Scott in the Antarctic

My friend Scott Nutter is a physics professor, and for the second time has had the opportunity to go to Antarctica to do some research. You can read all about this trip, and his previous trip, at his blog, Scott of the Antarctic


You can also watch a video from "Snow School" here on YouTube.

quote for the day

Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.

Benjamin Franklin

a thought about health-care

There is a difference between providing government-run health care, and in forcing everyone to pay for health insurance; the first involves paying taxes which go directly to health care (however "inefficiently", as conventional wisdom would have it), while the second involves paying taxes to a middle man who skims off some cash/profit before providing some kind health care (and by now we all know how well that system works).

The primary objection that Republicans have to government health care is that, like any tax-supported enterprise, the wealthiest citizens will pay more for the same service as the poorer ones do. This is why Republicans are trying so hard to push school vouchers (the true goal of NCLB), and why they support so enthusiastically the building of toll roads. If they could figure out how to charge per use on everything the government does, they would do it. See, if health-care is insurance-based, then everyone pays "equally" for it, whether they make $20,000 or $20,000,000. Change to a tax-based system, and your medical payments will be based on percentage of income, not raw dollars. Poor people will "get something for (practically) nothing", while the Rich will pay much more than they currently are for the same care.
Never mind the hidden benefits of such a system, America thinks only in terms of the ledger book these days, and it takes vision to see beyond the numbers and courage (or morality) to believe that there is something beyond the money those columns of numbers represent.

Republicans (not necessarily conservatives, but Republicans) are selfish and anti-society; they dont really care about society at large, just their own narrow portion of it. This is quite obvious not only by their actions, but often even in their words. Until the public figures this out and removes them completely from power (or at least puts a check on that power), America will continue to decline.

derived from a comment at Newsguy's blog
Bear in mind, this cartoon is from 1993!

sunday funny

quote for the day

That was how it had always been, he could see now. For thousands of years mean had bled and died so that others might be chauffeured to their mansions. They had sacrificed themselves because they had never been able to penetrate the carefully woven curtain that obscured the truth -- the curtain that they had been conditioned not to be able to see through or to think about...
The inverted logic that had puzzled him had not been something peculiar to the military mind; it was just that the military mind was the only one he had ever really known. The inversions came from the whole insane system that the military was just a part of -- the system that fought wars to protect the peace and enslaved nations by liberating them; that turned hatred and revenge into the will of an all-benevolent God and programmed its litanies into the minds of chidren; that burned and tortured its heretics while preaching forgiveness, and made a sin of love and a virtue of murder; and which brought lunatics to power by demanding requirements of office that no balanced mind could meet...
For the curtain that was falling away was the backcloth of the stage upon which the dolls had danced. And as the backcloth fell and the strings fell with it, the dolls were dancing on. The dolls were dancing without the strings because there were no strings. There never had been any, except those which the dolls had allowed the puppeteers to fasten to their minds. But those strings had held up the puppeteers, not the dolls, for the puppeteers were falling while the dolls danced on.

from: "Voyage From Yesteryear" by James P. Hogan

hump day happiness

"Dead Like Me" is one of my favorite shows, and like so many of my favorite shows it was cut off in it's prime. Well, MGM has made a feature-length episode of DLM, slated to be released direct to DVD sometime this summer. Rumor is, if it sells well, they may start the show back up again. I'll be buying one. The return of Dead Like Me would make me very happy indeed.

Oh, turn up the volume, the sound quality kind of sucks on this.

today's quote

“We look upon authority too often and focus over and over again, for 30 or 40 or 50 years, as if there is something wrong with authority. We see only the oppressive side of authority. Maybe it comes out of our history and our background. What we don’t see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do,”
- Rudy Giuliani, March 1994.

Freedom is what?! This was the guy that was being touted as the Republican front-runner mere weeks ago?
"Freedom is about Authority", War is Peace, insert your Orwellian phrase here.
As hard as it may be to believe, Rudy Guilliani may actually be a worse choice for president than George W. Bush was, and that worries me.

Props to the Cranky Yankee for the quote

sunday funny

It's been a while since I did one of these, partially because I've got no new material. So here is another Joey Waldon, which I promised once upon a time. Also, as informed by Anonymous last time I posted one of his comics, Joey is alive and well and living in Dallas, Texas and he has a Myspace page (I'll warn you, it takes forever to load) which you can enjoy (the films are pretty funny, er, odd).

drive-by, mk.II

just a few more thoughts -

- Huckabee won the race in Iowa on the GOP side, using a much smaller amount of money than Mit Romney, who spent a lot of money. Which sounds more like a true conservative?

- I find myself thinking that elections would be a lot more interesting (and productive) if voting were done like on "Survivor". Instead of voting for the prom queen in one go, maybe we could watch our candidates in action for a while, then have a national vote to kick one of them out of the race. Start off with a large field, with teams, just like the show. I bet the results would be much different, and the public would get far more involved. I wish we had done that here in Texas for the last Governor's race, because I'll bet old Rentboy Rick wouldnt have made it to Austin that way.

drive-by

Just some quick thoughts...

- I googled The Dancing of Politics, and didnt find a blog of that name, which is a shame.

- When The Bush Administration talks to petty tyrants and dicatators, do they ask for tips?

- I dont think that the election of 2008 will result in a turn-around for America. I also think that if 2012 doesnt do it, we're finished here and the American Dream will be dead. It's almost dead now.

- I've been cleaning lately, organizing, sorting and getting rid of stuff. It's only round 1, though, and hopefully I'll get rid of a lot more stuff. It's time to pare down and start travelling light (see above).