clinic on land zoned for such purpose.

Indeed, no one denies their goal, but still, why the secrecy?

But they had to use a certain amount of stealth because abortion is one of the services Planned Parenthood offers. And foes of abortion rights, longtime losers in the battle for public opinion, traditionally raise all kinds of rukus when Planned Parenthood comes into a community.

“Longtime losers”? If, as you say, the pro-life ideology is such a loser in the battle for public opinion why the hiding, the subterfuge, the concealment? There have indeed been cases of crazies causing physical harm to abortion doctors, in some cases killing, and destroying clinics. Such actions on the part of individual vigilantes are wrong and the perpetrators have been prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Those few cases are not a suitable excuse if, as Eric claims, abortion is such a universally accepted procedure. Hey, it’s only a baby.

In his smug pride, assured of the moral superiority of his position, he implies that Planned Parenthood and the services is provides ought to be as amoral as a Best Buy or Walmart. As if the killing of babies and the emotional and physical damaging of mothers, the admitted genocidal aims of abortion as issues are anywhere near the moral level of a big box store selling baubles and gewgaws. It makes me want to scream.

(P)oll after poll shows that, even after all the picketing and haranguing and hurling of moral opprobrium in the last 34 years, roughly 2 out of 3 Americans still support Roe v. Wade — the 1973 decision establishing a woman’s constitutional right to choose to have an early-term abortion.

Reading the other polls on the page, I see, not a losing pro-life ideology, but a closely divided America leaning to the side of further limiting the availability of abortions.

Responding to the news, the Reverend Dr. Johnny M. Hunter, DD. National Director of LEARN Inc., which claims to be the largest evangelical pro-life black organization, compares racial tragedies of true similarity. Unlike the sad Mr. Zorn, Dr. Hunter understands the proper order of morality and compares things which really ought to be compared.

Between 1882 and 1968, 3,446 Blacks were lynched in the U.S. That number is surpassed within 3 days by abortion.

Abortionists snuffs out the lives of 1,452 African-American children each day. This is womb-lynching, the implementation of black-genocide.

LEARN has been instrumental in providing an alternative voice in the African American community, speaking the truth when so many of their self-proclaimed moral leaders seem to fall completely for the thinly veiled eugenics plans of Sanger and her confederates.

Do they not have the wisdom, Messrs. Sharpton and Jackson, to know what Kimberly Jane Wilson’s father knew? That “not everyone who smiles in your face is your friend”?

Is their ignorance willful or blissful?

Racism in a white person is bad enough, but when you subscribe to a belief system whose known and stated goal is the control or extermination of your own race, is it racism still?

Back at the clinic building, the sides wait for the court hearings to proceed deciding whether Planned Parenthood broke the law in concealing their intent and what, if any, punishment there ought to be for such duplicity.

Mr. Zorn believes, as a good relativist, that there is no moral condemnation for breaking the law in order to achieve what he believes to be the greater good, the opening of a Eugenics Clinic. Also, as every relativist must, he believes he is right.

UPDATE: A Federal judge has just ruled that Planned Parenthoods rights are not being denied as it is being prevented from using it’s new clinic until the legal battles are over. The clinic will stay closed until all appeals are completed.

In this video, one union boss oversees a picket line of homeless and transients the union hired to do work the union’s members won’t do themselves. When a reporter tries to ask the picketers questions, they say that they will be fired if they talked to him. The union boss remains tight lipped too.A few notes to complement this video…

Shopfloor’s Carter Wood did some research on how old this story is and poses the question: “The federal minimum wage went up yesterday. Did the carpenters give their homeless picketers a raise?”

