Blind & Blinderer

A Federal judge has determined that the government discriminates against the blind by issuing paper money.

No, I'm not making this up, read the article for yourself.

From the article:
"U.S. District Judge James Robertson ordered the Treasury Department to come up with ways for the blind to tell bills apart. He said he wouldn't tell officials how to fix the problem, but he ordered them to begin working on it."

Of course Congress can simply order the Treasury Department to belay the order. Such a move would give the judge a wedgie by virtue of the fact that judges have become accustomed to being obeyed with out question and he's going to get his undies in a bunch. They'll have to be pulled out with the Jaw of Life; or perhaps Sir Elton John will do it with his own teeth.

I guess no one has to prove intent when it comes to discrimination anymore. It's as if this moronic judge is saying there has been a centuries long conspiracy to frustrate blind people through the money system.

No one has the right not to be inconvenienced. If you're blind you have to adapt. If you have no legs you have to adapt. If you're just plain stupid, as this judge clearly is, you simply have to adapt.

As I was writing this I had a grand idea. I could make a money scanner that a blind person could carry around and scan the money he receives from a bank or a store, etc. Clever chap though I am, I decided to go see if someone else was just as clever. Alas, I am too late to make my fortune with that invention. A company called Brytech is already making note readers for the blind. The Canadian government already gives them away to it's blind people. As much as I am in complete dis-favor of more government handouts, I'd much rather see the government purchase these in bulk and give them away to the blind than spend billions on taking our old money out of circulation and issuing all new bills. Not to mention the huge cost this would impose on the vending machine industry (higher prices for everyone!) and everything else that has been adapted to the presumably reliable shape and size of our worthless currency.

Shooting The Messenger

Coming to a town near you...

Quebec school officials are considering banning the use of cameras and cellphones in all classrooms after two students secretly recorded their teacher's angry outburst and posted three clips on YouTube.

I don't know whether or not most U.S. public schools already ban recording devices or not but if they don't, they'll start soon.

Of course they don't want their incompetence exposed so they'll do what they can to suppress any attempts at making them look bad. I'm sure none of this comes as a shock really but punishing dissent is something government tends to be very good at. There are laws to protect whistle blowers but I doubt those protections will ever extend to students. I recall seeing other cases where students have been suspended for writing negative things about teachers or students on their own MySpace pages.

Remember, they are the government and they're not there to help.

Kids Say The Darndest Things

Scene: Busy SoCal freeway (I know that's redundant) with Little Dif in the back, fresh out of her Collectivist Education Camp for the day.

"Daddy," she inquires, "what are those old things people used to play music on?"

"What things?" I asked distractedly.

Her little hand makes a circular motion and she says, "You know! They're like great big CD's!"

I just started laughing. I would have buried my face in my hands if the result wouldn't have been disastrous given my surroundings. "What's so funny daddy? Why are you laughing?"

"Are you talking about a 'record player'?"

"Yes! Have you ever used one?"

... kids these days!

Educating Children

Little Difster is an awesome kid. She's a total sponge when it comes to learning and I love it. Lately I've been spending more time on focused learning with her as well as our normal impromptu lessons about this that and the other thing. Keep in mind that she is not quite six years old yet.

A few weeks ago, I spent about an hour with her on counting coins. Like her dad, math is not her strong point but it's obviously something she needs to know and I think I've neglected it a bit with her. So I decided to play a little catch up with her on that. I had a pocket full of coins so I took them out and put them on the table. She already knew how much each coin represented so we skipped that part. She was a little frustrated at the beginning of the lesson but within an hour, she could add up any combination of coins I threw at her. After a little practice and some review drills, she can now do it in her head. This all came from an hour in concentrated instruction.

Just this evening I decided to pull out her dictionary and we flipped through pages and I had her reading some fairly difficult and unfamiliar words. For example, she read the word 'vocabulary' without missing a beat and then asked me what it meant. My reply was, "This is a dictionary, you can read the answer to that yourself." So she read the definition and she understood it. Great. For the next 45 minutes, her wee little brain learned added a bunch of new words to her vocabulary. Then something occurred to me; she doesn't know how to actually find a word in the dictionary for herself. After a respite, we sat down on the couch and I showed her how to find words and then gave her some words to find. She did great; I was really proud of her.

