The AJC, my least favorite major Atlanta daily (unfortunately also the only one), had a headline which read, "Should I vote for Obama because of my race, or Hillary because of my gender?"

I've got an idea. How about you vote for whomever you think would make the best President, and forget about group identification? I think it's racist of the AJC to assume that black women only vote for people based on their personal identification, rather than who will do the best job. I don't think black women are necessarily stupid or bigoted or sexist, but the AJC seems to.

An editorial in the Harvard Crimson, the school's student paper, called for a repeal of the Second Amendment. This is something different for gun control advocates, in that they are admitting that the Second Amendment does in fact call for an individual right to bear arms. It's also different because they are calling for a repeal of part of the Bill of Rights. The very thought of such a thing is ludicrous! The Bill of Rights are not, and were never intended to be, things the government "lets" us do. They are inalienable rights that are intrinsic to the very idea of the United States. If one of the first ten amendments to the Constitution were repealed by Congress, I would immediately consider them a false government. In order for this to be the United States of America, the ENTIRE Bill of Rights must be recognized as an absolute right, not to be legislated away. I'm not sure I'm really getting my point across the way I want to, a constitutional scholar could do a better job. But anyone calling for a repeal of any part of the Bill of Rights is a fool and should go move somewhere else.

I had dinner with an old friend last night, and we started discussing school vouchers. His contention is that anyone who favors vouchers wants to keep poor people poor and rich people rich by making it so those poor people can't get a good education. Ridiculous! I favor vouchers, and want nothing of the sort. In fact, I believe an anti-voucher stance does far more to keep poor people down. Think about the situation now, if you are a poor person.

You live in a low-income area, your parents can't afford to move. Your public school sucks, it is racked by violence daily, most of the students don't care, and many of the teachers have resigned themselves to just getting their jobs done with a minimum of hassle. You are stuck, and there's nothing you can do. On the other hand, some kid a few miles away lives in a high-income area and has a good public school. Sure, his parents could afford a private school, but why should they bother, he's already getting a good education in a fairly safe environment.

What happens when you add vouchers to the mix? The poor kid has a choice! He can't afford transportation to the nicer area of town, but now he can afford to go the new private school ion his area that caters to poor kids who want a good education, and who have parents that give a damn. The rich kid is going to stay at his public school, because he has no need to leave. Sure, he could take his voucher and go to a private school, but there's no need, he won't get any better of an education.

What group am I not mentioning? The people at the low income public school that are not proactive. And you know what? Too damn bad, if they don't want to go to better school, well at least they have option. Right now they have no choice. Our current educational system only serves to keep people where they are. Vouchers give choice.

And lest we forget, history has shown again and again that competition leads to improvements. When public schools have to compete with private schools for money, they will have to either improve or shut down. And the private schools, even the ones in low-income areas, will have to do a good job, because their students are the ones that made the choice to better themselves and they will find a different school to take their vouchers to if the first one seems like they are just trying to take people's money and not give a good education.

Don't give me the canard about how all the private schools will end up teaching creationism and such. If there were that many evangelicals going around, wouldn't Pat Buchanan have won the Presidency?

Here's why I will NOT vote for certain candidates, starting with the GOP crowd...

Guiliani: The dude is a total authoritarian. I call bullshit when people say Bush has curtailed our civil liberties, since no one that says that can ever point to a single instance where an American citizen's civil liberties were denied, except perhaps the lone case of Jose Padilla. Guiliani often sounds like he wants a police state, so boo on him.

Romney: First off, and I sort of hate to use this as a reason, but I don't think he's electable against a Democrat. Second, he comes off as a GOP Hillary, ready to give any opinion depending on how he thinks voters will respond.

The rest of the GOP, with the obvious exception of Fred Thompson, who I support, I think I can safely ignore.

And the Democrats....

Hillary: Do I really need to explain? Political opportunist, wants a socialist state, believes more government is the answer to everything. She's pretty much antithetical to anything I would want in a President. The only good thing about her is that her foreign policy would most likely follow somewhat closely to Bush's, and while Bush made some mistakes, I believe in 50 years people will look back at today and thank god we had that man in office instead of someone like Al Gore.

Obama: Many of his ideas seem very naive, especially on the foreign policy front. Who knows, in another decade or so the guy might be ready, but he ain't there yet.

So those are the major candidates I won't vote for, and some very simplistic reasons why.

This is one of the most amazing things I have ever seen. Some dude in Italy said God spoke to him and told him to build a temple or somesuch thing, so he spent a few years looking for a good place, then he bought a house there, and spent the next few decades digging beneath the house and creating these absolutely incredible underground caverns. Just amazing! Follow the link for pics.

