Category: Rant

$112 billion for single parents

A recent study indicates that American taxpayers spend $112 billion a year on assistance to single parents and divorces.  Wow! That’s a lot of money.  Should we eliminate assistance for single mothers?  No, that would be seriously stupid.  But the assistance needs to be much better managed.  Some responsibility needs to go along with it.…
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The Fear Epidemic

Fear is destroying our lives. There are some who say that money is the root of all evil.  If that is true, fear plays a close second fiddle. It’s crushing our society, our children, and our families. It’s one of the most debilitating problems in the 21st century. There are many who would argue that…
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Life After People – The History Channel

While flipping through channels today, I noticed a miniseries by The History Channel called “Life After People.”  They had been running some ads over the past several weeks with an interesting line that went something like this… Welcome to Earth: Population 0. It intrigued me and so I flipped to it. After just a few…
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Nobel Peace Prize goes to Al Gore???

I subscribe to CNN’s “Breaking News” email alerts. This morning, I was “alerted” to the fact that Al Gore was just awarded the Nobel Peace Prize along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Can someone please explain this one to me? What does Climate Change have to do with peace? Am I misunderstanding the…
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Texas Legislature voting process

Watch the full video for some interesting behavior from the Texas Legislature. It seems that if someone is absent, whoever gets to their desk first votes for them. [youtube eG6X-xtVask] I wonder if this happens in the US Legislature as well?

Murphy vs Bonds — Dale takes the gloves off

Dale Murphy recently fired out at Barry Bonds for his “unknowingly” taking performance enhancing drugs.  I was shocked at the public display of, well, hatred he has toward Bonds. “…  I’ve heard the last few weeks, that that he’s being treated unfairly. You know, life just usually isn’t like that. You don’t usually get treated…
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“Fat Tax” could save 3200 lives a year

A study coming from Oxford University is proposing a 17.5% “Fat Tax” to curb demand for sugary and unhealthy foods. The researchers claim that such a steep tax would reduce demand for these products and in turn save lives… an estimated 3200 lives a year. In addition, those who do ignore the tax will be…
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Familiarty vs Superiority and cognitive-lockin

A recent study from the Journal of Consumer Research and highlighted by ars technica indicates that most consumers are a little duped when it comes to judging the superiority of consumer products. Too often the average consumer is loyal to a product simply because of familiarity. That’s not all that bad, but they mistake that…
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OSC’s Afterword to Empire

The audio version of Orson Scott Card’s latest book, “Empire” (reviewed here) contained an afterward where a lot of what he said really hit me as just common sense. But how he phrased it needs to be heard by any and all involved in politics. From the top level “Right wing crazies” and the “Leftist…
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Stealing from the government

A quote from Benjamin Franklin sparked my curiosity on the amount of people who feel it’s OK to “steal” from the government. There is no kind of dishonesty into which otherwise good people more easily and frequently fall than that of defrauding the government So I entered the following search into Google: “statistics cheating taxes”.…
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