Since the price of gasoline in the US is increasing again, the talk making ridiculous claims about gas prices are too. For example, I recently received a chain email titled “Buy AMERICAN Gasoline”. This particular email (which I won’t help spread by posting a link) claims that we should buy “AMERICAN” gasoline or we will [...]
Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society. —Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Here are four articles to read this weekend: ‘The Tyranny of Defense Inc.’ from The Atlantic about the insight of two of Eisenhower’s speeches. ‘Light Out, Huck, They Still Want to Sivilize You’ from the New York Times is about the latest edited edition of Huckleberry Finn. The original is public domain (as it should [...]
Also filed in climate, energy
Tags: Bosnia, climate, Eisenhower, energy, Huckleberry Finn, Koch, military-industrial complex, politics, public domain, Tea Party
The Journal Gazette published a good story on prescription drug overdoses: ‘ODs from Rx drugs soar: Legal opiates now tied to more deaths than heroin, cocaine combined.’ The story highlights some interesting statistics, and makes an important point: … the problem is increasing even while most people’s concerns are elsewhere: Billions are spent to stop [...]
According to statistics cited by Sarah Meyer (of the Indiana BMV) in testimony before an Indiana General Assembly Committee, teens who have taken driver’s education classes are involved in more accidents that those who haven’t. Meyer did mention that the results could be skewed by the fact that teens who complete a formal driver’s education [...]
We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I’ve warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one [...]
This is a response to a misinformed editorial, ‘Government says unpaid internships may have to go: Why does it want to end a practice that benefits students?’ in the News-Sentinel. I submitted a version as a letter to the editor. I strongly disagree with the June 14 editorial arguing that companies shouldn’t have to pay [...]
If you’ve paid attention to national political news at any point in the last 18 years, I’m sure you’ve heard variations on the saying ‘safe and legal, but rare,’ when discussing abortion. Beyond the fact that a procedure where fewer than half of the patients survive can never be considered ‘safe,’ how is ‘rare’ defined? [...]
It’s amazing how often a little data can overthrow conventional wisdom. Today’s example is term limits. I had long thought that most elected offices should have strict term limits to solve the problem of the same politicians staying in office as a career, loosing touch with their constituents. Thinking about it a bit more a [...]
Most politicians in ‘both’ political parties—and practically everyone in the area where I live—base their economics and voting on this graph: Unfortunately, they neglect a critical fact: I’ll leave the conclusions to the reader, but it should be noted that at some point these two lines cross (and may already have done so). To avoid [...]