My Laptop Finally Bit the Dust

Bummer...

Well, it looks like my blogging days have come to an end. The 'ol laptop took it's last dying breath late last night. A new one is just not in the budget at the moment, so Reasonable Kansans will be signing off indefinitely.

Hopefully one day I'll be back...

Thanks for reading, and I've thoroughly enjoyed the discussions and the comments. It's been a blast.

All the best....

~FtK

World Aids Day

December 1st has been designated as World Aids Day for bloggers. The badge on the right column of my blog provides tons of information about how you can get involved.

If you're a member of Second Life, a new island has been created where participants in the event will help educate the public about the disease in efforts to decrease the spread of AIDS/HIV. On the 1st, there will be an entire day of activities to attend.

Worldwide, an estimated 33 million people are living with HIV. In the United States, an estimated one million Americans are living with HIV.

Please join us in educating the public about AIDS/HIV on December 1st!!

Happy Thanksgiving!!

Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the lands! Serve the Lord with gladness! Come into God's presence with singing! Know that the Lord is God! It is he that made us, and we are his; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture. Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise! Give thanks to him, bless his name! For the Lord is good; his steadfast love endures for ever, and his faithfulness to all generations.

~Psalm 100

Yeah....well, okay, this is kinda true....

He is hawt...I'll give him that. Let's just hope Mr. Hawt doesn't sink the ship.

Good grief...

What's Thanksgiving without Pilgrims and Indians. Ridiculous.

The Country is Screwed...

Read more.

Waaaaaahhhhhh!!!!! Is it a helpless feeling or what?

We're never going to sell that house we still have sitting on the market ravaging our finances. Our realtor told me that none of the comparable homes in our immediate area have sold in the last 6 months.

Just freaking great....

Here we walked the conservative walk for our entire lives....no debts (other than our house)...playing it safe, and now when we'd like to help our kids with a college education soon, we'll be in debt up to our asses.

UGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!

Christians and Gays Behaving Badly

This gal is spot on in regard to the fallout following the Prop8 vote...

Reportedly the Christians met once a week to pray and sing on the public corner. Whether they’re hoping to “straighten out” gays or simply trying to facilitate encounters with Christ is unclear, but their method is problematic; it’s not how Jesus would do it.

Jesus went to the people he wanted to meet and he ate with them — or served them. He fellowshipped and got to know the community in personal and intimate ways. He attracted them with his love and his stability. He didn’t stand around singing hymns and praying for them, which might have seemed both separatist and condescending — and therefore off-putting — to the very people he hoped to engage.

The Christians may have unintentionally come off as condescending. We may presume that they would not want a crowd of gays meeting on their curb each week to proselytize. As a Catholic I would take issue with other Christians, no matter how well-intentioned, standing at the curb praying for my redemption based solely upon their knowledge not of me, but of my habits or my religion. Their singing songs for my salvation would come off as sitting in judgment of me. Even if that’s not how they meant it.

You can read the author's views about the Gay community and their behavior at the same link. I'd rather focus on the Christian perspective for a moment...or at least my personal thoughts.

This issue creates such volatile responses that it's heart breaking at times, and extremely frustrating at others. There is also such hypocrisy boiling from both sides of the debate. One side cries intolerance never looking back to discern their own intolerance of other groups. Regardless, there are no easy answers in this decision.

My perspective is that God has allowed us free will to make the decision to follow his advice and live life according to the way He created us to live, or we can live according to our own will. I don't think He meant for Christians to coerce or force others to live according to God's plan.

That being said, I think it is everyone's right to vote in the way in which they feel they are lead in relationship to their worldview or religious beliefs. I don't think that the gay community should coerce Christians into voting for gay marriage by demanding that they are intolerant if they don't comply.

I don't have a problem with civil unions allowing homosexuals legal rights that married couples have, but I would vote against gay marriage because I believe marriage is reserved for a man and woman. Though I wouldn't picket, engage in a sing-in, or throw a raging hissy fit in attempt to coerce others to do the same.

Again, it's a matter of free will, IMHO.

The part of her article that really hit home with me is where she explains that Christ met, ate and communed with those whose worldviews were in conflict with his own. Actually, guys like Oleg, Rob and a few others take this approach when they come to my blog and chat in a respectful manner. Rather than scream and rant on and on about IDist views from the familiarity and comfort of their own side, they reach out and attempt to actually try to converse with me on my turf without being total jerks. Though we may never agree on anything, it certainly helps me learn to respect them if not their position. I just think that in so many of these controversial topics, there is too much preaching to the choir. Granted, there are times when you have to walk away, but if people can just *try* to understand each other better, it certainly helps ease the hatred and misunderstanding.

Just my 2 cents.

Actually it's Joy Behar who is "demented"

What a loon....she states that home schooled children are "demented".



Far from it, luv. I cannot tell you how impressed I am with some of the home school mothers who blog about what they are teaching their children. These gals have it going on! I ran across a whole slew of them about a year ago, and I just couldn't believe all the stuff they crammed into each day. Studies are showing that home schoolers are passing up their public school peers.

Side note: How in the bloody hell do you suppose Elisabeth Hasselbeck puts up with those other three far left liberal lunatics day in and day out???! Lord, I can't even watch them let alone imagine having to sit at that table with them everyday...gag.

To a good cause...

I just bought some more shoes. It looks like they're a little behind in their goal, so how about helping them out by donating another $5 or so??

Sigh.....

I really, really hope this is a fabrication. If anyone can provide more information about this incident, please do.

A New York man is linking the suicide of his 22-year-old son, a military veteran who had bright prospects in college, to the anti-Christian book "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins after a college professor challenged the son to read it.

"Three people told us he had taken a biology class and was doing well in it, but other students and the professor were really challenging my son, his faith. They didn't like him as a Republican, as a Christian, and as a conservative who believed in intelligent design," the grief-stricken father, Keith Kilgore, told WND about his son, Jesse.

"This professor either assigned him to read or challenged him to read a book, 'The God Delusion,' by Richard Dawkins," he said.

...


"He was pretty much an atheist, with no belief in the existence of God (in any form) or an afterlife or even in the concept of right or wrong," the relative wrote. "I remember him telling me that he thought that murder wasn't wrong per se, but he would never do it because of the social consequences - that was all there was - just social consequences.

"He mentioned the book he had been reading 'The God Delusion' by Richard Dawkins and how it along with the science classes he had take[n] had eroded his faith. Jesse was always great about defending his beliefs, but somehow, the professors and the book had presented him information that he found to be irrefutable. He had not talked … about it because he was afraid of how you might react. ... and that he knew most of your defenses of Christianity because he himself used them often. Maybe he had used them against his professors and had the ideas shot down."

He then explained to Jesse his own personal journey of seeking "other explanations of God's existence" and told of his ultimate return.