A lot of people are worried about the declining value of the dollar, and seem to think it's a sign of the fall of the United States as an economic powerhouse. Now I'm no finance genius, and had very little education in international finance in my MBA program, but the decline of the dollar is in no way any sign of the fall of the US economy. For example, remember that huge trade deficit we have that people have been pointing to for years as a bad omen? Well the lower the dollar goes, the less that trade deficit matters. In terms of GDP, our trade deficit (and our budget deficit) isn't very big at all. Did you know that the dollar fell 43% to the other big currencies between 1985 and 1995, which is much more than the 20% or so people are worried about now. Maybe 1995 is too far back for some pundits to remember, but I sure don't remember our economy making us the world's poorhouse back then. I do remember a lot of talk about how Japan was going to overtake us as the world's powerhouse economy. Then the Japanese stock market crashed, showing that it's really, really dumb to discount the power of the American economy. We are the richest, most economically robust society in the history of the world, and though there are some things to worry about (crappy school systems, failing physical infrastructure in large cities, etc.), we have some things that no other country can touch. The intangibles are probably our most important assets. Americans put a huge amount of value on the sanctity of private property. Americans are not scared to take risks. Our society loves innovation. You may think those three things aren't that big a deal, but they are. Few other societies have all of that, and thus few other societies have enjoyed such sustained economic growth as we have. Heck, much of the growth in other countries is due to innovations borrowed from the United States. And that's not going to stop any time soon.

Another thing people point to is that we have a very low savings rate compared to Europe. Who gives a crap? They can save all they want at 5% interest, I'd rather not save and earn 10% investing that money instead, so that savings thing is meaningless.

The fact is, international economics are way too complicated for anyone to be able to look at one number, in the this case the relative value of the dollar, and say it means anything, without considering everything else going on at the same time.

Read this, which explains a lot of this stuff much better than I can.

I've decided to officially throw my blog's support to Fred Thompson. Maybe I will sway the three people that read my blog regularly.

The biggest knock against Fred from people who normally agree with him is that he is lazy. First off, they said the same thing about Reagan. It's just the media spreading an anti-Fred meme because they are scared to death of him actually getting the GOP nomination. Second, the guy has been all over the place, making speeches, attending events, campaigning like a man who wants to win. His schedule has been the opposite of lazy.

A knock against him from a more libertarian is that he's ostensibly pro-life. I say that abortion is a non-issue. It doesn't matter who gets elected, Roe v Wade ain't going away, so it doesn't really matter what his views are on that issue. His views on other issues far outweigh something that isn't going to change no matter what.

In an upcoming entry, I will discuss Fred's platform in more detail. I've just signed up to be a volunteer for him. I've never done anything like that before, should be fun.

My goodness, there is a lot of ignorance out there. I was reading the comments on a short article about Fred Thompson enjoying a gun show, and a significant number of the commenters (probably all sent there from DailyKos or something) called Thompson a "Neocon Nazi." Anyone with an ounce of actual knowledge would realize that the neocons would have been the very first people to want to act against Hitler. To call someone a Neocon Nazi is to display a significant ignorance of both history and politics.

Sometimes football rules sure don't make much sense. So far in the Georgia Tech/UGA game today, UGA's man in the backfield has dropped two punts inside the 10 yard line. Both times they ended up recovering in the end zone and got touchbacks so they then got the ball on the 20. I don't understand why they are getting rewarded for dropping a catch, it makes no sense. In my opinion, if you drop a punt, then chase it back to the end zone where you recover it and are tackled before you can get back out, it should be a safety, 2 points for the punting team and possession back. Instead they get 12 more yards than they would have had had they caught the ball.

There's some kid at some high school who is an Eagle Scout, and when someone asked, probably jokingly, if anyone knew how to tie a noose, he said he did, having learned all about knots in the Boy Scouts, but that he wouldn't make one because he didn't want to get in trouble. Well he got in trouble anyway, because some overly sensitive black kid decided the use of the term noose was insulting, so the Eagle Scout got suspended for 10 days.

To associate only black people with hanging is ridiculously racist and ignorant. People of all color have been killed by hanging for thousands of years, and it really ticks me off when groups act as if they are the only people victimized by crime and punishment and hatred and blah blah blah. Sometimes I hear people talking about concentration camps. Do I get insulted by that? Only if they are talking about using them to kill people. It's possible to mention concentration camps in a slightly different context, however. Maybe historical? I had a class in college with a professor who seemed a little too intrigued by Nazi Germany for my own comfort. He even went so far as to say that the gas chambers were remarkable from an industrial efficiency perspective, but did I complain to the administration? No, because he also never said anything like, "I bet with today's technology, Jews could be killed even faster!" He talked about horrible things, but only to teach.

I learned a valuable lesson today. No matter how much someone complains about an issue they have, even if you yourself have a lot of expertise, do NOT offer unsolicited advice. Some people just cannot accept it, except as an insult.

