Scratch Pad

Reasons I'm Uncomfortable with John McCain

noreply@blogger.com (Bradley Ross) — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 21:24:00 +0000

John McCain sponsored the McCain-Feingold legislation that prohibits many forms of political speech. I think this is an affront to liberty.

He seems to have a quite immoral past. I don't have any reason to believe he isn't faithful to Cindy, but I'd like to have a leader that is trying to be righteous. I don't know if that is a goal of John McCain's.

Reasons I'm Uncomfortable with Barack Obama

noreply@blogger.com (Bradley Ross) — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 17:41:00 +0000

[I'm updating this post continually, so the original publication date isn't entirely accurate.]

Single-issue voting isn't healthy. It encourages wedge issue thinking and closed-mindedness. I think party platforms are a great place to start in understanding a candidates views. I don't think our evaluation of the candidates should end with the party platform. I'm keeping an ongoing list in this post of issues that make me uncomfortable with Barack Obama as our country's president. We'll weigh the positives and negatives of each candidates and then we can make a more informed decision.

Obama's voting record (extreme pro-abortion) doesn't jive with his rhetoric (moderation in abortion policy)

As an Illinois state senator, Barack Obama twice opposed legislation to define as "persons" babies who survive late-term abortions. Babies like Gianna. Mr. Obama said in a speech on the Illinois Senate floor that he could not accept that babies wholly emerged from their mother's wombs are "persons," and thus deserving of equal protection under the Constitution's 14th Amendment.

Obama has since argued that he had legitimate reasons for voting against that legislation, but his assertion has been disproved.

Obama's position on Iraq is irresponsible. He seems unwilling to own the current situation on the ground and instead argue about what we should have done.

Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said Thursday the United States cannot use its military to solve humanitarian problems and that preventing a potential genocide in Iraq isn't a good enough reason to keep U.S. forces there.

Affiliation with a church for apparently political purposes, exposing his children to blatant racism in a time when healing is needed.

Obama hasn't thrown himself fully into anything. I wonder if he's an "idea person" without the ability to see things through to completion. David Brooks elaborates on the difficulty in placing him in any community of practice. He was a law professor who was liked by students, but who never produced scholarship nor engaged with the other faculty. He was a community organizer who had ideas about improvement, but didn't stick around long enough to see them through. He joined a church for political reasons, never really became a part of that community, and then abandoned it when higher political aspirations beckoned. He skipped through the state legislature without really getting into it. His career in the US Senate was nothing more than a stepping stone to the presidency. He hasn't really engaged with his colleagues there on either side of the aisle save a handful.

By his own standard of judgment, Obama lacks sufficient experience for a high and responsible post. When asked about Supreme Court justices, Obama singled out Justice Thomas. He said, "I would not have nominated Clarence Thomas. I don't think that he, I don't think that he was a strong enough jurist or legal thinker at the time for that elevation." The Wall Street Journal editorial board responds to the accusation of insufficient experience.

So let's see. By the time he was nominated, Clarence Thomas had worked in the Missouri Attorney General's office, served as an Assistant Secretary of Education, run the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and sat for a year on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the nation's second most prominent court. Since his "elevation" to the High Court in 1991, he has also shown himself to be a principled and scholarly jurist.

They sum it up by noting, "Justice Thomas's judicial credentials compare favorably to Mr. Obama's Presidential résumé by any measure."

Utah Election 08 Resources

noreply@blogger.com (Bradley Ross) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 21:03:00 +0000

US House District 3 Race

A telephone debate between the candidates. Actually, more of a collection of sound bites from each candidate.