"I told him it was my relationship with God, not my knowledge of Him that brought me back to my faith. No one convinced me with facts. ... it was a matter of the heart."

That last paragraph irritates me to no end. *This* is why it is so important for students to understand that there *are* apologetic arguments that support their religious faith and utterly demolish the BS being pushed on them by atheist evangelists like Dawkins.

"Academic freedom" in the secular universities means nothing. True academic freedom would mean that ID and arguments against the ridiculous claims made by naturalists would be allowed in the classrooms as well. The liberal bozos running our universities provide little balance these days when presenting evolutionary "facts". AND, if professors are going to suggest books like the God Delusion, they should also suggest books refuting that BS....like Vox's The Irrational Atheist or any number of other outstanding books along the same line.

Students are impressionable during their college years, and it's a shame that only one worldview is allowed in the classrooms of our college campuses.

HT: Vox

The Academic Freedom Petition

SIGN IT please!



Also, please note that while Darwin enthusiasts will be hallowing his name on his 200th birthday (Feb. 12, 2009), the rest of us will be celebrating Academic Freedom Day by speaking out against censorship and standing up for freedom of speech by defending the right to debate the evidence for and against evolution.

Students are encouraged to participate in the Academic Freedom on Evolution Video and Essay Contest with a grand prize of $500. Read more about what you can do to help with Academic Freedom Day!

The Undoing of my Man

OMG, I hope my husband never discovers that these little critters exist. They are the spit and image of a Furby!



For those of you who are unfamiliar with my husband's dire fear of Furbies, you can read about it here.

Your "God View"...it drives everything

Our Pastor has engaged us in a thought provoking sermon series for the past three weeks. The title of the series is "God View", and he's been lecturing on why our view of God affects how we live our lives and the decisions we make. It's been an interesting series for me because it touches on so many things that I've discussed with theists, atheists and agnostics on line.

The first week of the series covered how our view of God affects our lives regardless of whether we believe or don't believe in an ultimate creator. The second week's lecture was on the resurrection of Christ and it's importance to the Christian belief system. This past Sunday's message was on the topic of exclusivity and Christianity.

I think this message also relates to ID in a way....it's my belief that our philosophical or religious worldview affects how we reason through the design concept as well as the evolutionary paradigm. Both the philosophical naturalist and the theist come to the table with a priori assumptions about the OOL, and it affects how they look at the scientific evidence. Both views rely on faith to a degree. I highly recommend listening to this series if you can find some spare time to do so.

We've been attending this particular church for the past few years, and from the start I knew it was the place for us. It's a non denominational church, which I think is becoming more attractive to many folks. The divisive nature of various Christian denominations is a turn off at times, and much of it could be so easily avoided, IMHO. Our Pastor is very well read, and he takes an intellectual approach to the Christian faith. He also stresses how important it is to strive to live an *authentic* Christian lifestyle. Difficult to do for sure, but it's a well sought goal.

The series of messages can be found at this link...weeks 11/2, 11/9, and 11/16.

He did mistakenly attribute the wrong author to a book he mentioned in yesterday's message...see if you can catch it! It's a book *all* of my readers should be familiar with.

*Love* Dave Matthews

Atheist Bus Campaign

Fox news seems to get a kick out of it....

Excellent Review of "The Irrational Atheist"

Thanks to Old Coot, you can read this review of Vox Day's, The Irrational Atheist.

In The Irrational Atheist, WorldNetDaily.com columnist Vox Day uses logic and facts (not theology) to refute the "unholy trinity" of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. What makes Day's book entertaining is his exuberant language -- the rhetorical fireworks with which he takes on the new atheists. High spirits and clever phrasing provoke continual chuckles, as for example when he remarks that not since the craze for Marx and Freud "has there been so much enthusiasm about the non-existence of God," and that this new evangelism is directed at "atheists whose lack of faith is weak." He employs mock praise, too, as in, "Hitchens and Dawkins became atheists after long and exhaustive rational inquiries into the existence of God, both at the age of nine." Yet the humor doesn't get in the way of subtle analysis, for he lays bare Dawkins's "incessant shell games," Harris's "exercises in self-parody," and Hitchens's "epic feat of intellectual self-evisceration."

Day divides atheists into high-church and low-church varieties. The "unholy trinity" belong to the high-church type -- i.e., they are university men who hate religion and demand that others enlist in their "anti-theist jihads." The low-church atheists describe themselves simply as of "no religion." In reply to the high-church boast that atheists are more moral than theists, Day points out that, while it is true that high-church atheists comprised only two-tenths of one percent of the criminals imprisoned in England and Wales in the year 2000, the low-church type made up 31.6 percent. Measured against their ratio in the overall population, this meant that atheists were four times more likely to go to jail for crimes than Christians. This is a sample of how Day explodes the false claims of the new atheists.

Perhaps the most engaging chapters in this book are those about war. The high-church atheists assert that religion causes war, but Day proves otherwise. He shows that over the past 232 years, 671,070 American soldiers have died in 17 wars, of which only one-half of one percent can reasonably be attributed to religion. This amounts to the deaths of 14 soldiers per year. Turning next to the Encyclopedia of Wars compiled by C. Phillips and A. Axelrod, Day examines 1,763 wars fought from 2325 B.C. to modern times. Of these wars, only 123 can reasonably be attributed to religion -- 6.92 percent of those recorded. Since half of these religious wars were waged by Muslims, this means that, apart from Islam, the world's religions are responsible for only 3.35 percent of all wars. "The historical evidence is conclusive," Day concludes. "Religion is not a primary cause of war."

Here is yet another glimpse of how Day uses facts to confute the "unholy trinity." Whereas Dawkins declares that atheists have the highest regard for works of art and architecture and not one of them in the world who would "bulldoze" places like Mecca, Chartres, or York Min­ster, Day replies with staggering evidence that atheists are far more likely than theists to destroy the landmarks of civilization, as when they razed 41,000 of the 48,000 churches in Russia, and 7,000 of the monasteries in Tibet.

Although Day is an evangelical, he is remarkably sympathetic to Catholics, who are usually the chief targets of atheists. Day scoffs at the way Dawkins, in the space of a couple of pages, dismisses the 3,000-page Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas: He says that Dawkins waved "a dead chicken over the keyboard" and tried to make readers believe he had "seriously considered" the Sum­ma and found it "wanting." Day also thinks it unfair that the Spanish Inquisition is ballyhooed as the high point of human wickedness. He points out that the Great Leap Forward and the Holocaust, both caused by atheists, resulted in 43 million and 6 million deaths respectively, whereas the Spanish Inquisition resulted in 3,230 deaths in three and a half centuries. And then, in the single year of 1936, Spanish atheists murdered 6,832 members of the Catholic clergy -- "more than twice the number of the victims of 345 years of inquisition." Summing up, Day reveals that 52 atheist rulers in the 20th century, from 1917 to 2007, were responsible for a body count of around 148 million dead -- "three times more than all the human beings killed by war, civil war and individual crime in the entire 20th century." And so it turns out that "the average atheist crime against humanity" is "18.3 million percent worse than the very worst depredation committed by Christians." To support these powerful refutations, Day offers footnotes on virtually every page.

