Lift Up Your Hearts!

In an earlier post on the Lisbon Treaty, I stated

[I]n the U.S. we have seen state laws gradually subsumed more and more by national regulation, so that fleeing to Pennsylvania from a repressive law in New York is not as easy as it once was.  I'm not saying this is always bad, but it can be, and bears watching.

I"m watching, and here's an example I saw today.  The U. S. Supreme Court has nullified a Louisiana law allowing for a sentence of the death penalty following conviction for the rape of a child under 12. (More)

The role of joking in the way we deal with one another is a concern of mine, as I've said before.  Thanks to Groshlink I've found another excellent essay on the topic, The Gospel and Humor by Tim Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City.  Unfortunately, the article is in PDF format, and you have to weave amongst some other articles to read it, but it's worthwhile.  To get you started—and to give those who won't follow the link a taste of what he says—here are some excerpts. (More)

Scott Adams strikes again, with a definitely nerdy variation on this popular saying:

You may have noticed I've been posting a lot recently.  At one point I decided to try to write a post a day for the month of June.  There were two reasons for this.  The first—and this doesn't matter for those who use feedreaders, but not everyone does—is that I want to give people a reason to stop by frequently; if you don't write anything new, people get out of the habit.  At least I did, before I let Bloglines keep track of things for me.

The second, more compelling, reason is the accumulating backlog of things impelling me to write.  Books lined up for review; interesting tidbits of news and commentary I figure folks might otherwise not encounter; and the everyday happenings in our lives, which is my attempt to close somewhat the 1000 or more (sometimes much more) mile distance between us and those we love.  The only problem with this system is that the list grows even as it shrinks.  But at least I'm holding my own this month.  I suppose I could post more often (this is actually my second post of the day), but there is more to life—like laundry, as the persistent dryer buzzer is now reminding me.

Confessions of a Medical  Heretic, by Robert S. Mendelsohn, M. D. (McGraw-Hill, 1979)

A quick review of this so I can get it off my desk and back on the bookshelf:  There's no doubt that modern medicine has lengthened and improved our lives; the underside of that story is that modern medicine has also shortened our lives, and in many ways diminished their quality.  If you're not already half convinced of the second part of that statement, you'll find Dr. Mendelsohn's style hard to get through.  I believe him, and I still wanted to scream by about the 40th time he beat to death his otherwise illuminating analogy of modern medicine as a religion. (More)

I love student recitals.  Our kids attended the Suzuki Music Institute of Central Florida for nearly 10 years, so I think I've heard more than my share of recitals.  Granted, the quality of music and musicianship was nothing compared with the Eastman School of Music recitals we subsequently enjoyed, but I can honestly say I was never bored, not even by the beginners, nor by hearing the same beginning songs again and again.  It was fun hearing the differences, not only from one child to another, but particularly as each child grew and advanced from one recital to another.

Nonetheless, I know that to many people the phrase "student recital" evokes horrifying thoughts of squeaks and off-pitch notes and shaky rhythms, over and over again as student follows student in a seemingly endless parade of classical or modern pieces the audience doesn't know and doesn't understand. (More)

We throw the term "witch hunt" around pretty loosely, but when it comes to child abuse accusations, apparently it's more accurate than not, at least in one Canadian city, where school officials reported sexual abuse of one of their students on the basis of a psychic's suggestion.  As Random Observations noted, the last time we accepted that kind of evidence in North America was during the Salem Witch Trials of 1692.

In this case, the child's mother was able to refute the accusation successfully, because the nature of her daughter's disability, combined with the fact that her elementary school had "lost" her several times, had prompted her to equip the girl with a GPS and a continuous audio monitor that provided clear evidence that the accusation was false.  How many other parents could have proven their innocence so easily?

A local man makes his living selling political propaganda, including campaign buttons.  Like a mercenary soldier, he plays all sides.  He feeds off bumper sticker philosophy, thumb-your-nose attitudes, and mocking humor.  It's not exactly the world's most useful occupation, certainly not among the more charitable.  But from the reaction to his "If Obama is president, will we still call it the White House?" button, you'd think Jonathan Alcox was a substantially lower form of life than drug pusher or Mafia don, just barely above child pornographer.