Fun Links

noreply@blogger.com (Keryn) — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 02:17:00 +0000

Spontaneous Mall Musical

Barack Obama

noreply@blogger.com (Keryn) — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 16:45:00 +0000

On the Wright controversy:

Video (and commentary) from a sermon Rev. Wright gave at Christmas 2007 (Powerline Blog)
Commentary on other Wright inflammatory rhetoric from the WSJ
Victor Davis Hanson discusses Rev. Wright's extremism
VDH part II
VDH part III
Rush Limbaugh with more clips from Rev. Wright (from the 2007 speech, a 2003 speech, and a 2001 speech)
Richard Minitier discusses why Rev. Wright's rhetoric isn't any different than many other black churches
Barack Obama denounces Rev. Wright's inflammatory sermons, announces he didn't know about them, and removes Rev. Wright from his advisory council
Victor Davis Hanson on Wright, Obama, and Don Imus
If we don't expect Barack Obama to denounce the radical views of his pastor, then how can we expect moderate Muslims to denounce radical imans and mosques?

Global warming winter 2008

noreply@blogger.com (Keryn) — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 04:00:00 +0000

From RIA Novosti, Oleg Sorokhtin writes:

Astrophysics knows two solar activity cycles, of 11 and 200 years. Both are caused by changes in the radius and area of the irradiating solar surface. The latest data, obtained by Habibullah Abdusamatov, head of the Pulkovo Observatory space research laboratory, say that Earth has passed the peak of its warmer period, and a fairly cold spell will set in quite soon, by 2012. Real cold will come when solar activity reaches its minimum, by 2041, and will last for 50-60 years or even longer.

Take it with a grain of salt, but the basic science seems on the ball to me.

From Investor's Business Daily, more about sunspots:

This solar hibernation corresponded with a period of bitter cold that began around 1650 and lasted, with intermittent spikes of warming, until 1715. Frigid winters and cold summers during that period led to massive crop failures, famine and death in Northern Europe.

Tapping reports no change in the sun's magnetic field so far this cycle and warns that if the sun remains quiet for another year or two, it may indicate a repeat of that period of drastic cooling of the Earth, bringing massive snowfall and severe weather to the Northern Hemisphere.

U of A Recommended Reading

noreply@blogger.com (Keryn) — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 01:21:00 +0000

From a list given to Bradley while in high school in Page, Arizona.

Achebe: Things Fall Apart
Aesop: Fables
Agee: A Death in the Family
Anaya: Bless me, Ultima
Anderson: Winesburg, Ohio
Austin: Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin: Notes to a Native Son
Bellow: Henderson the Ram King; Mr. Sammler's Planet
*: Bible
Borges: Dr. Brodie's Report
Boswell: Life of Johnson
Bronte, C: Jane Eyre
Bronte, E: Wuthering Heights
Buck: The Good Earth
Capote: In Cold Blood, The Grass Harp, and other short stories
Carson: The Sea Around Us
Carroll: Alice in Wonderland
Cather: Death comes to the Archbishop
Cervantes: Don Quixote
Chaucer: Canterbury Tales
Conrad: Heath of Darkness, the Secret Sharer
Cooper: last of the Mohicans
Crane: The Red Badge of Courage
Dante: The Divine Comedy
Dickens: David Copperfield; Great Expectations; Oliver Twist; Tale of Two Cities
Dickenson: Collected poems
Dostsyevsky: Crime and Punishment
Elliot, George: Adam Bede
Elliot, T.S.: Collected Verse: Murder in the Cathedral
Ellsion: Invisible Man
Emerson: Essays
Euripedes: Medea
Faulkner: The Bear: The unvanquished
Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
Franklin: Autobiography
Frost: Collected Poems
Gaines: The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
Goldsmith: She Stoops to Conquer
Grimm: Household Tales
Hardy: Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Return of the Native
Hawthorne: The House of the Seven Gables, The Scarlet Letter
Hemingway: For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old man and the Sea, A Farewell to Arms
Homer: Iliad, Odyseey
Huxley: Brave New World
Isben: A Doll's House, Enemy of the People
James: The Turn of the Screw, Portrait of a Lady
Kipling: Jungle Books, Kim, Captain Courageous
Lewis, C.S.: The Chronicles of Narnia, Out of the Silent Planet
Lewis, Oscar: The Children of Sanchez
Lewis, Sinclair: Babbitt, Arrowsmith
London: Call of the Wild
Marquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude
McCullers: Member of the Wedding, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Melville: Moby Dick, Billy Budd
Millay: Collected Poems
Miller: Death of a Salesman, The Crucible
Milton: Paradise Lost
Mishima: The Sound of Waves
Mitford: American Way of Death
Momday: House Made of Dawn, The Way to Rainy Mountain
Morehead: The Blue Nile, The White Nile
Murasaki: Tale of Genji
O'Neill: Emperor Jones, Beyond the Horizon
Orwell: 1984, Animal Farm
Paton: Cry, the Beloved Country
Plath: The Bell Jar
Poe: Tales
Polo: Travels of Marco Polo
Plutarch: Lives of the Caesars
Riesman: The Lonely Crowd
Rivera: "..and the earth did not part."
Roth: Call It Sleep
Sagan: Dragons of Eden
Salinger: Catcher in the Rye
Sandburg: Lincoln
Saroyan: The Human Comedy
Sekaquaptewa, H.: Me and Mine
Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Merchant of Venice, Midsummer Night's Dream
Shaw: Pygmalion, Saint Joan
Singer: Gimpei the Fool and other stories
Sophocles: Oedipus Rex, Antigone
Sheridan: The Rivals
Solzhenitsya: One Day in the Life of Ivan Devnisovich
Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath
Stevens: Collected Poems
Stevenson: Treasure Island, Kidnapped
Strachey: Victoria
Swift: Gulliver's Travels
Thacheay: Vanity Fair
Thorau: Walden
Tolkien: Lord of the Rings
Tolstoy: War and Peace
Tuchman: The guns of August, The Distant Mirror
Twain: Huckleberry Finn, Tom sawyer
Virgil: Aeneid
Welty: Collected Stories
Wharton: Ethan Frome
White, T.H.: The Once and Future King
Whitman: Leaves of Grass
Whittier: Selected Poems
Wilder: Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth
Williams: The Glass Menagerie