The "unholy trinity" are fond of saying that religion and science are incompatible, but Day shows that they have been compatible for centuries, both before and after the Galileo incident, which he sees as exaggerated by the Church's enemies. The enemies of religion prefer to forget that, in 1794, revolutionary atheists inspired by the Enlightenment beheaded Antoine Lavoisier, the father of modern chemistry.

Today, atheists are raising fears that mankind faces extinction unless religion is abolished, but Day replies that it is science that has put mankind in such danger. Men thrived with religion for 12,000 years, but they "may not survive four hundred years of science." Though science has been around for only three percent of the time that religion has, it has produced a "panoply of mortal dangers," including designer diseases and weapons of mass destruction.

Ironically, for all their supposed reliance on reason, the new atheists believe in improbable things like "multiple universes." Day observes that this is "an utterly non-scientific theory invented solely to get around the problem of the anthropic principle." Faced with the unwelcome fact that there are 128 fortuitous coincidences in the fundamental constants of physics, which suggests that the existence of life is no accident, atheists postulate "a potentially infinite number of universes" just so "our wildly improbable universe" can be found to be "mathematically probable." Here again, they use a double standard -- the multiverse theory is just as "un­falsifiable" as the "God Hypothesis," and far "more improbable."

Vox Day wisely concludes that there is no proof at all that a society can be established and survive on "an atheist foundation," while there is "a fair amount of evidence to the contrary."

If you don't want to go out and purchase the book, you can read it in it's entirety at this link. Vox put the book on-line as soon as it hit the book stores....very nice of him, IMHO.

Five Questions for Atheists

Silence to Be Deafening as Left Stops Yelling

Now that the far left has taken virtually everything in this election, they won't be left with much to bitch about. This article is too funny...

Conservatives for reasons too numerous to mention are depressed, but there are some bright spots.

Consider:

Will there be protests now at the White House? Against whom will college students spill their venom? Will they become well-mannered now and proceed to the White House respectfully, like ladies and gentlemen?

And what about their professors? How will they invigorate their class discussions centered on the eternal verities regarding race-class-gender without the jumping-off point about the Bush regime? What about training teachers in social justice? How will education schools train teachers to make their charges aware of the social injustice poisoning this country that emanates straight from the Capitol? Toward what power will students be taught to apply their “critical thinking” skills? Will the hegemony be dissolved, thereby ending 95% of the scholarship now produced?

What about creative writing forums? What will be the subject of poetry now? Can the resident long-haired creative writing professor introducing the poets at a reading say only good things about the president without getting boring? How will students prop up their self-esteem without asserting their intellectual superiority to the president of the United States? What outrages will students dramatize in plays? What about interpretive dances? How will over-mascara-ed, banjo-playing girl bands gain their creds of bravery without saying from a foreign stage that they are “ashamed” to be from the same state as their president?

What will happen to calendar manufacturers who rely on secretaries in humanities departments to display their keen wit by positioning the “Bushism-A-Day” calendars toward every student seeking a drop/add slip? What will professors post outside their office doors? Can they keep their “U.S. Out of Iraq Now” posters up? And what will they write their scholarly papers on? Once wealth is redistributed by a black president who is a favorite of feminists, what will be the focus of their papers? What will happen to the scholarly publishing industry? What about the bumper sticker business? What kinds of stickers will replace those festooning bumpers in faculty parking lots across the nation about a village in Texas missing its “idiot”?

What about the pundits? We all know that agreeable copy does not sell. So where will they get their raw material?

I'm sure they'll find something to moan about....

Of Ice Fish and Pocket Mice

Looks like Sean Carroll is still going strong with his ice fish lecture. I attended a similar lecture of his at Kansas State University back in March of '07. My review of the lecture can be found at this link.

This recent reviewer seems to have come away with thoughts similar to my own...

Carroll's argument against design eschewed the real question of how genes came into existence through natural processes. There are no grounds for assuming that the processes through which genes might degrade are the same processes through which they could be built up (Ref 1). In simple terms, genes are long stretches of DNA that carry the information necessary to code for the production of functional proteins. Intelligent design theorists claim that a piece-meal assembly of information-rich genes using the basic building blocks of DNA exceeds the capacities of Darwinian selection and is better explained by appealing to the activity of an intelligent agent (Refs 3,4). If anything, this very principle should have been Carroll's first point of contention if he was to say anything against ID. From a philosophical perspective the possibility remains that a designer may have supplied an organism with more genetic information than may have been needed for life- what one may call an "all the options, all the bells and whistles" approach. Such a designer could have been interested in placing non-functional genes in the genome for a future role in his or her design. We all install software into our computers that may not be operational until some later date when we finally choose to use it. Computers can now be accurately scheduled to start a process at a specified instant in the future, similarly to the programming of a recording on a video-recorder.

One may rightly ask what evidence Carroll could furnish to support the premise that non-functional genes were necessarily derived from functional counterparts found elsewhere in nature. Indeed empirical evidence in support of an evolutionary continuum was severely lacking throughout the presentation.

Ice Fish and Pocket Mice seem to be the best examples Darwinist can come up with for evolution as their lectures never seem to evolve past micro evolutionary examples for the theory. Eugenie Scott uses the simplistic example of the pocket mouse as well...lecture review can be found here.

Their theory (at the macro level) is based primarily on historical inference, which basically means they come in with a priori assumptions and are hardened against the concept of design. They simply cannot accept that there are *no* significant examples of empirical evidence supporting the macro evolutionary changes they claim are fact beyond question.

More about these micro/macro evolutionary changes at this link.

50,000 Pairs of Shoes in 50 Days challenge

Maci told me about a great way to give poverty a swift kick by helping with a charity drive to raise money for 50,000 pairs of shoes for the needy. Soles4Souls is launching this new campaign.

What a great idea!!

The challenge is to raise enough money to purchase 50,000 pairs of shoes in 50 days.

Only $5 buys 2 pairs of shoes!

Anyone who donates will be entered to win a trip to Mexico to personally deliver their shoes to someone who has never had shoes before, tying together the virtual world with the real world.

So, please donate $5 (or more!) to help with this campaign. You can do so at this site. It's super easy to do...only took me about a minute.

Even you folks who read my blog and cringe at my every word can help with this one. We can work together for once!!

