The-Asterisk

Watching the Twitter stream during last night's Republican National Convention coverage was telling. On a night that featured Ann Romney, whose goal was to introduce her husband to the viewers, and Gov. Chris Christie whose goal was to fire up the base, the contrast between left and right could not have been greater. The left whined about rich folks, back breaking work, no health care, union busting, hate, racism and despair. The right focused on God, country and the ability to pull one's self up by one's bootstraps. The right also talked about the oncoming pain that will occur when/if we break the addiction of trillions of dollars of handouts. What I feel on the morning after the night before is a sense of "will it ever be right again?" Our nation is divided pretty much 50-50 along the lines of "give us what we need" vs "earn what you get". The right wants limited government and the left sees that as wanting NO government. Something as s...

I've been thinking about this whole "they stole wealth from the third world" idea lately. Then I ran across this piece from George Gilder on National Review . George talks about how ideas and mental disciplines are as big of a part of production as are the raw materials... bigger actually. It made me think about Saudi Arabia. The nationalists and the anti-colonialists decry the fact that the US, et al, are stealing the oil from the Saudis. The Saudi royal family and many other hangers-on in the kingdom are rich beyond imagination because we are paying them $85-$110 per barrel for something that costs them $5 to produce. Theft? Yes... but in the other direction. I say that in jest, because in a non-coerced economy, we, the consumers, pay the producers what we think the value is and not a penny more. This is where we are with oil prices, right? Back to the point of this post. How many cars, trucks, airplanes, plastics, fertilizer, cosmetics and on and on did the Ara...

I just saw Chris Matthews on MSNBC, frothing, as he usually does, about Ryan's budget proposals. About how his proposal will cause a tax increase for the middle class... for everyone watching his program right now, just so that the richest Americans (including MANY lefties who steadfastly refuse to pay more taxes than they are currently required to pay) can get a 20% tax cut. I am not rich, but I sure pay "my fair share" of taxes. As little as I clear each year in my business (we are supposed to make a profit aren't we?), I always cringe to find out how much I will have to come up with to make sure I have paid enough. Tax refunds? Hah! As I have stated in a previous blog post , if the government confiscated every last penny of taxable income from the richest 1%, it would make a dent in the annual deficit but wouldn't allow for a surplus. Armed with this knowledge, even a fourth grader could figure out that by making our currently progressive tax rates more ...

I just read a blog post that I was made aware of on Twitter. Shaun Dakin posted an article called "In 1966 I Would Have Been A Criminal: My Thoughts on Chick Fil A and How Religion Is Used For Hate" . In it he makes the point that his marriage to an Indian-American woman would have been illegal in the State of Virginia, and that he doesn't understand how so many people could use a religion to promote hate. In a way that is a very naive point, since the second largest (maybe even the largest) organized religion in the world bases much of its raison d'être to hating and killing large swaths of the human population, but I digress. First and foremost, Christians who firmly believe the Bible's teachings (that is really who these self-righteous people are attacking) are not promoting HATE. In fact, if these Christians are true believers, the Bible teaches to hate the sin but love the sinner. At some point in any person's life, they must decide what they feel is...

Sheesh. These guys are supposed to be the smartest people in the room, right? It is now an accepted part of the new normal that we are a 50.1% / 49.9% nation when it comes to left and right, right? Well, we didn't start out that way. As few as 30 years ago, presidential elections were competitive, but not super close. Now, armed with vast computing power and the methods by which they can slice and dice data, the cognoscenti know which 6 or 7 states are in play. They then hone their message to speak only to the demographic of the specific 'undecided' voter. (How ANYONE could be undecided in this election still boggles my mind...) It occurred to me today that we are in this razor-thin margin situation precisely because of the ads and the polling and the scientific manipulation, not the other way around. Like any scientific observation, sometimes the reason things are the way they are can actually be caused by the scientific observation, and not so much on the static env...

I have had several long discussions on the subject of Voter ID lately. It seems that the left sees any attempt to ensure 'clean' voting as an attempt by Republicans to disenfranchise 'brown' people from their God-given right to vote. Those on the right see it as a way to make sure that Democrats do not gather up a busload of illegal aliens and street bums on election day and drive them from precinct to precinct to vote for Obama. "Vote early, and vote often..." goes the mantra. Even our good friend Garry Trudeau is jumping into the fray with this week's Doonesbury series . It is so easy to poke fun at right-wingers, isn't it? I mean, why fix a problem that isn't a problem? Here is the snag with that argument. If there isn't a problem, then why is something as simple as pulling out an ID to vote such an issue? Do white liberals really care that much about some random poor guy in Erie, PA that makes his way to the Ebeneezer Baptist Church...