Boo for Yahoo

noreply@blogger.com (Bradley Ross) — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 01:32:00 +0000

I was looking at the Yahoo Kids site today and left annoyed. I sent the following letter on their feedback form.

I visited the site to check out the possibility of letting my kids hang out here. The answer will be no. The front page of your site featured a music video from the "Naked Brothers Band." That the incongruity of the band's name didn't leap out at the editors leaves me with no trust in the rest of your site. The LAST thing I want to teach my children on the internet is that it might be okay to click on a naked-anything link. /smacks forehead

P.S. Yes, I watched the video and I realize it doesn't contain pornographic content. The point is the false association with risque titles and innocent content.

My latex-free boy

noreply@blogger.com (Keryn) — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 00:48:00 +0000

Our son has a heightened chance of developing a latex allergy (he has spina bifida). To combat this, we treat him as if he already has the allergy (without panic if something latex happens to touch him). We've learned to be on the alert for the innocent-looking-but- evil-latex-lurking-in-the-shadows--or, you know, just making sure we avoid latex where possible.

Latex free (as per websites or contact with customer service representatives):

Member's Mark Diapers, from Sam's Club
White Cloud Supreme Diapers, from Wal-Mart
Parent's Choice Diapers, from Wal-Mart
Kids II toys
Schleich animal toys
Bumbo chairs
Nuk oral massager

Not latex free:

chewing gum
Koosh balls
non-Mylar balloons

Good information to have about latex:

EVA foam doesn't have natural rubber latex--even though it sometimes is called "foam rubber"
"In rare instances, people who are allergic to latex may also react to rubber bands, erasers, rubber parts of toys, various rubber components in medical devices, rubber elastic in clothes, or feeding nipples and pacifiers. Products molded from hard, crepe rubber, such as soles of shoes, are unlikely to cause reactions. Almost all latex paints are not a problem since they do not contain natural rubber latex." from AAAAI
American Latex Allergy Association lists

Of Mice and Mormons: Religion in Higher Ed

noreply@blogger.com (Bradley Ross) — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 03:38:00 +0000

A scary tale of religious and social discrimination against a Latter-day Saint student in higher education. A seven part series, with all seven parts linked here for convenience. By Mike S. Adams at Townhall.com.

Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

Arbinger Books

noreply@blogger.com (Bradley Ross) — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 01:12:00 +0000

A few of the Arbinger Institute books have been published serially in Meridian magazine and are available there.

Bonds That Make Us Free: Healing Our Relationships, Coming to Ourselves

The Peacegiver (That is a link to the end of the book which has links to all the earlier chapters.)

The Anatomy of Peace (Again, this is the last chapter.)

Global Warming roundup 8/07

noreply@blogger.com (Bradley Ross) — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 03:56:00 +0000

In an interesting exchange on Steve U.'s blog, a commenter left a huge comment that really articulated well some of my feelings on the climate change issues. First, one commenter wrote, "There is one major fact about the global warming debate: no one debates the dirty air, water, and land created by greenhouse gases. If we are not the worst air quality in the nation, we are close to it."

That person made the mistake of confusing greenhouse gases with pollutants. Here is a snatch from the huge rebuttal that I really liked.

CO2 is NOT an "air pollutant" in the sense that carbon monoxide and particulates are. It is a trace element in the atmosphere. All animals (including people) generate high concentrations of it when they breathe. All carbon in plants and trees (including the food we eat) comes from this thin reservoir of CO2 in the atmosphere! All the carbon in carbohydrates was taken from the air by plants. Thus, CO2 is literally the basis of all life on earth. When we add a marginal amount to the atmosphere, we are adding the stuff that plants and animals are made of. It is the source of carbon that rains into the oceans and allows calcium carbonate to be turned into the shells of marine creatures and coral reefs.

The rest of that comment by Raymond Takashi Swenson was equally good.

Sun Spots, Schwabe Cycles, and Global Cooling

noreply@blogger.com (Keryn) — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 21:07:00 +0000

From the Financial Post, R. Timothy Patterson's article "Read the Sunspots":

Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe solar cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth. Beginning to plan for adaptation to such a cool period, one which may continue well beyond one 11-year cycle, as did the Little Ice Age, should be a priority for governments. It is global cooling, not warming, that is the major climate threat to the world, especially Canada. As a country at the northern limit to agriculture in the world, it would take very little cooling to destroy much of our food crops, while a warming would only require that we adopt farming techniques practiced to the south of us.
Meantime, we need to continue research into this, the most complex field of science ever tackled, and immediately halt wasted expenditures on the King Canute-like task of "stopping climate change."

Why the government shouldn't do health care...

noreply@blogger.com (Keryn) — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 03:05:00 +0000

Mark Steyn says:

There are immigration laws on the books right now, aren't there? Why not try enforcing them? The same people who say that government is a mighty power for good that can extinguish every cigarette butt and detoxify every cheeseburger and even change the very climate of the planet back to some Edenic state so that the water that falleth from heaven will land as ice and snow, and polar bears on distant continents will frolic as they did in days of yore, the very same people say: Building a border fence? Enforcing deportation orders? Can't be done, old boy. Pie-in-the-sky.

Hero Hypocrisy

noreply@blogger.com (Bradley Ross) — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 20:31:00 +0000

We haven't seen a lot of TIME or Newsweek cover stories about the heroics of our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Thomas Sowell points out the insincerity of calling our soldiers "heroes" only when we are painting them as victims.

The front cover of Newsweek’s March 5th issue featured a woman with amputated legs and a sweatshirt that said “ARMY” across the front. Inside, there were pages and pages of other pictures of badly wounded and disfigured military veterans, in a long article that began under the big headline: “Forgotten Heroes.”

The utter hypocrisy of all this can be seen in the word “heroes.” There have been many acts of heroism among our troops in Iraq — but those heroes didn’t make the front cover of Newsweek.

One man fell on a grenade to protect his buddies, smothering the fatal blast with his body, so that those around him might live when he died. But that never made the front cover of Newsweek. It was barely mentioned anywhere in the liberal media.

They are not interested in heroes. They are interested in depicting victims — in the military as in civilian society.