No reason really...

...just another of my favorites.



It was also Meghan McCain's final campaign song of the day. She did a wonderful job with her blog throughout the campaign. It was great to see all the up close and personal photos of their journey. She's a bright kid with a promising future.

Media finally asking questions??? LOL!

"We don't know much about Barack Obama." lol...do tell.



I guess we'll be finding out real soon now....

*eyes rolling*

And, he picks Rahmbo for chief of staff...

Way to go there, Obama....sheesh.

It should be a *very* interesting four years...

Humans are inherently religious beings...

...we were created that way.

Michael Critchon passed away recently. One of his thought provoking articles can be found here:

I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can’t be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people—the best people, the most enlightened people—do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.

Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it’s a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.

There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.

Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday—these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. I certainly don’t want to talk anybody out of them, as I don’t want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God who rose from the dead. But the reason I don’t want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can’t talk anybody out of them. These are not facts that can be argued. These are issues of faith.

And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism. Increasingly it seems facts aren’t necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It’s about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them.

Am I exaggerating to make a point? I am afraid not. Because we know a lot more about the world than we did forty or fifty years ago. And what we know now is not so supportive of certain core environmental myths, yet the myths do not die. Let’s examine some of those beliefs.

"Humans are inherently religious beings, created to be in relationship with God - and if they reject God, they don't stop being religious; they simply find some other ultimate principle upon which to base their lives."

~Nancy Pearcey


HT: Davescot

So much for Bipartianship

They're ready to can Lieberman for not walking the party line.

My guess is that all this talk about bipartianship coming from Obama is probably a load of bull.

Not a good start...

Buck up McCain supporters...

Thought it was a good day to resurrect this one...



That's right...go out and hug an Obama supporter today....*wink*

It's all good....

...let's just hope he is who he says he is. He'll have his work cut out for him in gaining my trust. I would love for the US to be less divided, which he says is his goal, so I hope he will be able to achieve it. That will be no small task...

Congratulations President Obama, and God bless.

Go Vote!!!

See ya at the polls!

Ummm.....

"I won't have to worry about putting gas in my car, I won't have to worry about paying my mortgage."

?????

Yikes. Hopefully, those sentiments were merely due to overexposure to the Messiah. After she comes down from her little encounter with the Obonga, perhaps she should try a few hits of reality.

The probability of life appearing spontaneously ...

...is nearly infintesimal.

A generation or more ago a profound disservice was done to popular thought by the notion that a horde of monkeys thumping away on typewriters could eventually arrive at the plays of Shakespeare. This idea is wrong, so wrong that one has to wonder how it came to be broadcast so widely. The answer I think is that scientists wanted to believe that anything at all, even the origin of life, could happen by chance, if only chance operated on a big enough scale. This is the obvious error, for the whole Universe observed by astronomers would not be remotely large enough to hold the horde of monkeys needed to write even one scene from one Shakespeare play, or to hold their typewriters, and certainly not the wastepaper baskets needed for throwing out the volumes of rubbish which the monkeys would type. The striking point is that the only practicable way for the Universe to produce the plays of Shakespeare was through the existence of life producing Shakespeare himself.

Despite this, the entire structure of orthodox biology still holds that life arose at random. Yet as biochemists discover more and more about the awesome complexity of life, it is apparent that the chances of it originating by accident are so minute that they can be completely ruled out. Life cannot have arisen by chance.

....

The probability of life appearing spontaneously on Earth is so small that it is very
difficult to grasp without comparing it with something more familiar. Imagine a
blindfolded person trying to solve the recently fashionable Rubik cube. Since he can't see the results of his moves, they must all be at random. He has no way of knowing whether he is getting nearer the solution or whether he is scrambling the cube still further. One would be inclined to say that moving the faces at random would "never" achieve a solution. Strictly speaking, "never" is wrong, however. If our blindfolded subject were to make one random move every second, it would take him on average three hundred times the age of the Earth, 1,350 billion years, to solve the cube. The chance against each move producing perfect colour matching for all the cube's faces is about 50,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1.

These odds are roughly the same as you could give to the idea of just one of our body's proteins having evolved randomly, by chance. However, we use about 200,000 types of protein in our cells. If the odds against the random creation of one protein are the same as those against a random solution of the Rubik cube, then the odds against the random creation of all 200,000 are almost unimaginably vast.

Much more to consider at this link.

Related: The Anthropic Principle

Obama's grandmother dies...

This has to seriously suck. It's too bad she wasn't able to hang on just a bit longer to see her grandson become President.

Keep his family in your prayers, please.

SNL and McCain

So long Democrats

Wendy Button, speechwriter for Obama, Edwards and Clinton, turns her back on the Democrats.

Average Joe's five minutes of fame

Shoot, if he capitalizes on that fame, maybe he *will* move on up to that $250,000 $200,000 $150,000 tax bracket!

Socialism's coming folks

Apparently we're selfish if we don't believe in handing over more money to the government so they can decide what to do with it.

Two hangings....one arrest.

Two men were arrested for hanging a life size image of Obama.

The Dude who hung Sarah from a noose was merely asked to take down his little "art" project.

Whatev...

Happy Halloween!!!

Obama Infomercial Spin

HERE.

EDIT: Looks like the donations Obama received from foreigners is enough to cover those costly infomericals. Taking that money is illegal, but what the hell. It's the Obamamessiah after all! Let's just overlook the endless evidence that should concern most citizens about his honesty, integrity and ethics.

EDIT 2: The McCain camp targets the infomercial.

EDIT 3: Michelle Malkin's play by play.

Scientific Imperialism

I love it when Voxy goes after the liberal scientific "elite" who are hell bent on turning science into a form of religion...

Some readers didn't understand why I included two chapters dealing with science in TIA. This endorsement of Obama should suffice to explain their relevance to those who didn't grasp the connection between science fetishism and the New Atheists. Read it and see if you don't agree that each and every individual who endorses it should be stripped of their science degrees and their intellectual pretensions:

Science is a way of governing, not just something to be governed. Science offers a methodology and philosophy rooted in evidence, kept in check by persistent inquiry, and bounded by the constraints of a self-critical and rigorous method. Science is a lens through which we can and should visualize and solve complex problems, organize government and multilateral bodies, establish international alliances, inspire national pride, restore positive feelings about America around the globe, embolden democracy, and ultimately, lead the world. More than anything, what this lens offers the next administration is a limitless capacity to handle all that comes its way, no matter how complex or unanticipated.