Other mentions:

• Miami, Fla., October 2004: “When it comes to picketing, the Carpenters’ Union has discovered it’s smart to outsource. …That’s part of the strategy behind a flurry of protests outside a few Brickell Avenue towers in recent months. But complaints have filtered to Miami police regarding abusive language and use of the homeless to hold signs. “Maybe some are homeless, but not the majority,” Kuzmik said.
• Indianapolis, Ind., May 2005: “The labor group hires demonstrators–including many homeless and unemployed people who have little or no connection to the construction trades–to picket various projects, carrying giant fake rats on sticks or even wearing rat costumes.”
• Columbus, Ohio, August 2006: “Ohio and Vicinity Regional Council of Carpenters is upset that some contractors and property-management companies don’t pay carpenters the $22.50-an-hour standard wage and, perhaps, don’t pay for health insurance or pensions. So the union is picketing these companies. Well, sort of. The union itself is not doing the protesting. Rather, it has hired more than 160 nonunion people — the jobless and the homeless — to do its picketing.”
• Louisville, January 2005
• Denver, January 2006
• And as we noted yesterday, Street Sense, the self-help homeless tabloid, reported the story in August 2005.

Bret Jacobson at Laborpains.org also notes another newscase from back in August 2006. (Video here.)

Loud noise, large crowds, the unwashed masses of todays’ global-warming zombies all gathered and listened to washed up acts playing washed up noise, all in the name of cooling the earth. Funny thing is, most people there probably thought cooling the earth meant giving it a drag on a reefer, and were hoping the “mouth” of the earth would open near their particular venue, and were vaguely concerned that the even organizers might have trouble finding enough of the precious stuff to give the earth a big enough hit that it would actually make a difference.

What is of particular interest to me is the bureaucratic red tape and restrictions placed by unthinking public entities on the construction of Nuclear power plants. Liberals and their ideology are the primary reason why Nuclear plants are considered taboo today. Nuclear energy is safe, clean, does not salmon runs or kill birds, uses a common natural resource, and have not been built in decades. Chernobyl, the skull and crossbones of the anti-nuclear-idiots society, has not turned out to be the ecological or even medical disaster it was warned of becoming. Three mile island “radiates” less energy than a person gets during a normal day from the sun. Nuclear meltdown is a bugaboo, not a fact. To those who it exists as a fact, there are many other “facts” which have similar import and veracity.

Daily Mail: Live earth a massive, hypocritical fraud

Conversations with Brit & Grit: Live Earth, Early Death

Radioactive Communist Zombies: Live Earth Even Snowed Out?
-also- ContacMusic

Joobo: Just a word on the fraud…

NationalReview: Living Through Live Earth

The Global Warming Heretic: Live Earth: CO2 For Me, But Not For Thee

Washington Times: Latest Crusade Is Going Green

The Chicago Sun-Times, my new home-town newspaper, published an article recently noting a few of the many claims made against the religious dogma known as Global Warming.

A cooperative and productive discussion of global warming must be open and honest regarding the science. Global warming threats ought to be studied and mitigated, and they should not be deliberately exaggerated as a means of building support for a desired political position.

Read the article and weep, if your name is Al Gore. Otherwise, just read the article.

In the shadow of the landmark decision by the Supreme Court striking down key provisions of Brown v. Board of Education, ideologues, politicos, and public school administrators are struggling to find new policy now that they’re not allowed to be racists any longer. Racism in any form is evil. W.E.B. DuBois was, and his philosophies continue to be, as racist as any other. The idea that by artificially creating “diversity” at any given social strata benefits no one, and harms many, most of all the ones the do-gooders purport to be assisting.

When any person, regardless of any unchangeable characteristic (such as race, gender, etc), is advanced artificially because some higher “level” of society is not “diverse” enough, that one’s most harmed are: first, the individual or individuals being elevated, and second, those they represent symbolically or actually. Role models are important, there are none who can deny this fact. When a whole generation of black Americans are seeing role models in the form of rap stars who are in and out of jail as frequently as they are on and off the stage. When the women the girls look to dress like whores and sluts, selling and subserviating themselves to men and boys. There is no respect or honor here, there will be precious little in the generation who looks up to them.