Global warming roundup 03/07

noreply@blogger.com (Keryn) — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 04:00:00 +0000

"The Great Global Warming Hoax" shown on Channel 4 in Britian (opens in YouTube)

A tale of two markets on the Economist.com, about carbon offsets

You are a carbon-emitting American, currently purchasing Q quantity of carbon-emitting electricity in your home market, which we'll call Market #1. You want to consume more electricity, but you worry about global warming. So you buy electricity in your local market, but offset this purchase by paying someone to build the equivalent generating power in windfarms in another market.
In your home market, your purchases are sending a signal: build more (dirty) power. You have shifted the demand curve outwards, so that at any given price, more power is consumed.

I guess I was too optimistic about the Senate and House hearings (opens in RealPlayer) on global warming on March 21--I honestly thought that the congressmen (both Republican and Democrat) would ask meaningful, intelligent questions, that they would attend the entire hearings, that they would be polite, etc, etc. Just goes to show that I'm awfully naive about our government. Anyway, here's some more coverage:

Iain Murray "Al's Warming Lies and the Real "Inconvenient Truth"
John Podhortez "Al Mighty Preacher Running out of Power"
Live-blogging the hearings at Powerline forums
"Cooler Heads" briefing on "An Inconvenient Truth"

Joe Wilson File

noreply@blogger.com (Bradley Ross) — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 03:05:00 +0000

Mona Charen article at National Review

The prosecutor accepted Joe Wilson’s “retaliation” theory from the start, looking for a White House conspiracy to harm Wilson. Fitzgerald tamely followed this line despite learning later that Wilson lied about how he was chosen for the mission to Niger (contrary to Wilson’s hot denials, it was his wife’s suggestion according to a Senate Intelligence Committee report), lied about what he found there (his report actually tended to confirm not deny Iraq’s uranium shopping), and lied about discrediting certain forged documents (they did not even appear until months after Wilson’s trip). Yet Wilson’s word was good enough for Fitzgerald.

Global warming roundup 02/07

noreply@blogger.com (Keryn) — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 03:47:00 +0000

Jonah Goldberg main column "Global Cooling is Too Expensive"
Europe's emissions vs United States' by Iain Murray
Dirty work at the green crossroads by Melanie Phillips
Climate of Opinion WSJ Editorial
A mine is a Terrible Thing to Waste by Peter Suderman
The Church of Climate Panic by Rich Lowry
A Carbon Cop-out by Michael Hanlon
It's the Science, Stupid by Thomas Sowell
NRO's new blog, Planet Gore
Ah...Bad Doomsday Predictions by Jonah Goldberg
Sydney Residents Wake to Laughingstock by Mark Steyn
An experiment that hints we are wrong about climate change in the London Times Online
Carbon offsets on Ecotality

plus some older ones:
Competitive Enterprise Institute debunking "An Inconvenient Truth"
Iain Murray on "An Inconvenient Truth"

You can only give us money if you...

noreply@blogger.com (Keryn) — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 03:43:00 +0000

Victor Davis Hanson has an insightful post about the attitude of the current Palestinian government on Western aid. The whole thing is incredible (in that I have a hard time believing it is even possible), but here's a key paragraph:

What has America done to suggest to a terrorist organization that it has an inherent right to American taxpayer money because it has found a way to market or soft-peddle its intention to destroy a democracy? The money quote of Hamas is the key phrase "they cannot..." Only in the Middle East does the recipient announce to the benefactor the conditions of the hand out.

Frustrations of a climate geologist

noreply@blogger.com (Keryn) — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 04:52:00 +0000

John Marchese from the Philadelphia Magazine interviews a geology professor in Al Gore is a Greenhouse Gasbag:

When Gieg gets to this point in his argument, as he often does when talking about global warming, he gets a little frustrated. “I always get sidetracked because, first of all, the science isn’t good. Second, there are all these other interpretations for what we see. Third, it doesn’t make any difference, and fourth, it’s distracting us from environmental problems that really matter.” Among those, Gieg says, are the millions of people a year who die from smoking and two million people a year who die because they don’t have access to clean water.