Science, is there anything it can't do? It sounds amazingly like the parody of the Corinthians-style ode to science I pointed out in the chapter entitled "Darwin's Judas". Even more amazing, these fetishists truly don't see how they have made a quasi-religion of the object of their adoration. On a closely related note, one of our more thoughtful critics, Dominic Saltarelli, emailed me yesterday:

While I'm sure there's plenty for us to disagree on in other matters, I just took a swim in some "secular, liberal, progressive" waters, and am still washing the sewage off. I tried talking a little sense into them regarding economics, because this is a crowd that sees the current economic situation as a fundamental failure of capitalism. So I tried injecting some facts into the discourse

It was like hitting vampires with sunlight. The venom some of these people resorted to in defense of just a damn economic model was, disheartening, to say the least. Having had this experience, whenever some refers to "Atheism as a religion" or to an "atheistic religion", I think I know exactly what they're talking about now, and it isn't pretty nor something I wish to be associated with.

Just wanted to let you know, that I feel your pain.

He does indeed. Science fetishists, economically vacuuous secularists, liberal progressives... they're not precisely the same, but there's certainly a significant amount of overlap. And in each and every case, there is a near complete inability to apply even the most rudimentary logic to the subject at hand as well as an intense, emotional reaction to having their ignorance punctured with the verifiable facts.

And all of this is setting aside the obvious absurdity of the idea that the scientific socialist Obama could possibly be a champion of Reason and Science.

Could. not. agree. more.

Hype the Obama Effect

HERE.

trailer...


"He's passing his hope bong around the drum circle of young America. He's inviting people to take deep tokes off of his bong packed with hope."

-Stephen Colbert



ROTFLMAO

More on Obama and Socialism

READ IT.

Side note: I didn't realize that Obama supports taxpayer funding for abortions. Boy oh boy is that going to raise a ruckus. I'd have a terrible time paying my taxes knowing that abortions are being funded by the feds.

Intelligent Design Conference from Oct. 26th

You can listen to the whole seminar on the audio provided at this site.

Great stuff....be SURE to listen to it in it's entirety. William Dembski speaks 30 minutes into the audio.

Obama's spiritual leader for **20** years...

Oh my....

This article has AtBC* written all over it.


*A forum overrun by rabid Darwinists

The N-word? Pfft...hardly

Have you heard the latest? Google if you haven't. Daily Kos et. al. are flippin' out because they believe the N-word was flung out during one of Palin's stump speeches.

Use the race card...Obama supporters love getting fired up about it.

Here's what was really said...

"He's a Nigger"????


...or "Redistributor"???


Sheesh....chill with the race card people.

HT: Michelle Malkin

Both sides of aisle rip MSNBC

From here...

In a room full of television industry executives, no one seemed inclined to defend MSNBC on Monday for what some were calling its lopsidedly liberal coverage of the presidential election.

The cable news channel is "completely out of control," said writer-producer Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, a self-proclaimed liberal Democrat.

She added that she would prefer a lunch date with right-leaning Fox News star Sean Hannity over left-leaning MSNBC star Keith Olbermann.

Olbermann was criticized by many who attended Monday's luncheon sponsored by the Caucus for Producers, Writers & Directors at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The event was dubbed "Hollywood, America and Election '08."

Bloodworth-Thomason and others seemed especially critical of the way MSNBC -- and other media -- has attacked Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin while demeaning her supporters.

"We should stop the demonizing," she said, adding that Democrats have been worse than Republicans as far as personal attacks on candidates are concerned. "It diminishes us," she said of her fellow Democrats. She stressed, though, that its Palin's small-town American roots she wishes to defend and not her politics or policies.

Bloodworth-Thomason even suggested a defense of Palin and her supporters should be written into TV programming, just as she went out of her way to portray Southern women as smart in her hit TV show "Designing Women."

Attendee Michael Reagan, the radio talk-show host and son of President Ronald Reagan, said he no longer will appear as a guest on MSNBC because "I actually get death threats."

"I'll stop sending them," joked Larry Gelbart, the writer, producer and director best known for the "M*A*S*H" television series and such movie screenplays as "Tootsie" and "Oh, God!"

Pollster Frank Luntz, a regular guest on the Fox News, joked that MSNBC is "the only network with more letters in its name than viewers."

Obama's 'Redistribution' Constitution

From here...

On the Supreme Court, six of the current nine justices will be 70 years old or older on January 20, 2009. There is a widespread expectation that the next president could make four appointments in just his first term, with maybe two more in a second term. Here too we are poised for heavy change.

These numbers ought to raise serious concern because of Mr. Obama's extreme left-wing views about the role of judges. He believes -- and he is quite open about this -- that judges ought to decide cases in light of the empathy they ought to feel for the little guy in any lawsuit.

Speaking in July 2007 at a conference of Planned Parenthood, he said: "[W]e need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it's like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old. And that's the criteria by which I'm going to be selecting my judges."

On this view, plaintiffs should usually win against defendants in civil cases; criminals in cases against the police; consumers, employees and stockholders in suits brought against corporations; and citizens in suits brought against the government. Empathy, not justice, ought to be the mission of the federal courts, and the redistribution of wealth should be their mantra.

In a Sept. 6, 2001, interview with Chicago Public Radio station WBEZ-FM, Mr. Obama noted that the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren "never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society," and "to that extent as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn't that radical."

He also noted that the Court "didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it has been interpreted." That is to say, he noted that the U.S. Constitution as written is only a guarantee of negative liberties from government -- and not an entitlement to a right to welfare or economic justice.

This raises the question of whether Mr. Obama can in good faith take the presidential oath to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution" as he must do if he is to take office. Does Mr. Obama support the Constitution as it is written, or does he support amendments to guarantee welfare? Is his provision of a "tax cut" to millions of Americans who currently pay no taxes merely a foreshadowing of constitutional rights to welfare, health care, Social Security, vacation time and the redistribution of wealth? Perhaps the candidate ought to be asked to answer these questions before the election rather than after.

...

A whole generation of Americans has come of age since the nation experienced the bad judicial appointments and foolish economic and regulatory policy of the Johnson and Carter administrations. If Mr. Obama wins we could possibly see any or all of the following: a federal constitutional right to welfare; a federal constitutional mandate of affirmative action wherever there are racial disparities, without regard to proof of discriminatory intent; a right for government-financed abortions through the third trimester of pregnancy; the abolition of capital punishment and the mass freeing of criminal defendants; ruinous shareholder suits against corporate officers and directors; and approval of huge punitive damage awards, like those imposed against tobacco companies, against many legitimate businesses such as those selling fattening food.

Nothing less than the very idea of liberty and the rule of law are at stake in this election. We should not let Mr. Obama replace justice with empathy in our nation's courtrooms.

Here's the deal. Yes, there are those who need help from the government, but there are many, many more who are taking advantage of the welfare system. They sit back and feel entitled to it. Some folks will not strive to better themselves when they can get what they need for free. What they need is EDUCATION folks! Put that welfare money into education, and make it more affordable for all students rather than just redistributing the wealth not knowing exactly how some families will use that extra money.