I saw a nifty Glenn Reynold's quote regarding global warming: "I'll believe it's a crisis when the people who say it is start acting like it." In other words, as long as the people who whine about global warming continue to live life normally, with Al Gore jetsetting all over the place and having a huge carbon footprint, with the UN Global Warming people planning conferences regarding warming in Bali so that the largest contingent, the one from New York, has to fly to the other side of the world, and use enough carbon doing it that a forest of four million trees couldn't absorb the resultant waste carbon, then maybe I will take their warnings seriously. Right now it's like a guy with three ex-wives telling me that marriage is an inviolable institution....

Here's a totally messed up story. Basically there was an unhappy 14 year old girl who found a ray of sunshine in her life in the form of a 16 year old boy on MySpace, but one day that boy turned on her, and the girl committed suicide. It was later discovered that the boy was fake, the creation of the mother of a former friend of the girl's who lives in the neighborhood. This woman set out to manipulate a 14 year old depressed girl in vengeance for some slight at her own daughter.

No charges were filed because there is currently no law covering this sort of thing, but even if it's not a legal crime (yet), it's about as morally wrong as one can get.

Well I gotta give Dell some credit. Even though it took almost an hour on the phone to get things set up so I could send my laptop in for repairs, the box came by DHL the next day, I sent it off on Tuesday, and got my repaired computer back this afternoon. They didn't just send a new computer of the same model, either, they replaced the parts that were broken on my unit. Good job, Dell.

Wouldn't it be great if someone came up with an engine that ran on saltwater and gave off freshwater as a waste product? Almost as good as a frictionless toilet bowl (the inside part, not the part you sit on).

Fred Thompson wrote an article on the right to bear arms and various findings by the UN Human Rights Commission that deny the right of an individual to self-defense and urge states to comply with their small arms guidelines. That's polite speak for gun control that would make current Washington D.C. laws look like an NRA fantasy. Anyway, Thompson, to put it succinctly, was against such thing. Of course several journalist criticized him, saying he made stuff up and the UN didn't say those things and whatever, but various bloggers found plenty of evidence to support everything Thompson said. Plus the guy quoted Grotius, a 17th century philosopher that I had heard of, but knew nothing about.

And what does Wikipedia say about Mr. Grotius? Well he wrote De jure belli ac pacis libri tres (On the Laws of War and Peace), among other things, and his ideas were the foundation of international law, which, up to that point, meant "might makes right." Some might say it's still like that, and in a way, they are right. But it seems what Grotius did was create a framework for relations between states which hopefully precludes "might makes right" situations from occurring. The main thing he came up with is that self-defense is a right, though I am currently not clear whether he was referring to the rights of individuals or of states, and that obviously makes a big difference.

The UN specifically states a right to self-defense... For states. Someone even found a little bit written by a UN lawyer where she says they have found no legal evidence that self-defense should be considered a right for individuals. Here are some relevant links:

Grotius
A summary of everything with links to more

I just read a blog where a guy in his 20's is bemoaning that he got a college degree and then decided to work for an NGO or the like doing some sort of charity work in the third world, and that job, as important as he thinks it is, doesn't pay much. Now one might say, "See, feeding starving people is important work, the free market system doesn't value the right things."

But I, a free market advocate, would respond, "Maybe the market works just fine, and knows that an entrepreneur who discovers a way to make corn grow in arid environments will help far more starving people than you could in a lifetime of your charity work." It's a simple and fairly obvious fact that one person who dedicates their self to helping people one person at a time is going to have a far smaller impact on world hunger than someone like the president of the World Bank, one of whose missions is to make capital available to poor entrepreneurs in developing countries.

This problem relates to issues I have with a lot of people who aren't terribly educated on economics. Sure, it's nice to see the immediate gratification of feeding a starving person, but if you want to fix the problem, and not just work on the symptoms, you need to enact real change, and that means forgetting the feeding one person crap and immediate gratification. That means helping start wealth-creating businesses and ways for people to earn their way to food.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.... Sure, it's great to take money from rich people to give to poor people, to create entitlements, etc. But when those rich people decide to stop earning money because they have no incentive to do so since the government takes their money, or the money the government uses to give to poor people dries up.... That's when our country turns to hell. I would rather have a small percentage of poor people always in our society than destroy a lot more lives by giving those poor people money. No system currently invented will make everyone wealthy, but free market democracies seem to have the fewest poor people combined with the most productivity and innovation of any system out there. Maybe someone will come up with something better someday, but for now free market democracy is the best way to go.

It's really easy to spend way too much time reading articles on Wikipedia. I just found this one, about a Jewish people in China. Theory is they were a bunch of ancient Jews that left the middle east for India, and then eventually moved to China, were they supposedly maintained their Jewish identity among a very different culture for many centuries.