Another interesting, but less persuasive article on the same subject ran in Canada Free Press.

Teacher Pay

noreply@blogger.com (Bradley Ross) — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 13:24:00 +0000

An OpnionJournal piece cites some interesting stats from the Bureau of Labor Statistics about pay for public school teachers.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, public school teachers earned $34.06 per hour in 2005, 36% more than the hourly wage of the average white-collar worker and 11% more than the average professional specialty or technical worker.

Of course, public school teacher earnings look less impressive when viewed on an annual basis than on an hourly basis. This is because teachers tend to work fewer hours per year.... That time off is worth money and cannot simply be ignored when comparing earnings. The appropriate way to compare earnings in this circumstance is to focus on hourly rates.

While these stats sound interesting, I was unable to reproduce them myself on the BLS website. You can try your hand too, if you like. That site requires Java to be installed.

According to my search, "Teachers, except college and universities" make $31.51/hr. Still, the number is reasonably close.

My Favorite Internet TV channels

noreply@blogger.com (Bradley Ross) — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 00:20:00 +0000

Here are a few sources for online video that I like to watch.

BYU-TV - Religious programming for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Annenburg specials at learner.org - Tons of TV documentaries for education use. Of course, they are lots of fun for self-edification as well!
PBS has some video online for several of their specials. Usually, these are just supporting clips, but sometimes the whole program is available for online viewing. For example, they have a cool NOVA documentary about string theory called The Elegant Universe.
http://www.ideachannel.tv/ - with economics videos from Milton Friedman. They also have the biographical special about Friedman's life.
WGBH on Google - They have put a bunch of their documentaries up there, including some cool ones about the ancient world. Some of the documentaries are NOVA documentaries that don't seem to be available at PBS.org above.
AOL In2TV has some fun old programs available online, like Gilligan's Island and the Flinstones.
ABC puts up full episodes of some of their popular prime-time programming. They don't stay there forever, so you have to watch them while they are around.
NBC Rewind features full episodes of a few of the current shows and 2 minute recaps of other recent shows.
Comcast Fan isn't a huge favorite, but sometimes I'll browse it for little news clips from recent events. I don't know if you have to be a Comcast subscriber to be able to see this one.
LDS.org has recently started putting up video on their website. Only one video is there as of this writing.

Race in America

noreply@blogger.com (Bradley Ross) — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 23:21:00 +0000

Shelby Steele wrote a fabulous piece at OpinionJournal.com about racial politics in America.

Racial identity is simply forbidden to whites in America and across the entire Western world. Black children today are hammered with the idea of racial identity and pride, yet racial pride in whites constitutes a grave evil. Say "I'm white and I'm proud" and you are a Nazi.

The underlying irony here is that white guilt has given America a liberalism that revives as virtue the precise moral formula at the core of fascism: power justified by race alone. Today a wealthy black will be preferred over the son of a white mailman at all of America's best universities. This of course is illiberalism of the same sort that segregation was.

Classic liberalism (today's conservatism) sees atavistic power as illegitimate because it always steps on individual freedom. The mailman's son is not free if his race is held against him. But the problem with classic liberalism is that there is no room in it for white redemption.

Fewer People Should Go To College

noreply@blogger.com (Bradley Ross) — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 21:29:00 +0000

That is the conclusion of Charles Murray in this piece for the Wall Street Journal. The following sums up the most persuasive part of the article for me.

For a few occupations, a college degree still certifies a qualification. For example, employers appropriately treat a bachelor's degree in engineering as a requirement for hiring engineers. But a bachelor's degree in a field such as sociology, psychology, economics, history or literature certifies nothing. It is a screening device for employers. The college you got into says a lot about your ability, and that you stuck it out for four years says something about your perseverance. But the degree itself does not qualify the graduate for anything. There are better, faster and more efficient ways for young people to acquire credentials to provide to employers.

Single payer vs health insurance

noreply@blogger.com (Keryn) — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 05:10:00 +0000

An interesting article in the Economist discusses why Canadians and Britons love their system of health insurance, and why Americans love ours.