We have several social workers in my family, and believe me, folks work the welfare system....big time. If you give it away, there is no use working for it, and some people don't want to get ahead because that would mean they get less help from the government. Redistributing the wealth is enabling people to live life in the slum rather than pulling themselves out of it.

Also, empathy is a good thing to an extent. But, if you do the crime you do the time. If you break a law or make poor judgements, you suffer the consequences. Period. That is how you learn to be a decent citizen. Just like raising children, if you allow your child to get by with bad behavior, you enable them to continue that course throughout their lives. They feel that they'll get by with that inappropriate behavior that will utimately be harmful to themselves and/or others.

Liberal Obama Supporters, Heads Up...

...tell me this dude is off the mark.

Because, it looks to me like Obama is being a tad misleading [again] when he makes the same statement over and over that there will be "no tax increases" for those making under $250,000.

I simply don't trust the guy due to his dishonesty about his excessive connections to radicals, and what those radicals stand for.

So, please scan the article for me, and enlighten me as to how the author is off his rock. If we're going to be stuck with Obamamessiah, I'd like to at least hope that his tax strategy isn't based on a slight of tongue in order to get the vote.

EDIT: Houston, we have a problem...

Don't work on election day???

The Obama campaign urges people to take off work on election day...



Sure, why not? Hell, Obama's just going to take what you make and redistribute the wealth anyway. Why push yourself?

Ever heard of P.U.M.A.??

My Mom was telling me about a group of women who were Hillary supporters, but are now voting for the Republican ticket. Their group is called P.U.M.A.. It's an interesting site to peruse.

I also ran across an article written by a blogger who considers herself a P.U.M.A.. Take a looky at the reasons why she's voting McCain/Palin.

Let me be clear....

In my last post, I stated "when Obama becomes President".

Yes, I think he'll slide in as the victor for ONE reason only....the appalling bias displayed by the media. I just read another AP article so blatantly biased I could vomit.

Most of the so called "smears" against Obama are supported by facts, yet they are washed out by the mainstream media sources.

I believe that if more Americans did their own research on the candidates, they'd think twice before voting for Obama. But, most people get only as far as the evening news and their local newspapers, most of which hold to extreme liberal bias.

I was talking to a gal from Italy in second life the other day, and she was wondering why on earth I wasn't voting for Obama. During our brief discussion, I asked her where she gets her information about Obama, and she mentioned that she primarily bases her views on what she reads in the newspaper. I encouraged her to do some Internet searches on the guy or read my blog. There is so much about Obama that the media has chosen to lay low about. If McCain or Palin had the numerous radical friends that Obama does, they'd have that information plastered everywhere. They'd also be drilling them during press conferences, etc. in an attempt to get some answers for their radical connections. But, Obama is about as liberal as they come, and because of those liberal views, mainstream media deemed him the next President some time ago.

Of course, there are those who know everything about Obama's history and connections, yet they could care less.

Skinheads planned assassination of Obama

O.M.G.!!!!1111!!!!

I saw this on the Drudge report...but, I can't get Drudge loaded at the moment. I'll look around for the story.

When Obama takes the Presidency, we're going to have to remember to keep him in our prayers. These freaky skinheads and other racist factions might come crawling out of the woodwork. What in the bloody hell is wrong with people??

EDIT: HERE

Off the Charts

Can you freaking imagine if someone had hung Obama from that noose?????!!!!11111!!!!



Holy shit. Unbelievable.

Evolution News and Views

Be sure to keep up to date on the war against Intelligent Design. Darwinists want our students to bury their heads in the sand and comply to authority. They don't want them to think outside of the box for fear they'll discover how lame the Darwinian concept really is. It's based upon a philosophical worldview...NOT SCIENCE.

Read Evolution News and Views daily!

Obama Bombshell Redistribution of Wealth Audio Uncovered

HT: William Wallace

Obama / Odinga Connection

HERE.

Even more smack on Obama

Here ya go.

Vote for him at your peril...

Second Life Straight Talk Cafe makes the AP

That SL group I hang out with sometimes made the news!

Kinda cool...

*BLINK*


EDIT: More to *blink* about. HT: Jason

Another one of my favorites

Mr. FtK used to be a dead head...lol. I'm not kidding. I've learned to love some of Jerry's stuff.

This one in particular strikes a chord lately.

Just Cuz I Like It

HT: Maci's Twitter. She just finished her first half-marathon! She ran for a great cause...go donate if you can.

London humanist campaign

Dawkins et. al are raising money to put these banners on buses in London...



There's *PROBABLY* no god.

ROTFLMAO

Probably? Isn't that kinda weak guys??

HT: The Pearcey Report

Dawkins is a Dork....

Seriously.

HT: UD

Yeah, yeah, I know...

So much for my little break. I'm weaning myself from the addiction...hopefully. I've found it's better to vent via blogging versus driving my family nuts with this stuff.

I don't think Ayers is fond of America

Check out the flag under his feet...



The guy is still unrepentant.

Read through this article as well as this one and be sure to check out all the links. Ayers should be in jail. Period.

Obama held hands with Ayers (and other shady characters) frequently.

Poor, poor judgement.

Ayers and Dohrn clearly want to overthrow capitalism. What gets my goat is listening to Ayers stance on war and his want for "peace". It's difficult to listen to a guy talk about peace when he's responsible for numerous terrorist acts himself. Think about it...he makes a stand against war by commiting acts of terrorism!.

Bizarre logic there.

Obama has too many connections to this guy and other unsavory characters.

He's bad news...

Democrats are to blame for the housing crisis.

SPOT ON...

This housing crisis didn't come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.

It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.

What is a risky loan? It's a loan that the recipient is likely not to be able to repay.

The goal of this rule change was to help the poor -- which especially would help members of minority groups. But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they can't repay? They get into a house, yes, but when they can't make the payments, they lose the house -- along with their credit rating.

They end up worse off than before.

This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it. One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules. The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them.

Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans. (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me. It's as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to the political campaigns of congressmen who support increasing their budget.)

Isn't there a story here? Doesn't journalism require that you who produce our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout? Aren't you supposed to follow the money and see which politicians were benefiting personally from the deregulation of mortgage lending?

I have no doubt that if these facts had pointed to the Republican Party or to John McCain as the guilty parties, you would be treating it as a vast scandal. "Housing-gate," no doubt. Or "Fannie-gate."

Instead, it was Sen. Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, both Democrats, who denied that there were any problems, who refused Bush administration requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and who were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting subprime mortgage loans almost up to the minute they failed.

As Thomas Sowell points out in a TownHall.com essay entitled "Do Facts Matter?" (http://snipurl.com/457to): "Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago. So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President. So did Bush's Secretary of the Treasury."