My point in all of this is not to brag about my daughter (which I am not loathe to do) but to demonstrate that it really takes very little effort to teach a child. An hour counting coins and 1.5 hours with a dictionary and she's got some knowledge that will propel her forward to the next level of learning.

You, as a parent have NO excuse not to educate your child. Don't trust the schools to do it; not even the private ones. And don't just educate them; teach them how to think. You can stuff volumes of information in to the head of a child but if he don't teach them how to apply it, how to reason things out and come to a conclusion, the knowledge is of no value. Furthermore, if you don't teach them to use the knowledge they have to serve God where they can, it's even worse. Knowledge must be heavily supplemented with virtue and with that we can hope to raise wise and godly children.

Knowledge alone is useless; it's only a starting point. Educating a child is the whole package; knowledge, virtue and reason. If you've been lagging behind so far, it's not too late to start.

Thus Spake Heidi

People don't want liberty. They want order and predictability so they can continue their lives uninterrupted by actually owning their own freedoms and bearing the burden of responsible stewardship of their nations. They want to enjoy the power of imposing their own will upon people weaker than themselves.

Ah, the essence of our sin nature legitimized in the form of government. That really is what it all boils down to isn't it? In order to help people understand the basic principals of liberty as I purpose to do in this blog, we also have preach the Gospel and free people from the bondage of their own sin.

Still we march on; one life, one soul at a time.

Vote For Liberty

In my continuing discussion with Miss O'Hara (among others) in regards to reasons for abandoning the Republican party based on principles I finally managed to nail down the issue succinctly.

Vote For Liberty!

It's really just that simple. Are you going to continue to vote for the party that is only destroying your liberty just a little slower than the other one or are you going to start voting based on actual principles?

I know that no party is going to represent your idealistic situation when it comes to liberty and some compromise is always necessary. Even so, are you going to vote for the guys that keep raising spending, creating more government agencies, meddling in world affairs we don't belong in and passing really bad laws like the Patriot Act or are you going to start voting for people who want to reduce the size and scope of government?

But Difster! Those other parties can't win! That doesn't really matter. They can't win NOW but if enough people start standing up to the party machines we have in place, we can eventually win. That's how it's done. It starts with you deciding whether you will continue to support the failed "conservative" policies of the last 14 years or take a good hard look at party politics and support the ultimate cause of liberty granted to us by our Creator.

It's up to you. If you have changed your mind, please post it in the comments and let me and the others know. In the near future perhaps I'll do an interview style post with a few of you.

Glenn Beck On CNN Tonight

Thanks to Miss O'Hara for the heads up on this one.

Glenn Beck will be on CNN tonight with a special called Exposed: The Extremist Agenda.

Check your local listings for CNN Headline News for exact times but if you can't watch it, make sure you program your DVR and watch it later. He's going to expose things about the Middle East that the media here normally doesn't let you see.

Tune in. Don't tune out!

Now That It's Over ...

Now that the election is over, it's time to reassess your political affiliations.

The excuse I hear most often as to why people are sticking with the Republican party is that there is no viable alternative. "We have to keep the House & Senate out of the hands of the Democrats." Well folks, your worst nightmare has come true. Nancy Pelosi is going to be the Speaker of the House and the Dems won a majority back in both Houses. It looks like your blind obedience to the GOP has failed you yet again.

Scroll down a bit and read my post from a couple of weeks ago called Battered Voter Syndrome. The GOP continues to do you wrong. You say this election was so important you couldn't defect this time. It's over, it's now time to reach down, grab hold and go change your party affiliation. I don't care if you change it to Libertarian, Independent or simply "Decline To State". Hey, you could even change it to the Green Party, I don't care. Just don't register for one of the major parties.

As long as you continue to vote a Republican ticket, no third party can emerge. It's going to take an awful lot of people to do that. Don't wait for everyone else; this will take time. And when it comes to the next election, vote for anyone BUT a Republican or Democrat for President. Besides, who is the GOP going to put up against Hillary? They're just going to front another Bob Dole type candidate who doesn't really stand a chance. Are you going to vote for that type of candidate because it's SO IMPORTANT to keep Hillary out of office.

At this stage of our political system it doesn't really matter who gets elected. Both parties support essentially the same things. They want bigger government, more involvement in our lives and are pushing harder and harder for global governance. Everything else they do is nothing but distractions. The Dems don't support the Iraq war. So? They want to give more power to the United Nations. But wait, Bush hasn't exactly been tough on the U.N. either has he? What has Bush done to pull us back from global governance? Nothing, in fact he's continues to march us further down that road. No Democrat president will be any different. The pace might pick up a bit though.

