I feel guilty about not having written anything for Sunshine Week. So, here’s something I wrote on the Great Orange Satan in 2005 (!):
As we should all know by now, (hundreds?) of thousands of individuals may have had their personal information compromised via a theft from ChoicePoint. CP initially thought they got lucky, and disclosed the California thefts (as they are required by Californian law), however, it looks like the thefts are of a much greater scale.
I’ve watched (most of) Gangs of New York (in little pieces) on AMC this past week or so, and it’s funny how hatred of the Irish (and German and Italians and Poles) Catholics begat hatred of African-Americans begat hatred of the Mexicans begat hatred of various ‘others’, while the Protestants are still, well, Protestants, be they Mainline, Methodist, Baptist, or what have you.
If we weren’t so dumb (or scared, anxious, or greedy), you’d think we’d have recognized the pattern by now.
The Beloit College Mindset List has become an annual tradition, listing the things that each new collegiate class has known (or will never know). You can see the list for the class of 2013 here. The class of 2020 (for those educated in Texas) is going to have some unique firsts, and may require their own separate list based on the revisions approved in accordance to far-right revisions of history by the Texas Board of Education, perhaps sourced from Conservapedia.
234-years ago, Adam Smith published the Wealth of Nations. While some see confirmation of Smith’s beliefs in the return of robber barons, others believe Smith did not mean what you think he meant. We see that the Adam Smith we have come to know is actually only 60-years young, and came from Chicago:
…Lost Legacy has never been slow in criticizing the ‘Chicago Adam Smith’, a person with ideas that are far from the ideas of the Adam Smith born in Kirkcaldy in 1723.
This is normally the sort of post that I would write and post as a “draft” until my prediction would come to fruition, running late Election evening or the following morning. I feel that it might be most useful to write it now, so anyone stumbling across it will look at political events in the near-term future through the frame of a likely-outcome that I’ve defined, hopefully reaching the same conclusions.
Since everything with the Catholic Church ultimately comes down to money, I’m having a hard time believing that the Church’s meddling in health care reform is due to their ideological and theological concerns over abortion and euthanasia. You’ll recall that Bart Stupak is obstructing reform over the issue of abortion, threatening procedural and parliamentarian shenanigans affected the Congressional calculus. I suspect that somehow it has more to do with the effect of reform on Catholic health care, given that it is one of the largest providers in the United States. At the very least, outlawing the funding of abortion with taxpayer dollars guarantees a level playing field with secular providers.
Let me start off by saying that Reagan is the President of my youth, the President that as a child I trusted to keep the missiles from falling, who grieved the astronauts, and who – at the time, I thought – single-handedly defeated communism. You can solidly put me down in the “not a fan” column. Yet I still think he deserves a place on our currency.
Starting on March 1st, you can visit this page and view the 2010 Census Participation results in real-time.
I’ve wanted to do a post on the slow motion car wreck that is the Toyota story, but I just haven’t had the time. This is a subject that satisfies several of my interests, from automobiles to politics to organizational dynamics, and I’ve followed it closely. So instead, here’s a collection of links…
This week’s horrid David Brooks column seems to pine for rule of the privileged elite of old and not the more-but-not-yet-truly-diverse leadership we currently have, as we no longer trust them:
One of the great achievements of modern times is that we have made society more fair. Sixty years ago, the upper echelons were dominated by what E. Digby Baltzell called The Protestant Establishment and C. Wright Mills called The Power Elite. If your father went to Harvard, you had a 90 percent chance of getting in yourself, and the path upward from there was grooved in your favor.