Rather than elevation there is opportunity. Booker T. Washington, a contemporary of W.E.B. DuBois, founder of the Tuskegee Institute, and promoter of the plight of the black American post Civil War during the reconstruction, espoused the idea that instead of artificially elevating an unready person who would then doubtless fail, adding insult to injury, “proving” the lies believed by the ex slave owners, and damaging the fragile plight of the newly freed humans, we ought to remove any restrictions that hindered the black American any more than the white American. Given opportunity, the strong would succeed, no matter their race. And those black Americans who succeeded because of their own strength would be less likely to fail and far better role models. Out of the Tuskegee Institute and the dreams and visions of Booker T. Washington came such shining examples as George Washington Carver, arguably one of the paramount inventors of America and one of the more prolific of all time. His inventions benefited millions with additional uses of common agricultural products, growing the demand for products common to the extremely poor, depressed post-war south. The Tuskegee Airmen, an all-black American Fighter Squadron formed during WW2 had one of the best records of success for bomber escort missions, to the point where bomber groups would ask for and demand them as escorts for their missions. These are examples of opportunity seized, and any of the Tuskegee Airmen would make excellent role models, several of them are still alive today (I’ve met them). George Washington Carver, were he alive, would make an excellent role model as well, and you can meet him, in books and articles, and every time you eat a peanut butter sandwich.

Racism occurs any time there is any measurement based on race. There is an important distinction between measurements based on race and measurements which take race into account. A measurement based on the incidence of terror propensities would be pointless in todays world if it did not take into account the religion and race of its sample. We need to know who is more LIKELY to be a terrorist. And right now, though it is dreadfully unpopular to say so, radical Muslims and those of Middle-Eastern descent are more LIKELY to be involved in terrorist action. Security is a numbers job. We don’t KNOW when and where and who and how. We can only guess based on when and where and who and how are more LIKELY. This is not a judgment, per se, on any race or creed, merely a statement of fact which happens to be rather sad in it’s results. A measure of crime will show that young black males are more LIKELY to be incarcerated than counterparts of other races. This is another very sad fact, but it does not make a judgment based on race, it merely takes race into account in measuring another, important, metric.

Racism is where you take those who have done no wrong and, because they, inescapably and through no choice of their own, belong to a particular category and either benefit them or cost them. Racism is always evil.

And if you like to read about odd and unethical experiments which nonetheless shed light on burning questions of human nature and vast social evil, the Milgram Experiments are classic cases studying the propensity of normal humans to do harm to other humans in given authority structure situations.

I support the ‘Bloggers Code of Conduct‘ mentioned in an earlier article here on I, Pandora. I believe that comment moderation is a careful balancing act of tact and civility versus open expression and free ideas. As any regular reader will know, I support freedom within framework, pure unrestrained freedom is anarchy, not liberty.

Here on I, Pandora I’ve made mistakes in my moderation of comments. I’ve never deleted an honest comment, but I have spoken against two of my early regulars who had ideas that differed with my own with a tenor that did not encourage them to continue participating. I have deleted, with the help of the Akismet spam plug-in, 377 and counting spam comments. I’ve never dealt with a genuinely inflammatory comment that deserved deletion for any reason.

If you were in a conversation with people regarding a mutually interesting subject, and some sub-par IQed fellow who happened to be interested in the same topic came in and began yelling obscenities at all those who disagreed with him, using short words only idiots use and argumental constructions such as ad-hominem attacks and the like, the over all conversation would be diminished and the expressive freedom of those engaging in the debate civilly would be taken away. Intellectual freedom is not hindered in the least by well-appointed rules regarding the behavior of those involved. There are always many ways to say anything, some of them are the wrong ways, and some of them are right ways. There are only very few things which are just wrong to say ever and in any way. Saying things in the wrong way at best prevents complete communication, and at worst damages people and ideas that do not deserve damaging.

If the Bloggers Code of Conduct project turns out a reasonable set of rules and regulations, I will sign on. I as the owner and operator of I, Pandora am responsible for the overall identity and atmosphere of the blog. I will use any tool at my disposal to ensure that this continues to be a place you the reader can find interesting news, commentary, original opinion, ideas and compositions without dealing with trolls or pigs of any shape or kind.

I support the Bloggers Code of Conduct. There is nothing to excuse the total and complete lack of civility that characterizes the state of conversation today, in the world and in cyberspace.