Barack Obama does not deny—indeed, he profits from—his partially African heritage.  I fail to see anything at all racist about that button; if being aware of someone's ancestry is racist, then we all are, including Obama's supporters, and the term has no meaning other than as an epithet to throw at our opponents when we run out of rational arguments.  If truth is no longer a defense, what hope have we for justice? (More)

I've had some adventures with palmetto bugs, but I'll take them over scorpions any day.  Check out "Et tu?"s Hospitality in my Home for your morning internal excercise, and better-her-than-me thanksgivings.

Thanks to Andy B.'s suggestion, I just installed the latest version of Firefox.  No verdict on it as yet—it was an easy install, and some of it is seamless, some really cool (such as the security information you can get by clicking on the title bar icon, though the number of websites that identify themselves has been disappointing), and some annoying (changed appearance of some of the icons, which will take some getting used to for someone with the kind of visual memory I have).  Some of the big new features include lots of things you can do from the title bar, and I see that how bookmarks are organized has changed; also, security has supposedly been significantly enhanced.

So far I've liked the evolution of Firefox, unlike Netscape which got more and more annoying with each new version, as they added features I didn't want and which ate up more and more memory and disk space.  Time will tell with 3.0.

Last night we enjoyed an outing to the Texas de Brazil restaurant.  This is not what I would normally call my kind of restaurant:  although I find salad bars, buffets, and all-you-can-eat establishments appealing for their wide variety and options, the high price and the encouragement of overeating make them generally unattractive to me.  However, our friends had two-for-one coupons, which brought the $45-per-person price down from the outrageous to the merely ridiculous-but-acceptable-for-a-special-occasion.  So we celebrated Father's Day one day late. (More)

We've been nibbling on the basil, parsley, and Thai basil from our garden, and the hot pepper plant has been producing prolifically and steadily for a year now, but this week saw the first harvest from our radish, lettuce, and stevia plants.  The radishes aren't quite ready yet, but the baby lettuces were spicy and delicious.

I've never grown stevia before, and didn't know quite what to do with the leaves, but I cut one stem, stripped off the leaves (maybe a dozen), and poured not qute a quart of boiling water over them.  I let that cool and then put it in the refrigerator.  Next I took a quarter cup of juice of a fresh lemon, poured it over a glass full of ice, added about half a cup of the stevia infusion (filled up the glass), and stirred it all together.  It was a delicious concoction.  Still tart, but that's how we like our lemonade.

In honor of Father's Day, I present an article that's a bit more challenging than my normal light fare.  It's from John Mauldin's InvestorsInsight financial newsletter, and is actually an excerpt from a book called A Roadmap For Troubling Times by Louis-Vincent Gave.  The article is The Problem with the Euro, and the excerpt begins a bit down the page, at "The Change in Policy."

It's heavy going, but one interesting thing I took from it, thanks to some help from my own Personal Economist (aka Porter) is this:  Countries, unlike people and businesses, don't go bankrupt—because they can always print more money.  Yes, that brings on inflation and a whole host of problems, but it keeps them in business.  However, this is no longer true of the countries of the European Union.  France, which is struggling under a national debt of 70% of its GDP, can no longer cover itself by printing more francs, since its present currency, the euro, is outside of its control.  Many other European countries are in similar straits. (More)

A week ago we paused in the middle of grouting our new entrance tile to turn around and watch the Space Shuttle Discovery sail through the clouds.  This morning the twin sonic booms informed us it was time to turn on the television to watch Discovery's return home.

And you thought the thrills of living in Florida had something to do with not shoveling snow.

Ireland's 3 million voters will decide on a document representing the 490 million people in the European Union.

You can look at it that way, and when you do, it sounds unfair that the success or failure of the Lisbon Treaty, which would create a new governing treaty for the European Union, should stand or fall based on what the Irish decide.  But so it is with democracy; in a close race, one person's vote can decide the fate of an entire country.  Not that it ever does, but it could.

I don't know enough to judge the Lisbon Treaty itself; it may be good or bad in the main, but I can say I am pleased that Ireland is standing by its own constitution, which requires that anything affecting the Irish constitution be decided by the Irish citizens themselves.  The Dutch and French people have already been railroaded by their own governments. (More)