There is a lot of buzz in the conservative community (hey, if gays and African-Americans can have a community, so can we) about the proposed signing of the UN Arms Trade Treaty . The rumor is that if this treaty is passed, it gives the UN the right to audit and to control even the existing weapons within the borders of a sovereign nation. I understand the desire to disarm the world, but guess what? It ain't gonna happen. Sorry folks... reality check. We tried it with Wiemar Germany, we tried it with alcohol during Prohibition, we have tried it with illicit drugs. How's that prostitution thing working out? To think that anyone can voluntarily remove the singular item that allows any man to control any other man is ludicrous. Laudable, yes. Attainable, no. With these thoughts in mind, here is the text of a message I sent to my two senators, Senator Mark Warner and Senator Jim Webb. SNAP! I overwrote my cache, so I lost my text. So, here is the jist of it: ...

It has been a crazy season for tomatoes, so far this year. We have quite an eclectic blend of varieties and the giant yellow, Mr. Stripey  (which is the size of my hand) lying next to some other tomatoes gave me an idea. Yes, folks, this is my tomato solar system. Does this count as playing with my food?

I will try to keep this post pithy. Another thing that hinders progress, both politically and socioeconomically in the US is our Constitution. Whoa, whoa, whoa... Wait a minute and hear me out before everyone on the right lynches me (wait, we don't lynch anymore, do we???) What I mean by that is that the Constitution of the United States specifically spells out powers of the federal government. These powers are also known as the Enumerated Powers . And, according to the 10th Amendment, if it ain't in the Constitution, it is left up to the states, therefore the federal government cannot (and should not) do it. So, if we as a people want to fund local education using federal money, the Constitution needs to change. If we want to fund companies to develop and manufacture solar panels, the Constitution needs to change. Heck, the Constitution really doesn't give the federal government the power to build an Interstate Highway System,  provide a retirement fund, or provide m...

For those of you who do not get involved in politics, good for you. Your life is much simpler than those who are. All you really need to worry about is either having a job or getting enough government benefits to make it through to the arrival of the next check (or direct deposit.) Sure, you have to worry about the normal things, like getting Madison to soccer practice and picking Bryce up after his karate class, but existential issues are pretty much not on your radar. ( By the way, please DO NOT vote in the next election since you are not paying attention to what is going on .) For those of us who follow politics, it is a pretty depressing time. The left is lining up behind Barack Obama because keeping him in charge means that they have a fighting chance at pushing their doctrine on America and the right is reluctantly lining up behind Mitt Romney because electing him means that they will have a fighting chance to push their doctrine on America. The left feels that the right is...

We found out this week that a family in Ohio stumbled onto a cache of baseball cards from 1910 (hopefully not from the 1910 Fruitgum Company ) while cleaning out their deceased grandmother's attic. The find is estimated to be worth as much as $3 Million. The proceeds will be divided among the 20 heirs to the woman's estate. So, here is my question (and I have posed this question in a previous post ), if these people are committed Democrats... i.e., left of center, should they sell these cards at an obscene profit, or should they sell them based upon their actual cost, which is ZERO? Sure, they could justify the gouging of committed baseball card collectors by saying that the collectors don't actually  need the cards.. the cards are not a necessity of life, like, say, gasoline, water, Big Macs, chain saws after a tornado, or iPhones. But what if the collector's need to collect can be proven to be some sort of mental deficiency as defined by the Americans with Dis...

I was presented with a question today about how to blog and include pictures, all from an iPad, so I am checking out my BlogPress app that I have rarely used, but which seems to work quite well for text. So, here is a picture I took just after the derecho tore through Virginia in late June. This is a telephone line that was prompted by a falling oak tree into slicing an aluminum sign almost in half. As far as I could tell, phone service was not disrupted. As for BlogPress, adding a photo from my iPad was as simple as adding one in Tweetdeck. Only complaint, is that I had a hard time positioning my cursor after the picture. Since Steve Jobs left the arrow keys off of of the keyboard in iOS, I don't quite know who to blame for this annoying glitch. Oh, one other thing. The text at the bottom of the post is hard to edit, because the virtual keyboard flies up to cover the text I want to point at. But wait. This just in... I was using landscape mode. If I flip the iPad into portrait m...

This evening I went up on the roof to unclog my gutters before it (hopefully) rains. Today it was around 90 degrees F, but for the past week it was over 100 degrees in the shade. I climbed up past my chimney and as I looked over at it, I saw 9 maple seedlings and 3 pine seedlings thriving in the little holes and cracks in the brick masonry. I wish I had taken a picture before I plucked the little guys from their foothold. I thought about how we must water our potted patio tomatoes every day, lest they shrivel up and die, yet these young plants thrive in minute gaps in intensely hot bricks, exposed to scorching sun without rain for at least two weeks. Go figure.

When the children who were born during the past decade grow up and find that temperatures are dropping, they will bemoan the fact that "global cooling" is a problem. Normal is what you are used to. The problem is... Mother Earth didn't get your memo.