These are facts. This financial crisis was completely preventable. The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was ... the Democratic Party. The party that tried to prevent it was ... the Republican Party.

Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush administration and Republican deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the press did not hold her to account for her lie. Instead, you criticized Republicans who took offense at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout!

What? It's not the liar, but the victims of the lie who are to blame?

Now let's follow the money ... right to the presidential candidate who is the number two recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae.

And after Fred Raines, the CEO of Fannie Mae who made $90 million while running it into the ground, was fired for his incompetence, one presidential candidate's campaign actually consulted him for advice on housing.

If that presidential candidate had been John McCain, you would have called it a major scandal and we would be getting stories in your paper every day about how incompetent and corrupt he was.

But instead, that candidate was Barack Obama, and so you have buried this story, and when the McCain campaign dared to call Raines an "adviser" to the Obama campaign -- because that campaign had sought his advice -- you actually let Obama's people get away with accusing McCain of lying, merely because Raines wasn't listed as an official adviser to the Obama campaign.

You would never tolerate such weasely nit-picking from a Republican.

If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama.

If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this crisis.

....

Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth. That's what you claim you do, when you accept people's money to buy or subscribe to your paper.

But right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie -- that the housing crisis should somehow be blamed on Bush, McCain and the Republicans. You have trained the American people to blame everything bad -- even bad weather -- on Bush, and they are responding as you have taught them to.

If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth -- even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.

Because that's what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don't like the probable consequences. That's what honesty means. That's how trust is earned.

Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one. He has revealed his ignorance and naivete time after time -- and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing.

Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter -- while you ignored the story of John Edwards' own adultery for many months.

So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all? Do you even know what honesty means?

Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for?

You might want to remember the way the National Organization of Women (NOW) threw away their integrity by supporting Bill Clinton despite his well-known pattern of sexual exploitation of powerless women. Who listens to NOW anymore? We know they stand for nothing; they have no principles.

That's where you are right now.

Further evidence supporting the truth of this article.

HT: William Wallace

This is a hoot....

Like conspiracy theories?

Get a load of this one. Someone went to a lot of trouble to put that thing together...lol.

Can't stop myself...it's a sickness

FOR ALL OF YOU WHO TRULY BELIEVE ANYTHING THE CANDIDATES SAY ABOUT THEIR TAX PLANS (OR ANYTHING ELSE FOR THAT MATTER), DREAM ON...



Not that anyone should listen to Barney about anything, but Obama and McCain's hands are going to be tied because of the recent fall on wall street.

In other words, we're screwed. big. time. and no one can save us.

Also, Biden's a loon, and he's a scary loon at that...



He also said this (which is not on the recording):

"And he's [Obama] going to need help . . . to stand with him. Because it's not going to be apparent initially; it's not going to be apparent that we're right."

WTF???????!!!

Albright seems to agree with him...



What in the heck is Biden thinking when he says stuff like that???

[FtK starts stock piling canned goods, cleaning and collecting all the guns, and buying major amounts of ammo...../signing out (again)]

Taking a break

I've decided I'm going to take a bit of a break from blogging. I think getting away from all the political warfare for a while will do me a lot of good. My anxiety level has gone through the roof since the fall of wall street, and the upcoming election is a bit depressing as well. I honestly don't care who wins the election at this point. I just want our economy fixed, and I don't see that happening soon regardless of who takes the White House.

I'm going to turn a blind eye to everything for a while and focus on my family, friends and those in my own community. All the bickering and debate on the Internet is a waste of time, as opinions will never change. I agree with Dennis Prager...that there are two irreconcilable Americas. Our nation is becoming increasingly divided every day. Red and Blue. McCain and Obama. ID and evolution. Religion and Secularism.

Americans are very anxious about where our nation is heading, and unfortunately I'm not very optimistic at the moment myself.

Later folks....

Dear Grandpa

Your 100th birthday was something we'll never forget, nor will we forget all of our visits to the farm and the wonderful stories you told about your past. We have always been so proud to be part of your legacy which will be passed on to our children and our children's children.

I am standing upon the seashore.
A ship at my side spreads her white
sails to the morning breeze and starts
for the blue ocean.

She is an object of beauty and strength.
I stand and watch her until at length
she hangs like a speck of white cloud
just where the sea and sky come
to mingle with each other.

Then, someone at my side says;
"There, she is gone!"

"Gone where?"

Gone from my sight. That is all.
She is just as large in mast and hull
and spar as she was when she left my side
and she is just as able to bear her
load of living freight to her destined port.
Her diminished size is in me, not in her.

And just at the moment when someone
at my side says, "There, she is gone!"
There are other eyes watching her coming,
and other voices ready to take up the glad
shout; "Here she comes!"

And that is dying.

-Henry Van Dyke

[My Grandfather died this morning at 11:55am. One of the last things he said was that he wanted to go to sleep and be with Jesus. He was still working on his farm until about a month ago when his heart, after 100 years, finally grew weary.]

Gag

Per TD blog, this post has been removed because it could not be verified.

I give up

Here I was trying to make a nice Saturday lunch for a change, and the whole thing went up in smoke.

We're rarely home Saturday afternoons, but my husband had to go in to work today so I thought I'd bake a chicken and some potatoes.

So, I put everything in the oven, fired it up and then went to bed and snuggled up with a good book. Nothing heavy....no ID/evolution, no politics....just a nice romantic love story for a change.

I heard my boys out in the kitchen milling around, and there was a beeping noise that I thought was the microwave being turned on and off.

I WAS WRONG.

About 15 minutes later all the fire detectors in the house started howling. I jumped up out of bed and ran to the oven and the thing was spitting out smoke. The oven door was jammed, or at least I thought it was. I couldn't detect any actual fire, but the smoke was pretty nasty. I was trying to figure out why in the heck I couldn't get the door open, and then it dawned on me what had happened. One of my kiddos must have accidentally turned off the oven and that was the beeping noise I'd heard earlier. They must have tried to reset it, but hit the oven cleaning button. That would have locked down the oven until it cooled down after the heating cycle.

Sigh...

So much for a nice lunch. The house stinks to high heaven and I'm in no mood to start over. I couldn't even if I wanted to because the stove won't unlock for a while yet.

Bologna anyone???

Crap.

Sarah's Special Fans

I love Joe the Plumber

This dude has it going on...

"Everything starts at home..um, they [Obama/liberals et. al] want the government to take care of it. I believe wholeheartedly that everything starts in the house, from education to responsibility for ones self, ones actions, to eventually when your parents get older, taking care of them...you know, as they took care of you. You know, a sense of family needs to be brought back to American as opposed to a, ah, sense of entitlement".

-Joe the Plumber

Amen brother...another reason why I like Sarah Palin.