Neither party is running on platform of smaller, less intrusive government. Neither party is running on a platform that even resembles an adherence to the basic principles of liberty. But you don't care. Unemployment is down, interest rates are still fairly low and gas prices have dropped. You're happily marching toward your own doom because you seem to be just fine the way you are.

In the mean time, your money is being stolen from you by the government and given to other people that would go to jail for taking it from you any other way than by the force of government.

It's your fault because you continue to support the elected officials who either don't know or don't care about the constraints laid on them by the Constitution of The United States of America.

Don't wait for a third party to get more power. You have to give them the power by joining with them. You have to convince your families, friends and neighbors to abandon the system that keeps the two major parties in power.

I'll be posting about this off and on through the 2008 election cycle.

Election Night Jihad

Wake up America! We now have our first Muslim in Congress.

I am ashamed to say this honor comes, courtesy of my birth-state of Minnesota.

I'd really like to be a reporter who corners him and asks him if he would like to see the Constitution replaced with Sharia law. No weasel words either. I wouldn't be snowed by "Oh, I swore to uphold the Constitution." I want to hear an outright disavowal of Sharia law.

We're in a lot of trouble.

Tales Of On Line Dating

A friend of mine has recently signed up with one of the Internet dating services. She's had a couple of interesting experiences so far. Here is one of them. Names have been changed to protect the innocent (my friend) but not the not-so-innocent (her date).

Lisa had 3 dates with Mike. She thought he was a nice enough guy but she really just was not very interested in continuing to see him. She just wasn't feeling any chemistry but she gave it an honest try. At the end of the third date, he asked to kiss her. She said yes. Quick kiss but then he tried leading her to the bedroom. She wasn't having any of that. Lisa is morally upstanding Christian woman.

So, Lisa tells me that Mike left her a message the next day about going out. She's afraid of hurting someone's feelings so she was putting off calling him back. I told her she should call him back, be polite but firm, give him a compliment but tell him she's not interested and just doesn't see it going anywhere.

I was at Starbucks with Lisa on Wednesday evening, her phone rang and it was Mike. I gave her a stern look and told her she should take the call. She did. She handled the situation with grace and aplomb. She did her best to avoid hurting his feeling but made it clear she really wasn't interested. I could tell that he was trying to talk her out of her decision so under my breath I told her not to let him argue with her. She extracted herself from the situation and managed to hang up. I was telling her that she did a fine job and that she shouldn't worry about hurting his feelings. Delaying the inevitable would only cause more damage later.

As we were discussing it, her phone rang again. Mike was calling back. "Do NOT answer that phone," I told her. She listened to the message. "Lisa, I felt that our conversation ended badly, I'd really like to sit and talk to you about this." Hmm..... what part of "I'm not interested," did he not understand?

About a minute after that, she gets a text message. "Please call me." This is getting pathetic.

A couple of minutes after that, she gets yet another text message: Lisa, you're breaking my heart - don't you see any potential here? I really think you're wonderful. Can't we at least meet for coffee?"

I can understand this behavior is you're trying to convince someone you've been in a relationship with to reconsider. They only had three dates though.

So, guys (girls too I suppose), after a couple of dates, you might get turned down for any future dates with that person. Accept it. Move on. This is especially true when you're finding your dates through a dating site. There are lots of other people willing to go on dates; all you have to do is contact them.

There is also another story of Lisa getting turned down by someone she was interested in and I'll post that next time. The rejection voice mail is blog worthy.

BTW - I have Lisa's permission to post these things.

John Kerry Offers a Lame Apology

Really, it was apology at all. Kerry told some student on Monday that if they study hard they could do well, if not, they get stuck in Iraq.

He apologized that has words were misinterpreted and meant no offense. He did not meant to imply that U.S. Troops were stupid.

Then he made an excuse and said, "You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq. Just ask President Bush." He said he botched a joke.

Uh-huh - Right.

If you botch a joke, you correct yourself. You know right away you botched it. He's lying through his teeth. He got caught saying our soldiers are stupid and the best his spinmeisters could come up with is that it was a joke gone awry.

What a moron.