Everything coming out of the White House these days seems to be attacking Capitalism as represented by Mitt Romney. After the "War on Women" didn't gain much traction with the critical 'undecided' 10%, it looks like the President will be running against Capitalism... at least bogeyman Capitalism, whatever that means. In fact, it really doesn't need to mean anything does it, as long as it pulls in votes? Look at Obama's latest screed against Romney and his Bain Capital days where he bemoans the fact that Romney's investment company shut down a steel mill in Middle America, firing hundreds of workers while "saving" the parent company. There was no mention of how many automobile dealerships with thousands of employees were shut down during Obama's "saving" of the auto industry. Yeah, that's different. It seems that any other -ism is better than Capitalism in his and his supporter's eyes. After all, fairness is the goa...

Logic and the heart. That is what it all boils down to in American politics isn't it? The Republicans are the party of logic and pragmatism (in the classic sense of the word) and the Democrats are the party of just doing what is right, right? I am having a discussion on Twitter with @dogwalkblog about this same idea. Mr. Dogg is to the left and I am to the right. I suspect, though, that we have much more in common than we have differences. I have recently read several articles, the last one by Fred Barnes in The Weekly Standard about how the Republicans in the House (both as a minority and as the majority) as well as minority Senators were totally pwned by Obama as they tried to craft deals with the administration to govern this huge nation of ours. While they negotiated in good faith with the President, he had no such ambitions.  AsteriskNote: I am sure that if I read a recounting of events from the POV of a Democratic insider, the take-aways would be different, bu...

This post is prompted by the current incendiary story of the killing of a seventeen year old black male, Trayvon Martin, by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch captain in Sanford, Florida. This weekend, the New Black Panthers have offered a $10,000 reward for the capture of Mr. Zimmerman dead or alive . I guess vigilantism is OK if a minority group wants the head of someone that is not a member of their minority. I do not want to write about the specifics of this tragedy, since the facts, such as they are, are either unknown or are being kept from the public by the authorities. Everything that we 'know' so far is hearsay, conjecture, veiled facts released by the local government or truth as stated by those who want to stir things up in America. In other words, no one truly knows what happened, except Mr. Zimmerman. What I would like to write about is how I think we, as a nation, got to this point. Sunday morning I watched a segment of Meet The Press on NBC. On the pane...

"One man's guerrilla warfare is another man's fair fight" -- The-Asterisk Lately I have been observing the unfolding political dress rehearsals leading up to the big show in November. I hear the screeching class on the left talk about how the Tea Party (aka Tea Baggers) is holding up all of the good that the President and Congress have wanted to accomplish since 2010. I watched this new video by Davis Guggenheim and narrated by Tom Hanks. It is a true work of art and a bit of fiction. If you haven't watched it, you must. Those that do not know what is going on, then watch this video may be swayed. Notice Obama's constant pensiveness as he thinks about how he can help the American people. Such sacrifice. There are quite a few truth benders in this piece. Disingenuous? Yes. Beyond the pale for a political campaign? No, but I would have expected to see something like this in August at the Democrat National Convention, not this early in March. Apparently if ...

I posted the following to Susan Bradley's blog as a reply to her poignant insight into how to best position the Microsoft brand. Susan, you hit this one out of the park (metaphorically speaking, of course...) I loaded the CP version onto a Dell Latitude ST tablet (no kbd or mouse) supposedly with multitouch and so far, IT SUCKS. Sorry. This Dell is a real tablet, not a convertable. In fact, the tablet looks a lot like an iPad with a aftermarket LineX wrap-around. So, I figured that an O/S that was destined, nee, built for tablet use would feel like a comfortable old running shoe, but it actually felt like a one-size-too-small combat boot (again, metaphorically speaking.)  The screen lurches, nothing is intuitive, I don't know how to swipe or gesture and I couldn't easily find a User's Guide (do they still make those things?) on the Internet to get me started.  Like hearing Creed and immediately comparing the band to Pearl Jam, I couldn't help but remember how nat...

"You've really changed... It's as if we don't even know each other anymore." Those words can put a dagger into the heart of just about any relationship. It could happen to teens after a summertime separation. It could happen to high school sweethearts after a year away at college, but it could also happen to a couple that has been married and living together for 30 or 40 years. Whatever the reason, people change and they can grow distant. Whose fault is it? Who changed? Was it random change, or was it growth? What if one person in a relationship finds religion where the couple had previously shared a no-holds-barred, hedonistic lifestyle? Would that relationship last? If they break up, do you blame the now pious one, or do you blame the one that has not changed? Does anyone need to be blamed? If there are children involved and the two decide to stay together "for the sake of the kids" but they constantly bicker, fight, and start hurting each other...