HT: Dave again.

Looks like they already have a t-shirt out in honor of 'ol Joe.



More Joe:

The Case Against Obama Part 1

Find it at Townhall. The comments are quite interesting as well.

EDIT: From the comment section...

Tax Cuts for dummys

I did not write this. I wish I had. The source is T. Davies, Professor of Accounting at the University Of South Dakota School Of Business, who got it from a student. So, the real author remains unknown. Here’s the article:

“Let’s put [income] tax cuts in terms everyone can understand. Suppose that every day, ten men go out for dinner. The bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:

“The first four men—the poorest—would pay nothing; the fifth would pay $1, the sixth would pay $3, the seventh $7, the eighth $12, the ninth $18 and the tenth man—the richest—would pay $59. That’s what they decided to do. The ten men ate dinner in the restaurant every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day the owner threw them a curve (in tax language, a tax cut).

‘Since you are all such good customers,’ he said, ‘I’m going to reduce the cost of your daily meal by $20.’ So now dinner for the ten only cost $80. “The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes, so the first four men were unaffected. They would still eat for free. But what about the other six—the paying customers? How could they divvy up the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his ‘fair share?’ The six men realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. If they subtracted that from everybody’s share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would end up being paid to eat their meals.

“So the restaurant owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man’s bill by the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay. The fifth man now paid nothing, the sixth paid $2, the seventh paid $5, the eight paid $9, the ninth paid $12, leaving the tenth man with a bill of $52 instead of his earlier $59. Each of the six was better off than before, and the first four continued to eat for free."

Subject: Tax Cuts for dummys (pt2)
“However, once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings. ‘I only got a dollar out of the $20!’ declared the sixth man, pointing to the tenth. ‘But he got $7!’

‘Yeah, that’s right!’ exclaimed the fifth man. ‘I only saved a dollar, too. It’s unfair that he got seven times more than me!’ ‘That’s true!’ shouted the seventh man, ‘Why should he get $7 back when I got only $2? The wealthy get all the breaks!’ ‘Wait a minute,’ yelled the first four men in unison. ‘We didn’t get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!’

“The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up. The next night he didn’t show up for dinner (or, in the real world, he took his business out of the country), so the nine sat down and ate without him. When it came time to pay the bill, they discovered, a little late, what was very important. They were $52 short of paying the bill. Imagine that!

“…And that, boys and girls, journalists and college instructors, is how the tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much or attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up at the table anymore. Where would that leave the rest? Unfortunately, most taxing authorities anywhere cannot seem to grasp this rather straightforward logic!”

The end!

Interesting.

What a sweet story...

I wish we'd get more media stories like this one. It's a nice distraction from the insanity of the campaign.

Watching the Early Show

One sided as it could possibly be. I saw an interview with Biden, and an interview with Michelle Obama...then I gave up and turned it off.

I did find an interesting debate fact check. Old Coot, you might check out the facts on health care. I'm not sure one plan is much better than the other.

Edit: More on the health care comparisons. Old Coot, I can see why your friends are voting Obama since he promises to make sure everyone gets health care even if you have a preexisting condition. I wonder if he can pull all that off. It's pretty apparant that the government will get bigger under Obama leadership.

Reasons Why I Could Vote Democrat

HT: A Conservative Teacher...


If I wanted to, I could vote Democrat because...

...English has no place being the official language in America.

...it's better to turn corn into fuel than it is to eat.

...I'd rather pay $4 for a gallon of gas than allow drilling for oil off the coasts of America.

..when we pull out of Afghanistan and Iraq, I know that the Islamic terrorists will stop trying to kill us because this will show that we are a good and decent country.

...I believe people who can't tell us accurately if it will rain in two or three days can now tell us with certainty that the polar ice caps will disappear in ten years if I don't start riding a bicycle, build a windmill, or inflate my tires to proper levels.

...I believe businesses in America should not be allowed to make profits. Businesses should just break even and give the rest to the government so politicians and bureaucrats can redistribute the money the way they think it should be redistributed.

...I believe guns, and not the people misusing them, are the cause of crimes and killings.

...when someone with a weapon threatens my family or me, I know the government can respond faster through a call to 911 than I can with a gun in my hand.

Lastly, I'm could vote Democrat, because I might think that the 5% profit that oil companies make on a gallon of gas is obscene, but government taxes of 18% (federal and state) on the same gallon of gas are not high enough.

Just can't do it....

I'm not watching the debate tonight...I just can't bear listening to the BS again. I'm curious how it's going, but I'm afraid I'd suffer from a massive coronary if I tried to actually sit through it.

I did visit the Second Life Straight Talk Cafe and read the comments made by the folks watching the debate, but I can't get myself to peek at the television.

I think it will be much better for my health if I just read about it tomorrow.

Remember the Martyr for Darwinism???

Seems that good 'ol Christine Comer wasn't the best choice for the role.

Good grief...

Introducing Obama's Wealthspread (TM)

While canvassing neighborhoods in Ohio this Sunday, Barack Obama advised a tax-burdened plumber not to worry about money because under his presidency money will disappear since it will no longer have any meaning anyway. Instead, all Americans will be living off Obama's highly nutritive WealthSpread™ formula that is surprisingly low in effort and is being promoted by a group of leading nutritionists known as the Cook Fringe of the Democrat Party under the brand name "I Can't Believe It's Not Earned!"

"Your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn't it?" the plumber asked, complaining that he was being taxed "more and more for fulfilling the American dream."

"So instead of cutting taxes with a kitchen knife we'll butter it up with wealth and spread it around like we earned it," the Democratic candidate continued. "It's a patented foreign blend that is guaranteed to help improve my standing in the polls, but it's made with 100% pure American taxpayer sweat, which once again shows how taxes can be patriotic."

HT: The People's Cube.

Clinton supporters aid Palin

I heard some gal on the news this morning mention that Palin wasn't pulling in any of the women who supported Clinton. She claims that independent white men and the Republican base are the only ones impressed by her.

Oops!!!

More Scary Obama Stuff...

I really hope all this stuff being dug up lately about Obama isn't accurate, because it looks like he's going to be our next President.

Sigh...

I'd like to think that Dave's instincts are wrong this time around, but he seems to be spot on about many things...ie. global warming which is obviously something the liberals pulled out of their a$*es for whatever reasons.

Big Government Ahead

This is, no doubt, where we're headed.

Are you buying this?

Boy, I certainly hope this little report is accurate.

A University of California Los Angeles team found searching the web stimulates centres in the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning.

The researchers say this might even help to counter-act the age-related physiological changes that cause the brain to slow down.

Hell, as much as I surf the net, my brain function and complex reasoning skills should be top notch by now! LOL. Either that or the constant surfing has me teetering on the verge of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.