Framing the Dialogue

Archive for November, 2011

In The Year 2525

The year 2525 is probably the year when we “officially” find out from historians that conservatives were right and that Barney Frank and Democrat policies started the global financial meltdown and Obama’s policies like the Stimulus, Obamacare, and Dodd-Frank prolonged the agony.  That is because history is mostly written by liberal academics (I know that is redundant) and they have a slightly biased view of the world.

I am exagerating about the date 514 years from now, but consider that until recently most historical accounts of the Great Depression give FDR credit for ending it.  There have been books like The Forgotten Man which set the record straight, but few probably read this.  However nearly seventy years after the depression ended two UCLA economists place the blame where it belongs…on FDR.

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Ten Men Walk Into A Bar

Suppose that every day, ten men go out for dinner and the bill for all 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 like they do now with the present income tax structure.

The fifth would pay $1.

The sixth would pay $3.

The seventh would pay $7.

The eighth would pay $12.

The ninth would pay $18.

The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59 of the bill.

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The Elephants Duel

When elephants duel the only ones who really get hurt are those poor souls unlucky enough to be between them.  Locally we have a somewhat nasty fuel between two health care behemoths.  The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (“UPMC) has not so quietly been gobbling up hospital after hospital after hospital.  They have built an impressive array of first-class medical facilities and propelled the Pittsburgh Region to the forefront of quality health care centers.  Highmark is is behemoth 2 and has been the local service for Blue Cross/Blue Shield and one of the larger insurance providers in the area.  UPMC go irked recently when Highmark took steps to purchase UPMC’s largest (actually quite smaller) competitor, West Penn Allegheny who have severe financial problems.

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Inheritance

Sadly this is the last of Christopher Paolini’s four novels featuring Eargon, dragon riders, elves, men, dwarves, and urgals in the land of Alagaësia. Inheritance guides us to the final battle against King Galabatorix and his minions.  Much like the Lord of the Rings novels the forces for good are marching to a final confrontation with the evil ruler and this work by Paolini was almost as good.  There is no higher praise that I can give a novel like this.  Though the general theme is similar to Rings, the journey and characters is not.  Inheritance doesn’t quite have the dark evil so it is probably better for young children though there is a good amount of violence/fighting. 

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Takes Two To Tango

Perhaps one of the saddest statistics that can be pinned to George Bush’s second term and hyper-inflated by the Obama Administration is the fact that as of August 2011 more than 45 million people were receiving food stamp benefits. So approximately 14 percent of Americans need government to survive. Since half of the recipients are children their parents are obviously unable to properly care for them. These “safety net” programs have morphed into the natural order of things for many families; relying on the government dole to exist.

“When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.”

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714.1

That’s the number of miles I traveled with my wife and daughter last weekend to “tour” two colleges in upstate New York.  We had originally planned the trip for October, but things came up and we had to postpone.  October would have been nice with sunny weather and beautiful fall foliage.  The first hour of our trip alternated between light snow, heavy snow, what they call a “wintry mix” (too pretty a name for freezing rain), and snow-covered roads.  It had been warm enough that I didn’t think the roads would be icy, but there is always that black ice to worry about. 

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Lincoln On Leadership

“When Abraham Lincoln came to power in 1861, he found himself in a similar dilemma.  The first Republican president elected by a minority of the popular vote, Lincoln was viewed by many as a gawky, second-rate country lawyer ill equipped to handle the chief executive office – his own cabinet considered him nothing more than a figurehead.  Ten days before he took the oath of office, the Confederate States of America seceded from the Union, taking all Federal agencies, forts, and arsenals within their territory.  The country was so stricken that rumors of a military coup and assassination abounded at the inauguration.”

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Holder’s Hapless Honor

I have a suggestion.  It is probably not very practical.  It would be fairly impossible to accomplish, but I would love to have it work for a while.

First I’d like the Republican presidential candidates to suspend their campaigns for a month, maybe 45 days.  No more endless debates, no more Cain bimbo eruptions, no more Perry gaffes, no more Romney (actually vanilla-flavored Romney has pretty much been quiet), Newt can still zing the media.  Let’s no longer give the media fodder so they can avoid and provide cover for what should be the big story on every night’s newscast.  Second let’s forget about Kim Kardashian’s fake marriage and all other Hollywood drivel.  Third let’s ignore anything with the word “occupy” anywhere in the title. 

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The Miracle of Freedom: 7 Tipping Points That Saved the World

“The best estimates of how many people have ever lived on the earth range from 100 to 110 billion.  Freedom House estimates that approximately three billion of the earth’s current population live in “free” nations…It has also been estimated that 554 million people have lived under freedom in the United States…We can also postulate that perhaps another billion, or fewer, have lived under freedom in the other European nations…Even being generous in our estimates, it seems clear that fewer than five billion of the earth’s total inhabitants have ever lived under conditions that we would consider free.  This would be something like 4.5 percent of people who have ever lived.”

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